BitsightvsSecurityScorecardUpGuard

Compare the capabilities and features of Bitsight and SecurityScorecard.
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 SecurityScorecard
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.
SecurityScorecard is a cybersecurity ratings platform that monitors external-facing vendor networks. It aggregates risk signals from various sources to produce vendor security ratings. SecurityScorecard integrates with SIEM and GRC tools and provides insights that mitigate supply chain attacks. However, risk assessment workflows are managed separately via the Atlas module, which can lead to fragmented processes that could delay vendor assessment delivery and impact program efficiency
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.
SecurityScorecard covers an extensive range of cyber intelligence, drawing from open, proprietary, and dark web sources to identify vendor security risks and assess IP reputation risks. SecurityScorecard’s well-known A–F letter grade system makes it approachable for executives and large enterprises.
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.
SecurityScorecard's staggered scan cycles disrupts real-time vendor security posture visibility. IP attribution issues are also cited as common scanning problems. Additionally, vendor monitoring and risk assessments are licensed separately, which may increase purchasing complexity and limit coverage of end-to-end visibility of supply chain vendors
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.
SecurityScorecard's dashboards and clear A-F grading help non-technical stakeholders quickly grasp vendor risk exposure. However, some users report multiple drill-down steps required to reach specific risk insights, which could lengthen new user learning curves
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.
SecurityScorecard offers extensive data collection across public-facing and dark web sources, though users occasionally report inaccurate attribution or misflagged IPs requiring support.
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.
SecurityScorecard's VRM workflow requires a separate module named Atlas for security questionnaire and risk assessment processes. This can introduce complexity into this process.
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. .
SecurityScorecard offers views into an organization's attack surface by leveraging IP scanning and attribution of identified domains and assets. The platform's approach helps users identify potential weaknesses in their digital footprint that an attacker might exploit.
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.
Employs an A-F rating with a 0–100 scale, penalizing breaches and factoring patching cadences, though some risk categories could have a disproportional impact on scoring. Large-scale data collection across the clear and dark web ensures broad coverage, updated roughly every 10 days for IPv4.
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.
Generally supportive for enterprise levels, with a community of free users. However, customers at lower licensing tiers report slower responses and less personalized support.
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.
SecurityScorecard’s workflow automation features let users create rule-based triggers that automatically respond to security events, such as score drops, new high-severity issues, or breaches. Users can choose from a range of automated response actions, including alert activation, report sharing, and reassigning scorecards for further review
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.
SecurityScorecard offers a branded AI capability named HEID. HEID’s operational workflows are primarily geared toward SecurityScoreCard’s MAX managed service offering, with claims that AI can generate automated remediation and questionnaire requests as risks arise. SecurityScorecard claims that HEID AI is available as a backend capability for customers with non-service plans, and it is used in its algorithms for risk scoring and classification of issue criticality.
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.
SecurityScoreCard offers an extensive marketplace of integrations with security, GRC, and workflow platforms. However, integrations tend to primarily focus on score visibility in other platforms rather than workflow extensibility. Offers integrations with several third-party platforms, such as RSA Archer, ServiceNow, 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 information is not available. Offers a free plan and a 14-day free trial for paid plans.
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 Symantec, Pepsico, Two Sigma, and Stony Brook University.
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.
4.2, based on 75 reviews.
Security rating
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950

Bitsight vs SecurityScorecard product overview

Bitsight vs UpGuard product overview

Learn more about the products and how they compare.

As outsourcing significant business functions is now common practice for most organizations, major third-party data breaches are rapidly taking over news headlines.

Ponemon Institute and IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report found the average cost of a breach has increased from $370,000 to $4.35 million, with third-party involvement listed as one of the main reasons. An eSentire survey from the same year highlights that 44% of firms surveyed have experienced a significant data breach caused by a third-party vendor.

With Gartner reporting 60% of organizations as having 1000+ third-party relationships, effectively managing the cybersecurity risks they create and practicing vendor due diligence proves increasingly difficult.

Information security teams often also rely on manual risk reporting methods which are time and labor-intensive. Many organizations are now turning to automated third-party risk management (TPRM) solutions that automate data breach detection capabilities, provide real-time insights, and streamline remediation workflows.

We assess three TPRM solutions, BitSight, SecurityScorecard, and UpGuard, to help you make an informed decision before investing in the right solution for your needs.

BitSight Technologies

BitSight Technologies is a Cambridge-based company that aims to quantify the external cybersecurity posture of organizations using publicly accessible data. Its FICO-like BitSight security rating is used by underwriters at insurance companies for pricing cyber insurance, 3rd party research for third-party risk teams, and due diligence research for private equity and M&A activities, and more.  

Additionally, security ratings can be used for security performance management and the assessment of third and fourth-party risk.

To learn what customers think of the Bitsight platform, read Bitsight reviews.

BitSight UI
Bitsight UI. Source: bitsight.com

SecurityScorecard

SecurityScorecard is a New York-based security ratings platform that uses traffic and other publicly accessible data to build security ratings to evaluate vendors and manage cyber risk among other use cases.

SecurityScoreCard also monitors "hacker chatter" and other public data feeds for indicators of compromise.

SecurityScorecard UI
SecurityScorecard UI. Source: securityscorecard.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 overhead in acquiring and using a new solution is key to making that solution deliver on its capabilities. All three solutions are cloud-based services with minimal installation criteria. Similarly, all three use web interfaces to navigate graphical representations of cyber risk.

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

SecurityScorecard: Simple interface for quick grade reports and charts.

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

BitSight, SecurityScorecard, and UpGuard help organizations stay informed about their vendors’ information security risks as part of a third-party risk management (TPRM) program.

A significant point of difference between SecurityScorecard and UpGuard is the amount of time required to perform a non-intrusive scan.

SecurityScorecard takes 10 days to perform a non-intrusive scan across the entire IPv4 web space, whereas UpGuard's scan is completed in just 24 hours. Shorter scanning times mean open ports and misconfigured services have less chance of being exploited by cybercriminals.

Smaller scan frequencies help you discover critical data breach risks, like open ports, faster.

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

BitSight: In addition to monitoring breach vectors indicating susceptibility to phishing, man-in-the-middle attacks, and email spoofing, BitSight aims to incorporate IP reputation methodology to catch active malware installations.

However, threat and risk intelligence enabling greater visibility into supply chain data leakages, compromised corporate identities, and brand fraud is not currently supported.

SecurityScorecard: SecurityScorecard utilizes active and passive data collection methods that are publicly available.

The data collected provides indicators of risk relating to open ports, DNS, HSTS, SSL (and more) that are processed via their proprietary algorithm to produce individual security ratings.

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

BitSight: BitSight maintains regular blog posts and webinars covering security incidents, feature updates, and industry developments.

These efforts, along with an extensive network of partnerships, provide the resources security professionals need to identify the best security practices for their program.

SecurityScorecard: SecurityScoreCard offers a user Academy for customer users along with a regularly updated company blog, webinar series, and resource center.

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.

SecurityScorecard: SecurityScoreCard makes releases as needed throughout the year, consistently enabling customer users to access information logs of beneficial changes.

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: Public pricing information is not directly available, but Bitsight pricing is reported to be around $2000-$2500 per vendor per year.

SecurityScorecard: Public pricing information is not available. SecurityScorecard pricing reportedly starts at $16,500 for self-assessment plus five vendors, and additional vendors cost $1,500-$2,000 per vendor per year.

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, SecurityScorecard, and UpGuard offer APIs.

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

SecurityScorecard: SecurityScoreCard offers API connections for users seeking greater security ratings extensibility.

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, SecurityScorecard, and UpGuard offer integrations into other platforms.

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

SecurityScorecard: Offers integrations with several third party platforms such as RSA Archer, ServiceNow, 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.

SecurityScorecard: Major customers include Symantec, Pepsico, Two Sigma, and Stony Brook University.

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.

SecurityScorecard: Provides a security rating on a numerical scale from 0-100 with letter scale breakdowns ranged within an A - F report card based scale.

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.

Ready to see
UpGuard in action?