We compared Splunk Enterprise Security and Microsoft Sentinel based on our users' reviews using several parameters.
Splunk Enterprise Security is praised for its threat intelligence, analytics, and user-friendly interface. Users mention improvements needed in user-friendliness, search query language, and performance. Pricing is considered high but justified by the value. Microsoft Sentinel is affordable and has a simpler setup process. Users appreciate the advanced threat visibility, integration with other Microsoft products, and machine learning capabilities. Improvement suggestions include a more intuitive interface, better customization options, and enhanced integration with third-party tools. Users find both products valuable with positive impacts on their organization.
Features: Splunk Enterprise Security stands out for its customizable analytics and real-time monitoring, while Microsoft Sentinel excels in advanced threat visibility and machine learning integration. Splunk focuses on scalability and customization, whereas Sentinel emphasizes centralizing alerts and actionable insights.
Pricing and ROI: Splunk Enterprise Security tends to have higher pricing and high setup costs initially, but users find the value and benefits worth the investment. Microsoft Sentinel is noted for its reasonable pricing, minimal setup costs, and flexible licensing options. Splunk Enterprise Security offers improved operational efficiency, threat detection, and incident response, while Microsoft Sentinel provides enhanced security, reduced incident response time, and seamless integration.
Room for Improvement: Splunk Enterprise Security users seek a more user-friendly interface and simplified search query language. They desire enhanced alerting and reporting features to improve performance. Microsoft Sentinel users want a more intuitive platform, better customization options, enhanced integration capabilities, and improved reporting and documentation.
Deployment and customer support: While Splunk Enterprise Security had varying implementation durations, users found Microsoft Sentinel quicker to deploy. However, some noted that Sentinel's setup was more complex compared to Splunk's faster implementation and simpler setup process. Splunk Enterprise Security stands out for its prompt response times and knowledgeable staff, enhancing the overall user experience. Microsoft Sentinel impresses with quick issue resolution and effective, helpful support, leading to positive user experiences.
The summary above is based on 201 interviews we conducted recently with Splunk Enterprise Security and Microsoft Sentinel users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"I've worked on most of the top SIEM solutions, and Sentinel has an edge in most areas. For example, it has built-in SOAR capabilities, allowing you to run playbooks automatically. Other vendors typically offer SOAR as a separate licensed solution or module, but you get it free with Sentinel. In-depth incident integration is available out of the box."
"Sentinel is a SIEM and SOAR tool, so its automation is the best feature; we can reduce human interaction, freeing up our human resources."
"Sentinel improved how we investigate incidents. We can create watchlists and update them to align with the latest threat intelligence. The information Microsoft provides enables us to understand thoroughly and improve as we go along. It allows us to provide monthly reports to our clients on their security posture."
"The data connectors that Microsoft Sentinel provides are easy to integrate when we work with a Microsoft agent."
"Sentinel has features that have helped improve our security poster. It helped us in going ahead and identifying the gaps via analysis and focusing on the key elements."
"The machine learning and artificial intelligence on offer are great."
"The most valuable feature is the alert notifications, which are categorized by severity levels: informational, low, medium, and high."
"Its inbuilt Kusto Query Language is a valuable feature. It provides the flexibility needed to leverage advanced data analytics rules and policies and enables us to easily navigate all our security events in a single view. It helps any user easily understand the data or any security lags in their data and applications."
"It is a one stop shop as a full monitoring and alerting solution for operations and application analysis for most of our back-end systems."
"The most valuable feature of Splunk Enterprise Security is website activity monitoring."
"Its huge, versatile AppBase helped me to configure and bring data from different sources to a unified platform."
"Splunk is quite flexible for our customers. Splunk does not filter from a specific lock, you can define it later."
"The solution allows easy gathering and ingestion of the data."
"It allows the centralization of data and makes possible new sorts of correlations that were previously impossible using traditional SIEMs such as ArcSight or QRadar."
"Splunk can extract all kinds of data. There's no limitation on what kind of structured and unstructured data one needs to extract — it can access any kind of data, including machine-generated data."
"Splunk is a user-friendly solution."
"Microsoft should improve Sentinel, considering that from the legacy systems, it cannot collect logs."
"They should integrate it with many other software-as-a-service providers and make connectors available so that you don't have to do any sort of log normalization."
"Sentinel provides decent visibility, but it's sometimes a little cumbersome to get to the information I want because there is so much information. I would also like to see more seamless integration between Sentinel and third-party security products."
"If their UI was a bit more streamlined and easy to find when I need it, then that would be a great improvement."
"The learning curve could be improved. I am still learning it. We were able to implement the basic features to get them up and running, but there are still so many things that I don't know about all its features. They have a lot of features that we have not been able to use or apply. If they could work on reducing the solution's learning curve, that would be good. While there is a training course held by Microsoft to learn more about this solution, there is a cost associated with it."
"We do have in-built or out-of-the-box metrics that are shown on the dashboard, but it doesn't give the kind of metrics that we need from our environment whereby we need to check the meantime to detect and meantime to resolve an incident. I have to do it manually. I have to pull all the logs or all the alerts that are fed into Sentinel over a certain period. We do this on a monthly basis, so I go into Microsoft Sentinel and pull all the alerts or incidents we closed over a period of thirty days."
"I would like to see more AI used in processes."
"The only thing is sometimes you can have a false positive."
"Better directions on search head clusters."
"On-premises scaling of the solution is a bit more limited than it is on the cloud."
"It is important to make sure that everything is built off of the threat models and all the underlying items within Splunk."
"I would like to see an updated dashboard. The dashboard is a little out-of-date. It could be made prettier."
"When we do a rollout from the server or host or anything, we'd like to see more automation. It would save us time."
"Delays in responses from the technical team can pose challenges for both vendors and clients, especially considering that Splunk applications and machine solutions are critical assets."
"The monitoring aspect of Splunk could be improved. We have to do some queries to get as much information as CrowdStrike or other solutions provide. If you run a big query, you will see a delay. That is the only concern we have because it will take some time if you query large data sets."
"I would like to see future development in terms of ML (Machine Learning)."
Microsoft Sentinel is ranked 2nd in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 85 reviews while Splunk Enterprise Security is ranked 1st in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 240 reviews. Microsoft Sentinel is rated 8.2, while Splunk Enterprise Security is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Sentinel writes "Gives a comprehensive and holistic view of the ecosystem and improves visibility and the ability to respond". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Splunk Enterprise Security writes "It has a drag-and-drop interface, so you don't need to know SQL or Java to construct a query ". Microsoft Sentinel is most compared with AWS Security Hub, IBM Security QRadar, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Elastic Security and Wazuh, whereas Splunk Enterprise Security is most compared with Wazuh, Dynatrace, IBM Security QRadar, Elastic Security and Datadog. See our Microsoft Sentinel vs. Splunk Enterprise Security report.
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