We performed a comparison between CRITICALSTART and Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The product can integrate with any device."
"The native integration of the Microsoft security solution has been essential because it helps reduce some false positives, especially with some of the impossible travel rules that may be configured in Microsoft 365. For some organizations, that might be benign because they're using VPNs, etc."
"The most valuable features in my experience are the UEBA, LDAP, the threat scheduler, and integration with third-party straight perform like the MISP."
"It is easy to implement (turn on) - does need a skilled analyst to develop queries and playbooks."
"Previously, it was a little bit difficult to find where an incident came from, including which IP address and which country. So in Sentinel, it's very easy to find where the incident came from since we can easily get the information from the dashboard, after which we take action quickly."
"In Azure Sentinel, we have found, they do have a store in their capability. AI and intelligence features. We found that to be very helpful for us because some other things we do need to integrate again or find another vendor for the store"
"I like the ability to run custom KQL queries. I don't know if that feature is specific to Sentinel. As far as I know, they are using technology built into Azure's Log Analytics app. Sentinel integrates with that, and we use this functionality heavily."
"It has a lot of great features."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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 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."
"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 solution provides threat intelligence with EDR."
"The automation part and the playbook creation part are awesome. The way it is responding to the customers and incidents is also very good. In the SOC environment, I guess it will carry out around 50% of the work."
"I have found the solution very useful, it integrates well with other platforms."
"It is a scalable solution."
"I have no complaints about Cortex's stability."
"The drag-and-drop interface enables analysts with no programming knowledge to create playbooks easily."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"It’s easy to install."
"The learning curve could be improved. I am still learning it. We were able to implement the basic features to get them up and running, but there are still so many things that I don't know about all its features. They have a lot of features that we have not been able to use or apply. If they could work on reducing the solution's learning curve, that would be good. While there is a training course held by Microsoft to learn more about this solution, there is a cost associated with it."
"We are invoiced according to the amount of data generated within each log."
"The solution should allow for a streamlined CI/CD procedure."
"I think the number one area of improvement for Sentinel would be the cost."
"There is some relatively advanced knowledge that you have to have to properly leverage Sentinel's full capabilities. I'm thinking about things like the creation of workbooks, how you do threat-hunting, and the kinds of notifications you're getting... It takes time for people to ramp up on that and develop a familiarity or expertise with it."
"Sometimes, we are observing large ingestion delays. We expect logs within 5 minutes, but it takes about 10 to 15 minutes."
"Sentinel can be used in two ways. With other tools like QRadar, I don't need to run queries. Using Sentinel requires users to learn KQL to run technical queries and check things. If they don't know KQL, they can't fully utilize the solution."
"The reporting could be more structured."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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 UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"When Palo Alto bought the solution, the pricing increased by 1.5 times. There's been a 50% increase, which is a lot."
"XSOAR could have more integration options."
"I would like to see Cortex become less dependent on Active Directory and group policies to manage the deployment. Maybe I need to update my understanding of how to deploy it, but that's the way I know how to use it."
"The solution's technical support could be better."
"There should be an on-premise version available for customers to have different choices."
"The solution's correlation rules and playbooks should be improved."
"The solution is very expensive."
"For building automation, there is not a lot of good documentation. The documentation is there, but it is not very good from my perspective. There should be an improvement in this area. I don't see issues with anything else. In terms of new features, I have heard that other products have EBA functionality. It would be good if this functionality could be added."
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CRITICALSTART is ranked 29th in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) while Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is ranked 2nd in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) with 42 reviews. CRITICALSTART is rated 9.4, while Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of CRITICALSTART writes "Offers the ability to close review tickets or alerts through a mobile phone and to interact with engineers on their side via the app". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR writes "Enables the investigators to go through the review process a lot quicker". CRITICALSTART is most compared with Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response, BlueVoyant CORE, ReliaQuest GreyMatter, CrowdStrike Falcon Complete and Red Canary, whereas Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is most compared with Cortex XSIAM, Splunk SOAR, Fortinet FortiSOAR, Swimlane and IBM Resilient. See our CRITICALSTART vs. Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR report.
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