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CRITICALSTART vs Stellar Cyber Open XDR comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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)
Stellar Cyber Open XDR
Ranking in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
25th
Average Rating
0.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (52nd), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (61st), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (21st), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (34th)
 

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 Stellar Cyber Open XDR is 0.8%, up from 0.2% 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.
Hrishiraj Bhattacharjee - PeerSpot reviewer
Correlates incidents, allows for quicker identification and helps prioritize investigations
The only challenge is, and that’s where we come into play, it’s a pretty high-tech platform. So, it’s difficult for small and medium-sized organizations to manage it on their own. It’s a very complex system. It requires a lot of expertise. All my guys who work on it have gone through certification from Stellar itself. There are three different certifications that you need to complete. Only then are you certified by Stellar to work on it. It’s a very complex platform. Not everyone can use it. A simple IT engineer or system admin won’t be able to handle it because it’s quite complex. You need to have an understanding of the industry, the subject, and the tool. So, just purchasing this tool or license and then using it on your own would be very difficult to configure and manage on a day-to-day basis. The pricing model is not suitable for small and medium companies, particularly small companies. The minimum pricing model they have is suitable for companies with more than one thousand users. So, if someone has 50 to 100 users, like typical small companies, it’s difficult for them because the cost involved is high. Stellar would charge you for those thousand users, but you do not need all those users. So what are they going to do? I guess Stellar does not want to target small companies directly and maybe relies on resellers and MSPs like us to sell it. So, that is something I would recommend changing. Otherwise, it’s a great tool, but because of the pricing model, small companies are unable to leverage the advantage of this beautiful tool. So, the pricing model should be suitable for small and medium businesses. The product currently has vulnerability monitoring and everything. But if they could also do something about vulnerability management and maybe patch management, that would be nice.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It can integrate with almost any cybersecurity tool available in the market."
"Stellar Cyber Open XDR offers these functionalities at a more affordable price, making it easier for me to position it with price-sensitive customers."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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."
"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..."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"Support is an issue because they have a limited number of resources."
"I would rate the stability at about five to six. The platform requires some fine-tuning, especially when integrating data sources and creating connectors."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It’s a single license platform."
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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
15%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Stellar Cyber Open XDR?
Pricing is a major benefit of Stellar Cyber Open XDR. I rate it between three and four on the cost scale. It offers functionalities at a significantly lower cost than rival products, enabling me to...
What needs improvement with Stellar Cyber Open XDR?
I am currently evaluating Stellar Cyber Open XDR in terms of their support. I do not see any major areas for improvement as of now. Their support is good, and the team is small, enabling them to ca...
What is your primary use case for Stellar Cyber Open XDR?
I use Stellar Cyber Open XDR ( /products/stellar-cyber-open-xdr-reviews ) as a 24/7 security monitoring tool, especially for customers with large and medium networks. It eliminates the need for a d...
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Sumitomo Chemical USA, PlastiPak Packaging, University of Denver, Large California State Agency, Large Midwestern American City
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. Stellar Cyber Open XDR and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.