CRITICALSTART vs Splunk SOAR comparison

Critical Start and Splunk are both solutions in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category. Critical Start is ranked #28, while Splunk is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.0. Critical Start holds a 0.3% mindshare in SOAR, compared to Splunk’s 7.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Critical Start users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

CRITICALSTART

Read 10 CRITICALSTART reviews

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32 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Splunk SOAR

Read 45 Splunk SOAR reviews

4,185 Views
1,586 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

CRITICALSTART

Splunk SOAR

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Splunk SOAR and CRITICALSTART compete in the cybersecurity orchestration, automation, and response market. Splunk SOAR leads with extensive integrations and sophisticated feature sets, whereas CRITICALSTART is notable for its robust threat detection and response capabilities, making it highly valued for its perceived value and ease of use.

Features: Splunk SOAR offers automated workflows, customizable playbooks, and advanced integration capabilities, ideal for sophisticated threat management. CRITICALSTART excels with managed detection and response services, advanced threat analytics, and 24/7 security monitoring. While Splunk SOAR supports complex integration, CRITICALSTART focuses on effective real-time threat detection.

Room for Improvement: Splunk SOAR can improve in deployment complexity, user training, and simplifying integration processes. CRITICALSTART should focus on reducing upfront costs, enhancing mobile app features, and improving the intuitiveness of its user interface. Both solutions could enhance predictive analytics capabilities to match evolving cybersecurity threats.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CRITICALSTART offers a streamlined deployment process with quick onboarding and continuous customer support. Splunk SOAR requires detailed configuration to optimize its powerful tools, demanding more deployment time compared to CRITICALSTART’s seamless setup and supportive customer service approach.

Pricing and ROI: Splunk SOAR requires substantial setup investment for customization and scaling, promising a strong long-term ROI for complex environments. CRITICALSTART has higher upfront costs but offers immediate value in threat mitigation and operational efficiency. Buyers often find CRITICALSTART’s cost appealing due to its tangible returns, while Splunk SOAR provides robust ROI potential over time for larger enterprises.

To learn more, read our detailed CRITICALSTART vs. Splunk SOAR Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Splunk SOAR

June 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 Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

28th

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (32nd)

Splunk SOAR

Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk SOAR is 7.4%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

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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SAURABHYADAV4

Consultant at HCL Technologies

Enables optimization by reducing manual intervention and increasing automation in the workflow

The product provides 100% automation for certain processes. It needs no manual intervention. We can integrate various tools like VirusTotal and ServiceNow. We can automate all the tasks. It is one of the best things about the tool. It also provides workforce protection. Whenever we get any alerts or make any configurations, we develop workflow automation using the playbooks. We can fully automate some of the security incident resolutions. We can also do identification and redirection using the product. I have integrated Splunk Phantom with Splunk Cloud. Previously, I used it with Splunk on-premise to get the logs into Splunk for tracking and audit purposes. Since Splunk is a SaaS-based product, it has certain maintenance windows. Over time, the vendor does some maintenance during off-production hours. Creating playbooks using the solution’s playbook editor is not tough. For someone who knows the solution, I rate the ease of creating playbooks as four out of five. The solution’s playbook viewer provides full visibility. The product provides different integrations. We can easily integrate the tool with VirusTotal, ServiceNow, and the asset and identity management system. The product is somewhat easier to use in an investigation. We have been able to identify the false positives using the product. The tool has helped reduce false positives by 30%. Splunk SOAR has helped reduce our mean time to detect by 10% to 15%. Splunk SOAR has a major impact on our meantime to resolve. Our mean time to resolve has been reduced by 35% to 40%. I have integrated VirusTotal with Splunk SOAR. Instead of doing manual checks, I can easily get the score by integrating the tool with Splunk SOAR. I have also synced Active Directory with the asset and identity management system. It's been a long time since we have implemented Splunk SOAR. It brings value to our organization. Before Splunk SOAR, everything was done using manual intervention. We had to educate the SOC team on how to do tasks. We also had to create playbooks for them. With Splunk SOAR, we only have to educate the team about how things are done so that they can perform a manual intervention when there is a failure, which is rare. After deploying the product, we had to provide some training to the SOC team. After getting trained, it was hands-on. Along with other Splunk solutions, Splunk SOAR provides the resilience to face any issues and hardships. We easily cope with downtimes. Splunk SOAR offers us end-to-end visibility across our environment. It depends on how much we utilize it. Visualizing and troubleshooting our cloud-native environment using Splunk SOAR is somewhat easy. I have to coordinate with the Phantom administrators if there is any issue. I work mostly on playbook development and integrating it with security instances.

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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

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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

"Its ability to integrate with other systems and applications in our environment is pretty easy. Sometimes if we see any complexity we try to involve a consultant to help us. Everything is through the built-in app. Splunk can connect to any assets through the built-in app. It could be in a platform, firewalls, or endpoints. It's easy if it's an app integration."

"The most valuable feature is the API connector, depending on how it's formatted and who made the actual app offering for it. The REST API is my favorite component. It's very easy to use. The filters are also really valuable. Those are the two primary features but I enjoy using the rest of it."

"The customization continues to be excellent."

"Splunk SOAR's quick response to incidents is the most valuable part."

"The best feature in Splunk SOAR is the visual Playbook Editor. The drag-and-drop interfaces make visualizations and understanding workflows easy."

"The playbooks are valuable. They are the core component. Being able to implement and build a code process to work through and scale out what we want to do is valuable."

"Surprisingly, the mobile app is valuable because it is very convenient for our on-call analysts to respond and get alerted to security alerts and events wherever they are. We are able to harness the power of Splunk SOAR and everything that we are doing, and we are also able to alert our on-call analysts 24/7. From their mobile phone, they can respond to those alerts."

"Our customers find it easy to conduct searches and consider it an excellent content management system."

More Splunk SOAR 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..."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

More CRITICALSTART cons

"We've had trouble implementing the solution with Microsoft products. There seems to be an integration gap."

"Providing Splunk app developers and playbook developers Python Stub files so that way when they create custom code through their IDE, they can have IntelliCode suggestions."

"The tool's response is slower because it has to search through a huge dataset, which can be improved for latency."

"In my opinion, the focus should be on improving its simplicity, specifically the interface, and configuration."

"They can improve on what they are currently doing. They can provide more playbooks or at least template playbooks that are in their repository."

"In the beginning, we couldn't find any specific documents for every function. It wasn't easy to navigate to what we needed."

"The cost of Splunk SOAR has room for improvement."

"The creation of playbooks is complex in Splunk SOAR, and the number of integrations needs enhancement. Although it enhances alert handling, it still has a journey to compete with Palo Alto SOAR and FortiSOAR."

More Splunk SOAR cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."

"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."

"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."

"Splunk SOAR is an expensive solution for an organization of our size."

"The tool is not cheap."

"We renewed it this year. This year was the first time there was a dramatic increase in the price. It was kind of non-negotiable. It was just a high increase. We had internal communications, and it was definitely a surprise to us. In a short time frame, we renewed it this year. Prices are going up everywhere, but they are not always justifiable, at least not to our eyes. The pricing this year was definitely a big shock."

"I don't know the exact price, but for my region, it is very expensive."

"Splunk is a fast enterprise tool, but it costs too much. At the same time, it's worth what we pay, in my opinion. We can efficiently perform all the functions and tie together the data. It's the perfect tool for our needs."

"The cost is high and the licensing is on an annual basis."

"Splunk SOAR is moderately priced, neither cheap nor overly expensive."

"When we first purchased our Splunk SOAR license, it was based on an event-count model. It was based on the number of events. I had strong opinions at the time that automation should not be stifled by the amount of automation you can accomplish, so the previous structure was not as beneficial for us. Later that year, we got told or saw at a conference that they announced user-based pricing. We are now in a renewal period, so we migrated to a user-based license model, which is more appropriate for us so that we no longer have to worry about stifling our automation based on the quantity."

More Splunk SOAR pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Healthcare Company

12%

Real Estate/Law Firm

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Splunk Phantom?

Splunk SOAR's quick response to incidents is the most valuable part.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk Phantom?

Splunk SOAR is moderately priced, neither cheap nor overly expensive.

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What needs improvement with Splunk Phantom?

There are areas in Splunk SOAR that have room for improvement. To make Splunk SOAR a better solution, there could be better built-in debugging tools, smarter playbook suggestions, and enhanced life...

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Compared 18% of the time

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Compared 17% of the time

Fortinet FortiSOAR vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 11% of the time

Tines vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 9% of the time

ServiceNow Security Operations vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 9% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

June 2025

Download CRITICALSTART product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk SOAR

June 2025

Download Splunk SOAR product report

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart

Phantom

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

Splunk SOAR offers features like automation and orchestration of manual tasks, speeding up work, detection and response to advanced and emerging threats.

Go from overwhelmed to in-control

Automate manual tasks. Address every alert, every day. Establish repeatable procedures that allow security analysts to stop being reactive and focus on mission-critical objectives to protect your business.

Force multiply your team

Orchestrate and automate repetitive tasks, investigation and response to increase efficiency and productivity, and do more with the people you already have. Make a team of three feel like a team of 10.

From 30 minutes to 30 seconds

Work faster with Splunk SOAR. Respond to threats in seconds. Lower your mean time to respond (MTTR) by automating security tasks and workflows across all of your security tools.

End-to-end security operations made easy

Take advantage of Splunk Enterprise Security and Splunk SOAR joining forces to provide a seamless and intuitive SecOps platform to prevent, detect and respond to advanced and emerging threats.

Splunk

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Recorded Future, Blackstone

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Splunk SOAR

June 2025

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