We performed a comparison between Darktrace and SentinelOne based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on our users’ reviews, we would conclude that SentinelOne is a stronger, more secure solution than Darktrace. Reviewers say that SentinelOne offers a deeper and more thorough level of security. Additionally, SentinelOne provides equal protection across Windows, Linux, and macOS. It can also support legacy infrastructure as well as newer environments. The single-pane feature helps protect numerous endpoints with a very lean team, saving time and money.
"The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning."
"Our customers are satisfied with Defender for 365 because Microsoft products are easy to use and customize to meet the client's needs. Everything is in one place, so we can adjust policies as needed for phishing, DLP, ATP, or any other security features that our clients want to apply."
"Threat Explorer is one of the features that I very much like because it is a real-time report that allows you to identify, analyze, and trace security attacks."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable features are safe attachments and safe links."
"Threat Explorer is an invaluable tool for me, and it plays a crucial role in helping me discern the origins of various email campaigns, pinpointing where they emanate from, and identifying the individuals within our organization who are affected."
"The good part is that you don't have to configure it, which is very convenient."
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"I would say that 90% of the spam and phishing attack emails get blocked right off the bat."
"It is a stable solution without downtime."
"The most valuable features of Darktrace are the tracing of unusual external emails and monitoring the local network."
"I like the dashboards, which are cool. They are more user-friendly, in my experience. Its learning capabilities are really good."
"The NDR is good in their solution and they have NTG for email."
"Darktrace is very flexible."
"I have found the automation and AI features to be valuable. If someone were to come in to the office at midnight and log in, Darktrace would flag it."
"The most valuable feature of Darktrace is the AI that detects abnormal network activity."
"Darktrace is very useful for us because it has a large number of models for detecting threats."
"It protects your machine, and it does an excellent job using AI to determine an attack and stop the attack. Its most powerful feature is prevention, and it can unwind ransomware activity as well. So, it is a really useful product in that sense."
"The user interface, ease of maintenance, and the efficient way to identify the root cause of an incident to see all the factors that contributed to it are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature of SentinelOne is the good graph it provides. It has a specific page where it detects the recent attacks on other machines or the hackers, for example, group APT28 and all."
"It has the ability to rollback a ransomware infection instantly and with minimal disruption to the user & provides robust reporting."
"I have been a Mac guy for twenty years, and the feature parity and the capabilities of a Macintosh agent are unparalleled in the industry. It is the first anti-malware and antivirus that does not make you feel that you bought the wrong processor. It is really good and lightweight."
"It is easy to manage and install. It has a very nice graphical interface that is very intuitive when end users are using it. You don't have to follow or read a book about 600 pages to have knowledge on how to use it. When SentinelOne is up and running, you can easily find your way."
"SentinelOne is a stable solution."
"The fact that SentinelOne is actively looking for threats and runs them against the hash on the Internet to determine if they are malicious or not, is what takes it to the next level compared to other antivirus products."
"Several simulation options are available within 365, and the phishing simulation could be better."
"About eight months ago, we started to measure the quantity of phishing and spam that we have been receiving, and it has been increasing a lot. That means that protection for our email is not as good as we were expecting."
"One area for improvement is support, in terms of being able to reach them and, especially, technical support for configuration."
"They can improve their security in a way where a customer can know if all their attachments are safe or not to open through a report. The solution does its job perfectly, but it never reports to the customer whether those attachments have been stopped before or not."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 should improve the troubleshooting tools. It's unclear whether the device is blocked at the firewall level or at the device itself. The granularity needed for troubleshooting is currently lacking. From my perspective, Microsoft should address this issue to benefit many users who likely share the same sentiment."
"Microsoft should provide more documentation for users so they can self-educate. I would like to see more documentation for advanced security features."
"We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend."
"Microsoft sometimes has downtime, and we'll get several incidents coming in back to back. We have a huge backlog of notifications, many of which may be false positives. However, there might be serious alerts, so we can't risk dismissing all of them at once."
"It takes time to go through the interface and pick up things. If it were a more straightforward interface, then it would free up time."
"Needs to improve its collaboration with local partners."
"A reporting portal could be a great addition to help customize reports."
"Darktrace could improve by being more user-friendly."
"It can have more integration with orchestration or event management solutions. They can provide more knowledge or research information for analysts for investigating cases and detecting anomalies in networks."
"The interface is too mathematical and it should be simplified."
"In terms of improvements, fine-tuning is the area where we have to spend some time because it works on unsupervised machine learning. It would be good if they can improve their algorithm or technical functionality to reduce the fine-tuning effort. They can also come up with something at the endpoint level. So far, Darktrace has been a network detection response (NDR) solution. It does not offer much at the endpoint level or on user-client devices or servers. There should be more visibility at the endpoint level. It would be good to have the detection and response at the endpoint level by Darktrace. It should also have integration with an agile environment so that we can have continuous development and continuous integration in the application development environment. This is currently not there. It should also have internet-facing platform visibility, which is currently missing. They also need to improve the reporting and management dashboards. Currently, these are not so easy for a non-technical person. All these features would make Darktrace much better, and they would also be helpful in selling more solutions."
"One thing I would like is for Darktrace to flag SMB traffic more accurately. Currently, it only flags that SMB traffic has occurred, but it doesn't specify which file was being transferred. This makes it difficult to investigate incidents involving SMB traffic, as we don't have concrete evidence of what was being sent."
"It would be nice if the console stored data daily, so that you could look at a timeline of events on a machine over a period of time, and currently this is not possible."
"Something we are looking forward to is the ability of the SentinelOne backend to ingest data from other sources. Now that they are moving to the Singularity data lake, we are looking forward to being able to query data that is not just collected by SentinelOne endpoint agents. We are looking forward to being able to query against all data that we are ingesting into that backend."
"One of the things they could do is extend the product range to include Android and iPhone so that you could have the app on your phone as well. There is probably something going on there with that, but that's something that they're lacking at the moment. For instance, if I was to have to recommend a client to protect their phone, I'd have to recommend Norton or something else. I don't have an answer within the SentinelOne solution."
"Singularity Complete's process stream has room for improvement."
"Singularity Complete needs to improve its ability to granularly select and extract the executable files that I want to run."
"All is good for now, but we cannot rest, and continuous development - in particular with regard to the areas of automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence - is required to keep ahead of the cybercriminals."
"I am not a fan of the UI and feel it has room for improvement."
"Since SentinelOne Hologram was an Attivo Networks product acquired by Microsoft, I have to install a different agent on endpoints for that product. It would be better if the same SentinelOne agent could be used for both the EDR and deception technology."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
More SentinelOne Singularity Complete Pricing and Cost Advice →
Darktrace is ranked 11th in Email Security with 65 reviews while SentinelOne Singularity Complete is ranked 2nd in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) with 177 reviews. Darktrace is rated 8.2, while SentinelOne Singularity Complete is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Darktrace writes "Great autonomous support, offers an easy setup, and has responsive support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SentinelOne Singularity Complete writes "Provides peace of mind and is good at ingesting data and correlating". Darktrace is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon, Vectra AI, Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks, Cisco Secure Network Analytics and ExtraHop Reveal(x), whereas SentinelOne Singularity Complete is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, ThreatLocker Protect, Datto Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Bitdefender GravityZone EDR.
We monitor all Email Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
You should not compare SentinelOne to Darktrace - they solve completely different problems. These types of questions show the ongoing challenges in cybersecurity. As written below, SentinelOne is an Endpoint Detection and Response tool. It is to protect a laptop or workstation from an attack. EDR is a core requirement for cyber defense.
Darktrace is a network detection and response tool. NDR tools detect attacks occurring against the network. NDR is also a core requirement for cyber defense.
Regardless of the quality of either tool, you need to cover both your endpoint and your network. So if you decide one is better and choose it, you remain vulnerable to attack.
Cover your endpoint only, and I am going to hit you with an attack on your network. Cover your network only, and I will get you via an endpoint.
EDR tools - SentinelOne, Cybereason, CrowdStrike, Carbon Black to name a few.
NDR tools - Darktrace, Vectra, ExtraHop, Cyglass to name a few.
Comparisons of these tools by category would be more valuable.
An easy answer for me - pretty much exactly what @Janet Staver described.
DT was a good east-west network traffic tool that could tell you all about communications between systems (think NDR) but limited capacity, expensive boxes, that we outgrew.
S1 is an endpoint tool with deep inspection, a central console, and is cost-effective.
I have done a POC with Darktrace three different times at different orgs.
They are actually a borderline scam company. On each POC, I set up tests that even a free install of Suricata could detect. DT failed to detect anything in each case.
The other thing is that they call their alerts breaches. This is a BAD idea and they would not listen to reason on this. They will send out young, good-looking salespeople, but by the time you are done with your POC, they will be gone and replaced by someone else.
Their sales engineers are too young to have any experience with a security issue you may be dealing with. And I suspect after a few POCs they see that this does not work, at all, and leave! Stay away from Darktrace!
You can't compare these two solutions - they are different.
SentinelOne is an EDR similar to known EDRs (Sophos, Sandblast, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto XDR, etc.).
You need an agent to install to the endpoint to manage. You can integrate via API if you want to integrate to existing networks like Clearpass and micro-segmentation software like Guardicore.
Darktrace is an AI-based tool to analyze traffic for known cyber threats from the network level without any agent. Either mirror the port or redirect traffic from VLAN to the Darktrace sensor. The sensor notifies you if any devices are newly discovered to the network, or new users access the particular device. You can block that traffic or device to mobile devices or web UI. In addition, Darktrace also has a module to integrate to SaS like the Office365 email.
Both @Janet Staver and @ITSecuri7cfd are spot on.
As a security vendor, like ITSecuri7cfd points out, one tool is for the endpoint and one tool is for the network side.
If you looking for an EDR tool, you should look to compare solutions from Carbon Black, Crowdstrike, etc.
As for Darktrace, they are classified as an NDR tool. Within the NDR market, there are essentially 2 types of solutions; tools for smaller organizations that have limited resources and tools that are designed for organizations that have SOC teams that need better visibility and data.
If you want to learn more about NDR solutions in general we have written an ebook called "What to look for in an NDR platform": https://bricata.com/wp-content...
Which solution is better depends on which is more suitable specifically for your company. Darktrace, for example, is meant for smaller to medium-sized businesses. It is also a good option for organizations who have limited security resources but still need deep insights into threats and network intrusions. Darktrace also has an invaluable feature that produces weekly reports.
A unique feature Darktrace has to its name is its use of artificial intelligence for cybersecurity and machine learning capabilities. Darktrace is able to successfully detect threats over networks before it's even possible for them to spread. In addition, it notifies you with all the threat details. Although Darktrace is geared toward smaller-sized organizations, it does come with a hefty cost. The cost increases as the number of products that need to be monitored increases.
SentinelOne is a great product and effective for mitigating threats. It allows you to have granular control over your environments and your endpoints. SentinelOne has a central management console. It also provides insight into lateral movement threats, by gathering data from anything that happens to be related to the security of an endpoint. Another SentinelOne feature that’s fantastic is their one-click automation remediation, along with rollback for restoring an endpoint, which can often be very helpful.
SentinelOne is also known for its ability to decrease incident response time and has deep visibility that comes in handy quite often. However, the dashboard design isn’t wonderful. In contrast to Darktrace though, SentinelOne is efficient because minimal administrative support is required, and it offers a lot for a solution that is cost-effective.
Conclusion
While both SentinelOne and Darktrace boast many beneficial features, one outweighs the other when it comes to price. If Darktrace is within your budget, I would recommend it. But if not, SentinelOne is a great solution that makes a lot of sense.