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 #27, while Splunk is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.4. Critical Start holds a 0.3% mindshare in SOAR, compared to Splunk’s 7.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Critical Start users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

CRITICALSTART

Read 10 CRITICALSTART reviews

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158 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Splunk SOAR

Read 50 Splunk SOAR reviews

4,447 Views
3,380 Comparison Views

87% 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: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART vs. Splunk SOAR

September 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)

27th

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (31st)

Splunk SOAR

Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk SOAR is 7.6%, down from 7.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Splunk SOAR	7.6%
CRITICALSTART	0.3%
Other	92.1%

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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Hamada Elewa

System Engineer - Security Presales at Raya Integration

Creating automation workflows has reduced detection time but integration and visibility challenges remain

The visibility of Splunk SOAR's playbook viewer is rather unclear to me; I wonder what the visibility is for. There are indeed some problems with integrating Splunk SOAR with other Splunk products or other vendors in my system, and it took a while after implementing Splunk SOAR to train my SOC team on how to use the playbooks. Splunk SOAR does not help me reduce my security event volume; in fact, it makes them massive. Splunk SOAR does not help me free up resources to work on other projects; they are not good in this regard. I have not seen time to value with Splunk SOAR; I am curious about what time to value means. I believe Splunk SOAR can be improved by adding more integrations and out-of-the-box integrations, and by increasing the number of admins that can access the solution simultaneously. I see the need to inject more AI in creating the playbooks. I think they can inject more threat intelligence into the solution.

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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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART pros

"Splunk SOAR's extensive library of pre-built integrations allows it to connect with a vast array of popular security and IT applications, streamlining workflows across our existing security stack."

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

"The most valuable features are the Splunk SOAR apps and playbooks."

"It helps increase efficiency and productivity."

"The customizable playbook is the most valuable aspect of the solution."

"Workflow management is most valuable. It is easily customizable"

"The customization of the playbook in Splunk SOAR is very beneficial."

"SOAR allows custom code to be written and integrates with various technologies through pre-built apps like Windows Remote Management or custom apps we can build ourselves like a secret retrieval app from our vault."

More Splunk SOAR pros

Cons

"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."

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

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

"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 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 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."

"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..."

"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."

More CRITICALSTART cons

"And most of the challenges that I have faced with the solution can be found in the documentation itself."

"Splunk's support for integration is subpar and has room for improvement."

"We have playbooks written to extract these events and put them into the workflow since it wasn't structured as expected. It was a miss for us. We couldn't figure out why it broke or what actually happened there. It was something in this feed with legitimate and security events, so we tried to understand the names and what we would call them."

"Creating playbooks using the solution’s playbook editor, for me, is very cumbersome. There have been instances where I have said to myself that I just don't want to use this editor. I might just use a code block and write my own code within it... The functionality in the playbook editor is 80 percent there, but that 20 percent is still lacking. They could make it more efficient."

"I'm not an expert on Splunk SOAR, but I'm sure our team members know what areas could be improved."

"have put a number of ideas on the ideas.splunk.com site for feature requests for the Splunk SOAR product. I posted one of them about three years ago, which finally got implemented in the latest release that just got announced, so the time to implement new features and things like that is a little bit concerning."

"SOAR is probably the most unreliable product Splunk has and that's because most of it is content driven from what you put into it. There are certain parts of it that have a little bit of difficulty at volume too. It's always changing. There is new stuff coming out for it that's going to make it a little bit better, but it does have some drawbacks."

"It could be easier to implement."

More Splunk SOAR cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

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

"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 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."

"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."

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

"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 licensing cost is reasonable."

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

"In my opinion, the price is high, but if you want good products, you have to be willing to pay for them."

"Splunk SOAR is more expensive compared to other options for SOAR."

"It's very overpriced because it is based on the number of users. There is no bulk licensing."

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

More Splunk SOAR pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Real Estate/Law Firm

15%

Healthcare Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

University

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	12
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	30

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?

I don't have experience with costs; management handles that aspect.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Splunk Phantom?

I'm not an expert on Splunk SOAR, but I'm sure our team members know what areas could be improved. I haven't spoken to them specifically about what could be improved or what they would want Splunk ...

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Compared 31% of the time

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Compared 28% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 20% of the time

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Fortinet FortiSOAR vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 11% of the time

ServiceNow Security Operations vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 10% of the time

Tines vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 9% of the time

Cortex XSIAM vs Splunk SOAR

Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

November 2025

Download CRITICALSTART product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk SOAR

October 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

September 2025

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