AWS CloudTrail vs. Microsoft Sentinel

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AWS CloudTrail
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of an AWS account. With CloudTrail, users can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking,…N/A
Microsoft Sentinel
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Sentinel (formerly Azure Sentinel) is designed as a birds-eye view across the enterprise. It is presented as a security information and event management (SIEM) solution for proactive threat detection, investigation, and response.
$2.46
per GB ingested
Pricing
AWS CloudTrailMicrosoft Sentinel
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Azure Sentinel
$2.46
per GB ingested
100 GB per day
$123.00
per day
200 GB per day
$221.40
per day
300 GB per day
$319.80
per day
400 GB per day
$410.00
per day
500 GB per day
$492.00
per day
More than 500 GB per day
$492.00 + $98.40
per day/plus each additional 100 GB increment
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudTrailMicrosoft Sentinel
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsYou can view, filter, and download the most recent 90 days of your account activity for all management events in supported AWS services free of charge. You can set up a trail that delivers a single copy of management events in each region free of charge. Once a CloudTrail trail is set up, Amazon S3 charges apply based on your usage. You will be charged for any data events or additional copies of management events recorded in that region. In addition, you can choose CloudTrail Insights by enabling Insights events in your trails. CloudTrail Insights analyzes write management events, and you are charged based on the number of events that are analyzed in that region.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AWS CloudTrailMicrosoft Sentinel
Features
AWS CloudTrailMicrosoft Sentinel
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
Comparison of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) features of Product A and Product B
AWS CloudTrail
-
Ratings
Microsoft Sentinel
8.1
31 Ratings
3% above category average
Centralized event and log data collection00 Ratings8.630 Ratings
Correlation00 Ratings8.531 Ratings
Event and log normalization/management00 Ratings8.031 Ratings
Deployment flexibility00 Ratings6.929 Ratings
Integration with Identity and Access Management Tools00 Ratings8.329 Ratings
Custom dashboards and workspaces00 Ratings8.031 Ratings
Host and network-based intrusion detection00 Ratings8.126 Ratings
Data integration/API management00 Ratings7.929 Ratings
Behavioral analytics and baselining00 Ratings8.027 Ratings
Rules-based and algorithmic detection thresholds00 Ratings8.429 Ratings
Response orchestration and automation00 Ratings8.428 Ratings
Reporting and compliance management00 Ratings7.35 Ratings
Incident indexing/searching00 Ratings8.429 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AWS CloudTrailMicrosoft Sentinel
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Score 6.0 out of 10
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Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Druva Security Cloud
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Score 9.4 out of 10
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Druva Security Cloud
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Score 9.4 out of 10
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Score 8.8 out of 10
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User Ratings
AWS CloudTrailMicrosoft Sentinel
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(4 ratings)
8.8
(53 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
6.7
(2 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
6.5
(7 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
AWS CloudTrailMicrosoft Sentinel
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
It is necessary to enable [AWS] Cloudtrail when using AWS in a production environment, otherwise you will not have any idea what is happening within your accounts. Third party monitoring applications will all require [AWS] CloudTrail to be enabled as well. I would not recommend it solely as a monitoring tool, to get the most out of it you must send the logs elsewhere. Either to Cloudwatch logs or a third party product.
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Microsoft
It's certainly well-suited in environments that rely heavily on Microsoft products, and it's well-suited for environments where you have other business drivers to go to the E5 license. If I were to say where I would not and why, I only gave it a seven on the recommendation, that answer would probably vary if you already owned E5 or not. It's extremely expensive. And if there are other alternatives, if you don't have any other driving reason to go to E5, I would coach you not to go to Microsoft Sentinel. But if you're there, it's a fantastic property. It's certainly part of the cost argument for moving to E5, but it's only a part. It can't by itself justify the move to E5.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • API Log
  • User activity tracking
  • Real-time alerts
Read full review
Microsoft
  • It's the scale. Having built-in detections and vulnerabilities and the ability to see into the traffic flows is absolutely key. Look at it from my perspective as network security. We want to see what's going on east, west, between all the kinds of subscriptions and the tenants. We don't have that. We don't have that with any other product. Microsoft Sentinel gives us that kind of visibility.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • [In my experience] Cost can easily get out of control with multiple trails on full logging
  • Logs can be difficult to decipher
Read full review
Microsoft
  • An area for improvement is how case management is surfaced within the Microsoft Sentinel experience, as clearer integration into Sentinel workflows would reduce context switching and improve incident handling.
  • There is an opportunity to further expand agentic, autonomous investigation and response capabilities.
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
it does the job reasonably well
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Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Because, as I said, it still lacks a lot of things, like many playbooks outside the Copilot integrations and the actual remediation. For example, for Microsoft Sentinel and SAP, I would want to see Copilot doing a lot of remediations in Microsoft Sentinel at SAPN, like executing the transaction code, maybe creating certain increases, or remediating stuff like that, which is all customized.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Microsoft support is one of the highest rated on the market. It has global and multilingual support. Calls can be made over the phone and the solution is virtually instantaneous with the help of Microsoft engineers. It's great!
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
I think in the end, CloudTrail has more features and you can dive deeper inside the logs so it depends on your usage and what you expect in the end to make the right choice, I would say that both tools are really useful and bring a lot of benefits to I.T. companies.
Read full review
Microsoft
Microsoft Sentinel excels in cloud-native scalability, Microsoft ecosystem integration, and AI-driven threat detection with UEBA and Fusion rules, offering faster deployment and lower costs (48% cheaper per Forrester) than Splunk, QRadar, Exabeam, SentinelOne, Securonix, and Wazuh. It lags in third-party integrations and syslog parsing. Organizations choose Microsoft Sentinel for its cost-effectiveness, automation, and Microsoft synergy, especially in Azure-heavy environments, though Splunk and Exabeam lead in flexibility and UEBA, respectively.
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Professional Services
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Did not use professional services
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Allows us to investigate any strange api actions
  • Increases security
  • Audit trail of changes made in AWS
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Microsoft
  • As any cybersecurity product, this has to be more with risk to avoid loss in case of a ransomware that more than relate to a productivity increase. Maybe the impact could be that instead of having people that are checking 24/7 the dashboard, you could implement Sentinel and have less people checking that or people with less expertise. So the saving will be a minor but will be a saving in the cost of your team.
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ScreenShots

AWS CloudTrail Screenshots

Screenshot of CloudTrail Insights: Identify and respond to unusual operational activity
•Unexpected spikes in resource provisioning
•Bursts of IAM management actions
•Gaps in periodic maintenance activity
•Automatic analysis of API calls and usage patterns
•Alerts when unusual activity is detected

Microsoft Sentinel Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Microsoft Sentinel Capabilities