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CRITICALSTART pros and cons

Vendor: Critical Start

4.7 out of 5

10 reviews
100% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

CRITICALSTART enhances decision-making through insights on SIEM products with 24/7 monitoring for prompt alert escalation. Exceptional customer service and expert teams improve efficiency, managing Tier 1 and Tier 2 alerts. While the mobile app offers real-time alert responses, issues like lack of native Slack integration and delays in alert responsiveness exist. More depth in Splunk alert investigation and external threat intelligence alerts requests remain. Communication breakdowns during rollout also occurred.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

CRITICALSTART provides significant value by offering expert advice and integration insights for potential SIEM purchases.

Customer service and support are rated highly, with easy access to their SOC analyst, sales, and leadership teams.

The service enhances analyst efficiency, allowing them to focus on higher-level tasks while managing Tier 1 and Tier 2 triage.

The mobile app allows convenient real-time response and communication with the SOC from any location.

The tuning capabilities of CRITICALSTART significantly reduce alert volume and false positives, ensuring that only critical alerts reach the team.

CONS

CRITICALSTART lacks native Slack integration, which has been requested for years but isn't a priority.

There were communication breakdowns during the six-month integration and rollout between CRITICALSTART leadership and customers.

Responsiveness is an issue, as alerts sometimes take time to load, affecting users' experience.

CRITICALSTART could improve by digging deeper into Splunk alerts to reduce the investigative burden on clients.

Adding general threat intelligence alerts as a service would enhance CRITICALSTART offerings.

CRITICALSTART Pros review quotes

RC

Vice President, Security at StackPath

Jul 22, 2020

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.

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SF

Senior Director of IT Security at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Jul 22, 2020

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.

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LR

Director of IT at Solana

Jul 26, 2020

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.

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DS

IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

Jul 26, 2020

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.

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DC

Dmitri Chernyshev

Director of Infrastructure and IT at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees

Jul 27, 2020

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.

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reviewer1394880

CISO at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 27, 2020

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.

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reviewer1395576

Cyber Security Manager at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 17, 2020

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.

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PB

Preston Broesche

Director of Information Technology at Kirby Corporation

Jul 28, 2020

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.

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reviewer1439061

Systems Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 20, 2020

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.

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JH

Sr. Manager, Security Engineering at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 29, 2020

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.

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CRITICALSTART Cons review quotes

RC

Vice President, Security at StackPath

Jul 22, 2020

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.

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SF

Senior Director of IT Security at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Jul 22, 2020

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.

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LR

Director of IT at Solana

Jul 26, 2020

The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on.

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Free Report: CRITICALSTART Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about CRITICALSTART. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

DS

IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

Jul 26, 2020

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.

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DC

Dmitri Chernyshev

Director of Infrastructure and IT at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees

Jul 27, 2020

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

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reviewer1394880

CISO at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 27, 2020

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.

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reviewer1395576

Cyber Security Manager at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 17, 2020

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.

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PB

Preston Broesche

Director of Information Technology at Kirby Corporation

Jul 28, 2020

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.

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reviewer1439061

Systems Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 20, 2020

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...

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JH

Sr. Manager, Security Engineering at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 29, 2020

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.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

IBM Security QRadar vs CRITICALSTART

CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR vs CRITICALSTART

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs CRITICALSTART

Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs CRITICALSTART

SentinelOne Vigilance vs CRITICALSTART

Red Canary vs CRITICALSTART

Secureworks Taegis Managed XDR / MDR vs CRITICALSTART

ServiceNow Security Operations vs CRITICALSTART

ReliaQuest GreyMatter vs CRITICALSTART

Expel vs CRITICALSTART

eSentire vs CRITICALSTART

BlueVoyant CORE vs CRITICALSTART

McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator vs CRITICALSTART

See all alternatives

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