CRITICALSTART vs Fortra's Alert Logic MDR comparison

Critical Start and Fortra are both solutions in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category. Critical Start is ranked #30, while Fortra is ranked #17 with an average rating of 10.0. Critical Start holds a 0.9% mindshare in MDR, compared to Fortra’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Critical Start users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Fortra users who would recommend it.

CRITICALSTART

Read 10 CRITICALSTART reviews

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100% willing to recommend

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

Read 11 Fortra's Alert Logic MDR reviews

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92% willing to recommend

CRITICALSTART

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR and CRITICALSTART are leading solutions in the managed detection and response services market. Alert Logic is favored for its integration capabilities and straightforward pricing, while CRITICALSTART has the upper hand with its advanced features and comprehensive threat detection, justifying its higher price point.

Features: Alert Logic MDR offers seamless integration with existing infrastructure, proactive threat detection, and robust intrusion detection. CRITICALSTART provides sophisticated threat hunting, extensive customization, and a trusted behavior registry for filtering alerts effectively.

Room for Improvement: Alert Logic could enhance its customization options and improve its user interface for better intuitiveness. Additionally, enhancing detailed reporting would make it more compelling. CRITICALSTART might benefit from streamlining its deployment process, addressing potential slowness in the updated UI, and lowering the cost of integrating more data sources.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Alert Logic MDR is known for an easy deployment and solid customer service, which is advantageous for resource-constrained teams. CRITICALSTART, with a more complex setup due to its comprehensive features, offers dedicated support to help users navigate initial challenges effectively.

Pricing and ROI: Fortra's Alert Logic MDR boasts a transparent and cost-effective pricing model, leading to a favorable ROI for businesses focusing on cost management. CRITICALSTART, despite higher initial costs, justifies its expense with its extensive features and long-term value, offering significant benefits for organizations prioritizing comprehensive security.

To learn more, read our detailed CRITICALSTART vs. Fortra's Alert Logic MDR Report (Updated: November 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

November 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 Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

30th

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (27th)

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Vulnerability Management (31st), SOC as a Service (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortra's Alert Logic MDR is 1.0%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Fortra's Alert Logic MDR	1.0%
CRITICALSTART	0.9%
Other	98.1%

Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

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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reviewer2191746

President at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

It's a highly mature, competitively priced solution that provides total visibility into your ecosystem. FORTRA's Alert Logic has the only Cybersecurity Platform that integrates XDR+WAF+VM+DLP in one.

Alert Logic offers total visibility into the client's IT ecosystem. The solution's intrusion detection system inspects 100 percent of the network packets and installs universal agents on all physical and virtual servers for log collection. Alert Logic also aggregates logs of the client's various 3rd Party security tools into a single pane of glass. All of the analytics from those data feeds got to a 24/7 SOC with sophisticated resources. Alert Logic has massive threat intelligence resources to provide additional context to the incident response declarations. They do all the heavy lifting for clients who lack the technology and resources to operate their own SOC. The client is solely responsible for the incident response component. The macro analytics resides on Alert Logic's cloud. You have the ECM response and business application team on the client side. Everything works in tandem, which is the only way you can deal with the advanced threats we face today, especially the ransomware families. If you don't respond in minutes, you're in trouble.

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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

"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 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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART pros

"It is a very stable product."

"Everything is in one dashboard; I'm notified when there's an incident and advised on what steps to take."

"It improves our security. Before, we didn't have anything scanning our containers. We had software scanning all the physical servers, but we had nothing to scan our containers. With Alert Logic, we can do that."

"The most valuable aspect of Alert Logic is its technology platform. They have SOCs in the US and Europe, giving them global visibility of the threat landscape. They detect and respond to threats in minutes. Their biggest value is human expertise. You're being attacked by a human, and you cannot respond to it unless you have a human on the other side. They have the human and technological resources to respond."

"The installation and configuration were slick."

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."

"Notifications and the detail of notifications are most valuable. It is a user-friendly solution."

"While I still have on-premises appliances, I can remotely monitor everything from the cloud, and Alert Logic's ease-of-access features have helped me streamline my workflow and reduce implementation time."

More Fortra's Alert Logic MDR pros

Cons

"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..."

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

"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 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."

"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."

"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

"This product needs to mature more. While it is a good product, there are some areas where it needs work."

"The setup process was complex."

"Alert Logic needs to expand its SOCs to serve more markets, such as the Middle East and Asia. There should be infrastructure that covers more time zones. The company should also develop an EDR that is natively integrated into their solution. Currently, a client must buy another EDR solution like CrowdStrike or Sophos. I think Alert Logic is developing this. Built-in email security could also be developed and integrated."

"We'd like to have triggered alerts sent to us so we see errors quicker."

"I would like to see it do initial scans and start capturing data, which it will truly analyze, not just be a reporting system saying, "Here is an email. Here is an email. Here is an email.""

"I would like more data on the alert payload. It would be good to have the ability to customize the alert payload to add whatever data that we want on there. Right now, it is a bit limited."

"The documentation, especially with the initial setup, needs improvement."

"As a user involved with the user interface, I believe there is a need to continue improving it based on feedback from our customers."

More Fortra's Alert Logic MDR cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Its pricing is very reasonable considering what you get for what you pay. There is quite a good value there. Its licensing is also very logical. They've got the licensing price points at a reasonable level. It is on a monthly license but a yearly contract. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees."

"Almost any product that is on the AWS Marketplace is super easy to subscribe to."

"Our ROI would probably be zero. We don't even use it. It sits in there. We get emails and just delete them. Around the world, we don't even use it."

"Price of the solution was very reasonable considering the size of our organization at the time, and so it worked out perfectly."

"Alert Logic has better competitive pricing than some of its competitors."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Real Estate/Law Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Performing Arts

Educational Organization

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	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	6

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Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 11% of the time

Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs CRITICALSTART

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Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

Rapid7 InsightIDR vs Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

Compared 8% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR vs Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

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Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

January 2026

Download CRITICALSTART product report

Buyer's Guide

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

January 2026

Download Fortra's Alert Logic MDR product report

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart

Alert Logic MDR, Alert Logic Managed Detection and ResponseAlert Logic Threat Manager, Alert Logic Cloud Defender, Critical Watch FusionVM

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

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR specializes in threat detection and response with features like log access and user-friendly notifications. It is used primarily in extensive e-commerce deployments for network protection.

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR provides a unified interface with comprehensive search capabilities, immediate log access, and efficient reporting tools. Users benefit from accurate scanning, automated security warnings, and rapid response times, supported by SOCs for global visibility. The technology employs human expertise for enhanced threat detection and prevention, with a hardware setup designed to avoid virtual environment issues. However, there's a need for improved error tracing, intuitive navigation, and stronger analytical automation within the platform. Enhancements in setup documentation and user interfaces are desired, alongside demands for a built-in EDR and better alert management systems.

What are the key features of Fortra's Alert Logic MDR?

Comprehensive Searching: Enables detailed investigations.
Immediate Log Access: Provides quick insight into system activities.
User-Friendly Notifications: Enhances alert effectiveness.
Automated Security Warnings: Offers proactive security measures.
Optimized Platform: Delivers efficient functionality across services.
Heuristic Monitoring: Guards against complex threats.

What benefits and ROI should users seek in reviews?

Quick Response Times: Minimizes downtime and improves efficiency.
Global Visibility: Extends threat management reach through SOCs.
Human Expertise: Enhances detection and intervention accuracy.
Streamlined Deployment: Facilitates smoother hardware integration.

Fortra's Alert Logic MDR is widely implemented across public and private sectors for robust network protection. It supports large-scale e-commerce operations, offering advanced detection capabilities with AI and machine learning. Security scanning, intrusion detection, and vulnerability analysis in Kubernetes are key applications.

Fortra

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Fortra's Alert Logic MDR

November 2025

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