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Bitdefender MDR vs CRITICALSTART comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 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

Bitdefender MDR
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
16th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
CRITICALSTART
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
32nd
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (31st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of Bitdefender MDR is 3.0%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
 

Featured Reviews

Jörg Köhler - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient email security and link scanning streamline network protection
One area for improvement is the user-friendliness of the UI. It is not intuitive to manage policies as I have to go through several pages to find necessary information. Additionally, the profile management for scanning and protection profiles is clumsy and could be more straightforward. There should be some simplification in changing profiles due to performance issues.
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

"The most valuable features include email security and web URL scanning, particularly the link scanning aspect."
"Bitdefender MDR's integration capabilities have been smooth, leveraging cloud-based and various threat intelligence feeds. Bitdefender's array of technologies, including remote mapping and machine learning, with numerous patents, ensures effective threat management."
"I like the EDR feature."
"It's easy to use."
"It has a very good cloud console that's easy to use and install."
"I would rate the stability a nine out of ten."
"If you're looking at an enterprise with centralized control, you can actually push the policies to all your clients' endpoints easily across VPNs."
"A user cannot uninstall or disable the tool from their systems. It has ransomware blocking and zero-day threat protection. The tool also alerts us whenever a system or device has been compromised. It has a web control feature to manage website categories."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
 

Cons

"The automatic backup isn't very big."
"One area for improvement is the user-friendliness of the UI."
"Bitdefender MDR consumes too many resources during scanning which further affects developers' productivity."
"One area for improvement is the user-friendliness of the UI. It is not intuitive to manage policies as I have to go through several pages to find necessary information."
"For improvements, focusing on the commercial viability of markets like India could make it more accessible. The pricing structure, especially for price-sensitive markets like those in Asian countries."
"Bitdefender needs to probably position this product and create more awareness among people because a lot of companies use products like CrowdStrike, which is doing pretty well."
"Integration capabilities are not as rich as other tools like CrowdStrike's. Bitdefender wasn't as feature-rich in that aspect."
"The lack of integration with Microsoft Outlook is a significant drawback."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It varies based on the number of licenses."
"I would rate the tool's pricing a four out of ten."
"As far as pricing is concerned, I would rate them not expensive, not cheap."
"Bitdefender fit well for customers with about 50 to 200 users. The price point is great, and you get a lot of bang for your buck."
"I know it is based on the volume and size and also on different multi-year agreements. There are different discounts applied, but I can't really speak about the specifics."
"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."
"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 of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Retailer
7%
Construction Company
6%
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

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Bitdefender MDR?
The product is on the lower price range compared to competitors. However, there are additional licenses for every add-on, which increases the cost gradually. Despite this, it remains below average ...
What needs improvement with Bitdefender MDR?
One area for improvement is the user-friendliness of the UI. It is not intuitive to manage policies as I have to go through several pages to find necessary information. Additionally, the profile ma...
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Also Known As

Bitdefender Managed Detection and Response
Critical Start, CriticalStart
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Northstar, SeSa, Greenman-Pederson, TUI Benelux
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Find out what your peers are saying about Bitdefender MDR vs. CRITICALSTART and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
847,625 professionals have used our research since 2012.