CRITICALSTART vs Netsurion comparison

Critical Start and Netsurion are both solutions in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category. Critical Start is ranked #28, while Netsurion is ranked #31. Critical Start holds a 1.2% mindshare in MDR, compared to Netsurion’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Critical Start users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Netsurion users who would recommend it.

CRITICALSTART

Read 10 CRITICALSTART reviews

2,527 Views
1,744 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Netsurion

Read 24 Netsurion reviews

5,182 Views
1,658 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

CRITICALSTART

Netsurion

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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).

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Netsurion

June 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

CRITICALSTART

Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

28th

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (25th)

Netsurion

Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

31st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (19th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (48th), SOC as a Service (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (43rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 1.2%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netsurion is 1.2%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
CRITICALSTART	1.2%
Netsurion	1.2%
Other	97.6%

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In a given quarter, I get 589,000 security events and 584,000 of those get reduced by the service before they even get to me, so the alerts that actually come through to me end up being about 1,400 in that quarter, which is a 99.7 percent efficiency rate."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We are absolutely seeing return on our investment from CRITICALSTART's services, as they're doing the job of a 24/7 SOC at a fraction of the price that it would cost me to run it myself."

More CRITICALSTART pros

"Netsurion's security operations center is critical for us because they provide 24/7 monitoring, we've never had another company meet the same need in the past, and it's a valuable tool to have."

"I like the UI, overall. I like the main page and there are aspects of the search page that I like. When you bring it up on the left-hand side of the page, as you look at the events, the ability to simply hit and click the plus/minus to pull events in and out of the overall view is well done and is very effective from a threat-hunting and an analysis perspective. I like the detail it shows."

"We use those standard reports every day and monitor them, and it probably saves us three hours a day because the solution is doing the consolidation of the log files for us."

"I like EventTracker's dashboard. I see it every time I log in because it's the first thing you get to. We have our own widgets that we use. For the sake of transparency, there are a few widgets that we look at there and then we move out from there... Among the particularly helpful widgets, the not-reporting widget is a big one. The number-of-logs-processed is also a good one."

"The solution provides actionable threat intelligence, it is not a passive service, they go in and perform mitigations on whatever they find, it is timely, and they provide context so it is understood by anyone who receives these reports."

"It's a deny-all policy, so there's an access list on each machine, and it was effortless to tune it for our software because we have four pieces of intellectual property used in-house, and that was super easy to get up and running compared to some of the other solutions I've seen."

"The managed service is great value which saves you a full-time employee on your staff by being able to outsource it to EventTracker to review all the logs and cull through the data to make recommendations and identify threats, then how to remediate them."

"We have also integrated our endpoint security into the Netsurion SIEM. That's important because we have all the events in one place; we don't have to manage them in multiple places. In addition, the embedded MITRE ATT&CK Framework was paramount in our decision to choose Managed Threat Protection because the MITRE Framework is the industry standard for threats."

More Netsurion pros

Cons

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

"They could dig a little bit deeper into the Splunk alerts when they feel like they need to be escalated to us."

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART cons

"Their SOC team can't understand our network because they haven't worked in the actual company. This does negatively affect security posture, e.g., if you don't have knowledge about the network, then you will miss things."

"The biggest problem is that we have too many domain controllers. So, we have to keep all the clients and main system updated with the latest versions along with making sure all the firewalls are open."

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

"The hosted on-premise hardware that we were using was having issues. The performance of it was horrendous, but we weren't using it."

"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."

"I would like to see the dashboard come up more quickly."

"The EventTracker support said, "We do have that." However, that wasn't necessarily the case. It was primarily an eight to five type of thing."

"The upfront costs have increased, and we have been locked into this contract."

More Netsurion cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"We have seen time and cost savings. It prevents us from having to hire specialized people for this type of work. We would need to hire six staff members to accommodate the same service."

"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."

"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."

"The upfront costs have increased, and we have been locked into this contract. The cost of changing over from it is way too high."

"The pricing and licensing seem very reasonable. The managed service part of it feels like it gives me the equivalent of a full-time engineer for a lot less money. So, I feel it's a good value."

"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."

More Netsurion pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

12%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

13%

Outsourcing Company

13%

Performing Arts

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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Compared 12% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

Binary Defense MDR vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 8% of the time

SentinelOne Wayfinder Threat Detection and Response vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

August 2026

Download CRITICALSTART product report

Buyer's Guide

Netsurion

July 2026

Download Netsurion product report

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.

Netsurion

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

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Netsurion

June 2026

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