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Microsoft Sentinel vs Swimlane 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

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)
Swimlane
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
18th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Swimlane is 3.4%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

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
Srikanth Nuthalapati - PeerSpot reviewer
Great support, scalable, and easier to code
The stability of the solution has room for improvement. I would like Swimlane to provide a single space where we can go to code, build, and automate. Where we have a provision to create tables, playbooks, and tables to produce results, connect all the dots, and make the flow automated. This would make it much easier to navigate than having to jump to different places. I would like to have a single button to click that would start me on the journey of creating my own code from the ground up, from the workflow algorithm to the automation process. This would be simpler than what I had with Splunk Phantom, where I had to piece things together and connect the dots to get the full picture. With this new feature, I could create the full picture with just one button click.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Sentinel enables us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. In addition to integrating our Cisco ASA Firewall logs, we get our Palo Alto proxy logs and some on-premises data coming from our hardware devices... That is very important and is one way Sentinel is playing a wider role in our environment."
"Previously, it was a little bit difficult to find where an incident came from, including which IP address and which country. So in Sentinel, it's very easy to find where the incident came from since we can easily get the information from the dashboard, after which we take action quickly."
"The most valuable features are its threat handling and detection. It's a powerful tool because it's based on machine learning and on the behavior of malware."
"The best feature is that onboarding to the SIM solution is quite easy. If you are using cloud-based solutions, it's just a few clicks to migrate it."
"The automation feature is valuable."
"The most valuable features in my experience are the UEBA, LDAP, the threat scheduler, and integration with third-party straight perform like the MISP."
"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."
"Swimlane enables two SOC analysts to work efficiently as much as ten analysts would without Swimlane, which translates to significant manpower savings."
"Swimlane is a very effective way to represent workflows involving multiple users."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the support."
"The technical support from Swimlane is very good."
"It provides us with a single portal for our logs from different solutions."
"Our primary goal was to reduce analyst time, and we have been successful in that."
 

Cons

"Microsoft Sentinel should provide an alternative query language to KQL for users who lack KQL expertise."
"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."
"The built-in SOAR is not really good out-of-the-box. The SOAR relies on logic apps and you almost need to have some kind of developer background to be able to make these logic apps. Most security people cannot develop anything..."
"If Azure Sentinel had the ability to ingest Azure services from different tenants into another tenant that was hosting Azure Sentinel, and not lose any metadata, that would be a huge benefit to a lot of companies."
"It could have a better API to be able to automate many things more extensively and get more extensive data and more expensive deployment possibilities. It can gain some points on the automation part and the integration part. The API is very limited, and I would like to see it extended a bit more."
"If Sentinel had a graphical user interface, it would be easier to use. I would also like it to be more customizable."
"There is room for improvement in entity behavior and the integration site."
"They could use some kind of workbook. There is some limitation doing the editing and creating the workbook."
"I would like to see improvements in the minor bugs that occur with each update, as some features might have issues."
"The initial setup and deployment are complex."
"We faced a lot of issues with the product’s stability."
"There is a need for enhanced version control in Swimlane. Currently, our version does not support it, making it tough to move changes between environments during significant updates."
"The stability of the solution has room for improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"From a cost perspective, there are some additional charges in addition to the licensing."
"Sentinel's price is comparable to pretty much everything out there. None of it is cheap, but we didn't think we could save money by going a different route. Sentinel was part of our Azure expenditures, so it was easier to add the expense instead of having a completely separate vendor."
"Microsoft Sentinel is included in our E5 license."
"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 pricing isn't very high. It depends on the number of logs you have. If you're expecting to ingest 50 to 60G in a day, but you're only ingesting 20 to 25G per day at first and you have a good team to analyze the logs, then you can segregate the ingestion at under 15G."
"For us, it is not expensive at this time, but if we start to collect all logs from our on-premise SIEM solutions, it will cost more than QRadar. If we calculate its cost over the next five or ten years, it will cost more than what we paid for QRadar."
"Cost-wise, Sentinel is based on the volume of information being ingested, so it can be quite pricey. The ability to use strategies to control what data is being ingested is important."
"The pricing is fair... With a traditional SIEM, you pay a lump sum for licenses. But with Sentinel, it's pay-as-you-go according to the amount of data you inject."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 Swimlane?
It provides us with a single portal for our logs from different solutions.
What needs improvement with Swimlane?
We faced a lot of issues with the product’s stability. Sometimes we find bugs in the plug-ins. We experience some latency when we have a huge amount of data.
What is your primary use case for Swimlane?
I use the solution for receiving alerts and case creation. It is used as a ticketing system.
 

Also Known As

Azure Sentinel
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
LinkedIn, TransUnion, Citrix, Aetna, Perspecta
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Sentinel vs. Swimlane and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.