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 #28, while Splunk is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.3. Critical Start holds a 0.3% mindshare in SOAR, compared to Splunk’s 7.6% 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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112 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Splunk SOAR

Read 45 Splunk SOAR reviews

5,266 Views
4,002 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

CRITICALSTART

Splunk SOAR

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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: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Splunk SOAR

June 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)

28th

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (33rd)

Splunk SOAR

Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk SOAR is 7.6%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

Featured Reviews

Preston Broesche

Director of Information Technology at Kirby Corporation

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.

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Hamada Elewa

System Engineer - Security Presales at Raya Integration

Playbook complexity challenges integration but customization enables professional operation

We work with Splunk SOAR from a security perspective, focusing on User Behavior Analytics (UBA) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) The customization of the playbook in Splunk SOAR is very beneficial. After building the playbook, it operates professionally. There is an AI…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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

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

"I have found all the security automation platform features of Splunk SOAR to be good. The Automation playbook development is highly useful."

"When you design a playbook, you can integrate multiple log sources and define rules... After that, the platform automatically compiles all these activities and, based on the results, the analyst only has to indicate whether the result is a true or false positive. That reduces the time and effort involved."

"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."

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

"So far, the interface is very easy to use."

"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."

More Splunk SOAR pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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

"The dashboard could be improved and some other features. SOAR should integrate network capabilities, allowing us to also monitor the WLAN network. Splunk is also expensive and difficult for beginners to learn. It's hard for a new user to figure out how to visualize old threat data. It took two to three months to learn with hands-on experience how to use the dashboard, visualize events, and analyze threats."

"And most of the challenges that I have faced with the solution can be found in the documentation itself."

"While there have been improvements to the investigation process, particularly with the playbook data, the current log review method is cumbersome."

"Unfortunately, not all of our analysts are iPhone users or iOS users. The mobile app is only supported on iOS. Our analysts who have Android do not have that benefit. That would be a nice thing to have so that we can have it across the board and not just for iOS."

"Improving the integration ecosystem can raise the quality of the bottom tier of the integrations so that they can work better out of the box."

"Splunk SOAR has room to improve its offering for small-sized customers. The price is not fair for smaller-sized customers."

"The font used in the interface could be changed and made easier to read."

"Portability is one thing that is currently lacking. The open-source product that I evaluated had portability. It would require a lot of development effort, but it will save the cost of rewriting all the playbooks."

More Splunk SOAR cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"Splunk SOAR is more expensive compared to other options for SOAR."

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

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

"When we first purchased our Splunk SOAR license, it was based on an event-count model. It was based on the number of events. I had strong opinions at the time that automation should not be stifled by the amount of automation you can accomplish, so the previous structure was not as beneficial for us. Later that year, we got told or saw at a conference that they announced user-based pricing. We are now in a renewal period, so we migrated to a user-based license model, which is more appropriate for us so that we no longer have to worry about stifling our automation based on the quantity."

"I don't know the exact price, but for my region, it is very expensive."

More Splunk SOAR pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Real Estate/Law Firm

12%

Healthcare Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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?

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

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What needs improvement with Splunk Phantom?

There are areas in Splunk SOAR that have room for improvement. To make Splunk SOAR a better solution, there could be better built-in debugging tools, smarter playbook suggestions, and enhanced life...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

July 2025

Download CRITICALSTART product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk SOAR

June 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

June 2025

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