Microsoft Sentinel vs Splunk: Key Differences, Benefits & Which One to Choose
Choosing the right Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution for your business isn’t just about the bells and whistles of advanced features. It’s about how the tool fits into your environment, team structure, and long-term security strategy.
In the ever-evolving world of SIEM platforms, two names consistently rise to the forefront: Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk Enterprise Security. These are two of the most recognised SIEM tools on the market. While both offer robust capabilities, their approaches differ dramatically.
In this comparison article, looking at Microsoft Sentinel versus Splunk, we’ll help you weigh up their strengths, limitations, and the strategic trade-offs of each so you can choose the right SIEM platform for your requirements and your business.
Through this guide, we’ll also show how DigitalXRAID helps organisations deploy and manage advanced security monitoring platforms through our 24/7 CREST-accredited Security Operations Centre.
Key Takeaways
- Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk are both market-leading SIEM platforms, but they suit different use cases and organisational needs.
- Microsoft Sentinel is cloud-native, cost-effective, and ideal for businesses already using Microsoft 365, Azure, or Defender, thanks to seamless integration and AI-powered automation.
- Splunk offers unmatched customisation and deep log analysis, making it ideal for complex, multi-vendor environments — but it often requires a larger internal team and higher ongoing investment.
- Key differences include deployment model (cloud-native vs hybrid/on-prem), pricing structure, integration complexity, and resource requirements.
- Microsoft Sentinel uses a usage-based pricing model, while Splunk’s volume-based model can lead to cost unpredictability if not managed carefully.
- Regardless of platform, success depends on expert deployment, tuning, and management — poor configuration leads to blind spots, wasted spend, and alert fatigue.
Why Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk Dominate the SIEM Market
Both Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk are market leaders for a reason. They’ve been adopted by enterprises globally to centralise threat detection, reduce response times, and improve compliance.
Quick Overview of Microsoft Sentinel
Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM platform with integrated SOAR capabilities, developed by Microsoft. It integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft ecosystem, including Microsoft 365, Azure and Microsoft Defender, and uses AI and automation to support real time detection and response.
Microsoft Sentinel is built for scale, agility, and rapid deployment. It’s particularly attractive to organisations that already have Microsoft licences with the Security Suite included, or that want to reduce infrastructure overhead and capitalise on Microsoft’s cloud-first strategy.
Microsoft has also been recognised as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM).
Key Features of Microsoft Sentinel
Cloud Native: Microsoft Sentinel can scale to meet data volumes and processing needs without requiring huge upfront infrastructure investments.
AI Driven: The volume of security alerts dealt with by security teams can be overwhelming. Microsoft Sentinel’s artificial intelligence (AI) driven approach proactively detects threats and reduces false positives. This ensures that security teams can focus on genuine threats, reducing response times and providing a more efficient security operation.
Cost- Effective: Traditional SIEM platforms often come with hidden costs, including infrastructure, maintenance, scaling, and more. As a cloud-native tool, Microsoft Sentinel removes many of these costs, as organisations only pay for what they use.
Seamless Integration: Microsoft Sentinel can seamlessly integrate and collate data with other Microsoft solutions or third-party platforms. This ensures a holistic view of the organisation’s security landscape, allowing for better-informed data-driven decisions.
Automated Workflows: By leveraging Azure Logic Apps, the platform can automate workflows., This ensures that once a threat is detected, predefined actions are triggered to mitigate it. This could be anything from sending an alert to shutting down a compromised system.
Quick Overview of Splunk
Splunk Enterprise Security is a modular SIEM platform known for its deep log analysis, wide third-party integrations, and powerful search capabilities. It’s highly customisable and widely used in multi-tool and complex IT environments.
However, its customisation capabilities come at the cost of added complexity and resource requirements.
To manage Splunk effectively, a team of skilled in-house specialists is necessary for deployment and ongoing management, which many businesses aren’t able to maintain.
Key Features of Splunk
All-in-One Platform: Splunk’s combined security tools and functionalities, including log data analytics and real-time monitoring, help organisations effectively manage their security posture.
Data: Splunk’s strength lies in its ability to ingest data from many external sources, including devices, applications, and platforms. However, this versatility can sometimes be a drawback. Integrating Splunk with other enterprise applications may require additional configurations, making the process more resource-intensive.
Professional Security Information: The data that Splunk analyses and the insights it provides align with the top standards in the cyber security industry. However, the depth and breadth of its features often translate to higher costs and the need for specialised resources internally.
Customisation: Splunk allows security professionals to create custom queries, dashboards and reports. All of this requires a certain level of expertise.
Scalability: Splunk can handle huge volumes of data, ensuring that as an organisation grows, the solution will always grow with it.
Key Differences Between Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk
Both Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk offer robust SIEM solutions. Both are formidable, but when placed head to head, certain advantages and disadvantages become clear:
Deployment and Infrastructure
Microsoft Sentinel is 100% cloud-native and built on Azure. There’s no infrastructure to manage, and deployment can be completed rapidly. It’s ideal for organisations looking to eliminate the operational burden of maintaining on-prem SIEMs.
Splunk offers on-premises, hybrid, and cloud deployments, but this can create additional complexity.
On-premise installations will require significant upfront infrastructure costs and technical expertise within your team to maintain.
Integration Ecosystem
Microsoft Sentinel integrates natively with Microsoft Defender, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft 365, and many more. If your business is already invested in Microsoft, the ecosystem alignment ensures a faster, more seamless setup.
Splunk is platform agnostic. It integrates with nearly anything, but that flexibility comes with extra technical work. Integration often requires custom connectors or configuration, which can delay deployment.
Pricing and Licensing Models
Microsoft Sentinel employs a pay-as-you-go model based on data ingestion and retention. You pay only for what you use, and there are built-in tools and dashboards to forecast and optimise costs.
Splunk uses a volume-based, or enterprise licensing, model. Costs scale rapidly with data volume, making budgeting more difficult and often more expensive, especially if you’re a fast-growing organisation.
Detection, Correlation, and Automation
Microsoft Sentinel offers built-in detection rules, ML and AI-driven insights, and native automation. You can respond to threats instantly with predefined playbooks that execute workflows automatically, which reduces your analyst team’s workload.
Splunk’s detection and response capabilities are extensive, but this often requires custom rule writing, tuning, and integration with third-party platforms such as SOAR, XDR, and others.
The results from a Splunk deployment can be powerful, but the path to get there is more labour-intensive and specialised.
Which Platform Is Best for Your Organisation?
There are several factors to consider if you’re choosing between these two SIEM platforms. The key ones you should consider are:
Choose Microsoft Sentinel If…
- You’re already using Microsoft 365, Azure, or Defender.
- You want fast deployment without the burden of having to add infrastructure.
- Your internal team is lean and needs automation to scale effectively.
- You want cost control through a predictable usage model.
Choose Splunk If…
- You have a large security team with experience in complex deployments.
- Your IT estate is highly diversified and vendor agnostic.
- You require complete control over custom dashboards, queries, and integrations.
- You can accommodate the higher upfront and ongoing costs.
Why Either Platform Still Needs Expert Management
Buying a powerful SIEM tool is only the first step. The real success comes from how it’s deployed, tuned, and maintained. Both platforms require expert oversight and specialist skills.
Common Setup and Configuration Pitfalls
- Poor alert tuning and excessive false positives.
- Excessive data charges with no filtering in place.
- Underutilised automation and playbooks.
- Misconfigured data sources lead to blind spots.
- Compliance dashboards that don’t reflect regulatory requirements.
These issues aren’t always due to the platform itself, they’re due to the technicalities of the deployment or because of a lack of in-house knowledge and capacity to take the integration and engineering steps needed.
The Value of Managed SIEM
With a Managed SIEM solution, your business gains 24/7 monitoring, full coverage of your threat surface, and continuous optimisation of the platform, all without overwhelming your internal IT and security teams.
At DigitalXRAID, we have a highly skilled team that manages SIEM environments such as Microsoft Sentinel every day.
We fine-tune configurations and data ingestion, develop custom detection rules, and ensure that the platforms deployed to monitor your infrastructure are always aligned with the latest threat intelligence from our CTI team.
How DigitalXRAID Helps You Maximise Microsoft Sentinel
As a Microsoft Security Solutions Partner with Threat Protection specialisation and a CREST and NCSC-accredited MSSP, we help organisations choose the right SIEM and then deploy it effectively, making it work day in, and day out.
Implementation and Platform Alignment
We assess your business goals, current IT estate, compliance requirements, and internal capacity. Then, we recommend the platform that best meets your needs and deploy it with minimal disruption.
If your business is already a Microsoft house, the best solution is likely Microsoft Sentinel.
Ongoing Threat Detection and Response
Our UK-based Managed SOC Service offers continuous 24/7 monitoring, detection, and response capabilities.
We build you tailored playbooks, detection logic, and threat-hunting strategies that match your threat profile, industry context and compliance requirements.
DigitalXRAID’s SOC Engineers have helped some customers reduce their Microsoft spend, with one by 96% through Microsoft Sentinel log tuning and another over £21,000 per month by reducing data ingestion volumes.
That’s operational efficiency and return on investment that you can measure and report back to your senior stakeholders.
Proving ROI and Reducing Risk
We can help you demonstrate tangible security outcomes to your senior stakeholders. You’ll gain visibility across your attack surface, improve compliance posture, and reduce your mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) all while avoiding fines and reputational damage and controlling your cost.
Real World Managed Microsoft Sentinel Case Study
A UK-based University wanted to implement a SOC service, and at the same time, it was also assessing how to better leverage its access to Microsoft’s advanced security suite of products.
Following a proof-of-concept period using Microsoft Sentinel, the University identified the benefits of the product, which include a greater ability to proactively detect and respond to cyber incidents, as well as the optimisation of the SOC service with advanced AI-powered threat intelligence.
DigitalXRAID managed the implementation of Microsoft Sentinel, which now provides next-generation security operations, allowing DigitalXRAID security analysts to detect and respond to threats with a unified set of tools at any hour of the day or night, without the need to escalate before remediation of any threats.
With AI-powered threat intelligence, the DigitalXRAID team responds to evolving and sophisticated threats decisively in real time.
The Microsoft Sentinel-powered SOC service is a key part of the University’s overall security improvements. This is part of the ongoing activity to address the ever-increasing and complex cyber threats that the Higher Education sector faces in view of a number of high-profile attacks in the sector over the last couple of years.
Read the full case study here.
Final Thoughts: It’s Not Just About the Tool, It’s About the Team Behind It
When comparing Microsoft Sentinel versus Splunk, it’s clear that both are powerful platforms. The right one for your business will depend on your existing environment, budget, and internal capabilities. But regardless of your choice, your success ultimately depends on how it’s managed and maintained.
DigitalXRAID helps you to get it right from the start and keeps your security posture optimised every day and night from then on.
As a Microsoft Security Solutions Partner with industry-leading credentials, we’ll help you turn your SIEM investment into an operational advantage and protect your business from the risk of cyber threats.
Ready to explore if a Managed SIEM Service is right for your organisation? Get in touch to request a free evaluation or proof of concept.
