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17,715 views|9,994 comparisons
92% willing to recommend
Critical Start Logo
303 views|122 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Siemplify Logo
1,381 views|855 comparisons
80% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between CRITICALSTART and Siemplify based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk and others in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR).
To learn more, read our detailed Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Report (Updated: April 2024).
769,789 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable features are its threat handling and detection. It's a powerful tool because it's based on machine learning and on the behavior of malware.""There are some very powerful features to Sentinel, such as the integration of various connectors. We have a lot of departments that use both IaaS and SaaS services, including M365 as well as Azure services. The ability to leverage connectors into these environments allows for large-scale data injection.""It is able to connect to an ever-growing number of platforms and systems within the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Azure Active Directory and Microsoft 365 or Office 365, as well as to external services and systems that can be brought in and managed. We can manage on-premises infrastructure. We can manage not just the things that are running in Azure in the public cloud, but through Azure Arc and the hybrid capabilities, we can monitor on-premises servers and endpoints. We can monitor VMware infrastructure, for instance, running as part of a hybrid environment.""The initial setup is very simple and straightforward.""Previously, it was a little bit difficult to find where an incident came from, including which IP address and which country. So in Sentinel, it's very easy to find where the incident came from since we can easily get the information from the dashboard, after which we take action quickly.""The log analysis is excellent; it can predict what can or will happen regarding use patterns and vulnerabilities.""The standout feature of Sentinel is that, because it's cloud-based and because it's from Microsoft, it integrates really well with all the other Microsoft products. It's really simple to set up and get going.""We’ve got process improvement that's happened across multiple different fronts within the organization, within our IT organization based on this tool being in place."

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"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.""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.""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.""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.""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.""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 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."

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"The most valuable feature of Siemplify is the playbooks that can be created.""The playbooks feature in Siemplify is crucial for automation. We've utilized both standard and custom integrations with other security operation solutions, enhancing our flexibility. The user interface is generally straightforward, although recent changes may require some adjustment and Siemplify's integrations and capabilities offer potential support for various compliance requirements.""Without hyperbole, I have never, in my entire career, encountered a vendor or a vendor community as awesome as Siemplify. Siemplify and the Siemplify Community quite literally made it possible for our SOC to increase almost five-fold in our number of clients and number of analysts and to go from a Monday to Friday 9-5 shop to a 24/7 shop all in the span of under a year and a half and all while continually adding capabilities and improving the services we offer to our clients."

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Cons
"The dashboards can be improved. Creating dashboards is very easy, but the visualizations are not as good as Microsoft Power BI. People who are using Microsoft Power BI do not like Sentinel's dashboards.""They need to work with other security vendors. For example, we replaced our email gateway with Symantec, but we couldn't collect these logs with Azure Sentinel. Instead of collecting these logs with Azure Sentinel, we are collecting them on Qradar. We couldn't do it with Sentinel, which is a problem for us.""In terms of features I would like to see in future releases, I'm interested in a few more use cases around automation. I do believe a lot of automation is available, and more is in progress, but that would be my area of interest.""Sentinel's alerts and notifications are not fully optimized for mobile devices. The overall reporting and the analytics processes for the end user should also be improved. Also, the compatibility and availability of data sources and reports are not always perfect.""The on-prem log sources still require a lot of development.""It would be good to have some connectors for third-party SIEM solutions. Many customers are struggling with the integration of Azure Sentinel with their on-premise SIEM. Microsoft is changing the log structure many times a year, which can corrupt a custom integration. It would be good to have some connectors developed by Microsoft or supply vendors, but they are not providing such functionality or tools.""They should integrate it with many other software-as-a-service providers and make connectors available so that you don't have to do any sort of log normalization.""When it comes to ingesting Azure native log sources, some of the log sources are specific to the subscription, and it is not always very clear."

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"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 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.""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.""There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design.""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."

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"Building the playbooks could be easier and the integration could improve. It is a difficult process, such as what API connections need to be made.""We often encounter minor issues that could be improved, but we maintain communication with the developers and submit feature requests. Recently, I requested enhancements such as improved search functionality within playbooks and expanded options for exporting case data.""I'm inclined to say that I'd love to see some Machine Learning capabilities integrated into the platform, however, I just attended a demo this morning where Siemplify gave a sneak peek into some Machine Learning capabilities that they are currently developing and have roadmapped for release soon."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It comes with a Microsoft subscription which the customer has, so they don't have to invest somewhere else."
  • "It is a consumption-based license model. bands at 100, 200, 400 GB per day etc. Azure Sentinel Pricing | Microsoft Azure"
  • "Good monthly operational cost model for the detection and response outcomes delivered, M365 logs don't count toward the limits which is a good benefit."
  • "I have had mixed feedback. At one point, I heard a client say that it sometimes seems more expensive. Most of the clients are on Office 365 or M365, and they are forced to take Azure SIEM because of the integration."
  • "It is kind of like a sliding scale. There are different tiers of pricing that go from $100 per day up to $3,500 per day. So, it just kind of depends on how much data is being stored. There can be additional costs to the standard license other than the additional data. It just kind of depends on what other services you're spinning up in Azure, or if you're using something like Azure log analytics."
  • "I am just paying for the log space with Azure Sentinel. It costs us about $2,000 a month. Most of the logs are free. We are only paying money for Azure Firewall logs because email logs or Azure AD logs are free to use for us."
  • "Sentinel is a bit expensive. If you can figure a way of configuring it to meet your needs, then you can find a way around the cost."
  • "Azure Sentinel is very costly, or at least it appears to be very costly. The costs vary based on your ingestion and your retention charges."
  • More Microsoft Sentinel 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."
  • "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."
  • "It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • More CRITICALSTART Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Yes, Azure Sentinel is a SIEM on the Cloud. Multiple data sources can be uploaded and analyzed with Azure Sentinel and… more »
    Top Answer:It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for… more »
    Top Answer:We like that Azure Sentinel does not require as much maintenance as legacy SIEMs that are on-premises. Azure Sentinel is… more »
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    Top Answer:The playbooks feature in Siemplify is crucial for automation. We've utilized both standard and custom integrations with… more »
    Top Answer:We often encounter minor issues that could be improved, but we maintain communication with the developers and submit… more »
    Top Answer:Siemplify has streamlined various tasks such as configuring playbooks, integrations, and running reports. It helps… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Azure Sentinel
    Critical Start, CriticalStart
    Siemplify ThreatNexus
    Learn More
    Overview

    Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution that lets you see and stop threats before they cause harm. Microsoft Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, providing a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response. Eliminate security infrastructure setup and maintenance, and elastically scale to meet your security needs—while reducing IT costs. With Microsoft Sentinel, you can:

    - Collect data at cloud scale—across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multiple clouds

    - Detect previously uncovered threats and minimize false positives using analytics and unparalleled threat intelligence from Microsoft

    - Investigate threats with AI and hunt suspicious activities at scale, tapping into decades of cybersecurity work at Microsoft

    - Respond to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks

    To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

    The cybersecurity landscape is growing more complex by the day with the arrival of new threats and new tools supposedly designed for combating them. The problem is it’s all creating more noise and confusion for security professionals to sort through.

    CRITICALSTART is the only MDR provider committed to eliminating acceptable risk and leaving nothing to chance. They believe that companies should never have to settle for “good enough.” Their award-winning portfolio includes end-to-end Professional Services and Managed Detection and Response (MDR). CRITICALSTART MDR puts a stop to alert fatigue by leveraging the Zero Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP) plus the industry-leading Trusted Behavior Registry, which eliminates false positives at scale by resolving known-good behaviors. Driven by 24x7x365 human-led, end-to-end monitoring, investigation and remediation of alerts, their on-the-go threat detection and response capabilities are enabled via a fully interactive MOBILESOC app.

    Siemplify offers the ability to: Manage security operations from a single platform, build repeatable, automated security processes, and track, measure and improve SOC performance.

    Manage Security Operations from a Single Platform

    From case creation, through investigation to remediation – Siemplify provides the intuitive,  cloud-native workbench security operations teams have been craving to effectively respond at scale.

    Build Repeatable, Automated Security Processes

    Playbooks orchestrate over 200 of the tools that you rely on with a simple drag and drop interface. Automate repetitive tasks to free up your time for higher-value work and slash response times.

    Track, Measure and Improve SOC Performance

    Rise above the daily firefighting to make data-informed decisions that drive continuous improvement with machine-learning-based recommendations and advanced analytics for complete visibility of SOC activity.

    - Largest independent SOAR vendor

    - Purpose-built for enterprise and the leading SOAR for MSSP

    - The first Cloud-native SOAR solution

    Sample Customers
    Microsoft Sentinel is trusted by companies of all sizes including ABM, ASOS, Uniper, First West Credit Union, Avanade, and more.
    Information Not Available
    FedEx Mondelez Intenrational Check Point Trustwave Atos Cyberint Bae Systems Crowe Longwall Security Telefonica Nordea HCL
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Energy/Utilities Company38%
    Financial Services Firm25%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Hospitality Company13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Energy/Utilities Company8%
    Retailer7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Retailer6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise47%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise59%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise36%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise63%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise54%
    Buyer's Guide
    Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk and others in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR). Updated: April 2024.
    769,789 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    CRITICALSTART is ranked 29th in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) while Siemplify is ranked 16th in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) with 3 reviews. CRITICALSTART is rated 9.4, while Siemplify is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of CRITICALSTART writes "Offers the ability to close review tickets or alerts through a mobile phone and to interact with engineers on their side via the app". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Siemplify writes "Great for reporting and ticketing for SOC MxDR client environments and has a great, supportive community". CRITICALSTART is most compared with Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response, BlueVoyant CORE, ReliaQuest GreyMatter, CrowdStrike Falcon Complete and Red Canary, whereas Siemplify is most compared with Splunk SOAR, Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR, ServiceNow Security Operations, Fortinet FortiSOAR and IBM Resilient.

    See our list of best Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) vendors.

    We monitor all Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.