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CRITICALSTART vs CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

CRITICALSTART
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
32nd
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (31st)
CrowdStrike Falcon Complete...
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR is 14.1%, down from 15.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
 

Featured Reviews

PB
Saves my team time and alert fatigue, allowing us to concentrate on more important things
The Trusted Behavior Registry helps resolve alerts in the sense that CRITICALSTART is doing a lot of that initial triage for me. Out of a given 500,000 events and alerts, for example, that come through, they're taking out 495,000 of them. That only leaves me with a subset of that to actually have to triage, and that's where it benefits us. They take care of Tier-1 and Tier-2 triage. And the new mobile app is awesome. It is one of the best I've ever seen. It's much better than its predecessor. It's more intuitive, a whole lot easier to navigate and get where you need to go. It's less repetitive and just generally easier to use. It allows me to not have to be sitting at my computer all the time. I can be on my phone or tablet or wherever I'm at. It makes it a lot easier to answer tickets and do that kind of thing. Also, the intuitiveness of the updated user interface for the service is spot-on. It is much easier to navigate, and know where to navigate, in the newer interface. I've never had an issue with responsiveness. It's very quick and doesn't sit there and chug on anything. It's fast, it's efficient. It has enabled our SecOps team to take action faster because if you have multiple ways of connecting to it and actually getting your alerts answered and taking care of things fast, it is extremely helpful. All the information that you need to make a determination is usually in the alert itself that comes through the Zero-Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP). I don't find myself going back to the app itself very often. That still happens, but not as often. The ability to flow the information forward, from the alert standpoint, helps me because it saves me from running back to get the information. It's improved my efficiency. Finally, there haven't been any data sources that the service wasn't able to integrate with.
Otis Brinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps users keep track of everything from one place
The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that we can track all of it in one place across all those different locations. Because it's cloud-based and reports up to the cloud, we also have access to the back end, and an incident response team monitors all incidents. We also have an escalation process in place. From my perspective, there are other pieces of CrowdStrike that the security architect team uses as well, but I don't get involved with those as much. I usually just wait for the end results or the notification if I need to get involved if there is an incident.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The way that the user interface presents data enables our team to be able to make decisions significantly quicker, rather than have to dig into the details or go back to the original tools."
"Outside of using the platform to manage alerts, the feature of the service that we get the most value from is being able to reach out to them and say, "Hey, we might go buy a SIEM," for example. They give us their overview of what's out there, what they've dealt with, what they integrate with, and what that looks like. That's been pretty powerful over the years for us."
"From where we were prior to going into them, the service has increased our analysts’ efficiency to the point that they can focus on other areas of the business. It gives me the ability to allow analysts to do Level 3 and 4 work and stay out of the weeds of the alerts, where you tend to get alert fatigue. The service takes care of much of the Tier 1 and Tier 2 triage. It is more effective than what we had been used to, because it allows the filtering of Level 1 and Level 2 type alerts to be taken care of. This leaves less for us to handle, which is a good thing."
"The new mobile app is awesome. It is one of the best I've ever seen. It's much better than its predecessor. It's more intuitive, a whole lot easier to navigate and get where you need to go. It's less repetitive and just generally easier to use. It allows me to not have to be sitting at my computer all the time. I can be on my phone or tablet or wherever I'm at. It makes it a lot easier to answer tickets and do that kind of thing."
"The quick interaction between the agents is the most valuable feature. If we have questions, they're quick to answer. If we make a change to our system, they quickly make the changes that are necessary to filter the logs correctly."
"The most valuable feature of their service is their tuning... If we were getting 1,000 alerts a day without them, they tune it until they know what to do for 999 of them, and one will make it through to us per day. That tuning is the most valuable part of their solution."
"I also use their mobile app. It's very easy to use and very convenient to be able to respond to alerts wherever you are. I love the app. You can respond and communicate, per ticket, with their SOC in near real-time. The response is very quick."
"There are two parts of CRITICALSTART's services that are most valuable to us. The MDR solution where they monitor our computers, laptops, and users across the board; and their knowledge of Palo Alto firewalls."
"The overwatch module is the most valuable feature of CrowdStrike Falcon."
"Overwatch is the most valuable feature of CrowdStrike Falcon Complete."
"The response service is the most valuable as it frees up our IT staff to focus on other tasks."
"Falcon's threat intel is strong, and the solution allows our customers to automate their site intelligence. We can integrate Falcon X with the other platforms we use, like FireEye, Insight, Cybertech, and Kaspersky."
"What I found most valuable in CrowdStrike Falcon Complete is that it has a lot of monitoring dashboards and use cases, and I saw that it's a very good product, but my company has only tested it, so it's not been used for real use cases. My company hasn't tested the complete license for CrowdStrike Falcon Complete, so the team hasn't checked the open fiber rooms for zero-day attacks, IOAs and IOCs, or any indicators of fraudulent activities. I was also amazed at the solution and its licensing. My company did a competitive analysis of many EDR solutions, but it went with CrowdStrike Falcon Complete. It's one of the top-rated solutions on CyberRatings as well."
"CrowdStrike Falcon Complete provides complete details of any malicious activity, including the impact date and file source."
"The solution is easy to deploy and manage."
"I like Falcon's AI functionality and vulnerability management. That has been so helpful. Falcon Complete can manage vulnerabilities, quarantine threats, and do all kinds of forensic incident analysis. It's a lightweight solution that only uses 1% of the CPU, which is a game changer. Other EDRs have had high CPU usage."
 

Cons

"The biggest room for improvement is not necessarily in their service or offering, but in the products that they support. I would like them to further their knowledge and ability to integrate with those tools. They have base integrations with everything, and we haven't come across anything. They should just continue to build on that API interface between their applications and other third-party consoles."
"They just did a user interface overhaul to the website portal that you use for troubleshooting tickets. The old one was fine. The new one is not intuitive..."
"It has frustrated us that they don't have a native Slack integration, because most things do now. That's something we've asked for, for years, and it just doesn't really seem like it's a priority."
"They could dig a little bit deeper into the Splunk alerts when they feel like they need to be escalated to us. For example, if a locked account shows up, they could do a little extra digging to verify that the locked account was due to a bad password on the local system. They could just do a little extra digging within the Splunk environment instead of pushing it onto us to go do that extra little digging."
"The updated UI is actually pretty bad. Regarding the intuitiveness, it is fairly easy to use, but the responsiveness, on a scale of one to 10, is a one. It's really poor performance."
"The only thing I can think of that I would like to see, and I'm sure they could work this into a service pretty easily, is not only alerts on issues that are affecting my company, but some threat intelligence of a general nature on what's out there in the environment. That might be a nice add-in."
"During the six-month integration and rollout, there were some bumpy roads along the way. There were communication breakdowns between the project manager, CRITICALSTART leadership, and us (as the customer). I expressed my displeasure during the integration in their inability to effectively communicate when there were holdups or issues. They were going through some growing pains at that time, but they have been right there for us ever since."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"The training provided could be better. There is a need to have more training to allow us to fine-tune our settings. Not that training is not comprehensive; they do provide training in hotels where we can go and see videos and other helpful information. However, they should be providing hands-on experience to the system administrators because this would be more useful. The training is normally for corporations and should be available for personal users as well."
"Their UI is a bit noisy."
"I would love for the threat intelligence part to be more globalized to provide a tailored response to types of malware and ransomware that are trending in other regions. For example, they can add a feature to tell us that there are separate attacks in South Asia or East Asia occurring at these times, so we can supply those things to our environment and protect ourselves."
"We have also been using Cisco AMP for Endpoints for three years. We have received multiple detections in Cisco AMP for Endpoints, and we had to take some actions, whereas CrowdStrike has not detected anything critical since it has been implemented. Most of the incidents that it has detected are false positives. They should work on the false-positive issue. When it is implemented throughout the organization, it gets very difficult to check each false positive and investigate what is correct and what is not correct. It requires technical and manual intervention."
"The reporting could be better. It's not as good as it could be."
"CrowdStrike Falcon Complete could improve the threat visibility and have remediated vulnerabilities that they find."
"I would like to see them introduce DLP."
"CrowdStrike Falcon Complete could improve by having advanced features, such as SOC, and HDR. There would have been a lot of processes involved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As far as the expense goes, it's very competitive pricing and the services you get are almost like you have a person on your team."
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."
"There are contractual penalties if their SLAs are not met. This commitment was very important in our decision to go with this service, because not having downtime is extremely important to us. The providers has not missed an SLA in the 18 months that I have worked with them."
"Overall, for what I'm paying for it, and the benefit I'm getting out of it, it is right where it needs to be, if not a little bit in my favor. For what it costs me to actually have this service, I could afford one internal person to do that job, but now I have a team of 10 or more who are doing that job, and they don't sleep because they work shifts."
"The pricing has always been competitive. They have always been good to us. They will make it a fight. They don't try to hide anything; it's always been fully transparent and well-worth what we pay for it."
"CrowdStrike Falcon Complete is very expensive in comparison to Bitdefender."
"There is a license for this solution and everything is included. However, The price of the could be lower."
"The licensing cost for this solution is $5000 per license, with each machine requiring its own license."
"CrowdStrike is more expensive than SentinelOne. Licensing works on the number of agents and the modules you buy. CrowdStrike has different modules, such as Falcon, Falcon Overwatch, Falcon Complete, etc. The pricing depends upon the module that the customer wants. They have different Incident Response (IR) teams, which are very expensive."
"There is an annual subscription."
"CrowdStrike offers solutions with the same functionality for both large enterprises and small to medium organizations with competitive pricing."
"While the cost is relatively high, it is justified by the value it brings."
"The pricing for CrowdStrike Falcon Complete is competitive. It's a cheaper solution when you compare it with others, and on a scale of one to five, I'm rating its pricing a four. You also don't need to pay extra for its features. CrowdStrike Falcon Complete is perfect."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Healthcare Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What do you like most about CrowdStrike Falcon Complete?
It is a cloud-based solution. You can easily scale it.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CrowdStrike Falcon Complete?
CrowdStrike has a reasonable price. It's a good price, but if CrowdStrike offered coupons or discounts on a monthly or quarterly basis, it would be more beneficial for smaller vendors trying to imp...
What needs improvement with CrowdStrike Falcon Complete?
There is room for improvement in the AI of CrowdStrike, known as Charlotte AI, which my team does not currently use. I have not had contact with it at this moment. Additionally, patch management in...
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
Falcon Complete
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Palm Beach State College, Mercedes-AMG, Pokemon, Telstra, Goldman Sachs, Zebra
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.