Alert Logic vs CRITICALSTART comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Alert Logic and CRITICALSTART based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about CrowdStrike, Arctic Wolf Networks, SentinelOne and others in Managed Detection and Response (MDR).
To learn more, read our detailed Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable part of Binary Defense is its team of cybersecurity analysts. Their analysts filter out the noise and only forward the critical threats that require a response instead of false positives.""With Binary Defense, we don't just get an alert, but also a detailed rundown of why they're alerting us on it. They tell us what was executed, or the username, script, or IP. That way, we're not wasting time investigating.""The speed at which their services are reactive is valuable. Nowadays, when a threat hits an endpoint, you've got minutes, not hours or days. Their average response time is about four minutes on an alert. For anything that needs to be sent to us, it's about fourteen minutes, which is pretty good. They're the third SOC that I've used in fifteen years. By far, they are the quickest ones to act. When you're looking at prevention, that's a key factor.""The most valuable features are the SIEM and the ticketing function; the latter is very smooth and easy to read and understand. We don't have any issues looking at the ticketing information when we're trying to identify what's going on.""The biggest aspect for us is that they are able to conform to our environment and utilize our tools. That way, we still maintain ownership of all the data and access to the applications, and we never lose control of the ability to run the solution ourselves if we need to.""Among the valuable features are the agent, continuous reporting, and dashboard. It has all the features we need and we haven't had to customize it, other than turning on certain features that we wanted.""Binary Defense's most valuable feature is the 24/7 monitoring and threat hunting. Their team checks the latest breaches and how they're done.""The customization has been the most valuable aspect and was really the reason we ended up selecting Binary Defense. They worked with us to provide exactly the level of support, features, response, and collaboration we needed."

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"The solution was consistently available, and I cannot recall any instances where it was down.""It is a very stable product.""Everything is in one dashboard; I'm notified when there's an incident and advised on what steps to take.""Notifications and the detail of notifications are most valuable. It is a user-friendly solution.""The installation and configuration were slick.""It improves our security. Before, we didn't have anything scanning our containers. We had software scanning all the physical servers, but we had nothing to scan our containers. With Alert Logic, we can do that.""The initial setup is pretty straightforward.""It has the ability to install agents. It is pretty straightforward. You can automate the process pretty easily."

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"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.""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.""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.""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.""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.""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."

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Cons
"It's hard to think of anything that they need to improve on, but just to point out something, I would like to see them provide advanced XDR.""It's sometimes difficult to know when to engage Binary Defense or TrustedSec, their sister company. TrustedSec is more focused on offensive security, as opposed to the defensive security that the MDR solution provides. It would be awesome if there were a better bridge between that relationship for when we need to get more proactive services or when we need to do a penetration test.""We found that an earlier version of the agent had high memory usage and that was a bit concerning, but we raised the concern with their support team and they immediately replied that they had noticed the same thing and had a candidate fix already available... it totally fixed the issue.""The most significant area for improvement is in support for non-English speakers; we're a global organization, so many of our users are not English speakers, which can make interacting with them a challenge. There's no Chinese language support, so we must rely on what we can do with the internet. We don't expect Binary Defense to build a language staff, but details can get lost in translation when we assume the whole world speaks English.""I don't find any downside to them, but if I have to put one, it would be consistent manpower or staffing. The only area where the solution can be improved is going to be with people. As they grow, they are struggling with the same thing that every other company is, which is getting talent and getting that talent to stay, but they've just revised their tiering system to go from a flat analyst and manager to a three-tier solution where it goes through two or three before it gets elevated. That seems to have worked out well, so if one level misses it, the next one picks it up, and it works out fine.""Binary Defense MDR could be even better with additional features, like automatic scans and file quarantine.""We found a couple of bugs in the user interface.""We should be able to isolate devices faster. They should shorten the time between clicking on a device to contain it and carrying out the action. That would be a welcome improvement."

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"The documentation, especially with the initial setup, needs improvement.""Could be more of an endpoint protector.""They have ideas and email you whatever they find, but they don't have a dedicated security team who will work on an attack or a specific security instance.""Alert Logic needs to expand its SOCs to serve more markets, such as the Middle East and Asia. There should be infrastructure that covers more time zones. The company should also develop an EDR that is natively integrated into their solution. Currently, a client must buy another EDR solution like CrowdStrike or Sophos. I think Alert Logic is developing this. Built-in email security could also be developed and integrated.""I would like more data on the alert payload. It would be good to have the ability to customize the alert payload to add whatever data that we want on there. Right now, it is a bit limited.""We'd like to have triggered alerts sent to us so we see errors quicker.""As a user involved with the user interface, I believe there is a need to continue improving it based on feedback from our customers.""I would like to see it do initial scans and start capturing data, which it will truly analyze, not just be a reporting system saying, "Here is an email. Here is an email. Here is an email.""

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"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.""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 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.""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.""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.""There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design.""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..."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The solution's price is spot on; if anything, it's slightly below the norm for most services. Compared to building the same team internally, it would cost more to create the same amount of capability than what we get from an external team. Price-wise, Binary Defense is in a great spot."
  • "From the initial cost that Binary Defense came in with, we pared it down quite a bit over the course of 30 or 60 days. My leadership would say that their cost was high, but realistically, they were in line with the market."
  • "The pricing is on target. Working with their sales team on pricing negotiations was a pleasant process. They were very respectful of the constraints we had and I feel that we're paying a fair price."
  • "It's valued at the right price. Even with the number of endpoints we have, we don't feel that it's a lot more than any competitor. In fact, it might be less expensive when you look at the fact that you're getting a full flex SOC out of it along with the tools."
  • "Binary Defense has changed its pricing model from being primarily based on the volume of data to one based on escalations and incidents they handle."
  • "Binary Defense MDR is priced competitively and may be slightly lower than CrowdStrike."
  • "After we acquired this platform, we met with a number of different vendors. Binary Defense came in with a proposal that was surprisingly affordable. In fact, we were able to recoup the cost of their services within a short period of time. This is because Binary Defense is able to provide the same level of security as a team of two or three in-house analysts but at a fraction of the cost. As a result, Binary Defense is saving us an estimated $250,000 to $300,000 per year."
  • "The pricing isn't that bad, it's very competitive. I don't feel that it's over-priced and I don't feel that it's under-priced."
  • More Binary Defense MDR Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Our ROI would probably be zero. We don't even use it. It sits in there. We get emails and just delete them. Around the world, we don't even use it."
  • "Alert Logic has better competitive pricing than some of its competitors."
  • "Almost any product that is on the AWS Marketplace is super easy to subscribe to."
  • "Its pricing is very reasonable considering what you get for what you pay. There is quite a good value there. Its licensing is also very logical. They've got the licensing price points at a reasonable level. It is on a monthly license but a yearly contract. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees."
  • "Price of the solution was very reasonable considering the size of our organization at the time, and so it worked out perfectly."
  • More Alert Logic Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "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 of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
  • "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."
  • More CRITICALSTART Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The most valuable feature is reviewing tickets and the notes added by technicians.
    Top Answer:Binary Defense is fairly priced. I would say that Binary Defense is flexible in negotiating and tailoring a solution… more »
    Top Answer:The only area I see for improvement with Binary Defense is their service portal. It could benefit from some… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable aspect of Alert Logic is its technology platform. They have SOCs in the US and Europe, giving them… more »
    Top Answer:Alert Logic's license is one of the most competitive. They deliver a high-quality service for a competitive price.
    Top Answer:Alert Logic should also develop an EDR that is natively integrated into their solution. Currently, a client must buy… more »
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    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Binary Defense Vision, Binary Defense Managed Detection and Response, Binary Defense Managed Detection & Response
    Alert Logic MDR, Alert Logic Managed Detection and ResponseAlert Logic Threat Manager, Alert Logic Cloud Defender, Critical Watch FusionVM
    Critical Start, CriticalStart
    Learn More
    Overview

    Binary Defense provides a Managed Detection and Response service using an Open XDR strategy that detects and isolates threats early in the attack lifecycle. Expert security analysts in the Binary Defense Security Operations Center leverage an attacker’s mindset, monitoring your environments for security events 24x7x365 and acting as an extension of your security teams. When a security event occurs, Binary Defense analysts triage, disposition, and prioritize the event. Analysts conduct full kill chain analysis and supply tactical and strategic mitigation recommendations to your security team with the goal of increasing your organization’s security posture against the latest adversary threats.

    Visit us online at https://www.binarydefense.com

    Alert Logic is a cloud-based security and compliance solution that provides threat detection and response, log management, and compliance automation. Its primary use case is to manage lag and protect the network, identify configuration issues related to security and cloud infrastructure, and serve as the primary SIEM tool before escalating tickets. 

    The most valuable feature is that it has everything in one dashboard, including being notified of incidents and receiving advice on what steps to take. Alert Logic has helped organizations process large amounts of data, remotely monitor everything from the cloud, and streamline workflow while reducing implementation time.

    The cybersecurity landscape is growing more complex by the day with the arrival of new threats and new tools supposedly designed for combating them. The problem is it’s all creating more noise and confusion for security professionals to sort through.

    CRITICALSTART is the only MDR provider committed to eliminating acceptable risk and leaving nothing to chance. They believe that companies should never have to settle for “good enough.” Their award-winning portfolio includes end-to-end Professional Services and Managed Detection and Response (MDR). CRITICALSTART MDR puts a stop to alert fatigue by leveraging the Zero Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP) plus the industry-leading Trusted Behavior Registry, which eliminates false positives at scale by resolving known-good behaviors. Driven by 24x7x365 human-led, end-to-end monitoring, investigation and remediation of alerts, their on-the-go threat detection and response capabilities are enabled via a fully interactive MOBILESOC app.

    Sample Customers
    Securitas USA, Black Hills Energy, Lincoln Electric,The J.M. Smuckers Company, New York Community Bank, State of Connecticut, NCR
    TIME, Genome Next, Rentalcargroup.com, Travel Tripper, C&J Energy Services, Investis, Retail Insights
    Information Not Available
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company33%
    Venture Capital & Private Equity Firm8%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Sports Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Healthcare Company8%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company8%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Energy/Utilities Company38%
    Financial Services Firm25%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Hospitality Company13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Retailer7%
    Energy/Utilities Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise31%
    Large Enterprise38%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise45%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise49%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise36%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise62%
    Buyer's Guide
    Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about CrowdStrike, Arctic Wolf Networks, SentinelOne and others in Managed Detection and Response (MDR). Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Alert Logic is ranked 18th in Managed Detection and Response (MDR) with 11 reviews while CRITICALSTART is ranked 30th in Managed Detection and Response (MDR). Alert Logic is rated 8.0, while CRITICALSTART is rated 9.4. The top reviewer of Alert Logic writes "Great reporting and session logic with an easy initial setup". On the other hand, 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". Alert Logic is most compared with Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response, CrowdStrike Falcon Complete, Rapid7 InsightIDR, Sophos MDR and SentinelOne Vigilance, whereas CRITICALSTART is most compared with Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response, BlueVoyant CORE, ReliaQuest GreyMatter, Red Canary MDR and CrowdStrike Falcon Complete.

    See our list of best Managed Detection and Response (MDR) vendors.

    We monitor all Managed Detection and Response (MDR) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.