No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

CRITICALSTART vs ServiceNow Security Operations comparison

Sponsored
 

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

Torq
Sponsored
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
AI-SOC (2nd), AI-Powered Security Automation (2nd)
CRITICALSTART
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
26th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (30th)
ServiceNow Security Operations
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Security Incident Response (1st), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Torq is 3.7%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 1.1%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Security Operations is 3.6%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Torq3.7%
ServiceNow Security Operations3.6%
CRITICALSTART1.1%
Other91.6%
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

Nimrod Vardi - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
JH
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.
SH
Freelancer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Gaining unified control over vulnerabilities has improved governance but pricing and support need work
The market price is slightly high. The pricing should be a little lower because this is a SaaS-based product. Everyone using ServiceNow might be getting many modules, but the overall module cost becomes high with license consumption one by one. I personally see that if ServiceNow is to grow over the next decade, they need to work on the pricing part. Cheap providers are emerging, and in the age of AI, it is evident that the chatbot and the virtual agent features, which are prominent features of ServiceNow, could be completely compromised and replaced by people choosing other tools. If ServiceNow develops a strategy to lower the price and increase the customer base, it could help ServiceNow to grow for another decade. I encountered one issue in ServiceNow Security Operations. The different tools, for example, Tenable and TVM, discovered vulnerabilities that had very limited information when imported. However, the same vulnerabilities from different sources, the TVM and Tenable, had shorter descriptions than what was present in the common vulnerabilities or CVE. If this depends on the implementer, such as Tenable or how other security operations implement them, the text was very limited. Customers were asking questions about why this was happening and if ServiceNow was working properly. The vulnerability information should be updated and the common text should be displayed every time, regardless of how many different tools are used for integration. The vulnerability database should be consistent when it comes to the description to avoid confusion for customers implementing it for the first time. This is an improvement that ServiceNow can make.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Once I started to use the system and I saw the potential, it changed all of our work in IT."
"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."
"Using that one piece of AI, we auto-closed 511 cases in quarter four alone."
"What I appreciate most about Torq is that it is an essential part of our system."
"Torq's unified platform approach to AI, SOAR, automation, and case management is superior compared to my experience managing multiple point solutions."
"Since we started working with Torq, I am handling much fewer alerts, it is becoming really easy for me to handle an alert, I have all the information that I need, I do not need to connect to different vendors to receive this information, and the main thing I got from Torq is time, which now helps me to build another automated system and learn."
"As an analyst, it has demonstrated potential to reduce workforce requirements and time needed for related activities."
"Torq has helped a lot regarding SOC analyst efficiency."
"This has been a positive experience and money well spent."
"When I start thinking about if I were to try to light up a SOC, which I've done before and I have no interest in doing, it could be a million dollars a year or more to do that, and for what I am paying them for the managed fees, it's a steal."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"After a year of using the service, our expectations have been met in terms of services delivered on time, on budget, and on spec."
"CRITICALSTART makes us much more comfortable with knowing someone else is watching our data and our systems and knowing that professional security people are taking a look at any issues that do arise."
"The product has a very simple UI."
"The most valuable aspect of working with ServiceNow is its meaningful and feature-rich product."
"When things are set up correctly it goes really smooth, however, it's getting there that takes time."
"The most valuable features are service management and case management, and ServiceNow Security Operations also takes care of problem management as well as GRC, governance, risk, and compliance, enabling it to provide risk assessment."
"It's stable."
"ServiceNow is a convenient platform to raise tickets, and the respective support team will contact us to resolve any issues."
"The ServiceNow platform provides tremendous value to organizations that not only want to implement SecOps, but when integrated with IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, Software Asset Management, Governance Risk and Compliance, and into their overall strategy for digital and business transformation."
"ServiceNow Security Operations provides significant control over vulnerabilities, allowing users to mark false alarms as false positives and ignore them, which is important because many vulnerabilities are not real but appear as such."
 

Cons

"Additionally, the documentation for Torq is not very clear. Most of the information is presented in videos, which are not ideal for reading; there are mostly paragraphs and other text-based content."
"We have MCP that we are working with our cloud security platform, and we wanted to connect this MCP to the case management."
"Even now, we have workflows that are in production that use AI steps and I get different results, making it unusable to some degree."
"Regarding stability, I have noticed some lagging, crashing, and downtime, which is one of my largest gripes."
"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."
"The initial deployment of Torq was not easy."
"Regarding the pricing of Torq, I would say it is expensive."
"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..."
"It has frustrated us that they don't have a native Slack integration, because most things do now."
"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Customer awareness and understanding of ServiceNow's SecOps capabilities could be improved."
"​Process framework and best practices for ease of integration between IT and security teams via incident, problem, and change.​"
"I would rate technical support for ServiceNow Security Operations as a six out of ten in terms of faster resolution."
"It's very slow. When you click a button or update a field, it takes forever to actually react."
"You can't connect to anything. It doesn't interact with things very well."
"They should stick to the roadmap and continue to build plugins and integrations with other third parties, enhance the UI, and enhance the reporting. It's all good. They should just continue enhancing the releases."
"There are limitations for the third-parties that are providing the inputs. They should increase the robustness of the solution."
"Report generation within ServiceNow can take some time. Additionally, there are occasional issues when raising a ticket, which can also consume time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"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 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."
"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."
"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 product is more expensive than other solutions."
"Compared to competitor tools, ServiceNow Security Operations is more affordable"
"The solution is more expensive than BMC Remedy, the other ITSM tool available in the market."
"It is an expensive product."
"This product is a good value for the money."
"If you're going to implement it on your own, there would be internal costs. If you're going to implement it through a contractor or consultant, you have to pay for that."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) solutions are best for your needs.
893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Real Estate/Law Firm
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
6%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Torq?
This is exactly what we discussed two days ago with the Torq team. We told them where we want to see improvements. Fo...
What is your primary use case for Torq?
I use Torq as my case management and alert system. Working as a SOC analyst, the first thing I do every morning is ge...
What advice do you have for others considering Torq?
I would definitely recommend Torq. I have no doubt, really. When we looked for another vendor, Torq really answered a...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What needs improvement with ServiceNow Security Operations?
The market price is slightly high. The pricing should be a little lower because this is a SaaS-based product. Everyon...
What advice do you have for others considering ServiceNow Security Operations?
ServiceNow Security Operations integrates very easily with third-party security tools. I am involved mostly with Serv...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Critical Start, CriticalStart
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Information Not Available
DXC Technology, Freedom Security Alliance, Prime Therapeutics, Seton Hall University, York Risk Services
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. ServiceNow Security Operations and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.