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CRITICALSTART vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator 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)
31st
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (32nd)
McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is 0.5%, down from 0.7% 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.
DavidJones7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers automation alert features with easy integrations and impressive scalability
I would rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. There are a few technical challenges with the deployment, but it can easily solved by an experienced professional but not by a beginner user of the tool. The complete implementation and migration to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator will take around three months. If someone is using a software platform already with implemented use cases in their environment, it might be difficult to implement the same use cases when the customer is migrating to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator. The conditions and prior alert settings needs to be accurate when migrating to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator, otherwise false positive alerts might get generated.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"The solution's best part is that it is very easy to manage McAfee Agent."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the central management console, which is used for DLP, endpoint security, drive encryption, and application control."
"The policy auditing, policy management, and device auditing are all valuable features. Our customers appreciated the ability to get alerts to system-wide events from a single view."
"You have to have some experience, however, it's pretty simple to understand."
"The DLP feature in McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is good."
"I really like the auditing component because it really looks at exactly what has happened on the network."
"The initial setup is very easy."
"Application control and traffic encryption are the most valuable features."
 

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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator should improve its integration with other tools."
"There needs to be support for Mac computers. Currently, McAfee does not work on iOS."
"The detection aspect should be improved so that signatures are updated more quickly."
"They have to do something to make the solution more resilient or recoverable from power failure events, which may include creating their own database."
"Sometimes agents hang. We have to reinstall the agents."
"One thing that I don't like is that McAfee products change very often and upgrade very often."
"There is a problem when it comes to agent communication and duplicate records, where the rebooting of a machine leads to the installation of a new agent and you get a lot of duplicate records that ultimately affect your compliance monitoring."
"The areas of concern where improvements are needed are related to the product's assignment policy and tag assignment, where users can assign the policies with the help of tags and sort out the systems."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."
"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 a license required to use this solution. If we use the additional components, such as DLP encryption, there is an additional cost. However, it is similar to a separate product altogether. If you want to use that or not, it is optional, but when you use it, it will cost you additional pricing."
"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is a cheaply priced product, meaning it is not expensive since McAfee provides a free version of ePO, which includes phone support as well."
"Compared to other Antivirus products, the cost of this solution is a bit high."
"It's an expensive solution"
"This solution is priced in the mid-range."
"For large enterprise companies, the price should be alright, but for small businesses, the uptake might be slow because, for these clients, the price doesn't look very attractive."
"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is not an expensive solution."
"It is attractively priced. It is a fraction of what we're going to pay for CrowdStrike or SentinelOne, but it only has a fraction of the capabilities as well."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Healthcare Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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Which is better - Mcafee's MVision ePO or ePolicy Orchestrator?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Mcafee's MVision ePO or ePolicy Orchestrator network security software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Mcafee's ePolicy O...
What do you like most about McAfee MVISION ePO?
McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator's performance is good.
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
McAfee ePO, ePolicy Orchestrator, Intel Security ePolicy Orchestrator, McAfee MVISION ePO
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Brelje & Race, Cognizant, Sutherland Global Services, Eagle Rock Energy, Arab National Bank, Bank Central Asia, Kleberg Bank, Leading Mexican Bank, SF Police Credit Union, Macquarie Telecom, Seagate Technology, Blackburn & Darwen Council, California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation, IRCEP, Major U.S. State Government, State of Alaska, State of Colorado, Cemex, Deutsche Edelstahlwerke
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.