Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs CRITICALSTART comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response and CRITICALSTART based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about CrowdStrike, Arctic Wolf Networks, SentinelOne and others in Managed Detection and Response (MDR).
To learn more, read our detailed Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Binary Defense has a human service department that provides live monitoring for our systems.""The best part about Binary Defense MDR is that it runs on everything, and they keep an eye on things 24/7.""The most valuable feature is reviewing tickets and the notes added by technicians.""With Binary Defense, we don't just get an alert, but also a detailed rundown of why they're alerting us on it. They tell us what was executed, or the username, script, or IP. That way, we're not wasting time investigating.""One of the main benefits of Binary Defense MDR is the ability to easily meet with their support team to discuss any issues we encounter.""The case interface is Binary Defense MDR's most valuable feature.""The speed at which their services are reactive is valuable. Nowadays, when a threat hits an endpoint, you've got minutes, not hours or days. Their average response time is about four minutes on an alert. For anything that needs to be sent to us, it's about fourteen minutes, which is pretty good. They're the third SOC that I've used in fifteen years. By far, they are the quickest ones to act. When you're looking at prevention, that's a key factor.""The most valuable part of Binary Defense is its team of cybersecurity analysts. Their analysts filter out the noise and only forward the critical threats that require a response instead of false positives."

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"Arctic Wolf is laser-focused on providing top-notch customer service.""Whenever there is a major thing like Exchange vulnerabilities, it scans our Exchange server for indicators of compromise. It then alerts us and points exactly where we need to go to check for ourselves if it is normal or not.""We can effectively manage the massive amounts of security data that we receive from various sources such as firewalls, switches, endpoints, and other log sources.""Arctic Wolf is our eyes and ears 24/7 because we can't possibly watch all of our alerts. We may see all of these alerts, but our attention is distracted because we're working on other things.""The tool's most valuable feature is its ease of implementation.""The visibility into our endpoints is huge.""Security protection is the best feature of this product.""The integration between Cisco AMPs and the Windows servers is most valuable. So, they can also sandbox machines on which they see something suspicious."

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"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.""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.""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.""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.""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.""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.""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.""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."

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Cons
"We found a couple of bugs in the user interface.""The current reporting system could benefit from improvement.""Binary Defense MDR could be even better with additional features, like automatic scans and file quarantine.""I don't find any downside to them, but if I have to put one, it would be consistent manpower or staffing. The only area where the solution can be improved is going to be with people. As they grow, they are struggling with the same thing that every other company is, which is getting talent and getting that talent to stay, but they've just revised their tiering system to go from a flat analyst and manager to a three-tier solution where it goes through two or three before it gets elevated. That seems to have worked out well, so if one level misses it, the next one picks it up, and it works out fine.""The only area I see for improvement with Binary Defense is their service portal. It could benefit from some enhancements.""We found that an earlier version of the agent had high memory usage and that was a bit concerning, but we raised the concern with their support team and they immediately replied that they had noticed the same thing and had a candidate fix already available... it totally fixed the issue.""It's hard to think of anything that they need to improve on, but just to point out something, I would like to see them provide advanced XDR.""I would like to see more frequent check-ins with our security status."

More Binary Defense MDR Cons →

"It can sometimes take up to an hour to get notification of a problem and that's a long time.""It would be great if the whole process of determining vendor risk could be simplified by Arctic Wolf.""It will be helpful if the dashboard is more granular.""While it isn't a regular occurrence, there have been some gaps in response to some support questions. Questions get answered, yet there are times it takes longer than I'm comfortable with.""We get a lot of false alarms, but that's because they don't know our network in detail. I think that could be alleviated if we told them more about our network so they could create rules to skip some of those things.""More integrations with various security tools to improve data ingestion would be beneficial.""In the future, I would like to see a summary report.""It's nitpicky; however, if it could integrate with more of our products, like our CRM, that would be ideal. They may only integrate with Salesforce. We use a different mid-market CRM."

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

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The solution's price is spot on; if anything, it's slightly below the norm for most services. Compared to building the same team internally, it would cost more to create the same amount of capability than what we get from an external team. Price-wise, Binary Defense is in a great spot."
  • "From the initial cost that Binary Defense came in with, we pared it down quite a bit over the course of 30 or 60 days. My leadership would say that their cost was high, but realistically, they were in line with the market."
  • "The pricing is on target. Working with their sales team on pricing negotiations was a pleasant process. They were very respectful of the constraints we had and I feel that we're paying a fair price."
  • "It's valued at the right price. Even with the number of endpoints we have, we don't feel that it's a lot more than any competitor. In fact, it might be less expensive when you look at the fact that you're getting a full flex SOC out of it along with the tools."
  • "Binary Defense has changed its pricing model from being primarily based on the volume of data to one based on escalations and incidents they handle."
  • "Binary Defense MDR is priced competitively and may be slightly lower than CrowdStrike."
  • "After we acquired this platform, we met with a number of different vendors. Binary Defense came in with a proposal that was surprisingly affordable. In fact, we were able to recoup the cost of their services within a short period of time. This is because Binary Defense is able to provide the same level of security as a team of two or three in-house analysts but at a fraction of the cost. As a result, Binary Defense is saving us an estimated $250,000 to $300,000 per year."
  • "The pricing isn't that bad, it's very competitive. I don't feel that it's over-priced and I don't feel that it's under-priced."
  • More Binary Defense MDR Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "It is more expensive than CrowdStrike, but it also has more features. I don't remember the amount, but I do remember that it was on the higher side. I believe we have five sensors, and the sensors have a yearly cost. We don't have any additional costs, but I know that if we have more features, they will add to the cost."
  • "I find their pricing to be reasonable and competitive."
  • "The pricing is fair."
  • "I rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten."
  • "The pricing is pretty competitive."
  • More Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
  • "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 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."
  • More CRITICALSTART Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The most valuable feature is reviewing tickets and the notes added by technicians.
    Top Answer:Binary Defense is fairly priced. I would say that Binary Defense is flexible in negotiating and tailoring a solution… more »
    Top Answer:The only area I see for improvement with Binary Defense is their service portal. It could benefit from some… more »
    Top Answer:The tool's most valuable feature is its ease of implementation.
    Top Answer:Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response's analysis and remediation parts could be improved. It's not bad, but it… more »
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    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Binary Defense Vision, Binary Defense Managed Detection and Response, Binary Defense Managed Detection & Response
    Arctic Wolf AWN CyberSOC
    Critical Start, CriticalStart
    Learn More
    Overview

    Binary Defense provides a Managed Detection and Response service using an Open XDR strategy that detects and isolates threats early in the attack lifecycle. Expert security analysts in the Binary Defense Security Operations Center leverage an attacker’s mindset, monitoring your environments for security events 24x7x365 and acting as an extension of your security teams. When a security event occurs, Binary Defense analysts triage, disposition, and prioritize the event. Analysts conduct full kill chain analysis and supply tactical and strategic mitigation recommendations to your security team with the goal of increasing your organization’s security posture against the latest adversary threats.

    Visit us online at https://www.binarydefense.com

    Built on the industry’s only cloud-native platform to deliver security operations as a concierge service, the Arctic Wolf® Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solution eliminates alert fatigue and false positives to promote a faster response with detection and response capabilities tailored to the specific needs of your organization. Your Arctic Wolf Concierge Security® Team (CST) works directly with you to perform threat hunting, incident response, and guided remediation, while also providing strategic recommendations uniquely customized for your environment.

    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.

    Sample Customers
    Securitas USA, Black Hills Energy, Lincoln Electric,The J.M. Smuckers Company, New York Community Bank, State of Connecticut, NCR
    Agero, Madison Memorial Hospital, DLZ, Howard LLP, City of Sparks
    Information Not Available
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company33%
    Wholesaler/Distributor8%
    Insurance Company8%
    Energy/Utilities Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Healthcare Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Insurance Company31%
    Legal Firm15%
    Recruiting/Hr Firm8%
    Government8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Government6%
    REVIEWERS
    Energy/Utilities Company38%
    Financial Services Firm25%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Hospitality Company13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Retailer7%
    Energy/Utilities Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise31%
    Large Enterprise38%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise45%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business76%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise45%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise36%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise62%
    Buyer's Guide
    Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about CrowdStrike, Arctic Wolf Networks, SentinelOne and others in Managed Detection and Response (MDR). Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response is ranked 2nd in Managed Detection and Response (MDR) with 17 reviews while CRITICALSTART is ranked 30th in Managed Detection and Response (MDR). Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response is rated 9.2, while CRITICALSTART is rated 9.4. The top reviewer of Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response writes "Very good support, excellent visibility, and useful security bulletins". On the other hand, the top reviewer of CRITICALSTART writes "Offers the ability to close review tickets or alerts through a mobile phone and to interact with engineers on their side via the app". Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon Complete, Red Canary MDR, Huntress, Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting and SentinelOne Vigilance, whereas CRITICALSTART is most compared with BlueVoyant CORE, ReliaQuest GreyMatter, Red Canary MDR and CrowdStrike Falcon Complete.

    See our list of best Managed Detection and Response (MDR) vendors.

    We monitor all Managed Detection and Response (MDR) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.