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CRITICALSTART vs Fortinet FortiSOAR 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) (33rd)
Fortinet FortiSOAR
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
8th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 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 Fortinet FortiSOAR is 4.4%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

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.
Mahmoud Younes - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation streamlines workflow and integrates seamlessly with various applications
I serve as both a reseller and customer of Fortinet FortiSOAR. The solution is suitable for all types of businesses from small to enterprise. The integration capability of Fortinet FortiSOAR deserves a rating of 10. It can be integrated with any system, and we have the capability for custom connectors. Even if Fortinet FortiSOAR doesn't have a specific connector, you can easily create a custom connector using AI. Simply provide your requirements or solution needs, and Fortinet FortiSOAR will create the connector, enabling integration with any application. My final rating for Fortinet FortiSOAR would be 10 out of 10, where one is bad and ten is good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"The most fascinating aspect of FortiSOAR is its modern and simple to understand and operate dashboards."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiSOAR is the playbook, which has to be defined to apply the policies."
"It's great that the solution is integrated with FortiAnalyzer."
"Fortinet FortiSOAR is a very interactive and user-friendly solution."
"The good news is that FortiSOAR is not hard to maintain. If you prepared well and deployed strong initially, then maintenance will take half an hour every other week, not more than that. A single person can do it."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiSOAR is the number of available connectors and the simplicity to start to automate."
"The solution is easy to implement and includes 450 built-in connectors."
"Generally, the tool helps just automating a lot of manual load or repetitive tasks."
 

Cons

"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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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..."
"The ease of playbook creation on FortiSOAR needs improvement."
"Fortinet FortiSOAR should improve its analysis."
"I have found that Fortinet FortiSOAR needs a lot of improvement. The Orchestration needs to be improved."
"The UI design of the solution needs to be changed since it can get difficult for a newbie to operate."
"I don't currently see where the solution is lacking features. For us and for our clients it works very well and we're pleased with it."
"Fortinet FortiSOAR's dashboard is not easy to understand."
"The solution doesn't connect well with the network devices."
"Fortinet FortiSOAR should add more documentation for some use cases."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"If you compare Fortinet FortiSOAR's price with the prices of the market leader, Palo Alto, then it can be considered a cheaper product."
"The price of the product should be lower. The brand value that Fortinet has, it has the reputation of being a reasonably priced product, and they have an enormous customer base in India. Most of the SME market is covered by FortiGate firewalls. It becomes an easy way for consultants, such as us, or even system integrators, to open the door with the Fortinet product lines."
"Pricing is fine compared to other solutions."
"Fortinet FortiSOAR is expensive."
"Fortinet FortiSOAR is an expensive solution."
"Since Africa is struggling with foreign exchange, the solution is pretty expensive there."
"The solution offers both licensing and subscription models that are similar in price to other products."
"Considering all the features of Fortinet FortiSOAR, I think it has a good price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Real Estate/Law Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
9%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Healthcare Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
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 Fortinet FortiSOAR?
Fortinet FortiSOAR is a very interactive and user-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiSOAR?
Regarding pricing, licensing, and setup costs for Fortinet FortiSOAR, the value proposition depends on your business size. In a small business, it might be considered expensive, but for enterprise ...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiSOAR?
Additional fine-tuning on ChatGPT could be added. This is the only area requiring improvement, with no other concerns identified.
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
CyberSponse, FortiSOAR
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. Fortinet FortiSOAR and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.