Microsoft Sentinel vs ServiceNow Security Operations comparison

Microsoft Sentinel vs. ServiceNow Security Operations

Download the complete report

Helped 845,406 peers since 2012

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

Microsoft Sentinel

Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (6th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (5th)

ServiceNow Security Operations

Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Security Incident Response (2nd), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 19.3%, down from 20.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Security Operations is 3.8%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

Featured Reviews

KrishnanKartik

Cyber Security Consultant at Inspira Enterprise

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

Read full review

KishoreKumar4

Senior QE Lead at Cognizant

A low-cost and open-source tool for incident and change management

If we encounter challenges while deploying, we raise incidents. These incidents are categorized by priority: high, medium, and low. We assign an incident number and notify the relevant teams to address the issue. For instance, if we experience a problem with Cloud services or any other issue, we…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has a lot of great features."

"The best functionality that you can get from Azure Sentinel is the SOAR capability. So, you can estimate any type of activity, such as when an alert was triggered or an incident was found."

"There are some very powerful features to Sentinel, such as the integration of various connectors. We have a lot of departments that use both IaaS and SaaS services, including M365 as well as Azure services. The ability to leverage connectors into these environments allows for large-scale data injection."

"Sentinel's most important feature is the ability to centralize all the logs in one place. There's no need to search multiple systems for information."

"The most valuable feature is the UEBA. It's very easy for a security operations analyst. It has a one-touch analysis where you can search for a particular entity, and you can get a complete overview of that entity or user."

"It's pretty powerful and its performance is pretty good."

"The log query feature has been the most valuable because it's very good. You can put your data on the cloud and run queues from Sentinel. It will do it all very fast. I love that I don't have to upload it to an Excel file and then manually look for a piece of information. Sentinel is much faster and is good for big databases."

"One of the most valuable features of Microsoft Sentinel is that it's cloud-based."

More Microsoft Sentinel pros

"Multiple projects use the ServiceNow tool because it is a low-cost and open-source tool."

"The solution is stable."

"Reduces time to closure and closure metrics for vulnerabilities."

"It's stable."

"Integration to other security tools allows for a consolidated view of all vulnerabilities, incidents, etc. for all sorts of leverage in a single platform to assess governance risk and compliance as well as an enhanced, enriched intelligence."

"It gives you the ability to bring data into the system. The workflows are out of the box, and it gives you the ability to auto-assign the incidents based on criteria and vulnerabilities."

"The "follow" feature is really good. If the user is not responding, there's an option to "follow". Just click on the button, and it will automatically trigger an email to the end user."

"ServiceNow Security Operations also takes care of GRC, governance, risk and compliance, enabling it to provide risk assessment."

More ServiceNow Security Operations pros

Cons

"The learning curve could be improved. I am still learning it. We were able to implement the basic features to get them up and running, but there are still so many things that I don't know about all its features. They have a lot of features that we have not been able to use or apply. If they could work on reducing the solution's learning curve, that would be good. While there is a training course held by Microsoft to learn more about this solution, there is a cost associated with it."

"They could use some kind of workbook. There is some limitation doing the editing and creating the workbook."

"We do have in-built or out-of-the-box metrics that are shown on the dashboard, but it doesn't give the kind of metrics that we need from our environment whereby we need to check the meantime to detect and meantime to resolve an incident. I have to do it manually. I have to pull all the logs or all the alerts that are fed into Sentinel over a certain period. We do this on a monthly basis, so I go into Microsoft Sentinel and pull all the alerts or incidents we closed over a period of thirty days."

"Sentinel still has some anomalies. For example, sometimes when we write a query for log analysis with KQL, it doesn't give us the data in a proper way... Also, the fields or columns could be improved. Sometimes, it is not giving the desired results and there is a blank field."

"The solution could be more user-friendly; some query languages are required to operate it."

"Sentinel can be used in two ways. With other tools like QRadar, I don't need to run queries. Using Sentinel requires users to learn KQL to run technical queries and check things. If they don't know KQL, they can't fully utilize the solution."

"The reporting could be more structured."

"They should integrate it with many other software-as-a-service providers and make connectors available so that you don't have to do any sort of log normalization."

More Microsoft Sentinel cons

"In future releases, I would like to add a follow-up and reminder feature. For the tickets in our queue, we could set reminders. This would help us prioritize older tickets before moving on to new ones."

"The product is called SecOps, but it is not security operations in terms of SIEM solutions."

"An area for improvement I observed in ServiceNow Security Operations is the need to maintain correct CMDB data because if you're unable to do this, you can't perfectly maintain the vulnerability data. CMDB data in ServiceNow Security Operations needs to be accurate. As I've been working on ServiceNow Security Operations for only seven months, I still need more time to try all its modules before I can give recommendations regarding additional features I'd like to see in the solution."

"Report generation within ServiceNow can take some time."

"It is challenging for the customers to understand the processes for SecOps. It needs to be simplified."

"It's very slow. When you click a button or update a field, it takes forever to actually react."

"They should stick to the roadmap and continue to build plugins and integrations with other third parties, enhance the UI, and enhance the reporting. It's all good. They should just continue enhancing the releases."

"The solution needs to make customization easier. You cannot do much customization immediately. It requires an extensive workload. If the customization process was user-friendly, it would be much better."

More ServiceNow Security Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Sentinel can be expensive. When you ingest data from sources that are outside of the cloud, you're paying a fair amount for that data ingestion. When you're ingesting data sources from within the cloud, depending on what your retention periods are, it's not that expensive."

"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."

"It is a consumption-based license model. bands at 100, 200, 400 GB per day etc. Azure Sentinel Pricing | Microsoft Azure"

"There are no additional costs other than the initial costs of Sentinel."

"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."

"I'm not happy with the pricing on the integration with Defender for Endpoint. Defender for Endpoint is log-rich. There is a lot of information coming through, and it is needed information. The price point at which you ingest those logs has made a lot of my customers make the decision to leave that within the Defender stack."

"It varies on a case-by-case basis. It is about $2,000 per month. The cost is very low in comparison to other SIEMs if you are already a Microsoft customer. If you are using the complete Microsoft stack, the cost reduces by almost 42% to 50%. Its cost depends on the number of logs and the type of subscription you have. You need to have an Azure subscription, and there are charges for log ingestion, and there are charges for the connectors."

More Microsoft Sentinel pricing and cost advice

"Compared to competitor tools, ServiceNow Security Operations is more affordable"

"The solution is more expensive than BMC Remedy, the other ITSM tool available in the market."

"The product is more expensive than other solutions."

"It is an expensive product."

"If you're going to implement it on your own, there would be internal costs. If you're going to implement it through a contractor or consultant, you have to pay for that."

"This product is a good value for the money."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

21%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

10%

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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...

What do you like most about ServiceNow Security Operations?

The most valuable aspect of working with ServiceNow is its meaningful and feature-rich product.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Security Operations?

The product is more expensive than other solutions like Archer but offers more features, making the pricing justifiable.

What needs improvement with ServiceNow Security Operations?

Report generation within ServiceNow can take some time. Additionally, there are occasional issues when raising a ticket, which can also consume time.

AWS Security Hub vs Microsoft Sentinel

Comparisons

Compared 22% of the time

IBM Security QRadar vs Microsoft Sentinel

Compared 9% of the time

Cortex XSIAM vs Microsoft Sentinel

Compared 8% of the time

Wazuh vs Microsoft Sentinel

Compared 6% of the time

More Microsoft Sentinel Competitors

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs ServiceNow Security Operations

Compared 26% of the time

Splunk SOAR vs ServiceNow Security Operations

Compared 16% of the time

Unified Vulnerability Management vs ServiceNow Security Operations

Compared 8% of the time

Tines vs ServiceNow Security Operations

Compared 7% of the time

Swimlane vs ServiceNow Security Operations

Compared 6% of the time

More ServiceNow Security Operations Competitors

Product Reports

Microsoft Sentinel

Download Microsoft Sentinel product report

ServiceNow Security Operations

Download ServiceNow Security Operations product report

Also Known As

Azure Sentinel

No data available

Overview

Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution that lets you see and stop threats before they cause harm. Microsoft Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, providing a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response. Eliminate security infrastructure setup and maintenance, and elastically scale to meet your security needs—while reducing IT costs. With Microsoft Sentinel, you can:

- Collect data at cloud scale—across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multiple clouds

- Detect previously uncovered threats and minimize false positives using analytics and unparalleled threat intelligence from Microsoft

- Investigate threats with AI and hunt suspicious activities at scale, tapping into decades of cybersecurity work at Microsoft

- Respond to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks

To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

Microsoft

ServiceNow Security Operations is a cutting-edge security solution designed to elevate organizations' security incident response (SIR) processes through automation and orchestration. Going beyond traditional SOAR, this comprehensive Security Operations Suite integrates seamlessly with other ServiceNow products and offers a wide array of features. Its components include Security Incident Response (SIR), which automates incident workflows and offers pre-built playbooks; Security Configuration Compliance (SCC), continuously scanning and automating compliance tasks; Vulnerability Response (VR), prioritizing and remediating vulnerabilities; Threat Intelligence (TI), aggregating threat data for proactive threat hunting; and additional features like IT Service Management integration, Machine Learning and AI, reporting, and a mobile app. The benefits span improved incident response speed, reduced mean time to resolution, increased security posture, enhanced compliance, collaborative synergy between security and IT teams, and operational cost reductions.

ServiceNow

Sample Customers

Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.

DXC Technology, Freedom Security Alliance, Prime Therapeutics, Seton Hall University, York Risk Services

Microsoft Sentinel vs. ServiceNow Security Operations