Microsoft Sentinel is a powerful cloud-native SIEM, but it is cloud-only, priced per GB ingested, and keeps your security data in Microsoft Azure. nPro gives you self-hosted control, per-agent pricing at $4.50 per agent per month, and residency that does not depend on an Azure region.
Sentinel is deeply integrated with the Microsoft ecosystem and excellent for organisations already all-in on Azure. But two structural realities push many teams to look for an alternative. First, the per-GB ingestion-and-retention pricing means costs scale with your data, and security teams often cut logging to control the bill, creating blind spots. Second, the data lives in Azure, which is a problem for organisations under data-residency or sovereignty mandates.
nPro inverts both: per-agent licensing with no ingestion penalty (see our cloud vs on-premise TCO analysis), and full self-hosting so your data never leaves your infrastructure. For regulated industries and the public sector across Southeast Asia, that combination is often decisive.
Sentinel is a strong product and the right answer for a lot of organisations. The question is whether your constraints match its model.
There is nothing to size, patch or scale. Microsoft runs it. If your team has no appetite for operating servers, that is the whole argument and it is a good one.
Native coverage of Entra ID, Microsoft 365 and Azure workloads is excellent and hard to match from outside the estate, and the library of prebuilt analytics rules and workbooks means you start further along.
nPro's behavioural analytics are still in development and are not comparable to a dedicated UEBA platform today. Its integration ecosystem is also smaller than the long-established platforms. If either is a requirement rather than a preference, weigh that honestly.
nPro has no SaaS option. That is deliberate, and it is also a commitment on your side. You need a Linux server that somebody patches, monitors and backs up. If your organisation has no appetite for running infrastructure, a hosted platform is the better fit whatever its licensing model looks like.
What you get in exchange is residency that does not depend on a vendor's regional policy, air-gapped operation where the network demands it, and a ClickHouse storage engine that takes materially less tuning to run than an Elasticsearch cluster. For regulated organisations that were going to self-host regardless, that trade is usually the easy part.
Self-hosted SIEM + XDR + network monitoring. Per-agent pricing, full sovereignty.