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Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence 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
8.1
Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence consolidates security, reduces costs, enhances intelligence, and effectively prevents breaches, offering significant ROI.
Sentiment score
7.3
Microsoft Sentinel enhances ROI with improved security, cost savings, automation, and faster threat detection, benefiting organizations efficiently.
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
7.4
Microsoft Defender support varies, with excellent technical help praised but mixed experiences with contact ease and expertise levels.
Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Sentinel support is responsive and helpful, though basic support can be slow, with some preferring community resources.
Level two support is knowledgeable and knows how the product works, which is very good.
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 Defender Threat Intelligence offers scalable security, favored for flexibility, ease of use, and seamless cloud integration despite potential costs.
Sentiment score
8.0
Microsoft Sentinel offers scalable, adaptable security solutions using Azure, ideal for various organizations with its flexible and updated features.
If there were some customizations available, I would rate its scalability as nine out of ten.
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
8.3
Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence is praised for stability, performance, security features, and resilience, despite occasional outages and delays.
Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Sentinel is highly reliable, with 99.9%+ availability and occasional minor issues, maintaining stability across diverse environments.
It provides a high level of security and avoids phishing and scam emails.
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 Defender Threat Intelligence needs pricing, integration, support, AI, automation, and customization improvements for better affordability and usability.
Microsoft Sentinel users seek better integration, user-friendliness, documentation, AI capabilities, and customizable features with improved performance and pricing.
Providing code customization would help keep pace with new vulnerabilities and threats.
From the telemetry data standpoint, I would prefer Defender data to be more open in future updates.
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 Defender Threat Intelligence is cost-effective in E5 bundles but can be complex and costly standalone for SMEs.
Microsoft Sentinel's usage-based pricing offers strong value with extensive integration, but cost unpredictability concerns some users.
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 Defender Threat Intelligence integrates globally informed threat detection with seamless Microsoft product integration for comprehensive, automated protection and analysis.
Microsoft Sentinel provides AI-driven automation, robust threat detection, scalability, and seamless integration for comprehensive security operations within the Microsoft ecosystem.
One of the best features is that it provides a certain level of customization, allowing us to set our spam confidence levels.
Our threat detection is enhanced due to the AI agents in Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence, which helps in detecting automatically.
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 Defender Threat I...
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
15th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (10th), Threat Intelligence Platforms (4th)
Microsoft Sentinel
Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite
4th
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 June 2025, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence is 0.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Sentinel is 5.0%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsoft Security Suite
 

Featured Reviews

TapabrataSamanta - PeerSpot reviewer
A cost-effective solution for monitoring and security but lacks supports for non-Microsoft products
There are weaknesses, and Microsoft is working on addressing them. Over the past three to four years, the ATP and other components have improved significantly, and the integration has also advanced. We are using third-party services. While we have Microsoft Threat Intelligence, which leverages Microsoft's facilities, we also utilize additional third-party threat intelligence. As of today, we don't completely rely on Microsoft for certain regions. This is an area where Microsoft needs to improve. Consequently, we use Anomali, a third-party threat intelligence provider. We integrate our product's intelligence with Anomali, from which we obtain threat insights. Microsoft products offer significant advantages, especially in the realm of threat intelligence. It works very well with Microsoft products. However, you might need additional services if you have non-Microsoft products in your environment. For instance, if you use Apple or Linux, Microsoft's solutions alone might not be sufficient. If they can work more effectively, especially with zero-day attack speed and other sophisticated threats, it will help us provide our customers with timely newsletters about new attacks.
Ivan Angelov - PeerSpot reviewer
Threat detection and response capabilities enhance investigation processes
My security team has been using Microsoft Sentinel for around two years. We also have Bastion and SolarWinds as part of our monitoring tools. We use a three-way tool, alongside Microsoft Sentinel, in our environment The most valuable features for us include threat collection, threat detection,…
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Educational Organization
11%
Government
10%
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

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence?
It just runs in the background. I don't have to worry about, making sure it's Intelligence. So, you know, this kind of makes it very easy, have to worry about installing. It is easy to use.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence?
From the telemetry data standpoint, I would prefer Defender data to be more open in future updates.
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence?
We have tried Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence. I have expertise with Microsoft Defender products. I am not familiar with Microsoft Defender for IoT because we did not use that in our environ...
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

No data available
Azure Sentinel
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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 Defender Threat Intelligence vs. Microsoft Sentinel and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
856,874 professionals have used our research since 2012.