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Bitdefender MDR vs CRITICALSTART comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

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

Bitdefender MDR
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
16th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
CRITICALSTART
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
33rd
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (28th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of Bitdefender MDR is 2.9%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
 

Featured Reviews

Jörg Köhler - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient email security and link scanning streamline network protection
One area for improvement is the user-friendliness of the UI. It is not intuitive to manage policies as I have to go through several pages to find necessary information. Additionally, the profile management for scanning and protection profiles is clumsy and could be more straightforward. There should be some simplification in changing profiles due to performance issues.
PB
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has a very good cloud console that's easy to use and install."
"I like the EDR feature."
"Customer service and support are very good."
"The most valuable features include email security and web URL scanning, particularly the link scanning aspect."
"A user cannot uninstall or disable the tool from their systems. It has ransomware blocking and zero-day threat protection. The tool also alerts us whenever a system or device has been compromised. It has a web control feature to manage website categories."
"It's easy to use."
"If you're looking at an enterprise with centralized control, you can actually push the policies to all your clients' endpoints easily across VPNs."
"I would rate the stability a nine out of ten."
"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 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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"They're doing a really good job. The throughput and the response time can always be better, but there's already a solution out there. It depends on how much and what tier you want to be a part of. The way they're designed is that if you pay for it, you can have a turnaround time in a very short amount of time. If you don't pay for it, your response time is going to be a little bit less. That can always be improved, no matter what tier you're on. It could be in terms of tech support, or it could also be things like getting the reports and getting the summary back from the labs. When something is detected, what did it all entail? There are a lot of those things. It's not all in one, but all of those are different branches."
"The lack of integration with Microsoft Outlook is a significant drawback."
"One area for improvement is the user-friendliness of the UI."
"They can improve their support a little bit. We've had some issues with some of the installations in terms of getting the installation, configuration, and flows correct, and sometimes, their support is not as simple and easy to deal with as we'd like."
"One area for improvement is the user-friendliness of the UI. It is not intuitive to manage policies as I have to go through several pages to find necessary information."
"Bitdefender MDR consumes too many resources during scanning which further affects developers' productivity."
"The automatic backup isn't very big."
"Bitdefender needs to probably position this product and create more awareness among people because a lot of companies use products like CrowdStrike, which is doing pretty well."
"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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 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."
"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..."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Bitdefender fit well for customers with about 50 to 200 users. The price point is great, and you get a lot of bang for your buck."
"I know it is based on the volume and size and also on different multi-year agreements. There are different discounts applied, but I can't really speak about the specifics."
"It varies based on the number of licenses."
"As far as pricing is concerned, I would rate them not expensive, not cheap."
"I would rate the tool's pricing a four out of ten."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
7%
Real Estate/Law Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Bitdefender MDR?
The product is on the lower price range compared to competitors. However, there are additional licenses for every add-on, which increases the cost gradually. Despite this, it remains below average ...
What needs improvement with Bitdefender MDR?
One area for improvement is the user-friendliness of the UI. It is not intuitive to manage policies as I have to go through several pages to find necessary information. Additionally, the profile ma...
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Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Bitdefender Managed Detection and Response
Critical Start, CriticalStart
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Northstar, SeSa, Greenman-Pederson, TUI Benelux
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Find out what your peers are saying about Bitdefender MDR vs. CRITICALSTART and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.