We performed a comparison between Microsoft Defender for Identity and Microsoft Entra ID based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Microsoft Security Suite solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It is easy to set up. Based on the number of devices you would like to set up, you can use scripts, Group Policy, etc. It takes five minutes to set up."
"The solution offers excellent visibility into threats."
"All the integration it has with different Microsoft packages, like Teams and Office, is good."
"The most valuable aspect is its connection to Microsoft Sentinel and Defender for Endpoint, and giving exact timelines for incidents and when certain events occured during an incident."
"The feature I like the most about Defender for Identity is the entity tags. They give you the ability to identify sensitive accounts, devices, and groups. You also have honeytoken entities, which are devices that are identified as "bait" for fraudulent actors."
"This solution has advanced a lot over the last few years."
"It automates routine testing and helps automate the finding of high-value alerts."
"The basic security monitoring at its core feature is the most valuable aspect. But also the investigative parts, the historical logging of events over the network are extremely interesting because it gives an in-depth insight into the history of account activity that is really easy to read, easy to follow, and easy to export."
"The way the laptops are joined is valuable. We can take advantage of that in terms of being able to log in and do things. It is easier to change passwords or set things up."
"The centralized management feature is very valuable."
"Using [Azure AD's] passwordless technology, you're not even using a password anymore. You're basically just creating a logon request without actually sending or typing or storing the password. This is awesome for any user, regardless of whether you're a factory worker or a CFO. It's secure and super-simple."
"It is a very straightforward implementation."
"Having access to Azure Active Directory on the cloud gives us speed and use of the latest technology. The application services are very good, such as GitHub."
"I like that you can run it on-premises. I also like that I can use Azure at any time as the main one."
"We haven't had any problems with stability. Everything works fine."
"Overall the solution functions very well, such as the ability to access it from the cloud."
"When the data leaves the cloud, there are security issues."
"There is no option to remedy an issue directly from the console. If we see an alert, we can't fix it from the console. Instead, we must depend on other Microsoft products, such as MDE. That is a significant drawback. It simply works as a scanner, which can sometimes put enough load on the sensors. Immediate actions should be possible from the dashboard because. It can prevent issues from spreading further."
"One potential area for improvement could be exploring flexibility in the installation of Microsoft Defender for Identity agents."
"Defender for Identity gives us visibility, but we often get false positives from Azure that take us down the garden path. We go through 30 incidents each day and most of those are false positives or benign positive alerts. Occasionally, we get true positive alerts."
"The technical support needs significant improvement. Documentation for more minor issues in the form of guides or walkthroughs could help to resolve this issue. The number of tickets raised would decrease, removing some pressure from the support team and making it easier to clear the remaining tickets."
"I would like to be able to do remediation from the platform because it is just a scanner right now. If you onboard a device, it shows you what is happening, but you can't use it to fix things. You need to go into the system to fix it instead."
"We observe a lot of false positives. Sometimes, when we go for a coffee break, we lock our screens. Locking the screen has a separate Windows event ID and sometimes I see it is detected as a failed login."
"Microsoft should look at what competing vendors like CrowdStrike and Broadcom are doing and incorporate those features into Sentinel and Defender. At the same time, I think the intelligence inside the product is improving fast. They should incorporate more zero-trust and hybrid trust approaches. They need to build up threat intelligence based on threats and methods used in attacks on other companies."
"The downside is that we now have all our eggs in one basket with Microsoft. We have this great authentication and single sign-on, but if Microsoft has an outage in North America or globally, on Outlook or Teams, we're dead in the water... We get some type of hiccup once a quarter."
"Many of the features are outdated, so the UI and UX could be improved."
"A nice feature that is not currently present, would be if they had some visualization tools."
"My understanding is, in the future, they will be able to bring everything into one single platform and they are not there yet."
"We would like to have more granularity in the Azure conditional access in order to be able to manage more groups for devices and for applications."
"Azure Active Directory could improve by having an authentication service for laptops or desktop computers running Mac and Linux operating systems. They currently have authentication capabilities for Microsoft Windows. Having this capability would benefit people because in today's world everybody is working from the home environment."
"Customers should be informed that public review features are not intended for production use."
"The licensing cost is a bit prohibitive."
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Microsoft Defender for Identity is ranked 8th in Microsoft Security Suite with 13 reviews while Microsoft Entra ID is ranked 4th in Microsoft Security Suite with 190 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Identity is rated 9.0, while Microsoft Entra ID is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Identity writes "Offers robust protection from insider threats, but the customer support is poor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Entra ID writes "Saves us time and money and features Conditional Access policies, SSPR, and MFA". Microsoft Defender for Identity is most compared with Microsoft Entra ID Protection, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Entra Verified ID, Splunk User Behavior Analytics and BloodHound Enterprise, whereas Microsoft Entra ID is most compared with Microsoft Intune, Google Cloud Identity, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, Okta Workforce Identity and Cisco Duo. See our Microsoft Defender for Identity vs. Microsoft Entra ID report.
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