CRITICALSTART vs Exabeam comparison

Critical Start and Exabeam are both solutions in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category. Critical Start is ranked #26, while Exabeam is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.5. Critical Start holds a 0.8% mindshare in SOAR, compared to Exabeam’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Critical Start users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 75% of Exabeam users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Exabeam and CRITICALSTART are competing security solutions providing distinct advantages aligning with specific requirements. Data comparisons suggest Exabeam is favored in pricing and support, while CRITICALSTART offers exceptional features and is considered worth the investment.

Features:Exabeam offers advanced security analytics, automated threat detection, and a user-friendly interface. CRITICALSTART provides comprehensive incident response, managed detection service capabilities, and a mobile app for on-the-go management.

Room for Improvement:Exabeam could enhance its application logging capabilities, while improving training resources would benefit new users. CRITICALSTART might enhance integration with various data sources and speed up its UI responsiveness. The cost of integrating additional data sources can be a factor for improvement as well.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:Exabeam simplifies deployment with a straightforward model and strong customer support for seamless system integration. CRITICALSTART offers a flexible and adaptable deployment process with a reputation for exceptional personalized customer service that stands out.

Pricing and ROI:Exabeam is known for competitive setup costs and promising ROI, making it attractive to budget-conscious buyers. CRITICALSTART has a higher initial cost but offers significant ROI through effective features and tailored services. The difference is Exabeam's affordability compared to CRITICALSTART's premium pricing for high-end features.

To learn more, read our detailed CRITICALSTART vs. Exabeam Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Exabeam

December 2025

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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

Torq

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Torq is 4.5%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Exabeam is 2.7%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Torq	4.5%
Exabeam	2.7%
CRITICALSTART	0.8%
Other	92.0%

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

Featured Reviews

Nimrod Vardi

Global IT Director at OpenWeb

Automation workflows have transformed our IT, enabling secure just-in-time access control

We work with them quite often, so we have a direct line regarding areas in Torq that have room for improvement. If we have a feature request, we can request it. I do not have anything in mind at the moment. We were a design partner for a short while, so we feel that they listen and that users of the system have an impact on the way the system is designed for the better. They have a new community, which is something that I personally suggested years ago. There are many people like me in different places and they might have already built the workflow that I need. Having the option to share workflows or to jump on a thread and say I have this need, did anyone ever build a workflow for it, is amazing. Someone would jump in and say yes, sure, here, take this workflow. I think this is an amazing thing and I really hope that the community will come alive because I think this is really powerful. This is something that I already suggested and it did happen eventually, and I am quite happy with it. I do not have any specific feature in mind that I have a need for at the moment.

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Justin Hadley

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.

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Deepanshu Hans

Solution Architect at CTC

Improved threat detection has provided clear user risk insights and streamlined incident response

Exabeam's UEBA is the most valuable feature that I have found so far. Exabeam's UEBA displays the type of description that it could show in a console regarding one particular user, the rating that it shows, and how vulnerable the user is, which is very good. Exabeam's automation for incident response is very good. The machine learning capabilities of Exabeam are also good.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Using that one piece of AI, we auto-closed 511 cases in quarter four alone."

"If I review about 100 vendors that I might work with, Torq is definitely in the top five that gave me personally investment back, just because every bit of effort I put into Torq eventually became a workflow that gave it back to me."

"As an analyst, it has demonstrated potential to reduce workforce requirements and time needed for related activities."

"What I appreciate most about Torq is that it is an essential part of our system."

"Once I started to use the system and I saw the potential, it changed all of our work in IT."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART pros

"The most valuable feature of Exabeam Fusion SIEM is the easy-to-use user interface."

"Exabeam's UEBA displays the type of description that it could show in a console regarding one particular user, the rating that it shows, and how vulnerable the user is, which is very good."

"The solution's initial setup process is easy."

"The setup is not difficult. It was easy."

"The most valuable feature of Exabeam is the timeline creation based on log sources, which helps in security investigations."

"It is user-friendly and quite simple to use."

"The solution's automation capabilities are great."

"It's a very user-friendly product and it's a very comprehensive technology."

More Exabeam pros

Cons

"The initial deployment of Torq was not easy."

"It was able to capture data but was unable to differentiate between the agent hostname we are using and the hostname that resides on the back end of the Internet."

"Regarding stability, I have noticed some lagging, crashing, and downtime, which is one of my largest gripes."

"Even now, we have workflows that are in production that use AI steps and I get different results, making it unusable to some degree."

"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 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."

"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."

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

"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..."

"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."

"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."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART cons

"We use the on-prem Exabeam product and face limitations using the web UI and administration of custom models and rules."

"Exabeam's integration capabilities are not good, as Exabeam has a very limited number of integrations and no out-of-box integration, which is an area where Exabeam should improve."

"Exabeam lacks customizable dashboards, which might be a limitation if visualization is a key requirement."

"The initial setup of Exabeam Fusion SIEM is complex because it needs to integrate with the SIEM solution, but after this is complete it is straightforward."

"Exabeam's reporting dashboard could have included a filtering option to filter by the most recent detection."

"They need to focus on more of the MITRE ATT&CK Framework and coverage. They claim they cover about 70 to 80%. I'm not sure if it's really quite that much, however."

"We still have questions surrounding hardware deployment."

"Exabeam needs to improve its adaptive nature towards rules and its capability to understand the entire client environment faster."

More Exabeam cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"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."

"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."

"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."

"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."

"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."

"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."

"They have a great model for pricing that can be based either on user count or gigabits per day."

"Exabeam is not a cheap solution."

"There is an annual license required to use Exabeam Fusion SIEM. The price of the solution should be reduced."

"The solution is expensive."

"Exabeam Fusion SIEM's pricing is reasonable."

"The platform is not extremely expensive compared to its direct competitors; I would rate its pricing around six out of ten."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

13%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Torq?

Regarding the downsides of Torq, one issue is that as a SaaS product, I sometimes encounter transparency issues about...

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What is your primary use case for Torq?

My role is Cyber Security Engineer, and we use Torq for our case management platform, automating some of our phishing...

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What advice do you have for others considering Torq?

Torq's maintenance requirements depend on how you define maintenance. While Torq handles the platform's overall relia...

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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, friendli...

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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...

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What needs improvement with Exabeam Fusion SIEM?

Exabeam's integration capabilities are not good, as Exabeam has a very limited number of integrations and no out-of-b...

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Comparisons

Tines vs Torq

Compared 44% of the time

Splunk SOAR vs Torq

Compared 14% of the time

Blink Ops vs Torq

Compared 12% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs Torq

Compared 10% of the time

Swimlane vs Torq

Compared 6% of the time

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ServiceNow Security Operations vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 14% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 11% of the time

Red Canary vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 11% of the time

Expel vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 9% of the time

ReliaQuest GreyMatter vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 8% of the time

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Splunk Enterprise Security vs Exabeam

Compared 7% of the time

Securonix Next-Gen SIEM vs Exabeam

Compared 5% of the time

Splunk User Behavior Analytics vs Exabeam

Compared 4% of the time

Dtex Systems vs Exabeam

Compared 4% of the time

IBM Security QRadar vs Exabeam

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Torq

January 2026

Download Torq product report

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

February 2026

Download CRITICALSTART product report

Buyer's Guide

Exabeam

February 2026

Download Exabeam product report

Also Known As

No data available

Critical Start, CriticalStart

No data available

Overview

Torq is the enterprise AI SOC solution that effectively combines adaptive insights and automation to handle critical threats efficiently. It manages threat lifecycles, swiftly moving from triage to response, ensuring effective risk management.

Torq is designed to streamline security operations by aggregating telemetry across your security stack. It investigates significant risks and manages threats from triage to containment and remediation. This AI-driven tool enhances the capabilities of your SecOps team, allowing them to achieve more impactful results without introducing complicated processes.

What are the key features of Torq?

Adaptive Agentic Insights: Provides real-time threat intelligence tailored to specific security challenges.
Automation: Automates responses to security incidents, minimizing manual intervention requirements.
Threat Lifecycle Management: Comprehensive handling of threats from detection to remediation.
Telemetry Aggregation: Integrates data across platforms for a unified security overview.

Why consider Torq based on reviews?

Efficiency: Users notice significant reductions in time spent managing threats.
Risk Reduction: Enhanced ability to identify and address critical threats promptly.
Resource Optimization: Allows teams to allocate effort to other critical tasks by reducing manual security operations.
Scalability: Adaptable to meet the demands of growing or changing infrastructures.

In industries like finance and healthcare, Torq shows effectiveness by adapting to specific risk scenarios often encountered in these fields. Its integration with existing infrastructures makes it a valuable asset for maintaining stringent security standards, essential for protecting critical data and operations in diverse high-stakes environments.

Torq

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.

Critical Start

Exabeam Fusion is a cloud-delivered solution that that enables you to:

-Leverage turnkey threat detection, investigation, and response
-Collect, search and enhance data from anywhere
-Detect threats missed by other tools, using market-leading behavior analytics
-Achieve successful SecOps outcomes with prescriptive, threat-centric use case packages
-Enhance productivity and reduce response times with automation
-Meet regulatory compliance and audit requirements with ease

Exabeam

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Hulu, ADP, Safeway, BBCN Bank

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Exabeam

December 2025

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