CRITICALSTART vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator comparison

Critical Start and McAfee are both solutions in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category. Critical Start is ranked #26, while McAfee is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.2. Critical Start holds a 0.8% mindshare in SOAR, compared to McAfee’s 1.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Critical Start users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 82% of McAfee users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator and CRITICALSTART are two strong contenders in the security management sector. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator has an edge in terms of pricing and ROI, while CRITICALSTART's advanced features make it attractive despite its higher cost.

Features: McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator centralizes management of security policies, boosts scalability, and integrates with a wide range of security products. CRITICALSTART, on the other hand, focuses on advanced threat detection, intuitive incident response, and versatile security analytics.

Room for Improvement: McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator could enhance its threat intelligence and incident response capabilities, provide more personalized customer support, and improve its user interface for better usability. CRITICALSTART may benefit from more competitive pricing, simplified deployment for smaller enterprises, and enhancements to its mobile app's performance.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator has a streamlined deployment process supported by extensive documentation. CRITICALSTART distinguishes itself with a personalized customer service experience and knowledgeable support, offering a more tailored deployment approach.

Pricing and ROI: McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator offers a cost-effective solution known for solid ROI through efficient policy management. In contrast, CRITICALSTART, priced higher, justifies this with robust threat detection and response capabilities, providing significant returns for those valuing security efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed CRITICALSTART vs. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

December 2025

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Torq is 4.5%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is 1.3%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Torq	4.5%
McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator	1.3%
CRITICALSTART	0.8%
Other	93.4%

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

Featured Reviews

Nimrod Vardi

Global IT Director at OpenWeb

Automation workflows have transformed our IT, enabling secure just-in-time access control

We work with them quite often, so we have a direct line regarding areas in Torq that have room for improvement. If we have a feature request, we can request it. I do not have anything in mind at the moment. We were a design partner for a short while, so we feel that they listen and that users of the system have an impact on the way the system is designed for the better. They have a new community, which is something that I personally suggested years ago. There are many people like me in different places and they might have already built the workflow that I need. Having the option to share workflows or to jump on a thread and say I have this need, did anyone ever build a workflow for it, is amazing. Someone would jump in and say yes, sure, here, take this workflow. I think this is an amazing thing and I really hope that the community will come alive because I think this is really powerful. This is something that I already suggested and it did happen eventually, and I am quite happy with it. I do not have any specific feature in mind that I have a need for at the moment.

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Justin Hadley

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.

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Binu Haneef

System Administrator at Sky News Arabia

Comprehensive security management enabled through efficient integration and automation

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator helps automate routine security tasks. We created customized automation. For example, when we did not have an EDR or XDR solution, we created tasks exclusively for detection and response automation and automatic segregation of infected PCs. The ability to customize the dashboard in McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator helps us significantly. The main feature is automation for auto-segmentation and segregation. As we are in an AI era, McAfee can focus on AI tools. Instead of putting manual effort into each security-related task, it can implement more advanced automation using AI. This enhancement could improve cybersecurity significantly. Regarding the reporting area in McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator, we are satisfied with what we currently have. Our cybersecurity team needs customized reports beyond the default ones. We have more than 20 separate reports for identifying threats, managing, and understanding the security posture of our company and assets.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"As an analyst, it has demonstrated potential to reduce workforce requirements and time needed for related activities."

"Once I started to use the system and I saw the potential, it changed all of our work in IT."

"Using that one piece of AI, we auto-closed 511 cases in quarter four alone."

"What I appreciate most about Torq is that it is an essential part of our system."

"If I review about 100 vendors that I might work with, Torq is definitely in the top five that gave me personally investment back, just because every bit of effort I put into Torq eventually became a workflow that gave it back to me."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

More CRITICALSTART pros

"From a single dashboard, I can take a look at several things including the endpoint protection, the file integrity section, the data activity monitor, and more."

"It is a very manageable and effective orchestrator to manage all resources under one umbrella."

"McAfee is helping us to clean all of the viruses from the machines, protecting our desktops from the latest threats."

"The solution provides excellent advanced analytics capabilities and the integration capabilities make it straightforward to integrate McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator with IT workflow systems."

"The general endpoint protection is valuable, and it is easy to manage."

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator has a built-in advanced pattern, which is very useful because it can detect any pattern."

"The solution's best part is that it is very easy to manage McAfee Agent."

"The central management console is the solution's most valuable aspect."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator pros

Cons

"Even now, we have workflows that are in production that use AI steps and I get different results, making it unusable to some degree."

"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."

"Regarding stability, I have noticed some lagging, crashing, and downtime, which is one of my largest gripes."

"The initial deployment of Torq was not easy."

"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 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 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..."

"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."

"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 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 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."

More CRITICALSTART cons

"The rollout to cover the online resources, such as SharePoint, One Drive, and Office 365 doesn't seem to have a very clear path."

"There are some issues we are having with updating our Windows server. So we need to contact support or access our support portal."

"The installation process is quite difficult and requires technical support."

"There should be more insights and completeness into the cyber kill chain, similar to CrowdStrike and SentinelOne. It just seems a little outdated in being 100% signature-based without all of the insights and protections that come with CrowdStrike and SentinelOne. Overall, they've got some catching up to do if they plan to compete in the comprehensive EDR space."

"The detection aspect should be improved so that signatures are updated more quickly."

"Some drawbacks include difficulty in supporting improvements because we don't get proper response from Trellix support, so there is a need to improve the support."

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator support has been helpful. However, sometimes when I raise the case they take a while to answer. For example, the last time I used them it took them two weeks to reply back by email. No one has contacted me back since. They should improve their service."

"The areas of concern where improvements are needed are related to the product's assignment policy and tag assignment, where users can assign the policies with the help of tags and sort out the systems."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."

"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."

"It is attractively priced. It is a fraction of what we're going to pay for CrowdStrike or SentinelOne, but it only has a fraction of the capabilities as well."

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is not an expensive solution."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"This solution is priced in the mid-range."

"$The price of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is expensive, it is approximately $6,000 to $9,000 per license annually."

"It's an expensive solution"

"For large enterprise companies, the price should be alright, but for small businesses, the uptake might be slow because, for these clients, the price doesn't look very attractive."

"McAfee tries to package different things into different products, then sell them as different products with different licenses. They just split everything up into multiple things. That's just their sales pitch and how they do it."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

13%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Marketing Services Firm

University

Performing Arts

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	19

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Torq?

Regarding the downsides of Torq, one issue is that as a SaaS product, I sometimes encounter transparency issues about...

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What is your primary use case for Torq?

My role is Cyber Security Engineer, and we use Torq for our case management platform, automating some of our phishing...

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What advice do you have for others considering Torq?

Torq's maintenance requirements depend on how you define maintenance. While Torq handles the platform's overall relia...

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Earn 20 points

Which is better - Mcafee's MVision ePO or ePolicy Orchestrator?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Mcafee's MVision ePO or ePolicy Orchestrator network secur...

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What do you like most about McAfee MVISION ePO?

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator's performance is good.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for McAfee MVISION ePO?

It's an expensive solution.

See all answers

Comparisons

Tines vs Torq

Compared 44% of the time

Splunk SOAR vs Torq

Compared 14% of the time

Blink Ops vs Torq

Compared 12% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs Torq

Compared 10% of the time

Swimlane vs Torq

Compared 6% of the time

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ServiceNow Security Operations vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 14% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 11% of the time

Red Canary vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 11% of the time

Expel vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 9% of the time

BlueVoyant CORE vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 6% of the time

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Splunk SOAR vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 18% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 18% of the time

Elastic Security vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 12% of the time

Symantec Data Loss Prevention vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Sentinel vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 6% of the time

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Torq

January 2026

Download Torq product report

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

February 2026

Download CRITICALSTART product report

Buyer's Guide

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

January 2026

Download McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator product report

Also Known As

No data available

Critical Start, CriticalStart

McAfee ePO, ePolicy Orchestrator, Intel Security ePolicy Orchestrator, McAfee MVISION ePO

Overview

Torq is the enterprise AI SOC solution that effectively combines adaptive insights and automation to handle critical threats efficiently. It manages threat lifecycles, swiftly moving from triage to response, ensuring effective risk management.

Torq is designed to streamline security operations by aggregating telemetry across your security stack. It investigates significant risks and manages threats from triage to containment and remediation. This AI-driven tool enhances the capabilities of your SecOps team, allowing them to achieve more impactful results without introducing complicated processes.

What are the key features of Torq?

Adaptive Agentic Insights: Provides real-time threat intelligence tailored to specific security challenges.
Automation: Automates responses to security incidents, minimizing manual intervention requirements.
Threat Lifecycle Management: Comprehensive handling of threats from detection to remediation.
Telemetry Aggregation: Integrates data across platforms for a unified security overview.

Why consider Torq based on reviews?

Efficiency: Users notice significant reductions in time spent managing threats.
Risk Reduction: Enhanced ability to identify and address critical threats promptly.
Resource Optimization: Allows teams to allocate effort to other critical tasks by reducing manual security operations.
Scalability: Adaptable to meet the demands of growing or changing infrastructures.

In industries like finance and healthcare, Torq shows effectiveness by adapting to specific risk scenarios often encountered in these fields. Its integration with existing infrastructures makes it a valuable asset for maintaining stringent security standards, essential for protecting critical data and operations in diverse high-stakes environments.

Torq

The cybersecurity landscape is growing more complex by the day with the arrival of new threats and new tools supposedly designed for combating them. The problem is it’s all creating more noise and confusion for security professionals to sort through.

CRITICALSTART is the only MDR provider committed to eliminating acceptable risk and leaving nothing to chance. They believe that companies should never have to settle for “good enough.” Their award-winning portfolio includes end-to-end Professional Services and Managed Detection and Response (MDR). CRITICALSTART MDR puts a stop to alert fatigue by leveraging the Zero Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP) plus the industry-leading Trusted Behavior Registry, which eliminates false positives at scale by resolving known-good behaviors. Driven by 24x7x365 human-led, end-to-end monitoring, investigation and remediation of alerts, their on-the-go threat detection and response capabilities are enabled via a fully interactive MOBILESOC app.

Critical Start

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (McAfee ePO) is the most advanced, extensible, and scalable centralized security management software in the industry. Unifying security management through an open platform, McAfee ePO makes risk and compliance management simpler and more successful for organizations of all sizes.

McAfee

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Brelje & Race, Cognizant, Sutherland Global Services, Eagle Rock Energy, Arab National Bank, Bank Central Asia, Kleberg Bank, Leading Mexican Bank, SF Police Credit Union, Macquarie Telecom, Seagate Technology, Blackburn & Darwen Council, California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation, IRCEP, Major U.S. State Government, State of Alaska, State of Colorado, Cemex, Deutsche Edelstahlwerke

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

December 2025

Free Report: CRITICALSTART vs. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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