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CRITICALSTART vs LMNTRIX Active Defense comparison

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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)
29th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (24th)
LMNTRIX Active Defense
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
41st
Average Rating
9.8
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Threat Deception Platforms (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 1.4%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of LMNTRIX Active Defense is 0.9%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CRITICALSTART1.4%
LMNTRIX Active Defense0.9%
Other97.7%
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

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"CRITICALSTART makes us much more comfortable with knowing someone else is watching our data and our systems and knowing that professional security people are taking a look at any issues that do arise."
"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."
"For companies like us that couldn't afford to setup and staff a 24/7 SOC, LMNTRIX is the perfect solution."
"I sleep better at night knowing that LMNTRIX is monitoring our systems and has the ability to respond to threats as they happen."
"LMNTRIX gives us fantastic information about the security of our environment. It tells us about possible threats and how to fix any issues."
"We have a dedicated technical representative that is very responsive."
"Automatic alerts from staying current with the threat landscape have helped us stay safe."
"The fact that it's constantly hunting, looking for anomalies, and can evict without any intervention is really incredible."
"I have no regrets about standardizing on LMNTRIX as our endpoint protection agent."
"Customer service is stellar and they really care about their customers."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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 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 UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"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."
"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."
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"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."
"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 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."
"In the beginning, we were having issues with the LMNTRIX respond agent not playing nice with Cisco AMP."
"The next release might include a monthly newsletter."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It's not the cheapest solution, but you certainly get what you paid for."
"The pricing and ease of install are great!"
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
17%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Construction Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Outsourcing Company
8%
University
6%
 

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: September 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.