ManageEngine ADAudit Plus vs. Microsoft Defender for Identity

ManageEngine is mostly a "check the box" solution for SIEM systems. We needed something that satisfied our customer and was cost-effective. I would highly rate the system on "worth what paid for". Support is eager to please and prompt. My only issue is that it's mostly based outside the US with helpful, but non-native speakers so it's hard to understand them. I wish they would spring for better help "phone lines" so I'm not dealing with difficult to understand and unclear speakers.

Incentivized

Microsoft Defender for Identity is a great solution for each company that has an Active Directory. It fills in the blanks for Identity related incidents that are being missed in the XDR platform. To get a full view on identity risks it is an essential component

• Logons - reports are very clean and concise and accurate
• Account Lockouts - very challenging to do without ManageEngine ADAudit Plus. The tool allows us to easily locate the device or, at the very least, point us in the right direction!
• AD change management - IT admins should consider this a necessity, and ManageEngine ADAudit Plus facilitates this seamlessly

Incentivized

• detect threats and suspicious activities
• pro-active measurements on possible breaches
• identity security posture

• In earlier releases there were quite a few bugs and performance issues. These have since been resolved.
• When integrated with the Log360 Suite, it can be confusing on whether EventLog Analyzer or ADAudit Plus are "managing"/"Ingesting" the data from a given endpoint.

Incentivized

• setup can be complicated, with AD complexity
• Sometimes the load on DCs is pretty high, leading to performance issues
• Better tuning options for preventing false-positive/bening alerts

It works great for everything we need and use. Any issues in the software are pretty easy to resolve with tech support. And they are very responsive to resolving issues. Even ones where a fix/patch are required. At present, the software does everything we need it to for compliance, audit, and account review.

Incentivized

ADAudit with its cloud and on prem install option allows any organization to get in on AD report management. Whether you need to report internally only for for external audit controls its a great tool with flexibility to handle most any user or group report capability. Since this also includes m365 integration it enables IT pros to administer usage, license, cost control and permission access to most anything in Microsoft's portfolio. Its a great tool all around for AD integrated access needs.

Incentivized

uptime good

Incentivized

Integration/overlap between products could be improved

Incentivized

The attention to cases or situations with the tool has been exceptional. being able to count on the manufacturer either by mail, call or chat. generate cases directly from the application allows you to have personalized support in order to solve problems that has been able to appear.

Incentivized

knowledgable and prompt response

Incentivized

The remote setup team helped when i needed it and setup weas very straight forward and easy. The advanced setup for an external db and customizations for our latest version AD environment went pretty easy once they found documentation on customization.

Incentivized

In terms of features, ADAudit Plus offers a comprehensive set of features for monitoring and auditing Active Directory, including real-time alerts, detailed reports, and user behavior analytics. The platform also offers support for multiple platforms, including Windows, UNIX, and Linux, as well as integration with other ManageEngine tools.

Incentivized

Microsoft Defender for Identity is more specialized on the Identity platform, it is a single solution compared to a multi-solution. The integration is better when using the XDR suite in combination with Sentinel. Microsoft Defender for Identity gives a better overview of the security posture

updates are effective and system is reliable

Incentivized

The visibility of changes made in AD are very helpfull. We had an admin that made a change in a GPO that causes some strange behaviour in our environment. Normally that would take days to find, especially because the admin was a few days out of office and couldnt tell us the change he made. But after looking into our alerts we found very fast the specific change that was made to a GPO that pointed us in the right direction to solve the problem within 30 minutes.

• No more ghost accounts and password never expires in our AD, the security level is therefore much higher then it was before. And we need less manhour to maintain that.
• Before ADAuditplus we had several hundred accounts with password never expires and at least 15 changes on that item every week. Since we have ADaudtiplus we have no accounts with password never expires and we only see modifications on that item sometimes when a new IT employee starts within our group. IT crew learns fast what to do and especially what NOT to do in our environment to keep things secure.
• Before ADAuditPlus I wrote PowerShell scripts to create reports for management, since ADAuditplus the reports are build automatically every month and send to management.

Incentivized

• Cost impact was pretty high
• Learning curve, needed time (money) for training
• Greatly improved detections and gives more insights