CRITICALSTART vs Sophos MDR comparison

Critical Start and Sophos are both solutions in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category. Critical Start is ranked #32, while Sophos is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.6. Critical Start holds a 0.8% mindshare in MDR, compared to Sophos’s 6.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Critical Start users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Sophos users who would recommend it.

CRITICALSTART

Read 10 CRITICALSTART reviews

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333 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Sophos MDR

Read 31 Sophos MDR reviews

3,726 Views
2,569 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

CRITICALSTART

Sophos MDR

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

CRITICALSTART and Sophos MDR compete in the managed detection and response market. CRITICALSTART is noted for competitive pricing and strong support while Sophos MDR offers advanced features, potentially providing superior value depending on user needs.

Features: CRITICALSTART supports robust threat detection with customizable dashboards, real-time incident reporting, and a mobile app for remote management. Sophos MDR stands out with comprehensive threat intelligence, automated response capabilities, and an integrated dashboard for multiple security functions.

Room for Improvement: CRITICALSTART could enhance its tuning to reduce false positives, speed up the user interface, and improve integration with certain data sources. Sophos MDR might benefit from simplifying its deployment process, reducing initial costs, and improving global telemetry reach.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CRITICALSTART offers straightforward deployment and responsive customer service ensuring quick integration. Sophos MDR provides comprehensive setup with detailed guidance, though it may be seen as complex by some users.

Pricing and ROI: CRITICALSTART presents cost-effective setup options, offering clear ROI with efficient threat management. Sophos MDR has higher upfront costs but justifies it with enhanced threat protection suitable for organizations needing comprehensive security solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed CRITICALSTART vs. Sophos MDR Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Sophos MDR

April 2025

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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)

32nd

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (31st)

Sophos MDR

Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

5th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sophos MDR is 6.1%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

Featured Reviews

Preston Broesche

Director of Information Technology at Kirby Corporation

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.

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Shaun Gordon

Chief Security Officer at Duxbury

Extensive data lake, ease of use is great and you can really get started very quickly

Sophos MDR is a service. MDR is managed detection and response. It's a managed security service. So instead of having an anti-malware, which in Sophos' case would be Intercept X, with MDR, they add human-led threat hunting. It's a managed service. So it's not a product that you sell the client per se. You're selling them a service, which is almost like an SLA, and that includes Cloud MDR. MDR is not a product. It's a service. The reality is that when it comes to the likes of SentinelOne, McAfee, CrowdStrike, ESET, and all the other players out there, they're single-product security companies. CrowdStrike is an anti-malware. That's one thing. ESET, same thing. But if you look at the other vendors, within the appliances, you're looking at Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Checkpoint. They only sell firewalls. That's all they do. When you deal with Sophos, they are the entire product suite. They sell firewalls. They sell Intercept X, which is their anti-malware, Intercept X for Server with anti-malware, email protection with ties into Office 365, and Sophos Plus encryption. All of these security products pull telemetry. So every time somebody hits a firewall, it's called, for argument's sake, that goes into their central data lake. All the firewalls around the world add that information to a data lake. Now, when you're dealing with Sophos, because of their exposure, because they've got so many different products, their data lake is a lot more extensive than competing vendors because they're not relying on one threat factor. They're not relying on one area of expertise. They're a global company. So, I can't compare their telemetry, for instance, to the likes of CrowdStrike. If CrowdStrike has probably started doing appliances, then the users will get that benefit as well. Sophos is the only vendor that does do that. It's like hiring a security team. Sophos do things differently in that they've got more telemetry and more insight into a network because they offer a variety of products. The other part about it is Sophos MDR; the service, unlike other vendors like CrowdStrike, is not limited to their products. If you are running CrowdStrike in your company, for instance, you can get their integration packs, in which case Sophos will manage your CrowdStrike system for you. Whereas with CrowdStrike, it's only CrowdStrike. You are locked into that vendor. So Sophos offers that flexibility. It's a multi-vendor service as opposed to SentinelOne or CrowdStrike, which is a single-vendor service. For instance, if I'm running Sophos, I would like to go with CrowdStrike MDR. I would have to remove my entire security investment, in this case, Sophos, and reinstall CrowdStrike in order to use their service. Sophos doesn't have that problem. If you've got CrowdStrike and you've already invested in CrowdStrike, cool. You stay on CrowdStrike. They will still manage it for you.

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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

"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 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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART pros

"The automated threat hunting feature and integration capabilities are valuable."

"There is a feature called XDR Central. With this, Sophos can connect to third-party security solutions."

"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to view environmental activities."

"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."

"Sophos MTR will stop the threat as it is happening. Intercept X, which is a part of it, has the ability to roll back, so the attack is undone. And then the advanced edition of MTR lets me handle the threat by talking on the phone. I don't have to deal with it. I don't have to just go through emails back and forth. We don't have to pay extra for Rapid Response services. If something is happening, they're right on top of it."

"The most valuable feature is threat hunting."

"The important mechanism is the dilation of the desktop. It quarantines and removes threats from the network. Sometimes, security devices similar to firewalls are used. It also creates dynamic rules to protect against attacks. The security cross-synchronization is very important."

"It provides reliable protection and clear data on its performance metrics, enabling straightforward communication of its capabilities."

More Sophos MDR pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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. 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."

"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."

More CRITICALSTART cons

"Sophos MDR’s pricing is the biggest factor that needs improvement per customers and technical professionals."

"The only challenge we face with the tool is the pricing. Clients often compare it with other products in the market and try to negotiate prices. This concern has caused some challenges in closing deals. Otherwise, as a product, we have no worries."

"Support could provide a faster response."

"The product's stability needs improvement."

"The service could enhance its scope, particularly in managing firewalls."

"The solution's integration should be made easier because it is difficult."

"Endpoint protection is very slow."

"The product must provide zero trust security."

More Sophos MDR cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."

"The product is reasonably priced considering the cybersecurity features."

"MDR is a complete enterprise solution, and compared to other OEMs, it is one of the cheapest."

"I rate Sophos MDR’s pricing a seven or eight out of ten."

"It is an expensive platform."

"The solution has subscription-based pricing plans."

"Sophos MDR is a cheap solution."

"The tool is too expensive for small companies."

"Compared to other tools, Sophos has a pretty good price."

More Sophos MDR pricing and cost advice

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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

Computer Software Company

20%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

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What do you like most about Sophos MDR?

The user doesn't need a technician; it offers 24/7 support to identify and manage your infrastructure and take complete care of any technological incidents.

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What needs improvement with Sophos MDR?

There could be improvement in features like more detailed reporting for the end customer. For example, reports should be in simple language that is easy to read and understand for management level ...

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What advice do you have for others considering Sophos MDR?

On the topic of improvements, if Sophos MDR offers better pricing on endpoints, it could be even more attractive. Additionally, Sophos offers breach compensation, which is a very appealing factor. ...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

May 2025

Download CRITICALSTART product report

Buyer's Guide

Sophos MDR

April 2025

Download Sophos MDR product report

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart

Sophos Managed Threat Response

Overview

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.

Critical Start

Threat Notification Isn’t the Solution – It’s a Starting Point
Other managed detection and response (MDR) services simply notify you of attacks or suspicious events. Then it’s up to you to manage things from there.

With Sophos MTR, your organization is backed by an elite team of threat hunters and response experts who take targeted actions on your behalf to neutralize even the most sophisticated threats.

Sophos

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Sophos MDR

April 2025

Free Report: CRITICALSTART vs. Sophos MDR

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