CRITICALSTART vs Netsurion comparison

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CRITICALSTART

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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: September 2026).

CRITICALSTART vs. Netsurion

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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

CRITICALSTART

Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

26th

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (24th)

Netsurion

Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

29th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (20th), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (48th), SOC as a Service (7th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (42nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 1.2%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netsurion is 1.2%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
CRITICALSTART	1.2%
Netsurion	1.2%
Other	97.6%

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.

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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

"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 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."

"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 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."

"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."

"This has been a positive experience and money well spent."

"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."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART pros

"There are a host of things that are most valuable. Obviously monitoring our environment and reporting out different events is important. They perform a suite of services. They monitor all of our servers, all of our key infrastructure, like our DNS, our switches, all that stuff. They aggregate and correlate that quarterly. They'll tell us if we're getting a lot of login failures and something is going on or if something's weird."

"I like the UI, overall. I like the main page and there are aspects of the search page that I like. When you bring it up on the left-hand side of the page, as you look at the events, the ability to simply hit and click the plus/minus to pull events in and out of the overall view is well done and is very effective from a threat-hunting and an analysis perspective. I like the detail it shows."

"Overall, we're really thrilled with them."

"If I were to look at logs manually, there's no way I could do that. As an example, they are 48 million logs processed a day. There is no way I could look at all 48 million of those. So, it gives me a good structure to be able to look at the different incidents which are created and do different searches."

"They have a number of integrations with different products. Google Workspace is one of them, and Microsoft Azure is another one. They integrate with a number of other things, such as Duo for multi-factor authentication. They can pull the logs from Duo to see if users are coming from bad repeatable IPs or if there are malicious known IPs that may be popping up in the logs. They are able to see that, and they can identify that. Some of the other integrations they do are from inside your network. For firewalls, they can integrate with SonicWall, Cisco, Fortinet, etc. They have a pretty wide variety of things to integrate with and be able to pull the logins from those devices."

"The solution provides actionable threat intelligence, it is not a passive service, they go in and perform mitigations on whatever they find, it is timely, and they provide context so it is understood by anyone who receives these reports."

"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."

"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."

More Netsurion pros

Cons

"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."

"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 biggest room for improvement is not necessarily in their service or offering, but in the products that they support."

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

"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."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART cons

"There are some issues with searches taking a long period of time, but they assured me that they have implemented a new search function that's available in version 9, but which requires a solid-state hard drive... Depending on how many logs you have it could take a long time to return the results if you're looking back prior to the last 30 days."

"The EventTracker support said, "We do have that." However, that wasn't necessarily the case. It was primarily an eight to five type of thing."

"The solution's dashboard is okay. The one thing that we ran into are issues when we upgraded to the newer version. It uses Elasticsearch for the different dashboard entries. So, we were running on spinning disks, and Elasticsearch didn't work that well. A number of the different dashboards, like my dashboard or different things like that, pull from Elasticsearch. Since Elasticsearch really wasn't working, we were having some issues with that, but we just migrated."

"The weekly reporting could use some improvement. For example, when we handed them our landscape document, it took longer than I would have liked for those details to become noticeable within the reports."

"I would also like to have a dashboard that I can access anytime to review the real-time data from their website."

"Everything that I've wanted has been added in. EDR was added, and MITRE was added. Those were two big ones that we didn't even have to push for."

"The threat detection and response is passive. We have asked if there were options for taking action, and we have not gotten any feedback on that, which would be useful to know. Depending on the situation and threat, some actions may not be possible, but we haven't gotten any feedback on what options could be directed and actionable with the understanding that it may have an extra cost. It would be nice to know or find out if it is actually possible to take actions by a SIEM service or a SIEM agent."

"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."

More Netsurion cons

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."

"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."

"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."

"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 and licensing seem very reasonable. The managed service part of it feels like it gives me the equivalent of a full-time engineer for a lot less money. So, I feel it's a good value."

"Netsurion's pricing is extremely fair and flexible. The price of their SIEM product is reasonable, and you can pay for those services you want on top of that. It wasn't cheap, but it's competitive, and we intend to renew our contract."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Our budget follows the calendar year. We just started a new budget year at the beginning of the month. We did budget for an increase in our threat management system selection. Therefore, we have the budget to implement and accommodate a threat management system change, including an increase for the quoted actions that we received to improve EventTracker. We are just waiting on our council to approve that budget, which might not be for a little while. Hopefully, when they do, we will be able to jump on doing something."

"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."

More Netsurion pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

18%

Construction Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

19%

Construction Company

12%

Performing Arts

Manufacturing 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

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Product Reports

CRITICALSTART

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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.

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

CRITICALSTART vs. Netsurion