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CRITICALSTART vs Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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 Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
31st
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (31st)
Palo Alto Networks Cortex X...
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
SOC as a Service (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is 10.9%, down from 12.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

PB
Saves my team time and alert fatigue, allowing us to concentrate on more important things
The Trusted Behavior Registry helps resolve alerts in the sense that CRITICALSTART is doing a lot of that initial triage for me. Out of a given 500,000 events and alerts, for example, that come through, they're taking out 495,000 of them. That only leaves me with a subset of that to actually have to triage, and that's where it benefits us. They take care of Tier-1 and Tier-2 triage. And 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. Also, the intuitiveness of the updated user interface for the service is spot-on. It is much easier to navigate, and know where to navigate, in the newer interface. I've never had an issue with responsiveness. It's very quick and doesn't sit there and chug on anything. It's fast, it's efficient. It has enabled our SecOps team to take action faster because if you have multiple ways of connecting to it and actually getting your alerts answered and taking care of things fast, it is extremely helpful. All the information that you need to make a determination is usually in the alert itself that comes through the Zero-Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP). I don't find myself going back to the app itself very often. That still happens, but not as often. The ability to flow the information forward, from the alert standpoint, helps me because it saves me from running back to get the information. It's improved my efficiency. Finally, there haven't been any data sources that the service wasn't able to integrate with.
NikhilSharma2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Ability to multiple playbooks to fetch data from multiple firewalls and utomated several tasks, including vulnerability scans and SOCL (Security Orchestration, Automation
Recently, they started implementing microservices in XSOAR, which has improved quality and addressed previous issues. However, they should focus more on licensing costs. The user licensing fees are quite high. For example, I received a quote for XSOAR, and it was $12,000 per user per year. If you have a SOC team of 30 members/analysts, you're looking at a substantial expense. They should consider reducing these costs since this high pricing seems to be more about profit. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing. Moreover, the reporting and dashboard features are decent but could be improved. The user interface (UI) is quite heavy and takes time to load, which is a major drawback.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Outside of using the platform to manage alerts, the feature of the service that we get the most value from is being able to reach out to them and say, "Hey, we might go buy a SIEM," for example. They give us their overview of what's out there, what they've dealt with, what they integrate with, and what that looks like. That's been pretty powerful over the years for us."
"Their Zero Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP) engine, which is kind of their correlation engine, is by far and away one of the best in the business. We can filter and utilize different lists to build out different alerts, such as, what to alert on and when not to alert. This engine helps reduce our number of alerts and false positives."
"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 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."
"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."
"There are two parts of CRITICALSTART's services that are most valuable to us. The MDR solution where they monitor our computers, laptops, and users across the board; and their knowledge of Palo Alto firewalls."
"The strengths of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR stem from the fact that it provides functionalities related to patching and URL blocking...It is a scalable solution."
"The drag-and-drop interface enables analysts with no programming knowledge to create playbooks easily."
"We use the solution to automate our SIEM tools and incidents."
"Each incident collected is orchestrated with automation that selects the security analyst to be involved, or provides complex execution plans for managing security incidents."
"The pricing is very good."
"I chose Cortex XSOAR because the client also has Palo Alto firewalls. I can incorporate the data from the Palo Alto firewalls into Cortex and send it into the same data lake to manipulate that data. It lets me manage and monitor the data in one place."
"The product can automate security tasks."
"It is quite scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"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 solution's technical support could be better."
"I think they should increase their collaboration base."
"The integration could be better. Cortex, for example, does not work with iPhone."
"We need a little hands-on experience to install the solution."
"Previously, when Demisto was, there was a community edition; we could use it, reinstall it, and customize it. Since Palo Alto took over, it has become more financially oriented. It's business, but they could offer a pro model and a lighter model for different needs."
"There is room for improvement in terms of the pricing model."
"The solution requires DV but does not support open-source DV elastic searches."
"The platform’s setup procedures could be streamlined compared to one of its competitors."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It is expensive."
"The pricing is fair. The pricing reflects the value and feature set it offers."
"Palo Alto offers significant discounts to customers who purchase the products repeatedly."
"The solution's cost is high."
"There is a perception that it is priced very high compared to other solutions."
"Cortex XSOAR's price could be lower."
"It is approx $10,000 or $20,000 per year for two user licenses."
"There is a yearly license required for this solution and it is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Healthcare Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR?
Even though customers often comment on the price, the potential savings come from managing a large number of security events with a limited number of analysts. This leads to economic advantages des...
What needs improvement with Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR?
The complexity of Cortex XSOAR has a trade-off with its versatility. The product can be tailored for each deployment to respond to specific customer needs, and this complexity may be seen as a down...
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
Demisto Enterprise, Cortex XSOAR, Demisto
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Cellcom Israel, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, esri, Cylance, Flatiron Health, Veeva, ADT Cybersecurity
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.