Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs. Microsoft Sentinel

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (formerly Microsoft Defender ATP) is a holistic, cloud delivered endpoint security solution that includes risk-based vulnerability management and assessment, attack surface reduction, behavioral based and cloud-powered next generation protection, endpoint detection and response (EDR), automatic investigation and remediation, managed hunting services, rich APIs, and unified security management.
$2.50
per user/per month
Microsoft Sentinel
Score 8.7 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
Microsoft Defender for EndpointMicrosoft Sentinel
Editions & Modules
Academic
$2.50
per user/per month
Standalone
$5.20
per user/per month
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
Microsoft Defender for EndpointMicrosoft Sentinel
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft Defender for EndpointMicrosoft Sentinel
Considered Both Products
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint consistently showed better user experiences during scans due to the reduced amount of resources used on each system compared to our previous endpoint protection solutions. However, the main reason we chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is …
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
It's very convenient and very well integrated with our environment.
Chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Defender works better for my org. This may depend on your ecosystem, however for me, Defender is a clear winner. I like Defender's ability to utilize multiple sensors and data points to detect possible breaches. I like the built-in EDR functionality. I do not need to purchase a …
Microsoft Sentinel
Chose Microsoft Sentinel
These are all the Microsoft products. We have used Splunk. And again, I would say Microsoft Sentinel stacks up because it's a native tool that is more like an ecosystem. It's not a standalone tool. It's like if you're in the Microsoft stack, Microsoft Sentinel will stack up …
Chose Microsoft Sentinel
Splunk, Google, SecOps. I look at how it stacks up based on the fact that it's the primary solution that we sell. So I think it stacks up really well. Why do we select it? Well, we selected it primarily because we're a very large Microsoft partner. The technology is very good …
Chose Microsoft Sentinel
Elastic seems to have a much better interface for log search and is able to filter out noise. Microsoft Sentinel also appears to generate a lot of false positives.
Chose Microsoft Sentinel
Prior to using Sentinel, we were using Splunk specifically Splunk Enterprise Security and Splunk Cloud, so their on-prem and their cloud-based products. We switched originally for cost reasons, specifically cost control, but I have found that the ability to create reports, the …
Chose Microsoft Sentinel
ArcSight is an on-prem solution that has a different approach than Sentinel.

In a basis this product is more complex to maintain and deploy. The query functionality in Sentinel is more powerful and easier to maintain. ArcSight has a much slower performance and an interface that …
Features
Microsoft Defender for EndpointMicrosoft Sentinel
Endpoint Security
Comparison of Endpoint Security features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
8.7
78 Ratings
2% above category average
Microsoft Sentinel
-
Ratings
Anti-Exploit Technology8.975 Ratings00 Ratings
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)9.177 Ratings00 Ratings
Centralized Management8.777 Ratings00 Ratings
Hybrid Deployment Support7.210 Ratings00 Ratings
Infection Remediation9.075 Ratings00 Ratings
Vulnerability Management8.672 Ratings00 Ratings
Malware Detection9.276 Ratings00 Ratings
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
Comparison of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
-
Ratings
Microsoft Sentinel
8.0
31 Ratings
2% above category average
Centralized event and log data collection00 Ratings8.630 Ratings
Correlation00 Ratings8.431 Ratings
Event and log normalization/management00 Ratings7.931 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 Ratings8.026 Ratings
Data integration/API management00 Ratings7.829 Ratings
Behavioral analytics and baselining00 Ratings7.927 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
Microsoft Defender for EndpointMicrosoft Sentinel
Small Businesses
ThreatLocker
ThreatLocker
Score 9.3 out of 10
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
LevelBlue USM Anywhere
Score 7.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
CrowdStrike Falcon
CrowdStrike Falcon
Score 9.1 out of 10
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
BeyondTrust Endpoint Privilege Management
BeyondTrust Endpoint Privilege Management
Score 10.0 out of 10
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Microsoft Defender for EndpointMicrosoft Sentinel
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(133 ratings)
8.7
(53 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.4
(10 ratings)
6.8
(2 ratings)
Usability
8.6
(10 ratings)
6.5
(7 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(7 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft Defender for EndpointMicrosoft Sentinel
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
It's basically good for any company when you have any amount of machines that need to be protected. It's just a good endpoint detection method that makes it well-suited for a lot of scenarios. If you're in business, it's probably something you need.
Read full review
Microsoft
Specifically for Microsoft Sentinel, it's going to have what's next to no value if you're not on Azure. You have to be in as your customer. If you want greater insight into what is going on in your cloud environment, turn Microsoft Sentinel on, but focus on where you enable it. You're not going to turn it on to see everything because it's not like focus on the areas where you are at risk or you believe you're at risk or something that you're, depending on your environment, do you have multiple subscriptions? Do you have a Microsoft Sentinel subscription that you just turned on, but it's not getting the visibility, and then you can alert on stuff that goes out of trend, etc.?
Read full review
Pros
Microsoft
  • Definitely on the threat action and response. We didn't have a stress-response option before, but the dependent brand point provided it instantly. Also, it's doing UVA and machine learning, which we didn't have before. So it's definitely providing more sophisticated threat-detection capabilities than we had before.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Strong integration with the Microsoft security ecosystem allows seamless connection to services such as Microsoft Defender, Microsoft 365, and Azure. This makes it easy to bring together identity, endpoint, and cloud signals to support investigation and detection scenarios.
  • Effective correlation of alerts and incidents in collaboration with Microsoft Defender XDR helps combine related signals into higher‑fidelity incidents. This reduces noise and improves visibility into attack context, making investigations more efficient.
  • High scalability for data ingestion and processing enables large volumes of security telemetry to be handled efficiently.
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • That's a tough one because I don't have many cons on the product. Maybe the con is really around reporting. It's harder to get to the reporting and the analytics side. We have to do some of the custom reporting on our own, either through Power BI and whatnot. So the out-of-the-box reporting could be improved upon.
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Microsoft
  • I think it's primarily going to be cost, since Microsoft Sentinel uses Microsoft Log Analytics as its base, right? So storing the logs and log retention is very expensive. That might result in users not adopting it as quickly. Second, I think Copilot for security can just do summarization and not many remediation tasks. In the future, we would like to see Copilot create many playbooks, including all box playbooks, to remediate many security issues.
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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
Cost add-ons for Security features is nickel and diming the process to keep pace with cybercrime. Limited Education budgets require us to be more pro-active in finding cost-effective measures to protect our devices, staff and students. Defender is a strong, well-featured product that is pricing itself out of the education market
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Microsoft
it does the job reasonably well
Read full review
Usability
Microsoft
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a great EDR to have that works quickly and silently in the background and it integrates well with other Microsoft services. As an IT manager, I can appreciate that I do not get bombarded by alerts for every small detail. On the flipside, the management site can use some work in being more clear and should be more streamlined so I'm not clicking through multiple pages to figure out what happened
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Microsoft
The Microsoft Azure Sentinel solution is very good and even better if you use Azure. It's easy to implement and learn how to use the tool with an intuitive and simple interface. New updates are happening to always bring new news and improve the experience and usability. The solution brings reliability as it is from a very reliable manufacturer.
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Reliability and Availability
Microsoft
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint chugs along just fine no matter what we throw at it and what systems it's running on. It doesn't take up a lot of resources either, so that's welcomed.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Performance
Microsoft
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is easy on memory and resources on clients.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Microsoft
The first time I tried to onboard my macOS endpoints to MDE I struggled for quite a bit. I had to reach out to Microsoft's MDE support team. The tech was very helpful in walking me through the steps during a screen share session
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Microsoft
Azure Sentinel is very easy to use and configure. If you are stuck somewhere, Microsoft support is excellent in assisting and solving your issue.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
Deployment was handled by our team here and everything went pretty smoothly. We did have a few hiccups in our test group, but that only took a bit to get ironed out.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint consistently showed better user experiences during scans due to the reduced amount of resources used on each system compared to our previous endpoint protection solutions. However, the main reason we chose Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is that it was part of our G5 licensing and integrated with all of our systems
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.
Read full review
Scalability
Microsoft
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is easily scaled from small orgs to giant enterprises.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Did not use professional services
Read full review
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • Reduced incidents of security breaches lead to lower remediation costs and avoid potential financial losses and reputational damage.
  • Reduces the need for additional third-party security solutions and training, thereby lowering overall security management costs.
  • Increased efficiency and productivity of IT staff lead to better allocation of resources and cost savings.
  • Reduces the risk of fines and sanctions associated with non-compliance, ensuring business continuity and protecting revenue.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Screenshots

Screenshot of blocked activitiesScreenshot of Detects & respondsScreenshot of discovers vulnerabilityScreenshot of Eliminates blind spotsScreenshot of Risk management

Microsoft Sentinel Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Microsoft Sentinel Capabilities