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CRITICALSTART vs ThreatQ comparison

 

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

CRITICALSTART
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
28th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (32nd)
ThreatQ
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
22nd
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Threat Intelligence Platforms (11th)
 

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 ThreatQ is 1.1%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

JH
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.
Yasir Akram - PeerSpot reviewer
Good reporting and pretty stable but needs to be simpler to use
The support team of ThreatQ set up a VM on our VPN, which was SlashNext's private VPN. Then we just initiated some system calls and ThreatQ provided us the configuration file with our settings (like our email, our API key, our URL, our category, etc.). They set up a VM on our private VPN cloud. And then they provided us the configuration file in which we just entered our details like our company URL, our API category, and API keys et cetera. We could just add it on the configuration file. We just uploaded it to the ThreatQ server. After running the system calls, we just initiated the ThreatQ and then performed tasks on the UI, such as categorizing the reports. If we only wanted the report for phishing, then we just manipulated the data on the UI and just extracted the reports. That's all. The deployment was complex. We used high hardware specifications. I don't remember the exact specifications, however, I recall them being high. There were some services that had some compatibility errors. That's why we had our VMs - to make sure that the customer would not face any errors. Everything's deployed with high specifications and custom specifications. That was the biggest challenge for us - to deploy on the customer VMs. On average, deployment takes 15-20 minutes if it's deployed without any errors. I was with one of the NetOps network admin during deployment. We were only two people and we just deployed and installed all services and we executed the deployment.

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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 reporting services are great. With reporting services, if you have customers that just visit a URL you can see the result - including why it's blocked and how and how the URL was first recognized as malicious."
"Integrating the solution with our existing security tools and workflows was easy."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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."
"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 solution should be simpler for the end-user in terms of reporting and navigating the product."
"The tool is not user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"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."
"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Healthcare Company
12%
Real Estate/Law Firm
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about ThreatQ?
Integrating the solution with our existing security tools and workflows was easy.
What needs improvement with ThreatQ?
The tool is not user-friendly. It is not beginner-friendly. It would be very difficult for a beginner to learn the tool. It will take at least two months to get familiar with it. Building the playb...
What is your primary use case for ThreatQ?
We used the solution for threat mapping and managing IoCs.
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Radar, Bitdefender, Crowdstrike, FireEye, IBM Security
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. ThreatQ and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.