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CRITICALSTART vs ThreatQ 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)
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
AI-SOC (3rd), AI-Powered Security Automation (2nd)
CRITICALSTART
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
26th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (31st)
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 (TIP) (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of Torq is 4.2%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ThreatQ is 1.3%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Torq4.2%
ThreatQ1.3%
CRITICALSTART0.8%
Other93.7%
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

Nimrod Vardi - PeerSpot reviewer
Global IT Director at OpenWeb
Automation workflows have transformed our IT, enabling secure just-in-time access control
We work with them quite often, so we have a direct line regarding areas in Torq that have room for improvement. If we have a feature request, we can request it. I do not have anything in mind at the moment. We were a design partner for a short while, so we feel that they listen and that users of the system have an impact on the way the system is designed for the better. They have a new community, which is something that I personally suggested years ago. There are many people like me in different places and they might have already built the workflow that I need. Having the option to share workflows or to jump on a thread and say I have this need, did anyone ever build a workflow for it, is amazing. Someone would jump in and say yes, sure, here, take this workflow. I think this is an amazing thing and I really hope that the community will come alive because I think this is really powerful. This is something that I already suggested and it did happen eventually, and I am quite happy with it. I do not have any specific feature in mind that I have a need for at the moment.
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.
Yasir Akram - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Freelancer
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

"Torq's unified platform approach to AI, SOAR, automation, and case management is superior compared to my experience managing multiple point solutions."
"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."
"Once I started to use the system and I saw the potential, it changed all of our work in IT."
"Any request that comes in, regardless of how complex it is, I can accomplish it with Torq."
"What I appreciate most about Torq is that it is an essential part of our system."
"Using that one piece of AI, we auto-closed 511 cases in quarter four alone."
"If I review about 100 vendors that I might work with, Torq is definitely in the top five that gave me personally investment back, just because every bit of effort I put into Torq eventually became a workflow that gave it back to me."
"When I start thinking about if I were to try to light up a SOC, which I've done before and I have no interest in doing, it could be a million dollars a year or more to do that, and for what I am paying them for the managed fees, it's a steal."
"In a given quarter, I get 589,000 security events and 584,000 of those get reduced by the service before they even get to me, so the alerts that actually come through to me end up being about 1,400 in that quarter, which is a 99.7 percent efficiency rate."
"CRITICALSTART makes us much more comfortable with knowing someone else is watching our data and our systems and knowing that professional security people are taking a look at any issues that do arise."
"This has been a positive experience and money well spent."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 reporting services are great, and if you have customers that just visit a URL you can see the result, including why it's blocked, how it's blocked, and how the URL was first recognized as malicious."
"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

"Regarding the pricing of Torq, I would say it is expensive."
"The initial deployment of Torq was not easy."
"The initial deployment of Torq was not easy."
"Regarding stability, I have noticed some lagging, crashing, and downtime, which is one of my largest gripes."
"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."
"Even now, we have workflows that are in production that use AI steps and I get different results, making it unusable to some degree."
"We have MCP that we are working with our cloud security platform, and we wanted to connect this MCP to the case management."
"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."
"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."
"It has frustrated us that they don't have a native Slack integration, because most things do now."
"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"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 and I hate it."
"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 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 tool is not user-friendly."
"The solution should be simpler for the end-user in terms of reporting and navigating the product."
"The solution should be simpler for the end-user in terms of reporting and navigating the product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"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."
"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Real Estate/Law Firm
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Torq?
We do not utilize the AI features that much. When it comes to general AI features of Torq, we are just slowly startin...
What is your primary use case for Torq?
Torq markets itself as a security tool, and we do use them for security, but not in the traditional sense they market...
What advice do you have for others considering Torq?
I would rate Torq an eight overall. I feel that Torq is as good as the effort you put into it. The limitations are ve...
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 to...
What is your primary use case for ThreatQ?
We used the solution for threat mapping and managing IoCs.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Critical Start, CriticalStart
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Information Not Available
Radar, Bitdefender, Crowdstrike, FireEye, IBM Security
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. ThreatQ and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.