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Microsoft Entra ID vs Microsoft Sentinel comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.5
Microsoft Entra ID improves efficiency and security, reduces costs, and enhances performance with integrated security and automated identity management.
Sentiment score
7.3
Microsoft Sentinel enhances ROI with improved security, cost savings, automation, and faster threat detection, benefiting organizations efficiently.
We leverage existing licensing, like Windows Server or SQL, and hybrid benefits, and our sales and marketing teams benefit from co-selling and partnership advantages.
We get a return from not needing to pay other vendors to do what we already had from Microsoft, which was better than the competition.
The return on investment comes from not needing as many IT staff to manage and verify user identity and ensuring seamless device connection without needing to administer device compliance manually.
If a customer is already using Microsoft’s ecosystem, the ROI can be positive due to seamless integration.
We attribute our growth to Sentinel.
From a risk perspective, it's about mitigating risk, and as mentioned earlier, we haven't missed many things since we've had the offering in market—only a couple of minor incidents.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Entra ID support is generally positive but quality varies; premium options offer faster and more expert assistance.
Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Sentinel support is responsive and helpful, though basic support can be slow, with some preferring community resources.
The actual support when you get to that level is a ten out of ten.
There are immediate answers to any issues that arise with great knowledge and a deep understanding of the product and business needs.
They usually try to deflect, buy time, and often do not address the problem immediately.
Their solutions' integration simplifies resolving issues compared to those caused by third-party products.
Working with a Sentinel engineer helped us tune settings effectively.
When my team needs to escalate issues to Microsoft, especially for Microsoft Sentinel, the response is fast through their French entity.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Microsoft Entra ID offers seamless scalability and integration, effectively supporting diverse and large-scale enterprise operations globally.
Sentiment score
8.0
Microsoft Sentinel offers scalable, adaptable security solutions using Azure, ideal for various organizations with its flexible and updated features.
We experienced no scalability issues with Microsoft Entra ID.
Its scalability is impressive, aided by Microsoft's efforts to expand its data centers.
When dealing with tens of thousands of objects, it requires proper management and best practices to retrieve only necessary data.
Office 365 and Exchange are running on it, covering about 35,000 users efficiently.
As our organization uses Microsoft Azure and Defender, everything grows together, and we can integrate various features seamlessly.
Being a SaaS solution, the scalability of Microsoft Sentinel is robust.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Microsoft Entra ID is praised for its stability and reliability, despite minor MFA issues and occasional sluggish response times.
Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Sentinel is highly reliable, with 99.9%+ availability and occasional minor issues, maintaining stability across diverse environments.
It's a critical solution that we can't do without.
The stability of the solution is very high at 99.999%.
We rarely had significant problems or crashes.
So far, we have not experienced any issues, and it has been stable from the beginning.
In the past two years, our team hasn't encountered any issues with the stability of Microsoft Sentinel from an operations perspective.
I need to be aware of deprecated connectors as they may disconnect, but the data continues to be sent with a need for quick adaptation.
 

Room For Improvement

Microsoft Entra ID requires better documentation, integration, user interfaces, pricing clarity, support, stability, and enhanced features for improved functionality.
Microsoft Sentinel users seek better integration, user-friendliness, documentation, AI capabilities, and customizable features with improved performance and pricing.
A recent incident we dealt with took four months to resolve with a seven-day deadline, which was quite frustrating.
Synchronization issues occasionally occur, making it challenging to analyze logs and pinpoint the exact problem.
There is a need for better transformation support from on-premises Active Directory policies to the cloud, as Entra ID doesn't cover this sufficiently yet.
We have some tools, such as our off-site Meraki firewalls, that have not fully integrated with Sentinel.
Currently, we are happy to have a way in the middle with not so much cost, but it would be nice to have the ability to enhance the automation of workflows based on learned incidents.
There are complexities in calculating the right pricing tier for different customers, which makes it difficult for me as a consultant during upfront pricing.
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Entra ID offers flexible user-based pricing and licensing tiers, with discounts for educational and nonprofit organizations.
Microsoft Sentinel's usage-based pricing offers strong value with extensive integration, but cost unpredictability concerns some users.
We are getting our money's worth.
Microsoft sets pricing based on customer demand, adjusting to find the optimal balance between sales volume and profit per unit, similar to how Costco manages product prices.
Most features of Entra ID are part of Microsoft's ecosystem and included in Microsoft 365 bundles, which means there are no additional costs associated with pricing and licensing.
Microsoft Sentinel offers more capabilities than Bastion, with a more intuitive experience.
Setting up the right cost model for customers is intricate, requiring careful consideration of various components and licensing tiers.
The ingestion costs for the data analytics is usually the highest cost.
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Entra ID enhances security and efficiency with features like single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and seamless third-party integration.
Microsoft Sentinel provides AI-driven automation, robust threat detection, scalability, and seamless integration for comprehensive security operations within the Microsoft ecosystem.
We can secure the applications that we are building and make sure that if the application were to be compromised, there is no full access to a customer's environment causing issues and other security concerns.
It's integrated with Microsoft technologies like Authenticator, SSO, and MFA, streamlining operations and creating a seamless environment.
The granular control, such as preventing logins from specific locations, enhances security significantly.
Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources and its detection capabilities are essential.
Microsoft Sentinel has improved cost efficiency, which is one of the key areas we're able to win business against the ability to have threat intelligence.
Microsoft Sentinel's ability to correlate data from multiple sources enhances our threat detection capabilities beyond what is a simple data lake solution by filtering out the noise and consolidating the signal down to a meaningful level that is easier to investigate and see.
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Entra ID
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
234
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (1st), Authentication Systems (1st), Identity Management (IM) (1st), Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) (1st), Access Management (1st)
Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
97
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (1st), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Entra ID is 9.5%, up from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 5.1%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsoft Security Suite
 

Featured Reviews

Bahram Piri - PeerSpot reviewer
Security focus and seamless implementation increase platform productivity
Microsoft Entra ID can be improved in many ways, and there's a big wish list.If we're focusing on security, something that I definitely expect is improvement in the UI and UX for frontline workers. This is important, especially for non-tech savvy individuals. It is something Microsoft Entra ID could do to improve for a wider audience. It's important to focus on the frontline workers since they are non-tech savvy individuals. They are not like those back-office engineering C-level employees who are constantly dealing with computers, and we need to build a specific user experience and user interface for them to handle this stuff. That's something I expect Microsoft to focus on more for Microsoft Entra ID.
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
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
29%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Duo Security compare with Microsoft Authenticator?
We switched to Duo Security for identity verification. We’d been using a competitor but got the chance to evaluate Duo for 30 days, and we could not be happier. Duo Security is easy to configure a...
What do you like most about Azure Active Directory?
It is very simple. The Active Directory functions are very easy for us. Its integration with anything is very easy. We can easily do third-party multifactor authentication.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Active Directory?
Regarding pricing, for the services we receive, it seems within the market range and about average.
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

Azure AD, Azure Active Directory, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Authenticator
Azure Sentinel
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Entre ID is trusted by companies of all sizes and industries including Walmart, Zscaler, Uniper, Amtrak, monday.com, and more.
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 Microsoft Entra ID vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,491 professionals have used our research since 2012.