CrowdStrike vs. SentinelOne: A Comparative Guide

The cloud has fundamentally changed the way organizations operate and how they protect themselves. With large numbers of endpoints connecting to your network, you need to secure both them and the identities behind them from exploit risks, both existing and new.

Two of the best platforms for securing your modern network infrastructure are from CrowdStrike and SentinelOne. Both offer unified solutions that provide blanket protection to your network. They can help you identify and stop threats before they become huge problems.

But how do you choose between the two?

In this article, we'll go beyond a simplistic CrowdStrike vs. SentinelOne checklist and detail comparable offerings from the two as well as their strengths and weaknesses. We’ll give you the information you need to determine which solution best meets the needs of your organization.

How to Choose Between CrowdStrike vs SentinelOne

Both CrowdStrike and SentinelOne offer a full suite of products to protect your network. The differences between the two lie in their feature sets and their strengths and weaknesses.

CrowdStrike: Core Technologies and Features

CrowdStrike was built with the cloud in mind. It offers large organizations the following core technologies and features: 

• Falcon Cloud Security: This platform provides a unified agent and agentless solution that will protect your assets from being coded to the cloud. It’s all about assessing risks and acting upon them. It first prioritizes risks relating to your cloud and applications and discovers assets within them. Then, it secures your sensitive data and stops breaches it has detected.

• Falcon Identity Protection: Identity and endpoint protection are key elements of this CrowdStrike platform. It provides this through a single agent and console operating in a cloud-native framework. It uses artificial intelligence to find and squash threats to your endpoints and the identities behind them.

• Falcon Next-Gen SIEM: This AI-native platform unifies your data with threat intelligence and workflow automation to stop breaches. It starts by ingesting your data as well as intelligence about it. Then, it detects threats and investigates the scope of them, and then it responds to breaches caused by these threats.

• Falcon Counter Adversary Operations: CrowdStrike isn’t just software. They have a unified threat intelligence and hunting team that operates around the clock to protect your organization, by predicting threats and preparing responses to them. The service covers not only your endpoints and your identities but your entire cloud infrastructure.

CrowdStrike’s cloud-native interface makes it easy to set up and maintain. Everything is available through a single interface. It’s as close as you can come to a turnkey security solution. The software also has a long history of success in detecting and responding to threats.

SentinelOne: Core Technologies and Features

SentinelOne’s solutions are more geared to medium-sized organizations and those whose networks are hybrid in nature and include legacy systems. When comparing SentinelOne to CrowdStrike, you should look at the following products: 

• Singularity Cloud Security: SentinelOne offers a unified, cloud-native platform to protect your cloud infrastructure and the assets within it. The platform provides automation combined with AI-driven threat intelligence to detect and respond to threats in real-time.

• Singularity Endpoints & Singularity Identity: These platforms protect your infrastructure’s endpoint and identity attack surface through proactive, intelligent, and real-time defenses. It not only detects and responds to in-progress endpoint attacks but can counter threats to your Active Directory and Entra ID implementations.

• Singularity AI SIEM: An AI-powered platform for securing your data and workflows. Built on top of Singularity Data Lake, the platform can transform your security information and event management (SIEM) in its entirety and transition it into a more secure one.

• Singularity Threat Intelligence: A service built on top of Mandiant that provides comprehensive adversary intelligence, it can enhance threat detection, investigation, and incident response through threat intelligence. It does this by understanding the threat landscape, proactively monitoring threats, and rapidly identifying adversaries.

Another key component of SentinelOne is its Singularity Marketplace. This allows you to build on top of their products through third-party addons, creating a customized solution that can meet the exact needs of your organization. 

SentinelOne has a long history of providing reliable solutions that keep your organization safe from a wide range of threats.

Key Differences Between SentinelOne vs. CrowdStrike

While both CrowdStrike and SentinelOne can provide comprehensive security for your network, each has strengths and weaknesses that can impact how well they work for your organization. 

The strengths of CrowdStrike products are: 

• Simplicity and Performance: CrowdStrike provides a near-turnkey solution through its simplicity. It’s easy to set up and maintain through its unified agents and consoles. It also has a long history of repelling threats.

• Cloud-Centricity: With CrowdStrike, everything is on the cloud. If your infrastructure is cloud-based and you don’t have to support legacy systems, CrowdStrike can be a perfect fit. 

Its weaknesses are:

• Reliability: While CrowdStrike has a strong reputation for recognizing and neutralizing threats, there have been serious outages relating to the software. Even if their reliability improves, this is an area of concern.

• Cost: While CrowdStrike can be cost effective for certain organizations, the upfront costs of the software are high. To some organizations, these costs may be prohibitive.

The strengths of SentinelOne products are:

• Reliability: SentinelOne products have a long history of keeping organizations safe from a wide variety of threats, and they also have avoided serious outages. This is particularly important for organizations where human lives depend on systems being up.

• Customizability: Through the Singularity Marketplace, you can customize your SentinelOne solution in endless ways. If your organization has complex needs, you will likely be able to build a solution to fit them. It also supports hybrid environments and legacy systems. 

Its weaknesses are: 

• Complexity: SentinelOne solutions can be complex, especially if you build a customized solution. They are not simple to set up or maintain.

• Narrowness: SentinelOne, out of the box, doesn’t provide the completeness other solutions do. While this can often be overcome by using the Singularity Marketplace, large organizations might be put off by the limitations inherent in the core products.

Making the Choice: CrowdStrike vs. SentinelOne

Both CrowdStrike and SentinelOne provide products that can secure your organization’s network. But neither provides a solution that’s perfect for all organizations. Large organizations that are cloud-centric and are looking for a turnkey solution may find CrowdStrike a better choice. Smaller organizations that desire a customized solution that is cost-effective and those that value reliability above all else may find SentinelOne better. 

Before selecting a solution, it’s imperative that you thoroughly evaluate it. This includes testing it in your environment with real data in real situations. You might want to evaluate both solutions as well as other products that could fit your needs.

It’s also important to make contingency plans in case of outages and other failures. No software is perfect, and the potential for human error is always present. Furthermore, planning for contingencies isn’t enough. You should also thoroughly test your business contingency plans, especially if human lives depend on your systems.

Want to learn more about how to secure your network? Check out CBT Nuggets Security+ training.