No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

CRITICALSTART vs CylanceGUARD comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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)
29th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (24th)
CylanceGUARD
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
48th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 1.4%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CylanceGUARD is 0.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CRITICALSTART1.4%
CylanceGUARD0.6%
Other98.0%
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
 

Featured Reviews

JH
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.
reviewer1521510 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead - Recruiting at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Reasonable price, scalable, useful for Malops detections, and helpful for layered defense
We are not satisfied with their support. We are facing some challenges. They should be proactive, but we have to chase them a lot. This is where there is room for improvement. They should be proactively serving their customers. We had some batch update issues, and we're still working on them. We are almost there, but it took a couple of email exchanges in order to achieve it.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Out of all the service providers I've had to work with over the years—I've been here six years—CRITICALSTART is my favorite to work with."
"It is a comfort to know that there is a team of professionals backing you up, especially in an area that you don't feel 100 percent comfortable."
"We are absolutely seeing return on our investment from CRITICALSTART's services, as they're doing the job of a 24/7 SOC at a fraction of the price that it would cost me to run it myself."
"After a year of using the service, our expectations have been met in terms of services delivered on time, on budget, and on spec."
"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."
"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 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 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."
"It helps us in layered defense, and if one of the other products does not capture what we require, it comes up in Cylance and vice versa, helping the overall security posture of the organization."
"It has a lot of things for Malops detections."
 

Cons

"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 biggest room for improvement is not necessarily in their service or offering, but in the products that they support."
"They could dig a little bit deeper into the Splunk alerts when they feel like they need to be escalated to us."
"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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 and I hate it."
"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."
"We are not satisfied with their support. We are facing some challenges."
"Their support needs improvement. We have to chase the Customer Success Manager a lot to get things done. It should have more features in terms of portability. It should be more scalable on other endpoints such as mobile devices and BYOD."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"Its price is reasonable, but there are other products that are cheaper than this."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solutions are best for your needs.
920,336 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
17%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
No data available
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Blue Bird Group, Patterson Companies Inc. Afrasia, Colorado Retina, Schneider Electric, ABB
Find out what your peers are saying about CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Huntress and others in Managed Detection and Response (MDR). Updated: October 2026.
920,336 professionals have used our research since 2012.