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CRITICALSTART vs CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR 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

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)
CrowdStrike Falcon Complete...
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR is 14.1%, down from 15.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
 

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.
Otis Brinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps users keep track of everything from one place
The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that we can track all of it in one place across all those different locations. Because it's cloud-based and reports up to the cloud, we also have access to the back end, and an incident response team monitors all incidents. We also have an escalation process in place. From my perspective, there are other pieces of CrowdStrike that the security architect team uses as well, but I don't get involved with those as much. I usually just wait for the end results or the notification if I need to get involved if there is an incident.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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 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."
"The detection and response times are impressive."
"We have experienced ROI using this solution. The value is clear when you are able to stop a ransomware attack or other threats."
"One unique thing that they offer is a breach warranty. We basically have a warranty of up to $100,000 should there be any breach that they're not able to manage."
"Their intelligence is really good. The security whitepapers that they write are outstanding. They handle it all for the clients. CrowdStrike Complete is managed by CrowdStrike. They only call a client if there is a problem that they can't address. They pretty much contain and eradicate. This is not something that every vendor provides."
"The initial setup was easy."
"I find the incident management feature valuable because it identifies new types of viruses and sends an alert to the console administrator to check the hardware."
"The real-time response features are valuable for us."
"The response service is the most valuable as it frees up our IT staff to focus on other tasks."
 

Cons

"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 UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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."
"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 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 can be an application for the mobile device for the administrator of the platform to have an overview. In less than two minutes, they should be able to see what is going on and take action."
"It has a lot of false positives, which can be an issue, but you can verify these false positives."
"Its price and integration into a pre-existing process could be better."
"The downside that we see with CrowdStrike is that it is not part of a broader ecosystem. It is an endpoint product. They don't sell firewalls or a broader cybersecurity ecosystem. Some of the behavioral detections could be more robust. It does a good job of stopping common tools and techniques, but when it comes to using Windows utilities, such as PowerShell, etc, it doesn't stop them. These are some of the things where we have been able to get past it. An argument there can be that these are administrative tools, not malware, so maybe it is not its job to stop it, but we see some of the competitive products doing a very good job of detecting behaviors as opposed to malware."
"Like any other solution, a lower price would make CrowdStrike Falcon Complete more appealing."
"Patch management in vulnerabilities needs improvement."
"I would like to have the option to deploy on-premise."
"In a future release, it would be ideal if they could add reporting and action histories to their suite of features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"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 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."
"While the cost is relatively high, it is justified by the value it brings."
"There is a license needed to use the solution. The price of the solution is fair."
"There is a standard license to use CrowdStrike Falcon Complete."
"CrowdStrike offers solutions with the same functionality for both large enterprises and small to medium organizations with competitive pricing."
"It is expensive, but looking at the capabilities that it brings, it is reasonable. There are no additional costs to the licensing costs. If you increase the number of licenses, support is included."
"CrowdStrike Falcon Complete is expensive."
"It is not cheap, and it is not overpriced. It positions itself in the upper half of pricing in the market. You can find a product that claims to do the same and is super cheap, but it'll be not at all good. You can find something that says it does everything in the world, and it is the best thing since sliced bread, but it would be incredibly expensive. Falcon Complete is neither of those. It is always best to go somewhere in the middle, but it is not in the middle. It is in the upper half. So, it is by no means cheap, but it is worth it. Its pricing is well fixed. Given what you get in return, you wouldn't feel bad paying for it. They have a great licensing model. You can add extra bells and whistles if you want. There is that ability to reduce the price by turning off certain features if you wish."
"The price is okay, although you're not going to get away cheap when it comes to security."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Healthcare Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about CrowdStrike Falcon Complete?
It is a cloud-based solution. You can easily scale it.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CrowdStrike Falcon Complete?
CrowdStrike has a reasonable price. It's a good price, but if CrowdStrike offered coupons or discounts on a monthly or quarterly basis, it would be more beneficial for smaller vendors trying to imp...
What needs improvement with CrowdStrike Falcon Complete?
There is room for improvement in the AI of CrowdStrike, known as Charlotte AI, which my team does not currently use. I have not had contact with it at this moment. Additionally, patch management in...
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
Falcon Complete
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Palm Beach State College, Mercedes-AMG, Pokemon, Telstra, Goldman Sachs, Zebra
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.