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 #17 with an average rating of 8.8. 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.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

March 2026

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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 March 2026, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Torq is 4.2%, down from 5.1% 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 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Torq	4.2%
McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator	1.3%
CRITICALSTART	0.8%
Other	93.7%

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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PankajKumar24

IT Manager at Gigabit Technologies Pvt Ltd

Centralized management console enhances deployment and threat detection processes

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.In using McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator as an on-premise solution, we face challenges such as login issues and stopped services, where Trellix does not provide prompt responses. They request time for logs for analysis, and after about 10 to 11 days, this ticket was finally closed.

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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

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

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

"Any request that comes in, regardless of how complex it is, I can accomplish it with Torq."

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

"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."

"Since we started working with Torq, I am handling much fewer alerts, it is becoming really easy for me to handle an alert, I have all the information that I need, I do not need to connect to different vendors to receive this information, and the main thing I got from Torq is time, which now helps me to build another automated system and learn."

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

"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."

"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 main difference between the other options and this one is the quality of the personnel within the SOC. It's their knowledge and depth and the way they handle customers."

"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."

"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."

"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 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

"The central manager policy means we have almost all client modules in one solution."

"I like the solution's feasibility. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is also better and easier to use than other ePOs."

"This solution reduced a lot of effort to check and confirm that all PCs are running the latest anti-virus signatures and patch levels."

"Application control and traffic encryption are the most valuable features."

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

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the central management console, which is used for DLP, endpoint security, drive encryption, and application control."

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

"If you set it up right, it can really manage a very complex environment which require fine tuning where there are a lot of exceptions. That's what it caters to. It can just do those specifics in those exceptional situations, which is good."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator pros

Cons

"We have MCP that we are working with our cloud security platform, and we wanted to connect this MCP to the case management."

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

"Regarding the pricing of Torq, I would say it is expensive."

"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."

"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..."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART cons

"The way that ePolicy launches the updates is very slow. It would be great if that was faster."

"One thing that I don't like is that McAfee products change very often and upgrade very often."

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

"Features such as full drive encryption are lacking in the cloud version."

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

"Lacks a single plug-in for multiple uses."

"The fact that it uses MSSQL, and cannot be deployed on anything other than Windows, can be a problem."

"While there are bugs and a few functionality issues, it is just a matter of raising them with the support team. However, support is part of the problem as well. You want everything to be seamless in a perfect world, but the support is spread across different countries. They have Level 1, 2, and 3. Level 1 is most likely in a developing country. They don't provide the best service."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

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

"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."

"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."

"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"There is a license required to use this solution. If we use the additional components, such as DLP encryption, there is an additional cost. However, it is similar to a separate product altogether. If you want to use that or not, it is optional, but when you use it, it will cost you additional pricing."

"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."

"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."

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

10%

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

Marketing Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

University

Performing Arts

Marketing Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	4

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?

We do not utilize the AI features that much. When it comes to general AI features of Torq, we are just slowly startin...

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What is your primary use case for Torq?

Torq markets itself as a security tool, and we do use them for security, but not in the traditional sense they market...

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What advice do you have for others considering Torq?

I would rate Torq an eight overall. I feel that Torq is as good as the effort you put into it. The limitations are ve...

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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

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Compared 37% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs Torq

Compared 9% of the time

Swimlane vs Torq

Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 14% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 10% of the time

SentinelOne Vigilance vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 8% of the time

Red Canary vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 8% of the time

eSentire vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 6% of the time

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Splunk SOAR vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 17% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 14% of the time

Symantec Data Loss Prevention vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 10% of the time

GTB Technologies Inspector vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Security QRadar vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Compared 6% of the time

More McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Torq

February 2026

Download Torq product report

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

March 2026

Download CRITICALSTART product report

Buyer's Guide

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

March 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

March 2026

Free Report: CRITICALSTART vs. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator

Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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