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."One of the most valuable features of Microsoft Sentinel is that it's cloud-based."
"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."
"We’ve got process improvement that's happened across multiple different fronts within the organization, within our IT organization based on this tool being in place."
"The pricing of the product is excellent."
"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."
"There are some very powerful features to Sentinel, such as the integration of various connectors. We have a lot of departments that use both IaaS and SaaS services, including M365 as well as Azure services. The ability to leverage connectors into these environments allows for large-scale data injection."
"It has a lot of great features."
"The ability of all these solutions to work together natively is essential. We have an Azure subscription, including Log Analytics. This feature automatically acts as one of the security baselines and detects recommendations because it also integrates with Defender. We can pull the sysadmin logs from Azure. It's all seamless and native."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"It has an extensive list of integrations that are available out of the box which makes it easy to start."
"I chose Cortex XSOAR because the client also has Palo Alto firewalls. I can incorporate the data from the Palo Alto firewalls into Cortex and send it into the same data lake to manipulate that data. It lets me manage and monitor the data in one place."
"It is quite scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"What I like most about Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is how user-friendly it is for development. It is much simpler to work with compared to similar tools I've used."
"The pricing is very good."
"From the security team's standpoint, the solution has improved our organization's overall cybersecurity."
"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."
"Sentinel could improve its ticketing and management. A few customers I have worked with liked to take the data created in Sentinel. You can make some basic efforts around that, but the customers wanted to push it to a third-party system so they could set up a proper ticketing management system, like ServiceNow, Jira, etc."
"I believe one of the challenges I encountered was the absence of live training sessions, even with the option to pay for them."
"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."
"Microsoft Sentinel should provide an alternative query language to KQL for users who lack KQL expertise."
"Its documentation is not so simple. It is easy for somebody who is Microsoft certified or more closely attached to Microsoft solutions. It is not easy for those who are working on open-source platforms. There isn't a central point where everything is documented, and there is no specific training or certification."
"The playbook is a bit difficult and could be improved."
"One key area that can be improved is by building a strong integration with our XDR platform."
"Not all information shows up in Sentinel. Sometimes there are items provided in 365 and if you looked in Sentinel you would not see them and therefore think they do not exist. There can be discrepancies between Microsoft tools."
"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."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR could improve the Panorama feature. We had to turn it off because it was not working properly."
"Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR could improve the look, feel, and management of the cloud console. Additionally, the user could be more easily integrated."
"Implementing this solution requires a lot of involvement from the vendor and it should be made easier for the partners."
"I think they should increase their collaboration base."
"The formats are not compatible, are readily not available, and are not readable."
"Its dashboard features need improvement."
"The dashboard performance could be improved."
"The solution's technical support could be better."
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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, Red Canary and CrowdStrike Falcon Complete, whereas Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR is most compared with Cortex XSIAM, Splunk SOAR, Fortinet FortiSOAR, Swimlane and ServiceNow Security Operations. See our CRITICALSTART vs. Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR report.
See our list of best Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) vendors.
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