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 #27, while McAfee is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.2. Critical Start holds a 0.6% mindshare in SOAR, compared to McAfee’s 1.1% 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 January 2026, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Torq is 4.9%, up from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is 1.1%, 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	4.9%
McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator	1.1%
CRITICALSTART	0.6%
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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART pros

"What I like the most is the ability to manage centrally, to manage the various devices, the platform, and the endpoint, all from one console."

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

"The valuable feature of the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is the management of the policies."

"The best part is management in McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator."

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

"The graphical interface of the solution is its most valuable aspect."

"You have to have some experience, however, it's pretty simple to understand."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the antivirus and the DLP."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator pros

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."

"The initial deployment of Torq was not easy."

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

"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."

"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 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."

"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."

"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."

"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 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."

More CRITICALSTART cons

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator needs to upgrade the technology; it's like their area function is not quite as good as compared to other market vendors."

"The solution could improve the EDR component in many areas, such as the zero-day and persistent threats. The implementation is also complex for this feature."

"The impact of the agent on the endpoint's performance - the resources it takes. Additionally, the difficulties we experience with inheriting and breaking inheritance on the organization's structure breakdown for policy inheritance and then for rules inheritance. We are actually struggling with this."

"It's a little bit complex to configure it, but when you start using it, it is much easier. There are many policies that you need to create, and in three or four places"

"The issues with the integration capabilities of the product, specifically the ones that are deployed on an on-premises model, need to be improved."

"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."

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator should improve its integration with other tools."

"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."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Compared to other Antivirus products, the cost of this solution is a bit high."

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

"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."

"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 ePolicy Orchestrator is a cheaply priced product, meaning it is not expensive since McAfee provides a free version of ePO, which includes phone support as well."

"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is not an expensive solution."

"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

15%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

17%

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Financial 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?

From our research and testing with the tool, we determined there need to be modifications and changes to train the LL...

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What is your primary use case for Torq?

I used Torq for conducting one of the proof of evaluations for a vendor we are connected with. I am currently working...

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What advice do you have for others considering Torq?

One of our members uses AWS, and we receive their feed. This involves triaging AWS-related logs. While I do not have ...

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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.

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Comparisons

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Compared 48% of the time

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Compared 13% 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 7% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 14% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 12% of the time

ReliaQuest GreyMatter vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 11% of the time

Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 10% of the time

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Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 20% of the time

Splunk SOAR vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 20% of the time

Symantec Data Loss Prevention vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 15% of the time

Elastic Security vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 13% of the time

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 11% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Torq

January 2026

Download Torq product report

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

January 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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