BitsightvsRiskReconUpGuard

Compare the capabilities and features of Bitsight and RiskRecon.
Also, see how they stack up against UpGuard.

Compare the capabilities and features of Bitsight and UpGuard. See which solution performs best across a range of categories.

Did you know UpGuard was voted #1 on G2 and has been for over two years?

Bitsight vs RiskRecon
Bitsight vs UpGuard

See how they compare side-by-side.
General summary
5 stars
UpGuard is an end-to-end third-party risk management platform with best-in-class time-to-value and scalability from initial implementations to beyond. 
UpGuard delivers powerful, integrated tools for automated third-party monitoring, in-depth risk assessment and remediation, and one-click reporting. 
By combining actionable insights with built-in risk management workflows, UpGuard helps organizations maintain comprehensive oversight of their supply chain security posture and equips them with the necessary tools to shut down emerging risks rapidly.
Bitsight is a cybersecurity ratings platform that continuously monitors organizational and vendor security postures. It collects and analyzes data from multiple sources—including botnet and malware intelligence—to offer evidence-based risk insights. Bitsight also integrates with GRC and TPRM workflows, allowing teams to proactively mitigate threats across their extended supply chain. However, Bitsight’s pricing structure can complicate scalability.
RiskRecon specializes in external security monitoring and asset attribution with strong accuracy and strong cloud scanning capabilities, which are particularly valuable for IT-centric organizations. Owned by Mastercard, RiskRecon has stable financial backing and solid scanning accuracy. However, it remains primarily focused on external scan strengths and takes a partnership-first approach to TPRM workflows.
Key strengths
UpGuard excels by completing full vendor scans every 24 hours, which provides near real-time visibility into vendor security postures while seamlessly integrating native end-to-end AI-powered vendor assessment workflows.
UpGuard's licensing model and efficient learning curve offer best-in-class time to value and program efficiency.
In addition to risk monitoring, Bitsight employs analytical forecasting to estimate future security trajectories. It integrates with platforms like ServiceNow, JIRA, and PowerBI to suit more advanced workflows. This network of partnerships, coupled with strong institutional acceptance, reinforces Bitsight’s profile with complex organizations.
RiskRecon provides a notably accurate external scanning solution and offers practical remediation guidance. It even prioritizes vulnerabilities by asset value for IT teams.
Key weaknesses
UpGuard's focus on core frameworks like ISO 27001 and NIST offers robust coverage for most security and compliance needs, though organizations requiring highly specialized or region-specific regulations may choose to augment it with dedicated GRC modules. 
Its strengths in cybersecurity and continuous monitoring ensure strong TPCRM capabilities, but those seeking an all-encompassing governance solution (e.g., covering environmental or privacy regulations) might benefit from additional integrations.
Bitsight's pricing structures can quickly escalate operational expenses for TPRM programs and create complicated decisions regarding the extent of risk visibility that can be deployed for vendors within a supply chain. Customers additionally cite attribution challenges for risks and assets within shared IP and cloud environments, which require support request submissions to address. Monitoring and assessment capabilities are also separately licensed, which may increase purchasing complexity and limit end-to-end coverage to several vendors within supply chains.
RiskRecon takes a partnership and integration-first approach to vendor assessment workflows. This necessitates the adoption of an additional solution provider to achieve an optimal assessment experience, as supported by the RiskRecon platform.
Usability and learning curve
UpGuard offers best-in-class time to value for initial implementations. 
UpGuard's platform architecture is designed from the ground up to deliver a quick and shallow adoption curve. UpGuard's clean and intuitive interface ensures ease of ongoing operation and rapid pick-up from new staff members as needed.
Bitsight is generally intuitive for professionals familiar with security ratings, with an interface offering clear vendor risk summaries. However, some advanced features require more expertise and time to leverage effectively, particularly when deploying Bitsight's separate modules for monitoring and risk assessments.
RiskRecon is focused on delivering clear, actionable findings for IT and SecOps-centric security teams with a clean interface for surfacing and remediating risks. While its limited scope of purely external scan data can simplify usage, complications can quickly arise for those integrating RiskRecon with a partner provider for assessment workflows.
Cyber risk data accuracy
UpGuard's real-time data refresh rate ensures up-to-date and accurate vendor security posture calculations while also allowing users to initiate scans on demand.
Cybersecurity experts manually review all internal and vendor data leaks to remove false positives. Data leak insights are also supported with comprehensive contextualization for targeted and timely remediation responses.
Bitsight is widely recognized for malware and botnet reporting, though attribution to hosting providers or shared IP ranges can lead to accuracy challenges requiring correction support.
RiskRecon is well regarded for accurate asset attribution, resulting in reliable and actionable insights.
Vendor risk management features
UpGuard offers a natively integrated end-to-end workflow addressing the complete Third-party Risk Management lifecycle—from onboarding to risk management and ongoing monitoring.
Bitsight supports third-party monitoring and risk workflows, including vendor onboarding, but relies on a separately licensed module for vendor risk assessments and workflows.
RiskRecon focuses on external scanning to calculate vendor risk and relies on partner integrations to offer risk assessment workflows, resulting in additional costs.
Attack surface management features
UpGuard provides continuous attack surface monitoring, identifying exposed assets, misconfigurations, and vulnerabilities. It maps internet-facing infrastructure, detects risks like expired certificates and open ports, and prioritizes threats for remediation. Clear, actionable insights help organizations reduce exposure and strengthen their external security posture.
Bitsight's External Attack Surface Management module is designed to discover hidden assets, provide detailed digital asset insights, and detect vulnerabilities such as unsupported product versions. .
RiskRecon focuses on high-accuracy external scanning and asset discovery, offering precise identification of vulnerabilities.
Security ratings
Uses a proprietary scoring model from 0–950, updated daily, emphasizing current, empirical data. 
UpGuard's objective and transparent approach helps CISOs, security teams, and stakeholders reliably gauge a vendor’s actual security posture in near-real time.
Offers a respected rating system correlated with breach likelihood and is used widely by insurers and financial institutions. Observed security events influence scores, but shared IP misattribution can occasionally skew results.
Provides A-F ratings with a focus on asset-specific value. Accuracy is high due to minimal false positives, but it remains narrower, reflecting only external posture without factoring in questionnaires or breach penalties.
Customer support
Known for world-class support across all tiers and customer-friendly guidance, UpGuard delivers proactive and prompt engagement to resolve customer issues quickly. Dedicated teams assist with both technical and strategic TPRM challenges.
Bitsight provides reputable support, particularly for large enterprises with dedicated account teams. Smaller organizations may experience less responsiveness and find self-service documentation limited.
RiskRecon offers stable support with detailed product documentation and guides available.
Workflow automation
UpGuard’s AI-powered Security Profile automatically identifies risks and control gaps, then generates contextualized, point-in-time assessment reports in minutes. It also provides a pre-configured (and adjustable) set of controls for two leading security frameworks: ISO 27001:2022 and NIST CSF 2.0.
Custom notifications simplify tracking of critical events and prompting of important follow-up actions.
The platform also facilitates automatic vendor tiering, labeling, and custom attributes based on questionnaire responses for faster vendor onboarding and improved TPRM scalability.
Bitsight integrates with SOAR platforms, allowing users to automate responses to newly discovered risks. However, advanced automation requirements, such as those addressing Vendor Risk Management workflows, require add-on services or third-party tools for complete automation.
It primarily automates external scanning and asset discovery, generating action plans and prioritized remediations. However, it lacks built-in automation for the end-to-end assessment cycle, relying on integrations or manual processes.
Artificial intelligence features
UpGuard’s AI-powered platform streamlines the entire vendor assessment process.
AI evidence analysis combined with automated scanning immediately uncovers control gaps and risks. Each finding is accompanied by transparent, traceable citations so security teams can quickly verify sources and take action.
AI-generated risk assessment reports, which are typically produced in under a minute, help organizations rapidly communicate risks with stakeholders. This results in faster decision-making, more accurate and consistent reporting, and significantly reduced manual workloads.
Bitsight offers a branded AI capability named Groma. Groma is primarily built to support improved risk scoring, identification and attribution of digital assets, and enhanced criticality classification of risk findings. Bitsight is additionally investing in AI development for TPRM workflows and threat detection capabilities. However, whether this will add to their Groma-branded capability or be released as integrated, separate offerings is unclear.
Risk Recon uses AI to primarily support the detection of potential risks and vulnerabilities in supplier security postures. However, its use of AI to support vendor assessments highly depends on capabilities made available by partner providers.
API and Integrations
4 stars
UpGuard provides a well-documented API enabling custom integrations, webhooks, and automation across common security and GRC tools. Its extensibility is straightforward, designed for rapid deployment and minimal setup friction. UpGuard also connects with over 4,000+ apps through a dedicated Zapier integration.
Streamlines remediation and monitoring by natively integrating with Jira, Service Now, and Slack.
Bitsight integrates with popular platforms like ServiceNow and Splunk, offering APIs for custom reporting and automation. Offers integrations with RSA Archer GRC, CyberGRX, OneTrust Vendorpedia, ProcessUnity, MetricStream, and more.
RiskRecon features basic integration options for exporting findings and connecting with ticketing systems or GRC solutions. Offers integrations with GRC platforms, such as RSA Archer, Sigma Ratings, Whistic, and more.
Purchasing & Licensing Transparency
UpGuard offers a freemium package for monitoring up to 5 vendors.
Also provides free access to an AI-powered vendor questionnaire management tool, Trust Exchange.
Pricing starts at USD 1,599 / month.
A 14-day free trial for paid plans is also available.
Public pricing is not available. Does not publically offer a free trial.
Public pricing is not available. Does not publically offer a free trial.
Customers
Major customers include The New York Stock Exchange (ICE), Morningstar, TDK, PagerDuty, Hopin, and IAG. 
To learn more, read UpGuard’s customer stories.
Major customers include Optus / Singtel, The University of North Florida, Snam, and PROSA.
Major customers include Informatica, Tufts Health Plan, the University of San Francisco, and Sentara.
G2 rating
Accurate as of March 2025
4.5, based on 383 reviews. Named a G2 Market Leader for Third Party & Supplier Risk Management Software.
4.6, based on 44 reviews.
4.5, based on 2 reviews.
Security rating
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950

Bitsight vs RiskRecon product overview

Bitsight vs UpGuard product overview

Learn more about the products and how they compare.

Whether you're a CISO, Vice President or individual contributor, you understand that information technology has changed how we do business, for better and for worse.

Technology has brought speed, scale, and better customer experience to all aspects of commerce and communication, but it has also increased cybersecurity risk, particularly data breaches, cyber attacks, and other cyber threats.

The consequences of poor risk management, particularly Third-Party Risk Management and Vendor Risk Management, are increasing in cost, reputation, and regulatory impact. According to research done by the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach globally has grown by 12 percent in the last five years to $3.92 million.

This number balloons to $8.19 million in the United States. It's safe to say it pays to prevent data breaches and data leaks.

Beyond financial costs, the reputational and regulatory impact is growing due to increasingly stringent general data protection and breach notification laws around the world. Examples include GDPR, PIPEDA, FIPA, the SHIELD Act, CCPA, and LGPD.

Many of these new regulations are extraterritorial, meaning they apply to any organization who processes the personally identifiable information (PII) or other sensitive data of any individual protected by the law, regardless of whether your organization operates in their jurisdiction.

What this all means is there is no excuse for mismanagement of your first-party and third-party cyber risk. Increasingly, you will be expected to assess the security performance of vendors who are deeper in your supply chain, i.e. fourth-party risk.  

This requires the translation of the technical details security postures, cybersecurity risk assessments, vendor questionnaires, and information security policies into business terms.

An increasingly popular way to do this is through security ratings (or cybersecurity ratings) providers who offer an instantaneous assessment of cyber risk, much like a credit score does for assessing credit risk.

The issue is that the methodologies employed by these threat intelligence tools vary greatly, as do their results.

For example, BitSight, SecurityScorecard, and RiskRecon largely focus on security assessments of business partners, third-party vendors, and service providers. Read our guide on SecurityScorecard vs BitSight to learn how they stack up.

In contrast, UpGuard has a complete continuous monitoring risk management solution that can handle internal risk with our behind-the-firewall Core product, vendor risk management with our Vendor Risk product, and data leak detection and cybersecurity performance monitoring with our UpGuard BreachSight product.

In this comparison, we'll help you understand what to look for in a solution and see how BitSight, RiskRecon, and UpGuard stack up for managing Internet-facing first and third-party risk.  

But before we dive into the specifics, it's important to understand what security risk ratings are.

BitSight Technologies Overview

BitSight Technologies is a Cambridge, MA-based company that aims to quantify the external cybersecurity posture of organizations using publicly accessible data.

BitSight’s security ratings are used by security and cybersecurity risk professionals to conduct due diligence research for Vendor Risk Management programs, private equity, M&A activities, and more.  

Additionally, these security ratings are used for attack surface analytics, industry benchmarking, and the assessment of fourth-party risk.

Bitsight's UI
BitSight's UI. Source: bitsight.com

RiskRecon Overview

RiskRecon is headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT with a presence in Boston, MA and representatives around the world. RiskRecon makes it easy to gain deep, risk contextualized insight into the cybersecurity risk performance of all third-parties by continuously monitoring across 11 security domains and 41 security criteria.

Like BitSight, it can be used for third-party risk management, enterprise risk management, and mergers & acquisitions.

Riskrecon UI
Riskrecon UI. Source: riskrecon.com

UpGuard Overview

UpGuard is a third-party risk and attack surface management platform that helps global organizations prevent data breaches, monitor third-party vendors, and improve their security posture. 

UpGuard’s platform uses proprietary security ratings, data leak detection capabilities, and remediation workflows to proactively identify security exposures.

UpGuard’s all-in-one third-party risk and attack surface management software intelligently groups risks into six categories: website risks, email security, network security, phishing & malware, reputation risk, and brand protection. 

Usability & Learning Curve

Minimizing the amount of time and effort in learning to use a new solution is a critical aspect of delivering on any value proposition.

BitSight, Panorays, and UpGuard offer their services via SaaS and are accessible from web-based platforms that can help users monitor and manage vendor risks.

BitSight: Provides views of identified vendor risks enabling detailed reporting of vendors.

RiskRecon: Provides risk prioritization based on your configured policy.

UpGuard: High-level summation of risk with the ability to drill down into precise technical details. Each risk is prioritized based on extensive research conducted by the in-house security team, and where possible remediation and protection suggestions are provided.

Capabilities

All three solutions provide security ratings, aggregated summaries of risk for immediate understanding and comparison, and their own standardize scoring methodology.

The way these security ratings are derived differ among the solutions to some degree. IP reputation relies on attributing malware traffic to an organization based on IP address, whereas scanning for misconfigurations means looking at an organization's actual Internet footprint and determining how it compares to best practices and what vulnerabilities lead to data breaches.

BitSight: Primarily IP reputation, read our guide on why IP attribution isn't a complete solution here.

RiskRecon: Assesses an organization against 11 security domains and 41 security criteria.

UpGuard: Runs hundreds of individual checks including email security and email spoofing risks (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC), website security (SSL, HSTS, header exposure), phishing and malware risk, explicit checks for 200 services across thousands of ports (mail, app, user auth, file sharing, voice, administration, database, unidentified, and open ports), domain hijacking risk (DNSSEC and domain registry issues), reputational risks (CEO rating and employee rating), credential management (exposure to known data breaches and data leaks detected by our data leak detection engine) and results of security questionnaires.

Predictive capabilities

The main reason organizations invest in security tools is to prevent incidents from happening in the first place.

A solution's ability to prevent data breaches and other cyber attacks before they happen should be front of mind when choosing a security platform.

BitSight, Panorays, and UpGuard all identify risks using passive scans on a third party’s public-facing attack surfaces.

BitSight: Renowned for malware and botnet reporting, incorporating IP reputation analysis to detect active malware. However, attribution accuracy can sometimes suffer from challenges linked to hosting providers or shared IP addresses, necessitating support requests for corrections.

RiskRecon: RiskRecon focuses on third-party assessment across 11 security domains and 41 security criteria.

UpGuard: Reviews many important breach vectors to assess the supply chain attack surface, including phishing, ransomware susceptibility, man-in-the-middle attacks, DNSSEC, vulnerabilities, email spoofing, domain hijacking, and DNS issues.

Provides threat and risk intelligence, enabling greater visibility into supply chain data leakages, compromised corporate identities, and brand fraud.

Community Support

Keeping informed on product updates and the latest cyber security developments is paramount, with new vulnerabilities and cyber threats emerging daily.

Customers need up-to-date resources and relevant insights to stay ahead of the curve and protect their organizations from emerging cyber risks.

The frequency of publication and presence of community engagement is a key indicator of a company’s mission, focus, and investment in its users.

BitSight, RiskRecon, and UpGuard offer comprehensive online resources to educate and inform customers.

BitSight: Provides views of identified vendor risks enabling detailed reporting of vendors.

RiskRecon: Company and product blog.

UpGuard: UpGuard Summit brings together a community of security leaders from leading companies, explores the future of security, and helps businesses stay secure.

The UpGuard cybersecurity and risk management blog is updated four times a week and the breach research blog has uncovered and secured some of the largest data breaches.

UpGuard’s free weekly Breach Newsletter informs 20,000+ subscribers of the latest global data breaches.

Release rate

Technology is always changing. New vulnerabilities are added to CVE on a daily basis, and attackers are constantly finding new zero-day exploits.

The speed at which a security platform can incorporate changes determines how well it can respond to new threats and customer requests.

Additionally, they should continue to update, adjust, and improve their threat detection methodology to reflect changes to the threat landscape.

BitSight: BitSight does not publicly disclose product release cycle periods but does provide overviews of significant platform updates via their corporate blog.

RiskRecon: RiskRecon does not appear to publicly share regular release rates, roadmaps, or documentation for solution updates.

UpGuard: UpGuard has adopted DevOps principles internally to develop, test, and release software continuously, ensuring fast, consistent, and safe releases. UpGuard has a regular release rate every two weeks, with all features, changes, and improvements listed under UpGuard Release Notes.

Pricing & Support

Cyber risk platforms can be expensive and the common use of opaque pricing policies often takes power away from the purchaser. With most services offering tiered licensing options and add-ons, finding a solution that fits your needs and budget can prove more difficult without transparent pricing.

BitSight: Pricing for Bitsight is not publicly available.

RiskRecon: Public pricing information is not available. Pricing for RiskRecon is reported to start at $10,000 and increases based on the number of vendors monitored.

UpGuard: UpGuard has a fully transparent and publicly accessible pricing model which you can view here. If you have any questions, please email sales@upguard.com.

API & Extensibility

Accessing the information in a cyber risk product outside of its graphical interface is important for integrated business strategies and consolidating data to a preferred system.

BitSight, RiskRecon, and UpGuard offer APIs.

BitSight: BitSight offers the ability for customers to extend security ratings through a Developer API.

RiskRecon: Offers a standard API to create extensibility for RiskRecon cybersecurity ratings.

UpGuard: Offers a standard API to pull data from UpGuard’s platform into other enterprise applications.

Third-party integrations

APIs are useful for technical staff, but not all information security teams have access to developers. In this situation, standard third-party integrations are an essential part of decision-making.  

BitSight, RiskRecon, and UpGuard offer integrations into other platforms.

BitSight: Offers integrations with RSA Archer GRC, CyberGRX, OneTrust Vendorpedia, ProcessUnity, MetricStream, and more.

RiskRecon: Offers integrations with GRC platforms such as RSA Archer, Sigma Ratings, Whistic, and more.

UpGuard: Integrates with Zapier to enable connections to 3,000+ apps; GRC platforms, ticketing systems like JIRA; VRM solutions like ServiceNow, and more.

Customers

BitSight: Customers include Optus / Singtel, The University of North Florida, Snam, and PROSA.

RiskRecon: Customers include Informatica, Tufts Health Plan, University of San Francisco, and Sentara.

UpGuard: Major customers include Accenture, DuPont, Fujitsu, GAP, McAfee.

Security rating

BitSight: BitSight Security Ratings range on a scale of 250-900 with higher ratings indicating better security performance.

RiskRecon: RiskRecon distills its assessment criteria into a simple score from 0-10.

UpGuard: Security rating scale of 0-950, ranked as A: 801-950, B: 601-800, C: 401-600, D: 201-400, F: 0-200. You can request your free security rating by clicking here.


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