Splunk vs. Microsoft Sentinel

Splunk Enterprise Security enables you to realize comprehensive visibility, empower accurate detection with context, and fuel operational efficiency. Detect what matters, investigate holistically, and respond rapidly. The only SIEM solution named a Leader across three major analyst reports.

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Microsoft Sentinel is priced based on data ingestion, with many potential areas of confusion around storage, archiving, restoration and searching, leading to surprise costs. Microsoft E5 customers may receive a daily data grant, but it is limited to specific sources.

Moreover, organizations are changing their technology approach faster than ever to keep up with the demands of their customers. With Microsoft Sentinel, you must use Azure Cloud as your back-end for SIEM. You cannot change this unless you want to change vendors.

To thrive in this dynamic landscape. Whether you need to be in one cloud or another, hybrid or on-premises, we have you covered today and tomorrow, keeping you in control of your entire architecture.

Sentinel has alerts, incidents and attack chains, but offers little help for overwhelmed practitioners. Helping SOC teams make sense of it all quickly so they can focus on key threats first is not a top priority. Sentinel’s immature ability to natively map events to industry frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, NIST CSF 2.0 and Cyber Kill Chain requires customers to rely on Azure Security Center for this.

Aligned to industry frameworks crafted by the Splunk Threat Research Team. Our unique risk-based alerting (RBA) prevents analyst alert fatigue by attributing risk to users and systems, so alerts only trigger when risks surpass predefined thresholds. RBA reduces alert volumes by up to 90%, ensuring that you're always focused on the most pressing threats. And detections within Splunk Enterprise Security natively align to industry frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, NIST, CSF 2.0 and Cyber Kill Chain®.

Microsoft Sentinel falls short in coordinating workflows throughout the threat detection, investigation and response process. While Sentinel includes playbooks, its reliance on Logic Apps automation is predominantly tailored to the Azure ecosystem, limiting its extensibility to non-Microsoft technologies.

Across the threat detection, investigation and response process using a modern and unified work surface. Fuel your SOC operational efficiencies with workflows that integrate Splunk SOAR to take your orchestration and response actions to a new level. With Splunk, your team can align and prioritize responses based on urgency so your business can better address risk.

We now have visibility into all of our tools and resources, whether they’re homegrown or third-party applications. That information raises security consciousness and informs the actions we take across the business.

Ojasvi Chauhan Threat Detection Engineer, Tide.

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Splunk vs Microsoft Sentinel

	Splunk	Microsoft Sentinel
Technology Choice	Splunk Enterprise Security seamlessly ingests, normalizes and analyzes data from any source — at scale. Streamline data optimization to selectively ingest crucial data, including at the edge, and benefit from cost-effective storage through data tiering. Splunk Enterprise Security prioritizes what’s important to customers and integrates with global leaders in technology. We don’t play favorites.	With Sentinel, customers are subject to Microsoft’s preference and priorities for data ingestion, starting with Microsoft products. In fact, even within the Microsoft ecosystem, certain data sources are not fully supported, remain in a preview state or require extensive configuration to manage. Further, Microsoft Sentinel guides customers to put high-value log sources, such as firewall logs, into a less performant data store, potentially hampering investigations and increasing costs.
Curated Detections	Splunk has 1,500+ curated detections aligned to industry frameworks so you can realize value from day one. With Splunk, you get automatic security content updates delivered directly from the Splunk Threat Research Team to help you stay on top of new and emerging threats.	Microsoft Sentinel makes it difficult to identify key, impactful content when you’re outside of the console. Security practitioners may not understand when content is updated or how it maps to MITRE ATT&CK until attacks are actually surfaced.
Data Optimization	Optimize your data sources for best use in the Splunk platform. Search data where it lives and only ingest into Splunk when needed for tasks such as normalization, enrichment and data availability and retention. With Splunk Enterprise Security, you have the flexibility to store and access your data — even at the edge — and the choice to ingest key data critical to your security use cases. This ensures the most cost-effective data optimization strategy.	Microsoft continues to prioritize Microsoft over everything else, making customers choose between a simple “Basic” or “Analytics” level of logging with few options for where to store that data. Over time, organizations lose control over where they can keep their own critical data.
Proactively Address Risk	Splunk Enterprise Security risk-based alerting (RBA) enhances prioritizations by attributing risk to users and systems, mapping alerts to cybersecurity frameworks and triggering alerts when risks exceed thresholds. This reduces alert fatigue, keeping efforts focused on detecting high-fidelity threats to proactively address risk.	Sentinel lacks sophisticated risk-based alerting. Security practitioners must dig through many alerts and attack chains, without knowing the most critical alerts to address first. Not having advanced correlations and customizable risk scoring prevents Sentinel from effectively prioritizing alerts, so high-risk threats may not be addressed promptly.
Achieve Operational Efficiency	With a unified risk-based threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR), Splunk powers the modern SOC by offering extensibility, seamless integrations and support for hybrid environments, coupled with a deep understanding of threats and risks. Splunk unifies TDIR workflows through integrated, industry-leading products such as Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk SOAR, Splunk User Behavior Analytics and Splunk Attack Analyzer to address a broad spectrum of SecOps use cases.	While Sentinel includes playbooks, its reliance on Logic Apps automation is tailored to the Azure ecosystem, limiting extensibility to non-Microsoft technologies. An effective SOC demands a SIEM platform that provides robust technical extensibility and seamless integrations, supports diverse, hybrid environments and empowers organizations with a deep understanding of threats and risks. With its narrower scope, Sentinel struggles to meet the dynamic, multifaceted needs of the modern SOC.
Investing for Tomorrow	In the world of security, being future ready is essential. Beyond choice in architecture, vendor and predictable costs, Splunk continues to invest in the security community. We are a founding member of the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), and are proud of our progress and where we’re headed.	While Microsoft has started to make minimal contributions to OCSF, it appears they remain more interested in driving engagement with Microsoft products and standards than anything else. As technology and standards evolve, customers may be left behind.