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CRITICALSTART vs Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR comparison

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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

Torq
Sponsored
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
AI-SOC (1st), AI-Powered Security Automation (1st)
CRITICALSTART
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
26th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (30th)
Palo Alto Networks Cortex X...
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
SOC as a Service (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Torq is 3.8%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 1.2%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is 8.7%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR8.7%
Torq3.8%
CRITICALSTART1.2%
Other86.3%
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

AD
Solutions Architect at Swimlane
Automation has streamlined multi-tenant SOC workflows and improves alert handling efficiency
Although the reporting within Torq is not that great, we did ask for many features regarding reporting in Torq, but due to some platform constraints, they could not make the whole dataset available for us to be used in reporting. Except for that, we used some basic reporting. When I used Torq, it was indeed in the early stages of AI capabilities. Only a few customers were allowed to use it, and we were among them. It functioned well as long as we summarized the data properly. If you input garbage, you would get garbage out. Thus, we had to do significant fine-tuning regarding what data context we provided to the AI orchestrator to get meaningful results. In terms of Torq's unified platform approach to AI SOC automation and case management compared to managing multiple point solutions across my security stack, I find it case-centric. The unified view in case management is good since it provides clarity, although there are limitations regarding how many items in case management can be modified at once. Bulk operations are very limited, potentially due to their back-end database or data retrieval processes that can be improved. Regarding improvements for Torq, when we were onboarded, there were aspects we were uncertain about, such as the number of cases that could be generated, what data we could bring in, how many clients we could onboard, and similar concerns. Initially, we also lacked clarity about the number of playbooks or workflows we could build. Different triggers like system triggers, case-based triggers, and others can be employed without restrictions, but when it comes to on-demand and scheduled jobs, there is a limitation based on the subscription and pricing tier that notably caps the number of workflows we can create. No bulk editing across cases was one issue, along with limited filtering related to single grouping constraints. Additionally, the out-of-the-box case templates provided require substantial modifications before they become usable. There is also a feature in the cases for notes that cannot be searched. They are only visible through the UI, which is another area for improvement. The workflow and execution-based charges seem misleading as this was not discussed initially. I am not sure if new customers are made aware of this. It seems that workflows revolving around cases hinder functionality outside of case management, as we have many use cases needing on-demand triggers and schedules for functions like reporting or polling devices. Creating additional workflows to achieve basic functionalities raises costs significantly, which disadvantages customers. While they facilitate optimization and scaling, the support received tends to be very basic. Improvements can be made in that area as well.
JH
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.
Sricharan R - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Application Security Engineer Iv at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Security automation has transformed incident workflows and now reduces response time dramatically
I think the areas of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR that could be improved are mainly in UX. We have communicated with the vendor team about this, but they are prioritizing product functionality over usability because most target customers are technical and understand a primitive UI. They face difficulties in implementing UI changes as their team is stretched. Thus, the UI/UX of the tool needs significant improvement. There are plans on their roadmap, but a lot remains to be done. Parts of the tool run on an older framework, causing slowness. Usability is a broader issue than features alone. This usability problem is common in many cybersecurity tools, unlike customer-facing applications. Some integrations have speed issues and might not function seamlessly with different upstream configurations, requiring manual updates. These are the main pain points we encountered, particularly with UI/UX, integration speed, and the usability of certain inbuilt playbooks.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Almost four or five hours of work is now completed in four or five minutes."
"Using that one piece of AI, we auto-closed 511 cases in quarter four alone."
"Under one SOC tool in Torq, analysts get to know everything within the context of an alert or incident they are working on, and this ability to view the whole picture within Torq is one of the major breakthroughs and best offerings of Torq."
"Torq's unified platform approach to AI, SOAR, automation, and case management is superior compared to my experience managing multiple point solutions."
"What I appreciate most about Torq is that it is an essential part of our system."
"What I liked the most about Torq is the actual workflow builder, which is really great because they offer a lot of features and convenience features that are useful for any automation engineer."
"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."
"Torq has exceeded expectations by delivering workflows in a timely and lower effort manner than XSOAR, and it meets all my needs while saving a ton of time and targeting $600,000 saved this year, which is a substantial amount of money."
"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."
"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."
"This has been a positive experience and money well spent."
"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."
"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."
"After a year of using the service, our expectations have been met in terms of services delivered on time, on budget, and on spec."
"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."
"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."
"The installation is very easy to set up; it’s not overly complex or difficult, and the deployment took less than a week as we had it up and running within a couple of days."
"It’s easy to install."
"I have found the solution very useful, it integrates well with other platforms."
"The orchestration in XSOAR is significantly easier compared to other SOAR tools I've used."
"They have a portal where you can find any kind of integration that you need."
"The most valuable features are the orchestration because of the way in which it coordinates the loss from all the devices and it provides us with a high-level overview of the critical log information."
"The performance is great."
"The most valuable features of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR are its overall track record and features that fit our use case."
 

Cons

"Torq does extensive marketing saying that SOAR is dead and markets itself as an all-in-one solution, but this is not actually true."
"Regarding the pricing of Torq, I would say it is expensive."
"The workflow and execution-based charges seem misleading as this was not discussed initially, and creating additional workflows to achieve basic functionalities raises costs significantly, which disadvantages customers."
"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."
"I wish Torq's AI assistant for building templated workflows from scratch worked better; when you start with a blank slate, asking AI to help you build or template the workflow out does not go well."
"Even now, we have workflows that are in production that use AI steps and I get different results, making it unusable to some degree."
"Additionally, the documentation for Torq is not very clear. Most of the information is presented in videos, which are not ideal for reading; there are mostly paragraphs and other text-based content."
"We have MCP that we are working with our cloud security platform, and we wanted to connect this MCP to the case management."
"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."
"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."
"They could dig a little bit deeper into the Splunk alerts when they feel like they need to be escalated to us."
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is complicated to learn."
"While I personally appreciate this approach, I have observed that junior analysts on my team find it difficult to build playbooks."
"Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR lacks to offer SIEM functionalities currently."
"The configuration of the solution could improve it is difficult."
"It's only one cloud right now. It might be helpful for some companies to have an on-premies option."
"The user interface could be a bit better."
"Customization and performance can be improved. For example, some formats were incompatible when integrating, and they said we needed to work with the vendor to fix this issue because some logs that AVA logs were not compatible, and it did not readily recognize the format."
"Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR could improve the Panorama feature. We had to turn it off because it was not working properly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's cost is reasonable."
"It is approx $10,000 or $20,000 per year for two user licenses."
"The solution is a bit on the expensive side."
"The solution is based on an annual licensing model that is expensive."
"The solution's pricing needs improvement."
"When I first looked at Demisto, it had a price tag of $250,000 but when we finally purchased it, it was $345,000."
"My company did not make any payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product since we were only using its pilot version."
"The price of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is comparable to other solutions in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise26
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Torq?
I do not dislike anything about Torq because it has satisfied all of our use cases and requirements. We contacted sup...
What is your primary use case for Torq?
Initially, we were using Slack for small automations, such as creating pipelines or shutting down servers. For exampl...
What advice do you have for others considering Torq?
I have been working for five years with experience in the IT field. Torq is very good. It manages everything. I would...
Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR?
Comparing pricing to Micro Focus, they were offering bundles, making it free with their SIEM. For customers, it is ze...
What needs improvement with Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR?
Regarding areas for improvement in Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR, I want to highlight one concern about playbook cr...
What is your primary use case for Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR?
My primary use cases for Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR are malware incidents, specifically phishing-related inciden...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Critical Start, CriticalStart
Demisto Enterprise, Cortex XSOAR, Demisto
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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: June 2026.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.