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CRITICALSTART vs Vulcan Cyber 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)
31st
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (32nd)
Vulcan Cyber
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
9th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (19th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (7th), Cloud Security Remediation (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vulcan Cyber is 0.3%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

PB
Saves my team time and alert fatigue, allowing us to concentrate on more important things
The Trusted Behavior Registry helps resolve alerts in the sense that CRITICALSTART is doing a lot of that initial triage for me. Out of a given 500,000 events and alerts, for example, that come through, they're taking out 495,000 of them. That only leaves me with a subset of that to actually have to triage, and that's where it benefits us. They take care of Tier-1 and Tier-2 triage. And 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. Also, the intuitiveness of the updated user interface for the service is spot-on. It is much easier to navigate, and know where to navigate, in the newer interface. I've never had an issue with responsiveness. It's very quick and doesn't sit there and chug on anything. It's fast, it's efficient. It has enabled our SecOps team to take action faster because if you have multiple ways of connecting to it and actually getting your alerts answered and taking care of things fast, it is extremely helpful. All the information that you need to make a determination is usually in the alert itself that comes through the Zero-Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP). I don't find myself going back to the app itself very often. That still happens, but not as often. The ability to flow the information forward, from the alert standpoint, helps me because it saves me from running back to get the information. It's improved my efficiency. Finally, there haven't been any data sources that the service wasn't able to integrate with.
Shreevinayak Deshpande - PeerSpot reviewer
Makes vulnerability management efficient with a single pane of glass and daily report generation
There are areas for improvement. Initially, when onboarding Vulcan Cyber, the setup and configuration was more complex than expected with a user-friendly approach. This aspect can be enhanced. An important area is performance and speed, as Vulcan Cyber often lacks speed when exporting reports. The team might have to work on scaling up servers. When we click on a vulnerability, it takes ten seconds to pop up a window and show the entire content. Instead of that, they can put a down arrow, and all the details should be shown on clicking the arrow. This will prevent that ten-second delay. Another area for improvement is providing support and documentation for their tool. Users should have access to easy-to-understand trial documentation for reference.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"They recently upgraded their UI, which is great. It is user-friendly."
"The interface of Vulcan Cyber is intuitive with a lot of information about vulnerabilities, which helps in classifying and analyzing threats."
"The automation capabilities using the Vulcan API platform or the API feature allow me to easily automate scripts and reports and schedule them."
"The most notable aspects include having prioritization capabilities and custom scripts."
"The interface of Vulcan Cyber is intuitive with a lot of information about vulnerabilities, which helps in classifying and analyzing threats. We have a good view of assets and vulnerabilities. It helps to do good threat analysis because we can see exactly what the threat is and assess it accordingly."
"Out of the three solutions I've used, Vulcan Cyber is the superior option."
"Vulcan Cyber gives the remediation team the focus points."
"Vulcan Cyber offers a single pane of glass for centralizing our security data."
 

Cons

"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."
"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..."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Mainly, what I would like from them is more maintenance of the different connectors they have in the platform."
"An important area is performance and speed, as Vulcan Cyber often lacks speed when exporting reports."
"It would be extremely helpful to have a community group around the product."
"Monitoring of the evolution of campaigns and perhaps having more customized options for monitoring them would be great."
"If there was a way for me to connect to the vendor directly from the application, it would be helpful."
"Initially, when onboarding Vulcan Cyber, the setup and configuration was more complex than expected with a user-friendly approach. This aspect can be enhanced."
"The fact that we cannot use it for our reporting leads me to rate it three out of ten."
"There are several areas needing improvement. The product helps, but the reporting relies heavily on Power BI. It is limited to graphical views and requires additional filtering, posing operational challenges."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"Its pricing is quite fair compared to what is out there in the market, especially compared to the tool from Microsoft. It is a SaaS platform that has an annual cost, so it is something that is already used by many companies. It is quite affordable."
"Our leadership knows better about the pricing. As per my knowledge, which might not be accurate, its price can come down."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Healthcare Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
29%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vulcan Cyber?
I don't deal with the pricing of the solution. I'm not a part of that department.
What needs improvement with Vulcan Cyber?
One area for improvement is clarity in the results column of vulnerability reports. Currently, the path where the vulnerability lies is not clear, so Vulcan needs to work on specifying the correct ...
What is your primary use case for Vulcan Cyber?
I have been using the solution for more than six months. Essentially, any reporting I do for our internal Internet assets involves using Vulcan. The primary use of Vulcan is extracting the reports,...
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Stitch Fix, Mandiant, Wealthsimple, Entrust, Anaplan, Deloitte, Origami Risk, Verana Health
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. Vulcan Cyber and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.