CRITICALSTART vs Splunk SOAR comparison

Critical Start and Splunk are both solutions in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category. Critical Start is ranked #27, while Splunk is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.5. Critical Start holds a 0.3% mindshare in SOAR, compared to Splunk’s 7.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Critical Start users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

CRITICALSTART

Read 10 CRITICALSTART reviews

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120 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Splunk SOAR

Read 47 Splunk SOAR reviews

4,554 Views
3,416 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

CRITICALSTART

Splunk SOAR

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Splunk SOAR and CRITICALSTART compete in the cybersecurity orchestration, automation, and response market. Splunk SOAR leads with extensive integrations and sophisticated feature sets, whereas CRITICALSTART is notable for its robust threat detection and response capabilities, making it highly valued for its perceived value and ease of use.

Features: Splunk SOAR offers automated workflows, customizable playbooks, and advanced integration capabilities, ideal for sophisticated threat management. CRITICALSTART excels with managed detection and response services, advanced threat analytics, and 24/7 security monitoring. While Splunk SOAR supports complex integration, CRITICALSTART focuses on effective real-time threat detection.

Room for Improvement: Splunk SOAR can improve in deployment complexity, user training, and simplifying integration processes. CRITICALSTART should focus on reducing upfront costs, enhancing mobile app features, and improving the intuitiveness of its user interface. Both solutions could enhance predictive analytics capabilities to match evolving cybersecurity threats.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CRITICALSTART offers a streamlined deployment process with quick onboarding and continuous customer support. Splunk SOAR requires detailed configuration to optimize its powerful tools, demanding more deployment time compared to CRITICALSTART’s seamless setup and supportive customer service approach.

Pricing and ROI: Splunk SOAR requires substantial setup investment for customization and scaling, promising a strong long-term ROI for complex environments. CRITICALSTART has higher upfront costs but offers immediate value in threat mitigation and operational efficiency. Buyers often find CRITICALSTART’s cost appealing due to its tangible returns, while Splunk SOAR provides robust ROI potential over time for larger enterprises.

To learn more, read our detailed CRITICALSTART vs. Splunk SOAR Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Splunk SOAR

September 2025

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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 Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

27th

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (31st)

Splunk SOAR

Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.3%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk SOAR is 7.7%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Splunk SOAR	7.7%
CRITICALSTART	0.3%
Other	92.0%

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

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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Mack Scott

Cyber Security Network Security Engineer at Cirrus Logic

Improves response time by consolidating tools and automating threat detection

I haven't gone too far into it to see anything that needs improvement yet. We can likely include some features related to the integration with on-premises resources, rather than focusing solely on the existing automation. These are the additional features that could be included in the future. Splunk's Unified Platform does help consolidate networking security and IT observability tools. They should integrate Splunk Enterprise Security better into Splunk Cloud.

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART pros

"Workflow management is most valuable. It is easily customizable"

"The tool's most valuable feature is its searchability and ease of action on the logs. I can easily search within the logs and take action on them, and I can trace them back to my environment because the way the logs are written is very helpful for us."

"Surprisingly, the mobile app is valuable because it is very convenient for our on-call analysts to respond and get alerted to security alerts and events wherever they are. We are able to harness the power of Splunk SOAR and everything that we are doing, and we are also able to alert our on-call analysts 24/7. From their mobile phone, they can respond to those alerts."

"Technical support is helpful."

"The best feature in Splunk SOAR is the visual Playbook Editor. The drag-and-drop interfaces make visualizations and understanding workflows easy."

"Very flexible integration with other tools"

"The most valuable features of Splunk SOAR are the easy integration with other solutions, including other Splunk solutions. The most important playbooks we need on the market come already on the Frontend. However, nowadays, Splunk changed its name, it's not Frontend anymore, it's Splunk Store. This is a very strong point."

"It's pretty easy when it comes to setting up assets. If you want to fetch emails or call a REST API, you can set up an asset and grab that information."

More Splunk SOAR pros

Cons

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART cons

"While support is available, the resources around Splunk SOAR are more homegrown by other users, and discovering different troubleshooting methods is harder to do with Splunk SOAR than with Enterprise Security or other Splunk services."

"Suppose I am initially granted user rights or analyst rights, but later on, I also get admin rights. SOAR is unable to amend the limitations of my role. I raised a support ticket with Splunk about this. They said it's a bug in their 5.3.5 version. To fix this, I had to reinstall the entire platform from scratch.."

"We've run into a few minor issues. Some of the playbook writing is a bit complicated. We've had a few hiccups with the source control. We'd really like to use GitHub deployment keys for a dedicated account. We haven't been able to do that. I think those are some of the major ones."

"The Splunk SOAR platform was not designed specifically for case management which is why this area needs improvement."

"I haven't had any issues with the solution so far."

"SOAR is probably the most unreliable product Splunk has and that's because most of it is content driven from what you put into it. There are certain parts of it that have a little bit of difficulty at volume too. It's always changing. There is new stuff coming out for it that's going to make it a little bit better, but it does have some drawbacks."

"The pricing could be a bit more reasonable. It would be great if it were feasible for smaller organizations."

"It would be ideal for us if Splunk SOAR could integrate with Teams."

More Splunk SOAR 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."

"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."

"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."

"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."

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

"The cost is high and the licensing is on an annual basis."

"Splunk SOAR is an expensive solution for an organization of our size."

"The licensing cost is reasonable."

"Splunk is a fast enterprise tool, but it costs too much. At the same time, it's worth what we pay, in my opinion. We can efficiently perform all the functions and tie together the data. It's the perfect tool for our needs."

"While I can't confirm the exact pricing, some colleagues have mentioned that Splunk SOAR may be on the costlier side."

"In my opinion, the price is high, but if you want good products, you have to be willing to pay for them."

"It's very overpriced because it is based on the number of users. There is no bulk licensing."

"Splunk SOAR is moderately priced, neither cheap nor overly expensive."

More Splunk SOAR pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Real Estate/Law Firm

14%

Healthcare Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

University

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	11
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	28

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Splunk Phantom?

Splunk SOAR's quick response to incidents is the most valuable part.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk Phantom?

I don't have experience with costs; management handles that aspect.

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What needs improvement with Splunk Phantom?

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Comparisons

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Compared 30% of the time

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Compared 28% of the time

ReliaQuest GreyMatter vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 23% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 20% of the time

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Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 18% of the time

Fortinet FortiSOAR vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 11% of the time

Cortex XSIAM vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 11% of the time

ServiceNow Security Operations vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 9% of the time

Tines vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 9% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

October 2025

Download CRITICALSTART product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk SOAR

September 2025

Download Splunk SOAR product report

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart

Phantom

Overview

The cybersecurity landscape is growing more complex by the day with the arrival of new threats and new tools supposedly designed for combating them. The problem is it’s all creating more noise and confusion for security professionals to sort through.

CRITICALSTART is the only MDR provider committed to eliminating acceptable risk and leaving nothing to chance. They believe that companies should never have to settle for “good enough.” Their award-winning portfolio includes end-to-end Professional Services and Managed Detection and Response (MDR). CRITICALSTART MDR puts a stop to alert fatigue by leveraging the Zero Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP) plus the industry-leading Trusted Behavior Registry, which eliminates false positives at scale by resolving known-good behaviors. Driven by 24x7x365 human-led, end-to-end monitoring, investigation and remediation of alerts, their on-the-go threat detection and response capabilities are enabled via a fully interactive MOBILESOC app.

Critical Start

Splunk SOAR offers features like automation and orchestration of manual tasks, speeding up work, detection and response to advanced and emerging threats.

Go from overwhelmed to in-control

Automate manual tasks. Address every alert, every day. Establish repeatable procedures that allow security analysts to stop being reactive and focus on mission-critical objectives to protect your business.

Force multiply your team

Orchestrate and automate repetitive tasks, investigation and response to increase efficiency and productivity, and do more with the people you already have. Make a team of three feel like a team of 10.

From 30 minutes to 30 seconds

Work faster with Splunk SOAR. Respond to threats in seconds. Lower your mean time to respond (MTTR) by automating security tasks and workflows across all of your security tools.

End-to-end security operations made easy

Take advantage of Splunk Enterprise Security and Splunk SOAR joining forces to provide a seamless and intuitive SecOps platform to prevent, detect and respond to advanced and emerging threats.

Splunk

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Recorded Future, Blackstone

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Splunk SOAR

September 2025

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