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McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator vs Microsoft Sentinel comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (6th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is 0.5%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 19.3%, down from 20.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

DavidJones7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers automation alert features with easy integrations and impressive scalability
I would rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. There are a few technical challenges with the deployment, but it can easily solved by an experienced professional but not by a beginner user of the tool. The complete implementation and migration to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator will take around three months. If someone is using a software platform already with implemented use cases in their environment, it might be difficult to implement the same use cases when the customer is migrating to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator. The conditions and prior alert settings needs to be accurate when migrating to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator, otherwise false positive alerts might get generated.
KrishnanKartik - PeerSpot reviewer
Every rule enriched at triggering stage, easing the job of SOC analyst
It's a Big Data security analytics platform. Among the unique features is the fact that it has built-in UEBA and analytical capabilities. It allows you to use the out-of-the-box machine learning and AI capabilities, but it also allows you to bring your own AI/ML, by bringing in your own IPs and allowing the platform to accept them and run that on top of it. In addition, the SOAR component is a pay-per-use model. Compared to any other product, where customization is not available, you can fine-tune the SOAR and you'll be charged only when your playbooks are triggered. That is the beauty of the solution because the SOAR is the costliest component in the market today. Other vendors charge heavily for the SOAR, but with Sentinel it is upside-down: the SOAR is the lowest-hanging fruit. It's the least costly and it delivers more value to the customer. The SOAR engine also uniquely helps us to automate most of the incidents with automated enrichment and that cuts out the L1 analyst work. And combining M365 with Sentinel, if you want to call it integration, takes just a few clicks: "next, next finish." If it is all M365-native, it is a maximum of three or four steps and you'll be able to ingest all the logs into Sentinel. That is true even with AWS or GCP because most of the connectors are already available out-of-the-box. You just click, put in your subscription details, include your IAM, and you are finished. Within five to six steps, you can integrate AWS workloads and the logs can be ingested into Sentinel. When it comes to a third party specifically, such as log sources in a data center or on-premises, we need a log collector so that the logs can be forwarded to the Sentinel platform. And when it comes to servers or something where there is an agent for Windows or Linux, the agent can collect the logs and ship them to the Sentinel platform. I don't see any difficulties in integrating any of the log sources, even to the extent of collecting IoT log sources. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has multiple components such as Defender for Servers, Defender for PaaS, and Defender for databases. For customers in Azure, there are a lot of use cases specific to protecting workloads and PaaS and SaaS in Azure and beyond Azure, if a customer also has on-premises locations. There is EDR for Windows and Linux servers, and it even protects different kinds of containers. With Defender for Cloud, all these sources can be seamlessly integrated and you can then track the security incidents in Microsoft's XDR platform. That means you have one more workspace, under Azure, not Defender for Cloud, where you can see the security incidents. In addition, it can be integrated with Sentinel for EDR deep-dive analytics. It can also protect workloads in AWS. We have customers for whom we are protecting their AWS workloads. Even EKS, Elastic Kubernetes Service, on AWS can be integrated, as can the GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). And with Defender for Cloud, security alert ingestion is free

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator's performance is good."
"The most valuable features of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator are the easy-to-use console, and lots of reports, such as customized reports and inventory reports. Additionally, overall the centralized management is very good where you can see the compliance levels and inventory."
"You have to have some experience, however, it's pretty simple to understand."
"The policy auditing, policy management, and device auditing are all valuable features. Our customers appreciated the ability to get alerts to system-wide events from a single view."
"The security is a key feature and the console is very user friendly."
"The graphical interface of the solution is its most valuable aspect."
"The central management console is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"It is a scalable solution...I rate its scalability a nine out of ten."
"The native integration of the Microsoft security solution has been essential because it helps reduce some false positives, especially with some of the impossible travel rules that may be configured in Microsoft 365. For some organizations, that might be benign because they're using VPNs, etc."
"The most valuable feature is the alert notifications, which are categorized by severity levels: informational, low, medium, and high."
"The analytic rule is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is the performance because unlike legacy SIEMs that were on-premises, it does not require as much maintenance."
"The solution offers a lot of data on events. It helps us create specific detection strategies."
"It is able to connect to an ever-growing number of platforms and systems within the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Azure Active Directory and Microsoft 365 or Office 365, as well as to external services and systems that can be brought in and managed. We can manage on-premises infrastructure. We can manage not just the things that are running in Azure in the public cloud, but through Azure Arc and the hybrid capabilities, we can monitor on-premises servers and endpoints. We can monitor VMware infrastructure, for instance, running as part of a hybrid environment."
"In Azure Sentinel, we have found, they do have a store in their capability. AI and intelligence features. We found that to be very helpful for us because some other things we do need to integrate again or find another vendor for the store"
"I like the ability to run custom KQL queries. I don't know if that feature is specific to Sentinel. As far as I know, they are using technology built into Azure's Log Analytics app. Sentinel integrates with that, and we use this functionality heavily."
 

Cons

"One thing that I don't like is that McAfee products change very often and upgrade very often."
"As for improvements, I think that putting everything on a cloud and one console would be a great idea and would be useful for customers."
"I would like to see McAfee reduce the amount of manual work required."
"The areas of concern where improvements are needed are related to the product's assignment policy and tag assignment, where users can assign the policies with the help of tags and sort out the systems."
"The Virtual Patching feature needs to be improved."
"There are some issues we are having with updating our Windows server. So we need to contact support or access our support portal."
"The solution could improve the EDR component in many areas, such as the zero-day and persistent threats. The implementation is also complex for this feature."
"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator needs to upgrade its technology since the solution's EDR function is not good compared to other vendors in the market."
"They need to work with other security vendors. For example, we replaced our email gateway with Symantec, but we couldn't collect these logs with Azure Sentinel. Instead of collecting these logs with Azure Sentinel, we are collecting them on Qradar. We couldn't do it with Sentinel, which is a problem for us."
"From a client perspective, they'd like to see more cost savings."
"They could use some kind of workbook. There is some limitation doing the editing and creating the workbook."
"The on-prem log sources still require a lot of development."
"Only one thing is missing: NDR is not available out-of-the-box. The competitive cloud-native SIEM providers have the NDR component. Currently, Sentinel needs NDR to be powered from either Corelight or some other NDR provider."
"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."
"Documentation is the main thing that could be improved. In terms of product usage, the documentation is pretty good, but I'd like a lot more documentation on Kusto Query Language."
"They only classify alerts into three categories: high, medium, and low. So, from the user's point of view, having another critical category would be awesome."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a license required to use this solution. If we use the additional components, such as DLP encryption, there is an additional cost. However, it is similar to a separate product altogether. If you want to use that or not, it is optional, but when you use it, it will cost you additional pricing."
"$The price of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is expensive, it is approximately $6,000 to $9,000 per license annually."
"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is not an expensive solution."
"For large enterprise companies, the price should be alright, but for small businesses, the uptake might be slow because, for these clients, the price doesn't look very attractive."
"McAfee tries to package different things into different products, then sell them as different products with different licenses. They just split everything up into multiple things. That's just their sales pitch and how they do it."
"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is a cheaply priced product, meaning it is not expensive since McAfee provides a free version of ePO, which includes phone support as well."
"This solution is priced in the mid-range."
"Compared to other Antivirus products, the cost of this solution is a bit high."
"We must have saved some money with this product. It is a cloud-native product, and the ingestion is per GB. Every GB costs a certain amount of money. That is how the license of Microsoft Sentinel works."
"Good monthly operational cost model for the detection and response outcomes delivered, M365 logs don't count toward the limits which is a good benefit."
"The current licensing is based on the logs that are being ingested on the platform. Most of the SIEM solutions utilize that pricing model, but Microsoft should give us a customization option for controlling the kind of logs that we feed into Microsoft Sentinel. That will be much better. Otherwise, the pricing is a bit higher."
"Microsoft Sentinel is included in our E5 license."
"It is priced fairly given the value that you get from the use of the product. The biggest mistake people make with Microsoft Sentinel is not understanding the pricing model and the amount of data that they are going to be running through the tool because you are paying based on the flow. You are paying based on the amount of data that is moving through the tool. People do not plan, and therefore, they get surprised by the cost associated with using the tool. They connect everything because they want to know everything, but connecting everything is very expensive."
"The price is reasonable because Sentinel includes features like user behavior analytics and SOAR that are typically sold separately. Overall, a standalone on-prem solution would require some high-end servers, and there's a different cost. It is a cloud-based solution, so there are backend cloud computing costs, but they are negligible."
"Microsoft can enhance the licensing side. I feel there is confusion sometimes... They should have a single license in which we have the opportunity to use the EDR or CASB solution."
"Microsoft Sentinel is pretty expensive, and they recently announced that they will increase the price of all Microsoft services running in Azure by 11 percent. Luckily, I'm not responsible for the financial side. For one of my clients, the estimated cost is 880,000 euros for one year. There are additional costs for the service agreement."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Mcafee's MVision ePO or ePolicy Orchestrator?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Mcafee's MVision ePO or ePolicy Orchestrator network security software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Mcafee's ePolicy O...
What do you like most about McAfee MVISION ePO?
McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator's performance is good.
Is there a common threat intelligence tool that aggregates multiple threat intelligence sources?
Yes, Azure Sentinel is a SIEM on the Cloud. Multiple data sources can be uploaded and analyzed with Azure Sentinel and its Threat Hunting functionality with AI available as templates or customized ...
What is a better choice, Splunk or Azure Sentinel?
It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for ingestion of anything, but the charge per GB/Day Indexed and it gets expensive as log ...
Which is better - Azure Sentinel or AWS Security Hub?
We like that Azure Sentinel does not require as much maintenance as legacy SIEMs that are on-premises. Azure Sentinel is auto-scaling - you will not have to worry about performance impact, you will...
 

Also Known As

McAfee ePO, ePolicy Orchestrator, Intel Security ePolicy Orchestrator, McAfee MVISION ePO
Azure Sentinel
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Brelje & Race, Cognizant, Sutherland Global Services, Eagle Rock Energy, Arab National Bank, Bank Central Asia, Kleberg Bank, Leading Mexican Bank, SF Police Credit Union, Macquarie Telecom, Seagate Technology, Blackburn & Darwen Council, California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation, IRCEP, Major U.S. State Government, State of Alaska, State of Colorado, Cemex, Deutsche Edelstahlwerke
Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.