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CRITICALSTART vs CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR 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

CRITICALSTART
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
32nd
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (31st)
CrowdStrike Falcon Complete...
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR is 13.5%, down from 15.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Otis Brinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps users keep track of everything from one place
The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that we can track all of it in one place across all those different locations. Because it's cloud-based and reports up to the cloud, we also have access to the back end, and an incident response team monitors all incidents. We also have an escalation process in place. From my perspective, there are other pieces of CrowdStrike that the security architect team uses as well, but I don't get involved with those as much. I usually just wait for the end results or the notification if I need to get involved if there is an incident.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It's a stable application. It is one of the most stable out of all the other market applications, especially if you're talking about within the EDR platform."
"The AI and the group knowledge base that they get from having multiple clients in the cloud is very useful to us."
"We have experienced ROI using this solution. The value is clear when you are able to stop a ransomware attack or other threats."
"If there is something wrong or not normal in the endpoint CrowdStrike Falcon Complete is very responsive."
"I find CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR to be effective and stable, with minimal false positives."
"It is a stable solution."
"I am not a CrowdStrike fanboy, but as an IT leader, they make my life easy. I like proactive monitoring and remediation, so I do not have to guess or run around. They are doing everything for me."
"The most valuable feature is that it has a zero-day approach. It does not work with the signature itself. It looks into what is happening on an endpoint and protects you better against threats that are not yet known but are captured in a signature. It provides far better detection than when it is only signature-based. You get much quicker protection against any new threat. This is the most important feature of the CrowdStrike solution."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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 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."
"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."
"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..."
"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"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."
"We have also been using Cisco AMP for Endpoints for three years. We have received multiple detections in Cisco AMP for Endpoints, and we had to take some actions, whereas CrowdStrike has not detected anything critical since it has been implemented. Most of the incidents that it has detected are false positives. They should work on the false-positive issue. When it is implemented throughout the organization, it gets very difficult to check each false positive and investigate what is correct and what is not correct. It requires technical and manual intervention."
"An MDM, Mobile Device Manager, should be added in the next release."
"As of recent, their MITRE scores were not as good as in years past."
"CrowdStrike Falcon Complete does not include patch management functionality."
"We're a small organization. I'm not sure how it would fare if you were larger and had more and more users and added complexity."
"Falcon Complete's user interface isn't very user-friendly, especially for writing rules."
"The solution could use an on-demand scan feature."
"The performance slows down by between 10% and 40%, depending on what type of work the machine is doing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"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."
"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."
"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."
"We pay $50,000 for the 200 endpoints we have."
"There is a license needed to use the solution. The price of the solution is fair."
"It is expensive, but looking at the capabilities that it brings, it is reasonable. There are no additional costs to the licensing costs. If you increase the number of licenses, support is included."
"They are really reasonable for the services they are providing. When you add more endpoints, you are going to pay more for the license."
"The price is okay, although you're not going to get away cheap when it comes to security."
"The average price is approximately $500 per customer."
"I think the pricing is a little high."
"The pricing could be lower."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Real Estate/Law Firm
11%
Healthcare Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about CrowdStrike Falcon Complete?
It is a cloud-based solution. You can easily scale it.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CrowdStrike Falcon Complete?
CrowdStrike has a reasonable price. It's a good price, but if CrowdStrike offered coupons or discounts on a monthly or quarterly basis, it would be more beneficial for smaller vendors trying to imp...
What needs improvement with CrowdStrike Falcon Complete?
There is room for improvement in the AI of CrowdStrike, known as Charlotte AI, which my team does not currently use. I have not had contact with it at this moment. Additionally, patch management in...
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
Falcon Complete
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Palm Beach State College, Mercedes-AMG, Pokemon, Telstra, Goldman Sachs, Zebra
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.