CRITICALSTART vs Netsurion comparison

Critical Start and Netsurion are both solutions in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category. Critical Start is ranked #30, while Netsurion is ranked #36. Critical Start holds a 1.0% mindshare in MDR, compared to Netsurion’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Critical Start users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Netsurion users who would recommend it.

CRITICALSTART

Read 10 CRITICALSTART reviews

1,711 Views
1,181 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Netsurion

Read 24 Netsurion reviews

3,574 Views
1,072 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

CRITICALSTART

Netsurion

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

CRITICALSTART and Netsurion are competitors in the cybersecurity market. CRITICALSTART has an advantage in customer satisfaction due to its lower pricing and effective support, while Netsurion is known for its extensive feature set that provides a strong value proposition.

Features: CRITICALSTART stands out with managed detection and response capabilities, threat visibility, and proactive incident management. Netsurion is prominent for unified threat management, multiple security layers integration, and attack surface reduction.

Room for Improvement: CRITICALSTART could enhance its feature set to compete with more comprehensive solutions. Its detection accuracy and user interface could be more intuitive. Netsurion's deployment process could be simplified, and pricing could be more competitive. Its customer support responsiveness also has room for enhancement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CRITICALSTART offers an efficient and streamlined deployment process with highly supportive customer service. Netsurion has a more complex deployment due to its extensive features but compensates with detailed guidance and dedicated support teams.

Pricing and ROI: CRITICALSTART is known for a lower initial cost, appealing to those seeking a cost-effective solution without sacrificing quality. Netsurion, though more expensive initially, offers considerable ROI through comprehensive security capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed CRITICALSTART vs. Netsurion Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Netsurion

April 2026

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Helped 894,668 peers since 2012

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)

30th

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (26th)

Netsurion

Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

36th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (30th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (52nd), SOC as a Service (14th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (43rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 1.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netsurion is 1.0%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
CRITICALSTART	1.0%
Netsurion	1.0%
Other	98.0%

Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

Featured Reviews

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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John-Berry

Information Technology Manager at ProfitSolv

The SOC center monitors, hunts, and notifies us of threats around the clock

I know they are working to resolve this issue, but Netsurion is currently unable to retrieve logs from S3 buckets. We use WP Engine for a lot of web hosting as well as AWS, and both of these platforms use S3 buckets. I would like Netsurion to be able to pull logs from Linux devices. We have some of that capability, and I believe they can do it. However, the way it works with Amazon is strange and glitchy. Therefore, working something out with Amazon would be great. Netsurion's SOC can be a bit too aggressive at times. We have asked them to adjust their playbook because I am tired of being notified about the same issue multiple times a day. I am aware of the issue, and it is not a cause for concern. Let's only take action on this issue if we see an actual problem.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The biggest lesson is transitioning from alert overload to being at a point where we do have eyes on alerts, where every alert is truly possible."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In a given quarter, I get 589,000 security events and 584,000 of those get reduced by the service before they even get to me, so the alerts that actually come through to me end up being about 1,400 in that quarter, which is a 99.7 percent efficiency rate."

"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."

"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."

"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 is that we get the events: the alerts about disk space and the security reports that we get once a day, including user lockouts and the like."

"Having this in place gives us the ability to see what's going on, on a daily basis, on all of our systems across the enterprise."

"The managed service is great value which saves you a full-time employee on your staff by being able to outsource it to EventTracker to review all the logs and cull through the data to make recommendations and identify threats, then how to remediate them."

"I really appreciate the fact that the dashboard breaks everything down into a pretty easy view for me... It shows what changes are happening to privileged user accounts, access and identity, what's cropping up. It shows application activity and whether we've got system resources that aren't online and being found anymore. It's a pretty simple, easy, quick hit and there are the supporting logs behind it. If I need to drill down further, I can do that quickly. It's very effective."

"Netsurion's 24/7 monitoring has enhanced the overall security of the company. They have someone looking at the data 24/7 who will call us as needed. If their team spots a malicious process after hours, they notify the appropriate person by phone. We get a lot of actionable threat intelligence from Netsurion. For example, if a user clicks on a malicious link in a web page and starts an unusual process that isn't on the white-list, Netsurion's team can detect it and prevent it from executing. Afterward, they'll notify us by telephone, so we can respond and clean up whatever damage has occurred."

"EventTracker is exactly that; it's giving me all of the features and functions that we need to do our jobs, and at a price point that's incredibly attractive."

"EventTracker has increased productivity and saved us time, absolutely."

"We use those standard reports every day and monitor them, and it probably saves us three hours a day because the solution is doing the consolidation of the log files for us."

More Netsurion pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"They could dig a little bit deeper into the Splunk alerts when they feel like they need to be escalated to us."

"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..."

"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)."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART cons

"The hosted on-premise hardware that we were using was having issues. The performance of it was horrendous, but we weren't using it."

"I'd like to see improvement in the ease of generating reports. It seems fairly cumbersome whenever you decide to start tracking new categories of events. It seems a little kludgy when trying to generate those reports."

"The upfront costs have increased, and we have been locked into this contract."

"I'd like to see improvement in the ease of generating reports. It seems fairly cumbersome whenever you decide to start tracking new categories of events."

"Where there is an opportunity for improvement is in the interface used for performing the searches."

"We get a report generated on a particular day of the week and we go through it, trying to mitigate problems and make sure we're seeing everything that's happening. It would be helpful if the SOC spent a little more time with us going through some of those reports."

"Communication is always something that can be improved, but I feel that any time we've had a communication issue, it's quickly addressed when we bring those up at the monthly meetings. Usually, it's an individual that wasn't clear in the communication, it's not the process per se. You always have to be able to segregate if the process didn't work or an individual either didn't say the right thing or my people didn't understand what they were being told."

"It would be great if they had a client for phones by which they could push a notification to us, as opposed to via email."

More Netsurion cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"Licensing is very easy. Our CIO takes care of the billing, but in terms of price point, he hasn't complained, so it must be good."

"We have seen time and cost savings. It prevents us from having to hire specialized people for this type of work. We would need to hire six staff members to accommodate the same service."

"We put together the package of what we needed. It was based pretty much on the number of agents that we were deploying. If we needed to manage logging from certain specific applications, like Active Directory and SQL Server, there has been no additional cost for that. We had agents deployed for those specific servers and the applications were included, then there was just an additional installation that they had to do for us."

"You are paying for different levels, especially as far as the monitoring goes and how often you review it with the team. The other factor that figures in is how many nodes are on your network, such as clients, network equipment, servers, etc. There are some additional pieces on top of that, but it's laid out pretty simply, as far as how much you're going to pay for a node."

"I don't know if the pricing is by the seat but we're paying about $20,000 to 25,000 a year. On top of that, we pay for the managed support services. That runs us about another $35,000 or $40,000 a year."

"It is a bit expensive as compared to some of the other products that have come out in recent years. Expense-wise, the only downside is that it is not cheap."

"The solution is fairly expensive, but in my experience, all of the SIEM applications that I've evaluated or looked at cost about the same."

"The upfront costs have increased, and we have been locked into this contract. The cost of changing over from it is way too high."

More Netsurion pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Real Estate/Law Firm

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Healthcare Company

Performing Arts

11%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	7

Comparisons

ServiceNow Security Operations vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 13% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 10% of the time

SentinelOne Wayfinder Threat Detection and Response vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 9% of the time

Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 6% of the time

Expel vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 6% of the time

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IBM Security QRadar vs Netsurion

Compared 7% of the time

GoSecure Titan Platform vs Netsurion

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Netsurion

Compared 6% of the time

Rapid7 InsightIDR vs Netsurion

Compared 6% of the time

Legato Security vs Netsurion

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

May 2026

Download CRITICALSTART product report

Buyer's Guide

Netsurion

April 2026

Download Netsurion product report

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart

Netsurion Managed Threat Protection, Netsurion EventTracker

Overview

CRITICALSTART enhances cybersecurity through advanced alert management, expert guidance, and a user-friendly interface. It promotes efficient monitoring and response to alerts, utilizing a Zero Trust model for heightened security.

CRITICALSTART is designed for organizations seeking to manage security alerts and streamline monitoring processes. Known for its quick response times and efficient alert filtering, it integrates tools like Cylance and Carbon Black to offer managed detection and response services. Users experience enhanced security by focusing on critical threats while the platform's easy navigation aids in efficiently responding to alerts. Improvement areas include better alert prioritization, enhanced compliance disclosure, and smoother integration with third-party communication tools.

What are the key features of CRITICALSTART?

Alert Management: Efficient handling and filtering of alerts to minimize noise.
Expert Guidance: Insights for integrating SIEM and optimizing response strategies.
Mobile Access: Easy access through a mobile app to manage alerts on the go.
Zero Trust Model: Enhances security by minimizing unnecessary access and noise.
User-Friendly Interface: Seamless navigation enhances user interaction and response times.

What advantages and ROI should users consider?

Improved Security Confidence: Advanced alert handling promotes a secure environment.
Increased Efficiency: Streamlined monitoring allows focus on critical threats.
Expert Insight: Professional guidance enhances security strategies and operations.
Quick Response Times: Rapid handling of threats reduces potential impacts.

In industry applications, organizations use CRITICALSTART to bolster cybersecurity measures across finance, healthcare, and technology sectors. Managed detection services and third-party integration make it suitable for enterprises looking to optimize security operations and minimize alert fatigue while ensuring 24/7 monitoring and protection.

Critical Start

Netsurion offers robust SIEM capabilities enhanced by managed services, facilitating efficient threat identification and response with real-time alerts and comprehensive reporting.

Netsurion stands out for its integration of SIEM, IDS, and vulnerability management. Its real-time threat alerts and dashboards enhance user response capabilities. With centralized logging from Windows, Linux, Cisco devices, firewalls, and Active Directory, Netsurion enables effective compliance support for HIPAA and PCI standards. Managed Threat Protection with the embedded MITRE ATT&CK Framework enhances threat intelligence, while its evolving interface aims to improve user interactions. However, some users find deployment and searching challenging, pointing to areas for improvement.

What are Netsurion's key features?

SIEM Capabilities: Efficient threat identification using real-time alerts and dashboards.
Managed Services: Provides remote monitoring and advisory support.
Comprehensive Reporting: Assists in compliance and actionable insights.
MITRE ATT&CK Framework: Enhances threat intelligence and management.
Seamless Integration: Works with existing systems for streamlined operations.

What benefits should users consider in reviews?

Threat Response Tool: Rapid identification and response to security incidents.
Usability: Efforts to evolve and simplify user interactions.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlined processes through integration and managed services.
Compliance Support: Assistance with industry standards like HIPAA and PCI.

Netsurion is frequently implemented in industries requiring comprehensive security monitoring and compliance, such as healthcare and finance. It aids businesses in consolidating security efforts, offering insights into user activities and system changes, an asset for companies lacking substantial internal resources.

Netsurion

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

The Salvation Army, The FRESH Market, Pacific Western Bank, NASA, American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), and Talbot’s Stores

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Netsurion

April 2026

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