We performed a comparison between CRITICALSTART and Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk and others in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)."I like the unified security console. You can close incidents using Sentinel in all other Microsoft Security portals, when it comes to incident response."
"The main benefit is the ease of integration."
"Native integration with Microsoft security products or other Microsoft software is also crucial. For example, we can integrate Sentinel with Office 365 with one click. Other integrations aren't as easy. Sometimes, we have to do it manually."
"The UI-based analytics are excellent."
"The most valuable features are its threat handling and detection. It's a powerful tool because it's based on machine learning and on the behavior of malware."
"Investigations are something really remarkable. We can drill down right to the raw logs by running different queries and getting those on the console itself."
"Log aggregation and data connectors are the most valuable features."
"The data connectors that Microsoft Sentinel provides are easy to integrate when we work with a Microsoft agent."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"Many different playbooks are available and can be customized."
"The automation is excellent."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"They have a portal where you can find any kind of integration that you need."
"The solution is easy to deploy."
"Palo Alto is easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is its capability to automate responses and collect information for any security event before you even delve into the details. It's a vast product with an active roadmap, so I'm satisfied with it for now. It's very efficient at data collection and correlation."
"The most valuable features of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR are the remote controller from the workstation that can execute commands and isolate the systems outside of the network. Only the system with an internet connection can execute the task because the main console is in the cloud."
"Microsoft should improve Sentinel, considering that from the legacy systems, it cannot collect logs."
"The built-in SOAR is not really good out-of-the-box. The SOAR relies on logic apps and you almost need to have some kind of developer background to be able to make these logic apps. Most security people cannot develop anything..."
"Microsoft Defender has a built-in threat expert option that enables you to contact an expert. That feature isn't available in Sentinel because it's a huge product that integrates all the technologies. I would like Microsoft to add the threat expert option so we can contact them. There are a few other features, like threat assessment that the PG team is working on. I expect them to release this feature in the next quarter."
"At the network level, there is a limitation in integrating some of the switches or routers with Microsoft Sentinel. Currently, SPAN traffic monitoring is not available in Microsoft Sentinel. I have heard that it is available in Defender for Identity, which is a different product. It would be good if LAN traffic monitoring or SPAN traffic monitoring is available in Microsoft Sentinel. It would add a lot of value. It is available in some of the competitor products in the market."
"I think the number one area of improvement for Sentinel would be the cost."
"They need to work with other security vendors. For example, we replaced our email gateway with Symantec, but we couldn't collect these logs with Azure Sentinel. Instead of collecting these logs with Azure Sentinel, we are collecting them on Qradar. We couldn't do it with Sentinel, which is a problem for us."
"If I see an alert and I want to drill down and get more details about the alert, it's not just one click. In other SIEM tools, you just have to click the IP address of the entity and they give you the complete picture. In Sentinel, you have to write queries or use saved queries to get details."
"While I appreciate the UI itself and the vast amount of information available on the platform, I'm finding the overall user experience to be frustrating due to frequent disconnections and the requirement to repeatedly re-authenticate."
"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 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..."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The formats are not compatible, are readily not available, and are not readable."
"I would love to see more flexibility on what we can display and design on the dashboards."
"The dashboard could be better."
"Corex XSOAR could be improved by reducing the time it takes to process large amounts of data and increasing the number of integrations."
"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 is complicated to learn."
"The integration could be better. Cortex, for example, does not work with iPhone."
"The solution's correlation rules and playbooks should be improved."
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Earn 20 points
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.
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