Microsoft Sentinel vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
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
SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)	Score 7.9 out of 10	N/A	SolarWinds LEM is security information and event management (SIEM) software.	N/A

Pricing

Microsoft Sentinel

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

Editions & Modules

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

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Sentinel	SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Free Trial
Yes	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

More Pricing Information

Pricing Info

Community Pulse
	Microsoft Sentinel	SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Considered Both Products	Microsoft Sentinel Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel Compared to platforms such as Splunk, LogRhythm, and Devo, Microsoft Sentinel’s cloud‑native, consumption‑based pricing model and reduced infrastructure overhead tend to offer better overall cost efficiency. This is especially true for organizations already invested in the … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel Microsoft Sentinel gave us the opportunity to move to pay as you go model. This allows us to determine the value of a log source rather than paying a flat rate for data ingested or hosting a server ourself. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel Most of our landscape, both on prem and cloude, is based in Microsoft technologies, while the unification of tools implies some risk, decreasing the vendor levels simplify integrations, and by scale, help us to reduce costs too. Yes, the tool itself is a good contender, but the … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel They are for different use cases, field effect helps us monitor network traffic and decide what to do with it while Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence allows more robust monitoring and control over 365 variables such as emails that come in and out and Entra ID information. Incentivized Helpful? Mohamad Islam Hamadieh SOC Engineer Chose Microsoft Sentinel Microsoft Sentinel feels on another different level from these solutions , all in the cloud . No need for troubleshooting , deployment or upgrades. Constant updates from the vendor and good support Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel 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 … Incentivized Helpful? IS Ian Stuebe Project Manager Chose Microsoft Sentinel We decided to go with Microsoft Sentinel because it works really well with Microsoft tools we are already using. Microsoft Sentinel's intelligent features detect and resolve problems more quickly than Sumo Logic. It also allows us to pay for what we use and grow as we need. … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel Well, primarily we use different stuff like CrowdStrike. We use different sign-on features. We primarily use those different products because we support a wider ecosystem. Incentivized Helpful? RD Richard Dornhart National Security Practice Manager 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel Well before there was Microsoft Sentinel, you had other competing products like ArcSight or Splunk, et cetera. I think they have their own qualities, but the Microsoft integration story is really why we're using it. Incentivized Helpful? HP Himanshu Pawar Manager Chose Microsoft Sentinel In my opinion, Microsoft Sentinel is much more reliable and Trustworthy. They are a bigger name with bigger scope of use. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel We use intune to protect endpoints and we pull logs from all the endpoints through the intune connector into the Microsoft Sentinel SIEM and that way we can run rules on those logs to find anomalies. Incentivized Helpful? Harshit Lal security consultant Chose Microsoft Sentinel it is easy to use Microsoft Sentinel and has faster deployment and advanced artificial intelligence than splunk Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel Elastic is some carbon for various use cases. So because Elastic is a very, very wrong history in the market. So Sentinel is very recent for products from my understanding. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel Well, we didn't select, we selected Sentinel for our Azure stuff, our Microsoft stuff, but we do use a different SIEM for the other stuff still. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel We've used Splunk before, but it really is just pick your poison. They're all very similar. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel Based on the overall infrastructure configuration that we have and also after analysing various solutions provided by Microsoft Sentinel, we came to a conclusion that the Microsoft Sentinel is the best option for us to help us in overall threat detection on our custom servers, … Incentivized Helpful? Ajay Sehgal Project Manager Chose Microsoft Sentinel Sentinel AI makes it a better choice. Also, its flexibility and customization make it a bit more costly than other competitors. Incentivized Helpful? EB Edward Broderick CISO Chose Microsoft Sentinel I use most of the Sims that are out there, but RSAs, old Sim Log, logic, elastic, a lot of them. Sumo, we checked out Sumo too. We're a Microsoft shop and live almost entirely on top of a Microsoft ecosystem. We are considering other Microsoft security products to integrate … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel The SecureWorks product is a more mature product. We prefer the SecureWorks product over Microsoft Sentinel at this point. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel As mentioned, the product was part of the purchase of several Microsoft Suites that we did earlier last year and with 200 licenses included, we can exclude those from the other SIEM and SOAR product, it just work well with the Microsoft's environment that we partially have Is … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Sentinel The key advantage of using Sentinel lies in Microsoft already being a renowned name in cloud services. Hence, the Collection of data at the cloud scale across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and especially in the MS Cloud, is super easy. … Incentivized Helpful?	SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) The compare well against the others - the pricing models for all but Splunk (free version) are based on EPS/TB consumed... the problem they pose is guesstimating the price tag per month. SolarWinds Security Event Manager gets around that. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) It came down to price on this one. SolarWinds gave us a great break on it. For the features that we were looking for, SolarWinds is a great value for our dollar. As far as features go, we were looking for some Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) easier to use than Splunk, light linux core Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Not applicable Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) This was the first product we used in this category and we are very happy with it. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Solarwinds Security Event Manager (SEM) is the best solution for price/performance. The solution has an easily understandable architecture and also the solution can be installed easily. The solution is a very stable and fast solution for our company size. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Ease of deployment Good UI Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Fortianalzyer can only do logs from FortiGate so usefulness is limited. Elasticsearch was a lot slower than Solarwinds and the filters were a lot harder to set up and use. The connectors for SEM were far more stable. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Splunk was a pretty good product but the licensing structure needed a lot of work. They changed the structure three times that I am aware and I still had problems understanding LogRhythm had a lot of issues correlating users to IP addresses, the mappings were frequently wrong … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) We found that SolarWinds performed poorly when the Architecture included many large data centers spread across the globe. When evaluating the SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) solution we quickly realized that we needed a distributed architecture with log aggregation to … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) We chose this product because of its integration to SolarWinds Orion. We were Threat Monitor users previously. This product has been a great substitute. Dollars to dollars this product performs fairly well. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) SEM is much better value proposition due to being priced by node and not by size of the event database. It's also much easier to configure that splunk and needs much less infrastructure to run. Out of the box SEM beats splunk on functionality. We looked at many products and … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) I find Tripwire Log Center to be adequate and stable but it lacks the graphics and the unified UI that you can have with SolarWinds products. It is also not as simple to set up and operate. One more advantage that SolarWinds products have is the THWACK forum, a big user base … Incentivized Helpful? KS Kim Schroeder CTO (Chief Technical Officer) Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) is more of a complete, turn key approach to event management. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) It is a bit hard to compare, since Cortex XDR is kind of a different starship, with endpoint protection and such, and not really great for auditing Windows Event Logs. ELK stack on the other hand is free in some of it's editions but seems much similar then Cortex. SolarWinds SEM … Incentivized Helpful? Tim Short Infrastructure Administrator Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) We picked SolarWinds because of the better price point, integration with other SolarWinds products, and the ease of training. Because we were already familiar with the SolarWinds way of doing alerts and reports, it made this product a nice fit for our company and it has great … Incentivized Helpful? Brandon Demko Systems Administrator Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) We had an older version of SolarWinds SEM, however, it was not being utilized. Incentivized Helpful? AR Adam Radics Production Data Systems Superintendent Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) This was recommended to us by a vendor. As we were using other SolarWinds products, we did not analyze many options. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) The first reason is the ease of installation. Unlike competitor, SEM was running and partially deployed within a day. With the defaults already in the SEM, it's super easy to get result quickly, without a consultant. Also, it's not too resource-intensive, and does not … Incentivized Helpful? AG Alex Giralias System Support Engineer Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) SolarWinds SEM was selected because it integrates with VMAN on the Orion platform and allows all monitoring information and alerts to be aggregated in one place. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Several clients have moved away from LogRhythm because of cost. SEM offers the best ROI for the function. Its interface is much cleaner then LogRhythm. However, there is a steeper learning curve with SEM. The ease of search and data integrity offered by SEM is definitely a … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) I know the Qradar is not the right SIEM tool to compete with Solarwinds SEM but when we looked from a cost, audit & compliance perspective (which are major for many customers), we knew the log management and compliance with regulation would be achieved with SEM. But no machine … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) SolarWinds provides support so when you have problems you don't need to turn to information bases as you can just get a hold of SolarWinds support. I would say another reason for getting SEM is that it is generally easier to configure and easier to learn than the other … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) I have additionally used Netwrix Auditor, which has some similarity with SolarWinds SEM. I use both hand in hand, but typically use the SEM first since it is easier to manage. With Netwrix custom searches are more complex than customer searches in the SEM. The SEM makes it easy … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) We implemented SolarWinds Security Event Manager to replace our Cisco MARS appliance. We found the Cisco MARS appliance cumbersome and difficult to connect to and use, as well as very costly from a support and maintenance perspective. SolarWinds Security Event Manager has more … Incentivized Helpful?

Features

Microsoft Sentinel

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Comparison of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) features of Product A and Product B
	Microsoft Sentinel 8.2 Ratings 4% above category average	SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) 8.9 Ratings 12% above category average
Centralized event and log data collection	8.70 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Correlation	8.60 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
Event and log normalization/management	8.10 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
Deployment flexibility	6.90 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
Integration with Identity and Access Management Tools	8.50 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
Custom dashboards and workspaces	8.10 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Host and network-based intrusion detection	8.30 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
Data integration/API management	8.10 Ratings	00 Ratings
Behavioral analytics and baselining	8.10 Ratings	00 Ratings
Rules-based and algorithmic detection thresholds	8.40 Ratings	00 Ratings
Response orchestration and automation	8.50 Ratings	00 Ratings
Reporting and compliance management	7.30 Ratings	00 Ratings
Incident indexing/searching	8.40 Ratings	00 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Microsoft Sentinel	SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Small Businesses	LevelBlue USM Anywhere Score 8.1 out of 10	LevelBlue USM Anywhere Score 8.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Sumo Logic Score 9.0 out of 10	Sumo Logic Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises	Sumo Logic Score 9.0 out of 10	Sumo Logic Score 9.0 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Microsoft Sentinel	SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Likelihood to Recommend	8.3 (0 ratings)	8.0 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	6.6 (0 ratings)	7.3 (0 ratings)
Usability	7.1 (0 ratings)	8.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	8.0 (0 ratings)	7.5 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Microsoft Sentinel	SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)
Likelihood to Recommend	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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Solarwinds SEM is great for generating reports for investigation purposes. Once you set up the connectors you can walk away and the product runs without needing maintenance. It was however pretty difficult to create the reports and alerts when now starting out and it can be very intimidating for new users. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	It's mainly the data correlation. For example, in the Microsoft ecosystem, Microsoft Entra ID is a primary component of the authentication and authorization mechanism. So whenever you're using tools like Microsoft Intune, Defender for Endpoint, Entra ID is the key signal, right? So Microsoft Sentinel correlates the logs from all these devices and services very well, so I can see a very detailed attack shape to figure out what's going on. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	SolarWinds easily provides the much needed visibily into changes in an Active Directory (AD) environment. Email alerting can be configured to alert a team if an account is locked out, disabled by another users, or if users and/or computers accounts are created. SolarWinds allowed a searchable audit feature. Microsoft Windows can be configured to log many different parts of a system, but search those logs can be difficult. SEM allows you to search for specific users or events. Incentivized Adam Morrison Director of IT Engineering Read full review
Cons	I think it should include more third party integration with non microsoft products as well as with other cloud providers. These integrations should be native. It should improve ML and AI capabilities. I find its documentation a little bit difficult to understand at the start. So the words should be simple. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Compared to other SIEMs, there are features that are missing. Machine learning, automatic event correlation, ability to correlate multiple sources together. The UI is clunky, and the New event log analyzer page felt really disjointed from the rest of the product. In my experience, the dashboards were almost unusable. They persisted across login per device, and even then they sometimes would reset and go back to the ''Getting Started'' look. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	it does the job reasonably well Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	It is pretty likely that we will renew SEM when the time comes up. It is easy to use and maintain so there isn't much of a need to replace this product. It is also a pretty fair price for the capabilities provided by the SEM Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	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. Incentivized Flavio Pereira Analista de sistemas Read full review	It is very good - but you get what you pay for. The intent is not for a Fortune 500 that needs more "heavy lifting" with SolarWinds Security Event Manager & for whom the price tag is not (much of) a consideration. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	Azure Sentinel is very easy to use and configure. If you are stuck somewhere, Microsoft support is excellent in assisting and solving your issue. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	The quality of support can vary depending on whom you end up speaking with. I was fortunate enough to work with a support representative who was very familiar with the product. He had even authored some of the support documentation on the website. On the flip side, I had two other experiences where I was simply directed to online training material. Incentivized Brandon Demko Systems Administrator Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Compared to platforms such as Splunk, LogRhythm, and Devo, Microsoft Sentinel’s cloud‑native, consumption‑based pricing model and reduced infrastructure overhead tend to offer better overall cost efficiency. This is especially true for organizations already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, where Sentinel can deliver strong capabilities with a lower total cost of ownership. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	The compare well against the others - the pricing models for all but Splunk (free version) are based on EPS/TB consumed... the problem they pose is guesstimating the price tag per month. SolarWinds Security Event Manager gets around that. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	It's probably neutral. We see value, but it's, again, tick that kind of expense stuff. We're getting more insight and value into what is going on in that cloud workspace, but just noting the cost. So it's probably neutral. I'm not directly responsible, so the full kind of return on investment kind of cycle, that's someone else's problem. I'm like the end user. It's my team that will look at the data and look at the output of Microsoft Sentinel. So the ROI, someone else can worry about that. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	It saves a lot of time when we had issues trying to figure out where the user account lockout was coming from. With it being an affordable SIEM, we are able to have the ability to do the actions associated with a SIEM and the advantages of not “breaking the bank account”. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots	Microsoft Sentinel Screenshots	SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Screenshots