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CRITICALSTART vs LMNTRIX Active Defense 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)
28th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (25th)
LMNTRIX Active Defense
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
36th
Average Rating
9.8
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Threat Deception Platforms (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 1.2%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of LMNTRIX Active Defense is 0.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CRITICALSTART1.2%
LMNTRIX Active Defense0.9%
Other97.9%
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
EQ
Chief Information Officer at The C&S Companies
It gives us fantastic information about the security of our environment
The dashboard can seem overwhelming at times. It's fairly simple for the end user, and we don't need to do much to make it work, but the dashboard makes it seem a little more complicated than it actually is. There could also be more guidance on how to set up playbooks.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This has been a positive experience and money well spent."
"My impression of the transparency of the data is that it has good detail. It allows you to see how many events have come in, how many of those events have made it down to their analysts to review, and then however many from their analysts to be able to close out, have been able to been escalated to us. It's a good metric that we can share with my management. They see the value of what the SOC is bringing on top of what my team is already doing."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"The fact that it's constantly hunting, looking for anomalies, and can evict without any intervention is really incredible."
"Automatic alerts from staying current with the threat landscape have helped us stay safe."
"For companies like us that couldn't afford to setup and staff a 24/7 SOC, LMNTRIX is the perfect solution."
"LMNTRIX first validates incidents before alerting us of the activity, so we're not inundated with false positives."
"Customer service is stellar and they really care about their customers."
"We have a dedicated technical representative that is very responsive."
"I have no regrets about standardizing on LMNTRIX as our endpoint protection agent."
"I sleep better at night knowing that LMNTRIX is monitoring our systems and has the ability to respond to threats as they happen."
 

Cons

"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."
"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"The biggest room for improvement is not necessarily in their service or offering, but in the products that they support."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"The dashboard can seem overwhelming at times."
"In the beginning, we were having issues with the LMNTRIX respond agent not playing nice with Cisco AMP."
"The only multifactor authentication that is available is Google Authenticator. I would love to see other multifactor applications added to this list as well as physical devices such as Yubikey."
"The next release might include a monthly newsletter."
"The only multifactor authentication that is available is Google Authenticator."
"The portal is still a bit buggy, although it's new and still being refined."
"The dashboard can seem overwhelming at times. It's fairly simple for the end user, and we don't need to do much to make it work, but the dashboard makes it seem a little more complicated than it actually is. There could also be more guidance on how to set up playbooks."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 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."
"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 cost is going to be a little higher than traditional endpoint protection, but you are getting the 24/7 monitoring and validation by highly skilled analysts and that makes it worth it."
"The pricing and ease of install are great!"
"It's not the cheapest solution, but you certainly get what you paid for."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Construction Company
14%
Non Profit
6%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
No data available
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Alliance Funding Group (AFG) - USA Kestrel Coal - Australia Success Resources - Malaysia
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. LMNTRIX Active Defense and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.