CRITICALSTART vs Netsurion comparison

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CRITICALSTART

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

CRITICALSTART and Netsurion are competitors in the cybersecurity market. CRITICALSTART has an advantage in customer satisfaction due to its lower pricing and effective support, while Netsurion is known for its extensive feature set that provides a strong value proposition.

Features: CRITICALSTART stands out with managed detection and response capabilities, threat visibility, and proactive incident management. Netsurion is prominent for unified threat management, multiple security layers integration, and attack surface reduction.

Room for Improvement: CRITICALSTART could enhance its feature set to compete with more comprehensive solutions. Its detection accuracy and user interface could be more intuitive. Netsurion's deployment process could be simplified, and pricing could be more competitive. Its customer support responsiveness also has room for enhancement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CRITICALSTART offers an efficient and streamlined deployment process with highly supportive customer service. Netsurion has a more complex deployment due to its extensive features but compensates with detailed guidance and dedicated support teams.

Pricing and ROI: CRITICALSTART is known for a lower initial cost, appealing to those seeking a cost-effective solution without sacrificing quality. Netsurion, though more expensive initially, offers considerable ROI through comprehensive security capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed CRITICALSTART vs. Netsurion Report (Updated: June 2026).

CRITICALSTART vs. Netsurion

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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

CRITICALSTART

Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

30th

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (26th)

Netsurion

Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

36th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (27th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (49th), SOC as a Service (13th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (43rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 1.1%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netsurion is 1.0%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
CRITICALSTART	1.1%
Netsurion	1.0%
Other	97.9%

Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

Featured Reviews

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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John-Berry

Information Technology Manager at ProfitSolv

The SOC center monitors, hunts, and notifies us of threats around the clock

I know they are working to resolve this issue, but Netsurion is currently unable to retrieve logs from S3 buckets. We use WP Engine for a lot of web hosting as well as AWS, and both of these platforms use S3 buckets. I would like Netsurion to be able to pull logs from Linux devices. We have some of that capability, and I believe they can do it. However, the way it works with Amazon is strange and glitchy. Therefore, working something out with Amazon would be great. Netsurion's SOC can be a bit too aggressive at times. We have asked them to adjust their playbook because I am tired of being notified about the same issue multiple times a day. I am aware of the issue, and it is not a cause for concern. Let's only take action on this issue if we see an actual problem.

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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

"After a year of using the service, our expectations have been met in terms of services delivered on time, on budget, and on spec."

"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 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."

"Out of all the service providers I've had to work with over the years—I've been here six years—CRITICALSTART is my favorite to work with."

"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."

"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 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."

More CRITICALSTART pros

"The product satisfies our compliance, and thus, all of our auditors. All of the data that we use and store for all security events is required by our auditors to be kept in a central storage location."

"They have what they call Elasticsearch which is very quick, although that's only available for the last seven days' worth of data. It used to be that, if I wanted to do a search from three days ago, it might take me 10 to 15 minutes because it had to actually unzip some archive files. So I really like that feature. It's almost instantaneous for anything within the last seven days."

"EventTracker is exactly that; it's giving me all of the features and functions that we need to do our jobs, and at a price point that's incredibly attractive."

"The real-time alerting for things such as people getting dropped into a VPN group or the domain admin group — things like that which really shouldn't happen without proper change management, but we all know the reality, they do from time to time — gives me real-time visibility into what's going on."

"I think Netsurion scales well. We've gone from a small number of agents up to thousands. So I would imagine that it would continue to scale. I don't see any issue with that."

"When it comes to threat detection and response, it does a very good job detecting and blocking on its own. And the SOC is a nice added value because they're doing analysis on things that aren't as obvious, on things that you can't just detect with a signature or behavior. Also, any SIEM will come with a lot of noise, so having them do a lot of the initial analysis to find out what's critical and what issues are false alarms is very good."

"Overall, we're really thrilled with them."

"If I were to look at logs manually, there's no way I could do that. As an example, they are 48 million logs processed a day. There is no way I could look at all 48 million of those. So, it gives me a good structure to be able to look at the different incidents which are created and do different searches."

More Netsurion pros

Cons

"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 and I hate it."

"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."

"The biggest room for improvement is not necessarily in their service or offering, but in the products that they support."

"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."

"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."

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

More CRITICALSTART cons

"Netsurion's SOC can be a bit too aggressive at times."

"The weekly reporting could use some improvement. For example, when we handed them our landscape document, it took longer than I would have liked for those details to become noticeable within the reports."

"There's always room to improve because there would be no competition if they had a perfect solution. The GUI to perform searches within the product may not be intuitive to a new user."

"The system requirements are very, very high. So I need a pretty powerful server to run. If they could lighten that load so that the on-premise part of their product didn't impact my systems as much that would be ideal."

"Netsurion's threat detection and response aren't quite mature. I would expect a little more."

"The solution's dashboard is okay. The one thing that we ran into are issues when we upgraded to the newer version. It uses Elasticsearch for the different dashboard entries. So, we were running on spinning disks, and Elasticsearch didn't work that well. A number of the different dashboards, like my dashboard or different things like that, pull from Elasticsearch. Since Elasticsearch really wasn't working, we were having some issues with that, but we just migrated."

"It would be great if they had a client for phones by which they could push a notification to us, as opposed to via email."

"Everything that I've wanted has been added in. EDR was added, and MITRE was added. Those were two big ones that we didn't even have to push for."

More Netsurion cons

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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"Netsurion's pricing is competitive. At the same time, they're the only ones who do what we want to do the way we want it. I can't say we would've paid more, but we would've had to have come up with our own solution if they weren't providing that."

"Our budget follows the calendar year. We just started a new budget year at the beginning of the month. We did budget for an increase in our threat management system selection. Therefore, we have the budget to implement and accommodate a threat management system change, including an increase for the quoted actions that we received to improve EventTracker. We are just waiting on our council to approve that budget, which might not be for a little while. Hopefully, when they do, we will be able to jump on doing something."

"Our pricing for Netsurion last year was US $52,000 per year."

"It is a bit expensive as compared to some of the other products that have come out in recent years. Expense-wise, the only downside is that it is not cheap."

"We put together the package of what we needed. It was based pretty much on the number of agents that we were deploying. If we needed to manage logging from certain specific applications, like Active Directory and SQL Server, there has been no additional cost for that. We had agents deployed for those specific servers and the applications were included, then there was just an additional installation that they had to do for us."

"Netsurion's pricing is extremely fair and flexible. The price of their SIEM product is reasonable, and you can pay for those services you want on top of that. It wasn't cheap, but it's competitive, and we intend to renew our contract."

"The solution is fairly expensive, but in my experience, all of the SIEM applications that I've evaluated or looked at cost about the same."

"In the security space, it's hard to quantify your return on investment. So, I don't. We spend about $40,000 a year and so. It's hard to say if the SIEM saved that much money."

More Netsurion pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Construction Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Performing Arts

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	7

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Product Reports

CRITICALSTART

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Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart

Netsurion Managed Threat Protection, Netsurion EventTracker

Overview

CRITICALSTART enhances cybersecurity through advanced alert management, expert guidance, and a user-friendly interface. It promotes efficient monitoring and response to alerts, utilizing a Zero Trust model for heightened security.

CRITICALSTART is designed for organizations seeking to manage security alerts and streamline monitoring processes. Known for its quick response times and efficient alert filtering, it integrates tools like Cylance and Carbon Black to offer managed detection and response services. Users experience enhanced security by focusing on critical threats while the platform's easy navigation aids in efficiently responding to alerts. Improvement areas include better alert prioritization, enhanced compliance disclosure, and smoother integration with third-party communication tools.

What are the key features of CRITICALSTART?

Alert Management: Efficient handling and filtering of alerts to minimize noise.
Expert Guidance: Insights for integrating SIEM and optimizing response strategies.
Mobile Access: Easy access through a mobile app to manage alerts on the go.
Zero Trust Model: Enhances security by minimizing unnecessary access and noise.
User-Friendly Interface: Seamless navigation enhances user interaction and response times.

What advantages and ROI should users consider?

Improved Security Confidence: Advanced alert handling promotes a secure environment.
Increased Efficiency: Streamlined monitoring allows focus on critical threats.
Expert Insight: Professional guidance enhances security strategies and operations.
Quick Response Times: Rapid handling of threats reduces potential impacts.

In industry applications, organizations use CRITICALSTART to bolster cybersecurity measures across finance, healthcare, and technology sectors. Managed detection services and third-party integration make it suitable for enterprises looking to optimize security operations and minimize alert fatigue while ensuring 24/7 monitoring and protection.

Critical Start

Netsurion offers robust SIEM capabilities enhanced by managed services, facilitating efficient threat identification and response with real-time alerts and comprehensive reporting.

Netsurion stands out for its integration of SIEM, IDS, and vulnerability management. Its real-time threat alerts and dashboards enhance user response capabilities. With centralized logging from Windows, Linux, Cisco devices, firewalls, and Active Directory, Netsurion enables effective compliance support for HIPAA and PCI standards. Managed Threat Protection with the embedded MITRE ATT&CK Framework enhances threat intelligence, while its evolving interface aims to improve user interactions. However, some users find deployment and searching challenging, pointing to areas for improvement.

What are Netsurion's key features?

SIEM Capabilities: Efficient threat identification using real-time alerts and dashboards.
Managed Services: Provides remote monitoring and advisory support.
Comprehensive Reporting: Assists in compliance and actionable insights.
MITRE ATT&CK Framework: Enhances threat intelligence and management.
Seamless Integration: Works with existing systems for streamlined operations.

What benefits should users consider in reviews?

Threat Response Tool: Rapid identification and response to security incidents.
Usability: Efforts to evolve and simplify user interactions.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlined processes through integration and managed services.
Compliance Support: Assistance with industry standards like HIPAA and PCI.

Netsurion is frequently implemented in industries requiring comprehensive security monitoring and compliance, such as healthcare and finance. It aids businesses in consolidating security efforts, offering insights into user activities and system changes, an asset for companies lacking substantial internal resources.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

The Salvation Army, The FRESH Market, Pacific Western Bank, NASA, American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), and Talbot’s Stores

CRITICALSTART vs. Netsurion