Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

AWS Security Hub vs CRITICALSTART 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

AWS Security Hub
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
5th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
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)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) category, the mindshare of AWS Security Hub is 9.4%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
 

Featured Reviews

MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers best practice recommendations and supports various compliance standards
Security Hub provides insightful information about what is running and where there might be weaknesses. It offers best practice recommendations and supports various compliance standards such as ISO and PCI DSS. Enabling these compliance checks helps identify non-compliant services and suggests steps to achieve compliance. The main advantage is providing information and compliance insights rather than prevention.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like that AWS Security Hub currently has several good features, around four or five. The technical support for AWS Security Hub is also responsive."
"I rate Security Hub ten out of ten for stability."
"Security Hub provides insightful information about what is running and where there might be weaknesses."
"The advantage is that it is cloud-native, and we do not need to install agents or sensors to find findings."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is easy to manage...It is a scalable solution."
"The advantage is that it is cloud-native, and we do not need to install agents or sensors to find findings."
"Very good at detection and providing real-time alerts."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the scanning of all the cloud environments and most of the compliances available in the cloud."
"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."
"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 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 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."
"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."
 

Cons

"The user interface, graphs, and dashboards of the solution could improve in the future. They are not very sophisticated and could use an update."
"Security needs to be measured based on their own criteria. We can't add custom criteria specific to our organization. For example, having an S3 bucket publicly available might be flagged as a critical alert, but it might not be critical in a sandbox environment. So, it gets flagged as critical, which becomes a false positive. So, customization options and creating custom dashboards would be areas for improvement."
"Security Hub is currently not worth investing in, as it requires more configurations and integration with other services to work effectively."
"Whenever my team gets some alarms from the central team, my team needs to initiate whether it's a real or false trigger. The central team needs to keep adjusting to the parameters or at least the concerned IPs, whether it's really from the company's pool of IPs, so the trigger process can be improved. In the next release of AWS Security Hub, I'd like a better dashboard that could result in better alert visibility."
"It is not flexible for multi-cloud environments."
"AWS Security Hub's configuration and integration are areas where it lacks and needs to improve."
"There is room for improvement in implementing AI capabilities. It would be beneficial for Security Hub to implement preventative measures and to directly apply recommendations instead of just suggesting them."
"I would like a more fine-grained capability for creating custom rules and a more user-friendly experience programmatically in writing queries and configuring custom security rules, making it quicker and easier."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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..."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Security Hub's pricing is pretty reasonable."
"The cost is based on the number of compliances, core checks, and services required, and for more than 10,000 recommendations, the charge is just one dollar."
"AWS Security Hub is not an expensive tool. I would consider it to be a cheap solution. AWS Security Hub follows the PAYG pricing model, meaning you will have to pay for whatever you use."
"The pricing is fine. It is not an expensive tool."
"There are multiple subscription models, like yearly, monthly, and packaged."
"The price of the solution is not very competitive but it is reasonable."
"Security Hub is not an expensive solution."
"The price of AWS Security Hub is average compared to other solutions."
"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."
"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 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."
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) solutions are best for your needs.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user186927 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 16, 2015
Cybereason vs. Interset vs. SQRRL
Capture DB - they all use NoSQL db and hence solve the ad hoc query and 'go back in time' problem with current best of breed SIEM and DLP solutions that rely on real time analysis of incoming logs (and don't store them). This means deeper and quicker iterative threat analysis and assessment…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Healthcare Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Azure Sentinel or AWS Security Hub?
We like that Azure Sentinel does not require as much maintenance as legacy SIEMs that are on-premises. Azure Sentinel is auto-scaling - you will not have to worry about performance impact, you will...
What do you like most about AWS Security Hub?
The most valuable features of the solution are the scanning of all the cloud environments and most of the compliances available in the cloud.
What needs improvement with AWS Security Hub?
There is room for improvement in implementing AI capabilities. It would be beneficial for Security Hub to implement preventative measures and to directly apply recommendations instead of just sugge...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

SQRRL
Critical Start, CriticalStart
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Edmunds, Frame.io, GoDaddy, Realtor.com
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Security Hub vs. CRITICALSTART and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.