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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)
33rd
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (28th)
CrowdStrike Falcon Complete...
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR is 12.5%, down from 15.7% 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

"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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 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."
"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."
"Its ease of use is valuable. Nothing is left to you."
"The most valuable feature of CrowdStrike Falcon Complete is endpoint detection and response."
"I like Falcon's AI functionality and vulnerability management. That has been so helpful. Falcon Complete can manage vulnerabilities, quarantine threats, and do all kinds of forensic incident analysis. It's a lightweight solution that only uses 1% of the CPU, which is a game changer. Other EDRs have had high CPU usage."
"Crowdstrike has better support than Carbon Black."
"Endpoint protection is the most valuable feature of CrowdStrike Falcon Complete at this moment."
"It's not a signature-based solution, which is ideal for us."
"The main valuable features are feasibility, ease of deployment, and that it's all based in the cloud. I like that it is gradually updated and that the detection rate is higher than that of other endpoint solutions. There are fewer loopholes."
 

Cons

"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"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."
"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."
"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 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..."
"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."
"CrowdStrike Falcon Complete could improve by having advanced features, such as SOC, and HDR. There would have been a lot of processes involved."
"The installation could always be a bit easier. You need to install it manually at the endpoint."
"It would be better if they offered other language options. It's only in English, and in Latin America, we mostly speak Spanish."
"An MDM, Mobile Device Manager, should be added in the next release."
"I prefer to put a pound into the prevention and an ounce into the cure, but CrowdStrike put more focus into the EDR. This works as a business model for them, as they get a lot of customers purchasing their MDR services, usually SMBs lacking the staff to leverage the EDR tool themselves adequately. We have many such customers. I would much rather see more refinement and investment into the prevention side of the equation, though CrowdStrike has a good engine. The solution is as effective as SentinelOne and Windows Defender for Endpoint; it's an excellent endpoint protection solution."
"The downside is that if you are using a device offline, not connected to the internet, you will potentially have exposure."
"All of our customers complain about the reporting and say that it is very poor."
"When you enable a particular feature, it takes a long time, from 15 to 30 minutes, to implement in enterprise environments. This can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."
"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."
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"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."
"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."
"There is an annual subscription."
"There is a license for this solution and everything is included. However, The price of the could be lower."
"The pricing is a little bit expensive for our region."
"Its price is very high. CrowdStrike Falcon Complete is 50% more expensive than Cisco AMP for Endpoints."
"CrowdStrike offers training at an additional cost, so many organizations wouldn't want that route."
"Falcon Complete isn't too pricy."
"We have a yearly license, and it could be cheaper."
"The pricing for CrowdStrike Falcon Complete is competitive. It's a cheaper solution when you compare it with others, and on a scale of one to five, I'm rating its pricing a four. You also don't need to pay extra for its features. CrowdStrike Falcon Complete is perfect."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Healthcare Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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?
I am comfortable with the way it is working right now. From a pricing perspective, I am not really involved, so I do not know. For UI/UX, it is good, but I think they should keep up with the times....
 

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: June 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.