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CRITICALSTART vs Exabeam comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 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 Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
28th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (32nd)
Exabeam
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (17th), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (2nd), Security Incident Response (4th), Threat Intelligence Platforms (9th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Exabeam is 1.8%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

JH
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.
Stephen-Armstrong - PeerSpot reviewer
The SIEM provides a user-friendly UI experience
When events come into the system, the dashboard categorizes them by the highest risk score, not when they appear on the system. When you've got multiple ongoing incidents you can only see the highest risk score at the top of the list rather than the most recent detection. Exabeam's reporting dashboard could have included a filtering option to filter by the most recent detection.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Exabeam has improved our organization by speeding up the investigation process."
"I have customers that like the EUBA functionality of it. The solution has the ability to build a session, basically. It pulls a lot of information together, for example, everything a user does in a specific timeframe. It's quite helpful."
"It is user-friendly and quite simple to use."
"The way it can connect with AWS is very useful, and the integrations are pretty good."
"The Exabeam SIEM has a user friendly UI interface."
"The most valuable feature of Exabeam is the timeline creation based on log sources, which helps in security investigations."
"The advanced analytics has a really great overview of user behavior."
"Exabeam includes machine learning features and out-of-the-box rules that we rely on."
 

Cons

"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."
"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 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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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."
"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..."
"Exabeam needs to improve its documentation and provide more customization for dashboards and case management."
"I believe if it were more flexible it would be a better product."
"Exabeam should be a bit faster, especially in loading and vulnerability scanning."
"We had a large volume right from the beginning and they weren't quite prepared for that. That's something that they should think about when it comes to customers that have a large volume to start off with."
"The only problem is that the UI is not very impressive."
"One area that needs improvement is interacting with Exabeam's API. There was a headache regarding the API; the documentation wasn't clear, and the syntax wasn't very precise."
"We still have questions surrounding hardware deployment."
"The organzation is rigid and not flexible in the way they operate"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"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."
"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"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."
"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."
"There is an annual license required to use Exabeam Fusion SIEM. The price of the solution should be reduced."
"Exabeam is not a cheap solution."
"Exabeam Fusion SIEM's pricing is reasonable."
"The solution is expensive."
"The platform is not extremely expensive compared to its direct competitors; I would rate its pricing around six out of ten."
"They have a great model for pricing that can be based either on user count or gigabits per day."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Healthcare Company
12%
Real Estate/Law Firm
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What are the biggest differences between Securonix UEBA, Exabeam, and IBM QRadar?
It mostly depends on your use-cases and environment. Exabeam and Securonix have a stronger UEBA feature set, friendlier GUI and are not licensed based on capacity (amount of logs and information in...
What do you like most about Exabeam Fusion SIEM?
The solution's initial setup process is easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Exabeam Fusion SIEM?
I do not have much information about the pricing. However, I am aware that Exabeam is cheaper than Palo Alto based on discussions in meetings.
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Hulu, ADP, Safeway, BBCN Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. Exabeam and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.