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

CRITICALSTART vs McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator 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)
McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 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 McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is 0.5%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. 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.
DavidJones7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers automation alert features with easy integrations and impressive scalability
I would rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. There are a few technical challenges with the deployment, but it can easily solved by an experienced professional but not by a beginner user of the tool. The complete implementation and migration to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator will take around three months. If someone is using a software platform already with implemented use cases in their environment, it might be difficult to implement the same use cases when the customer is migrating to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator. The conditions and prior alert settings needs to be accurate when migrating to McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator, otherwise false positive alerts might get generated.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"What I like the most is the ability to manage centrally, to manage the various devices, the platform, and the endpoint, all from one console."
"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator's performance is good."
"Application control and traffic encryption are the most valuable features."
"The automation alert for the ticketing tool is one of the vital features"
"McAfee is helping us to clean all of the viruses from the machines, protecting our desktops from the latest threats."
"The DLP feature in McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is good."
"The initial setup is very easy."
"Technical support is very helpful."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"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."
"We need to consolidate multiple features into one console. It would be beneficial to have all the important features on a single platform."
"We would like to see more integration with different platforms and extend this to other platforms. We are migrating to the cloud and want to extend it from our on-premises setup to the cloud."
"There needs to be support for Mac computers. Currently, McAfee does not work on iOS."
"They have to do something to make the solution more resilient or recoverable from power failure events, which may include creating their own database."
"It would be highly beneficial if the metrics or dashboards could be customized"
"The areas of concern where improvements are needed are related to the product's assignment policy and tag assignment, where users can assign the policies with the help of tags and sort out the systems."
"Sometimes agents hang. We have to reinstall the agents."
"There is a problem when it comes to agent communication and duplicate records, where the rebooting of a machine leads to the installation of a new agent and you get a lot of duplicate records that ultimately affect your compliance monitoring."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."
"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."
"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."
"It's an expensive solution"
"McAfee tries to package different things into different products, then sell them as different products with different licenses. They just split everything up into multiple things. That's just their sales pitch and how they do it."
"This solution is priced in the mid-range."
"It is attractively priced. It is a fraction of what we're going to pay for CrowdStrike or SentinelOne, but it only has a fraction of the capabilities as well."
"There is a license required to use this solution. If we use the additional components, such as DLP encryption, there is an additional cost. However, it is similar to a separate product altogether. If you want to use that or not, it is optional, but when you use it, it will cost you additional pricing."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"$The price of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is expensive, it is approximately $6,000 to $9,000 per license annually."
"McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator is not an expensive solution."
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.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Healthcare Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Which is better - Mcafee's MVision ePO or ePolicy Orchestrator?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Mcafee's MVision ePO or ePolicy Orchestrator network security software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Mcafee's ePolicy O...
What do you like most about McAfee MVISION ePO?
McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator's performance is good.
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
McAfee ePO, ePolicy Orchestrator, Intel Security ePolicy Orchestrator, McAfee MVISION ePO
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Brelje & Race, Cognizant, Sutherland Global Services, Eagle Rock Energy, Arab National Bank, Bank Central Asia, Kleberg Bank, Leading Mexican Bank, SF Police Credit Union, Macquarie Telecom, Seagate Technology, Blackburn & Darwen Council, California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation, IRCEP, Major U.S. State Government, State of Alaska, State of Colorado, Cemex, Deutsche Edelstahlwerke
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.