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CRITICALSTART vs Google Security Operations comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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

Torq
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
AI-SOC (1st), AI-Powered Security Automation (1st)
CRITICALSTART
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (24th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (29th)
Google Security Operations
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (27th), Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (11th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (10th)
 

Featured Reviews

AD
Solutions Architect at ProArch
Automation has streamlined multi-tenant SOC workflows and improves alert handling efficiency
Although the reporting within Torq is not that great, we did ask for many features regarding reporting in Torq, but due to some platform constraints, they could not make the whole dataset available for us to be used in reporting. Except for that, we used some basic reporting. When I used Torq, it was indeed in the early stages of AI capabilities. Only a few customers were allowed to use it, and we were among them. It functioned well as long as we summarized the data properly. If you input garbage, you would get garbage out. Thus, we had to do significant fine-tuning regarding what data context we provided to the AI orchestrator to get meaningful results. In terms of Torq's unified platform approach to AI SOC automation and case management compared to managing multiple point solutions across my security stack, I find it case-centric. The unified view in case management is good since it provides clarity, although there are limitations regarding how many items in case management can be modified at once. Bulk operations are very limited, potentially due to their back-end database or data retrieval processes that can be improved. Regarding improvements for Torq, when we were onboarded, there were aspects we were uncertain about, such as the number of cases that could be generated, what data we could bring in, how many clients we could onboard, and similar concerns. Initially, we also lacked clarity about the number of playbooks or workflows we could build. Different triggers like system triggers, case-based triggers, and others can be employed without restrictions, but when it comes to on-demand and scheduled jobs, there is a limitation based on the subscription and pricing tier that notably caps the number of workflows we can create. No bulk editing across cases was one issue, along with limited filtering related to single grouping constraints. Additionally, the out-of-the-box case templates provided require substantial modifications before they become usable. There is also a feature in the cases for notes that cannot be searched. They are only visible through the UI, which is another area for improvement. The workflow and execution-based charges seem misleading as this was not discussed initially. I am not sure if new customers are made aware of this. It seems that workflows revolving around cases hinder functionality outside of case management, as we have many use cases needing on-demand triggers and schedules for functions like reporting or polling devices. Creating additional workflows to achieve basic functionalities raises costs significantly, which disadvantages customers. While they facilitate optimization and scaling, the support received tends to be very basic. Improvements can be made in that area as well.
JH
Sr. Manager, Security Engineering at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
The transparency of data in the platform is perfect: You see everything as they are seeing it
Their Zero Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP) engine, which is kind of their correlation engine, is by far and away one of the best in the business. We can filter and utilize different lists to build out different alerts, such as, what to alert on and when not to alert. This engine helps reduce our number of alerts and false positives. The service's Trusted Behavior Registry helps the provider solve every alert. The way that they have it built out is very intelligent. The way every alert comes in, it gets triaged one direction or another. If it is already a false positive, then it is still getting addressed and reviewed on a regular cadence. Also, true positive alerts get escalated to the appropriate personnel. Its mobile app is great. The ability just to be able to quick reference and see what's coming in when you're on the move or go. You don't always need to have your computer or laptop handy, because you can operate it just from the mobile app. It can communicate with analysts, which is great. The mobile app is great at affecting the efficiency of our security operations. Those guys are using it throughout the day, whether that be at the office, home, or off hours. Typically, they triage from the mobile app. Then, if an escalation needs to be done on a computer, they will pull out a computer. We were on the original UI for a few years, so the updated UI has been a refreshing change. It has significantly more ability to filter and translate data, then load that data. It is rather intuitive to click through for some of our junior analysts or interns, especially as we are starting to onboard and teach them different aspects of the security operations team.
CK
Technical Lead at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Simplified detection rules and SOAR workflows have improved compliance-focused operations
One improvement I am looking for is silent log source monitoring. If some feed or some host went offline or was not pulling any logs into Google Security Operations, I would want better visibility. Silent host monitoring would make a significant difference because it is very hard to track which host went down, and there are many false positives as a result. I think there is a lot of room for scalability improvements, particularly in the integration of third-party applications. Currently, I have to write a script and use a cloud run function to pull logs. If there were direct ingestion by simply providing an API key and some sort of client certificate, it would be much easier.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Under one SOC tool in Torq, analysts get to know everything within the context of an alert or incident they are working on, and this ability to view the whole picture within Torq is one of the major breakthroughs and best offerings of Torq."
"According to positive outcomes, Torq reduced manual work and made incident response more efficient."
"What I appreciate most about Torq is that it is an essential part of our system."
"Torq has changed the day-to-day experience for my security analysts and me by saving literally thousands of man-hours per month since we have implemented some of these use cases."
"What I liked the most about Torq is the actual workflow builder, which is really great because they offer a lot of features and convenience features that are useful for any automation engineer."
"Torq's unified platform approach to AI, SOAR, automation, and case management is superior compared to my experience managing multiple point solutions."
"One of the workflows I manage with Torq looks good and provides faster response, saving time and resulting in happy clients."
"Torq has impacted my organization positively by allowing us to earn time and invest resources in other projects that are more meaningful and more interesting, pushing deeper into what a SOC is, and building our processes."
"Customer service and their response are phenomenal. I would give their customer support a nine point five (out of 10). Our easy access to their SOC analyst, sales team, and leadership team instills confidence in me that they are there for us 24/7."
"There is a team of people who monitor our traffic and processes 24/7, so if anything raises a flag or alert, it will escalate back to me right away. That's the most incredible part: Humans working behind the scenes 24/7 to monitor our networks."
"It is a comfort to know that there is a team of professionals backing you up, especially in an area that you don't feel 100 percent comfortable."
"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."
"When I start thinking about if I were to try to light up a SOC, which I've done before and I have no interest in doing, it could be a million dollars a year or more to do that, and for what I am paying them for the managed fees, it's a steal."
"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."
"This has been a positive experience and money well spent."
"We are absolutely seeing return on our investment from CRITICALSTART's services, as they're doing the job of a 24/7 SOC at a fraction of the price that it would cost me to run it myself."
"The valuable parts of Google Security Operations include how easy it is to write parsers or detection rules, and it is well-advanced in the analytical part."
"The playbooks feature in Siemplify is crucial for automation. We've utilized both standard and custom integrations with other security operation solutions, enhancing our flexibility. The user interface is generally straightforward, although recent changes may require some adjustment and Siemplify's integrations and capabilities offer potential support for various compliance requirements."
"The most valuable feature of Siemplify is the playbooks that can be created."
"Google Security Operations helps meet all the important regulatory compliance across all verticals."
"Google SecOps is extremely useful for threat detection and hunting."
"Overall, Google SecOps is a very useful service for security operations."
"Without hyperbole, I have never, in my entire career, encountered a vendor or a vendor community as awesome as Siemplify. Siemplify and the Siemplify Community quite literally made it possible for our SOC to increase almost five-fold in our number of clients and number of analysts and to go from a Monday to Friday 9-5 shop to a 24/7 shop all in the span of under a year and a half and all while continually adding capabilities and improving the services we offer to our clients."
 

Cons

"It was able to capture data but was unable to differentiate between the agent hostname we are using and the hostname that resides on the back end of the Internet."
"I wish Torq's AI assistant for building templated workflows from scratch worked better; when you start with a blank slate, asking AI to help you build or template the workflow out does not go well."
"The initial deployment of Torq was not easy."
"The case management piece, due to the platform being an automation-first tool, lacks real robust out-of-the-box case templates or good solutions for creating those without spending a lot of time doing development work, which makes the overall experience poor, honestly."
"Torq can probably use more ML and look at what can be closed and what cannot be closed in terms of data classification."
"Torq can be improved by adding some more features, such as adding more automation and providing a no-code option so I don't have to code for everything."
"Regarding stability, I have noticed some lagging, crashing, and downtime, which is one of my largest gripes."
"We have MCP that we are working with our cloud security platform, and we wanted to connect this MCP to the case management."
"In terms of responsiveness, when I open up an alert, sometimes it takes a bit of time to load. However, it only happened once or twice."
"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 could dig a little bit deeper into the Splunk alerts when they feel like they need to be escalated to us."
"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."
"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"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."
"The biggest room for improvement is not necessarily in their service or offering, but in the products that they support."
"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."
"I can give customer service a rating of six because it is very hard sometimes to keep up with the support."
"Building the playbooks could be easier and the integration could improve. It is a difficult process, such as what API connections need to be made."
"We often encounter minor issues that could be improved, but we maintain communication with the developers and submit feature requests. Recently, I requested enhancements such as improved search functionality within playbooks and expanded options for exporting case data."
"I'm inclined to say that I'd love to see some Machine Learning capabilities integrated into the platform, however, I just attended a demo this morning where Siemplify gave a sneak peek into some Machine Learning capabilities that they are currently developing and have roadmapped for release soon."
"The main improvement could be in the accuracy and detail provided in threat descriptions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"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."
"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
17%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Torq?
What has not worked as well as I hoped with Torq is related to product data management and storing data, although it ...
What is your primary use case for Torq?
My main use case for Torq is for managing IT services and providing faster response.
What advice do you have for others considering Torq?
I would rate Torq a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. I chose this rating because customer service is excellent. I suggest to...
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Siemplify?
The pricing for Google SecOps and Microsoft Sentinel is almost the same, with no significant differences.
What needs improvement with Siemplify?
A potential area of improvement for Google Security Operations could be cost. I think Google has already started deve...
What is your primary use case for Siemplify?
Google Security Operations is the main tool that my clients use for the security operations of their companies.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Critical Start, CriticalStart
Siemplify ThreatNexus
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Information Not Available
FedEx Mondelez Intenrational Check Point Trustwave Atos Cyberint Bae Systems Crowe Longwall Security Telefonica Nordea HCL
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. Google Security Operations and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.