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CRITICALSTART vs Splunk SOAR comparison

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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
6.5
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
AI-SOC (1st), AI-Powered Security Automation (1st)
CRITICALSTART
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
25th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (28th)
Splunk SOAR
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Torq is 3.6%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 1.3%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk SOAR is 7.1%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Splunk SOAR7.1%
Torq3.6%
CRITICALSTART1.3%
Other88.0%
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

AD
Solutions Architect at ProArch
Automation has streamlined multi-tenant SOC workflows and improves alert handling efficiency
Although the reporting within Torq is not that great, we did ask for many features regarding reporting in Torq, but due to some platform constraints, they could not make the whole dataset available for us to be used in reporting. Except for that, we used some basic reporting. When I used Torq, it was indeed in the early stages of AI capabilities. Only a few customers were allowed to use it, and we were among them. It functioned well as long as we summarized the data properly. If you input garbage, you would get garbage out. Thus, we had to do significant fine-tuning regarding what data context we provided to the AI orchestrator to get meaningful results. In terms of Torq's unified platform approach to AI SOC automation and case management compared to managing multiple point solutions across my security stack, I find it case-centric. The unified view in case management is good since it provides clarity, although there are limitations regarding how many items in case management can be modified at once. Bulk operations are very limited, potentially due to their back-end database or data retrieval processes that can be improved. Regarding improvements for Torq, when we were onboarded, there were aspects we were uncertain about, such as the number of cases that could be generated, what data we could bring in, how many clients we could onboard, and similar concerns. Initially, we also lacked clarity about the number of playbooks or workflows we could build. Different triggers like system triggers, case-based triggers, and others can be employed without restrictions, but when it comes to on-demand and scheduled jobs, there is a limitation based on the subscription and pricing tier that notably caps the number of workflows we can create. No bulk editing across cases was one issue, along with limited filtering related to single grouping constraints. Additionally, the out-of-the-box case templates provided require substantial modifications before they become usable. There is also a feature in the cases for notes that cannot be searched. They are only visible through the UI, which is another area for improvement. The workflow and execution-based charges seem misleading as this was not discussed initially. I am not sure if new customers are made aware of this. It seems that workflows revolving around cases hinder functionality outside of case management, as we have many use cases needing on-demand triggers and schedules for functions like reporting or polling devices. Creating additional workflows to achieve basic functionalities raises costs significantly, which disadvantages customers. While they facilitate optimization and scaling, the support received tends to be very basic. Improvements can be made in that area as well.
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.
Vikash Kushwaha - PeerSpot reviewer
Full Stack Software Engineer at mindpathtech
Automated playbooks have transformed incident response and now protect critical services
The biggest advantage I see from my personal experience as an integrator with Splunk SOAR is that it integrates with most of the security features among the Defenders, Microsoft Defender, firewalls, CloudWatch, and AWS security agents, as well as EC2 machines, firewalls, EDR, IAM, email security, and antivirus. It automates the security process over phishing emails and any other brute force attacks. It helps quite a lot because if 100 phishing emails were sent to a domain, a developer can only reach one, two, or five, but for hundreds of others, it actually supports better automated playbooks and provides major security. Splunk SOAR introduced some new and innovative capabilities or approaches that transformed the way my SOC operates. Splunk SOAR provides playbooks for automatic security features, such as for firewalls, phishing mails, and utilizing Defenders or virtual tools. A playbook maintains its algorithms or processes, so if any kind of security issue arises, the playbook automatically runs and handles actions such as IP blocking or resolving brute force attacks, notifying the admin about suspicious users. After implementing Splunk SOAR, the training process for my SOC team to use playbooks takes a long time during the whole integration part, as it retrieves all credentials from us, whether for an EC2 machine or any antivirus. It takes about one to two months for the team to fully sustain and know the processes of the playbooks and security, particularly for three or four individuals in the cyber security or DevOps team. Splunk SOAR significantly reduces the time spent on monotonous security tasks. In banking, insurance, or healthcare, automated services for addressing phishing emails and security threats are common. Having a manual workforce of two or three individuals can only handle five or ten security threats while Splunk SOAR automates the entire process across apps and machines, making it easier and notifying the admin about the threats. If someone tries to breach, Splunk SOAR immediately processes incoming requests, validating them and blocking any unsecured requests, which reduces a lot of time and effort. With the help of the playbook viewer, I assess the visibility provided by Splunk SOAR as very positive, especially for security purposes. If someone is attacked by 100 users, it blocks all the users, while individual developers such as myself can only handle two or three at a time. The automated process of Splunk SOAR handles all the processes concurrently, making it a game-changing solution. It helps reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR). It takes around 10 to 20 minutes to resolve one incident through the whole process and notify the admin of the issue. If there are multiple incidents, calculating the time taken for each, it generally requires around 40 to 50 minutes to resolve five incidents.

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."
"Torq has exceeded expectations by delivering workflows in a timely and lower effort manner than XSOAR, and it meets all my needs while saving a ton of time and targeting $600,000 saved this year, which is a substantial amount of money."
"What I liked the most about Torq is the actual workflow builder, which is really great because they offer a lot of features and convenience features that are useful for any automation engineer."
"Torq has impacted my organization positively by allowing us to earn time and invest resources in other projects that are more meaningful and more interesting, pushing deeper into what a SOC is, and building our processes."
"As an analyst, it has demonstrated potential to reduce workforce requirements and time needed for related activities."
"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."
"Torq offers the best feature through integration with AI."
"Any request that comes in, regardless of how complex it is, I can accomplish it with Torq."
"I also use their mobile app. It's very easy to use and very convenient to be able to respond to alerts wherever you are. I love the app. You can respond and communicate, per ticket, with their SOC in near real-time. The response is very quick."
"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."
"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."
"This has been a positive experience and money well spent."
"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."
"It is a comfort to know that there is a team of professionals backing you up, especially in an area that you don't feel 100 percent comfortable."
"The biggest lesson is transitioning from alert overload to being at a point where we do have eyes on alerts, where every alert is truly possible."
"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 product’s integration with other Splunk products is valuable."
"Technical support is helpful."
"It's pretty scalable."
"It has definitely saved a decent amount of time for our analysts so they can focus on other tasks."
"Splunk SOAR consolidates tools in my environment significantly, notifying users about ongoing malicious activities based on integrated security features in my banking app."
"Splunk SOAR helps reduce my mean time to detect significantly and enhances it very well; it reduces the mean time to detect by approximately 70%."
"The automation part of the product is great, Splunk SOAR can easily be connected with a lot of solutions that are available out there, and the in-built apps are pretty useful to me."
"In terms of time savings in threat responses, as a team, we save more than 30%, estimated around 30-40%."
 

Cons

"Torq does extensive marketing saying that SOAR is dead and markets itself as an all-in-one solution, but this is not actually true."
"If Torq could enhance its AI features, it would benefit customers significantly by making the platform even more user-friendly."
"Even now, we have workflows that are in production that use AI steps and I get different results, making it unusable to some degree."
"The workflow and execution-based charges seem misleading as this was not discussed initially, and creating additional workflows to achieve basic functionalities raises costs significantly, which disadvantages customers."
"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."
"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."
"I wish Torq's AI assistant for building templated workflows from scratch worked better; when you start with a blank slate, asking AI to help you build or template the workflow out does not go well."
"The initial deployment of Torq was not easy."
"They could dig a little bit deeper into the Splunk alerts when they feel like they need to be escalated to us."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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."
"The biggest room for improvement is not necessarily in their service or offering, but in the products that they support."
"What we have seen is if the workflow gets halted or if we want to halt a workflow, it cannot be resumed."
"Splunk SOAR follows very flat pricing and most of the time it's very high when compared to the other competitors."
"I haven't used it fully, but based on my usage, I could not find simulation tools and features. It currently lacks simulation features, which are important for me for creating a playbook. It is also very expensive for my region."
"The Splunk SOAR platform was not designed specifically for case management which is why this area needs improvement."
"There is some homework to be done before you can really properly use Splunk SOAR. Resolution times could be faster in terms of support."
"The price of Splunk SOAR is high. From a price perspective, the cost for an organization is very high."
"The number of playbooks on offer should be increased."
"They can improve on what they are currently doing. They can provide more playbooks or at least template playbooks that are in their repository."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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 pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"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."
"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."
"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."
"It's very overpriced because it is based on the number of users. There is no bulk licensing."
"In my opinion, the price is high, but if you want good products, you have to be willing to pay for them."
"The tool is not cheap."
"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."
"I found the price of Splunk SOAR to be good."
"While I can't confirm the exact pricing, some colleagues have mentioned that Splunk SOAR may be on the costlier side."
"Splunk SOAR is moderately priced, neither cheap nor overly expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise47
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Torq?
Torq can be improved by adding some more features, such as adding more automation and providing a no-code option so I...
What is your primary use case for Torq?
My main use case for Torq is reviewing the incidents and responding to them. After that, I investigate them and take ...
What advice do you have for others considering Torq?
I would definitely recommend others to use Torq as it is an all-rounder tool which even integrates AI. As we all know...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Splunk Phantom?
For pricing, I would rate Splunk SOAR a seven where one is high price and ten is low price.
What needs improvement with Splunk Phantom?
When it comes to Splunk SOAR, in terms of improvement, I feel there should be some pre-deployed solutions available. ...
What is your primary use case for Splunk Phantom?
I started working with Splunk SOAR four years ago. I provide Splunk SOAR solutions to our customers as an MSSP. We wo...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Critical Start, CriticalStart
Phantom
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Information Not Available
Recorded Future, Blackstone
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. Splunk SOAR and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.