We performed a comparison between CRITICALSTART and Splunk SOAR 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)."The AI capability is one of the main features of the solution because I believe that in the market, there are few solutions that are providing security solutions based on AI and machine learning."
"The best feature is that onboarding to the SIM solution is quite easy. If you are using cloud-based solutions, it's just a few clicks to migrate it."
"We have no complaints about the features or functionality."
"I've worked on most of the top SIEM solutions, and Sentinel has an edge in most areas. For example, it has built-in SOAR capabilities, allowing you to run playbooks automatically. Other vendors typically offer SOAR as a separate licensed solution or module, but you get it free with Sentinel. In-depth incident integration is available out of the box."
"Sentinel improved how we investigate incidents. We can create watchlists and update them to align with the latest threat intelligence. The information Microsoft provides enables us to understand thoroughly and improve as we go along. It allows us to provide monthly reports to our clients on their security posture."
"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."
"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."
"Azure Application Gateway makes things a lot easier. You can create dashboards, alert rules, hunting and custom queries, and functions with it."
"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."
"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 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 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 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."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature of Splunk SOAR is the automated playbooks, which saves analysts time."
"Scalability is the best feature of the solution."
"So far, the interface is very easy to use."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The playbooks are valuable. They are the core component. Being able to implement and build a code process to work through and scale out what we want to do is valuable."
"The product’s integration with other Splunk products is valuable."
"The customizable playbook is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The solution allows us to customize playbooks and incorporate custom code, allowing us to drag and drop elements while still writing code to build the integrations we need."
"Everyone has their favorites. There is always room for improvement, and everybody will say, "I wish you could do this for me or that for me." It is a personal thing based on how you use the tool. I do not necessarily have those thoughts, and they are probably not really valuable because they are unique to the context of the user, but broadly, where it can continue to improve is by adding more connectors to more systems."
"If we want to use more features, we have to pay more. There are multiple solutions on the cloud itself, but the pricing model package isn't consistent, which is confusing to clients."
"Add more out-of-the-box connectors with other SaaS platforms/applications."
"Sometimes, we are observing large ingestion delays. We expect logs within 5 minutes, but it takes about 10 to 15 minutes."
"One key area that can be improved is by building a strong integration with our XDR platform."
"We'd like also a better ticketing system, which is older."
"Microsoft Sentinel should provide an alternative query language to KQL for users who lack KQL expertise."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"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."
"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 technical support for the Splunk SIEM solution was average."
"What we have seen is if the workflow gets halted or if we want to halt a workflow, it cannot be resumed."
"Splunk SOAR has room to improve its offering for small-sized customers. The price is not fair for smaller-sized customers."
"It could be easier to implement."
"Splunk SOAR should improve its ease of upgrade, which is a pain point for us right now."
"The UI can be more customizable for the clients."
"The number of playbooks on offer should be increased."
"In my opinion, the focus should be on improving its simplicity, specifically the interface, and configuration."
Earn 20 points
CRITICALSTART is ranked 29th in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) while Splunk SOAR is ranked 3rd in Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) with 30 reviews. CRITICALSTART is rated 9.4, while Splunk SOAR is rated 8.0. 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 Splunk SOAR writes "Takes most of the work away, but the time they take to implement new features is a little bit of concern". CRITICALSTART is most compared with Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response, BlueVoyant CORE, ReliaQuest GreyMatter, CrowdStrike Falcon Complete and Red Canary MDR, whereas Splunk SOAR is most compared with Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR, Cortex XSIAM, ServiceNow Security Operations, Torq and Cisco SecureX.
See our list of best Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) vendors.
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