BitSight vs Whistic: 2023 Comparison and Review

The usability and design of a product play a large part in how quickly you can get up to speed and start getting your money's worth.

BitSight, Whistic, and UpGuard offer their services via SaaS and are accessible from web-based platforms that can help you find, assess, and monitor vendors.  

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

Whistic: Risks detailed on each point-in-time vendor assessment, which means new risks are only detected during the next assessment process. Remediation requests are not available. Their risk assessments are aligned to the VSA questionnaire, CAIQ, SIG, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, CIS Security Controls, and Privacy Shield Framework.

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.

BitSight provides security ratings that aggregate different risks into a single score that allows for immediate and easy comparison of different organizations, third-party vendors, and service providers.

Whistic relies on point-in-time risk assessment to determine enterprise risk and primarily focuses on the results of standardized questionnaires.

UpGuard uses risk assessments and security ratings to provide a holistic overview of an organization's security risk. As you likely know, it can be hard to get a time-poor vendor to complete a questionnaire, and when they do, the results are subjective and are rendered inaccurate over time as new security issues emerge.  

Each service relies on a different risk assessment methodology to assess the potential risk of an IT vendor. BitSight relies on IP reputation which attempts to attribute malware traffic based on IP addresses. We've outlined in detail why we believe IP attribution isn't a complete solution for your third-party risk program.

Whistic is focused on conducting and responding to security reviews. This is designed to remove inefficiencies in third-party risk management programs for organizations and their vendors alike, rather than completing the same questionnaire over and over, they can choose to publish it to their security profile.

The standardization of security assessment practices against recognized security frameworks, and making attestations easily shareable helps all business save time, resources, and increases trust in the supply chain.

That's why, like Whistic, UpGuard has introduced security profiles to help our customers save time and money by publishing completed security questionnaires and supporting documentation to their secure, UpGuard security profile.

Additionally, UpGuard uses security ratings to provide real-time critical risk monitoring capabilities, integrated vendor processes, and accessibility to provide businesses with a complete solution.

BitSight: Relies primarily on IP reputation.

Whistic: Relies on point-in-time risk assessments that can become outdated until the next assessment process.

UpGuard: Augments point-in-time risk assessments with security ratings to ensure information is always up-to-date. Our security ratings algorithm 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). Each identified issue is given a risk prioritization category so you know what represents the highest risk.

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.

This is where BitSight, Whistic, and UpGuard truly differ.

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.

Whistic: Relies on risk assessments which can quickly become out of date as new zero-day exploits are discovered and new IT infrastructure is used. The truth is that questionnaires, much like penetration testing, can be subjective and become inaccurate over time as new security issues emerge. Additionally, Whistic provides no controls for capturing data loss incidents.

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.

Keeping informed on product updates and the latest cyber securitydevelopments is paramount, with new vulnerabilities and cyber threatsemerging 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.

Each company has its own blog that is a useful source of information for cybersecurity awareness training, as well as vendor risk management best practices.

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.

Whistic: 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.

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.

Whistic:

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.

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 prices are reported to be around $2000-$2500 per vendor per year.

Whistic: Reported to start at $25,000 and is based on the number of vendors managed in the platform or the number of security questionnaires to which you're responding.

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.

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, Whistic, and UpGuard offer APIs.

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

Whistic:

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

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, Whistic, and UpGuard offer integrations into other platforms.

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

Whistic: Integrates with RiskRecon, Active Directory, Okta, and onelogin.

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

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

Whistic: Customers include Betterment, Invision, Airbnb, Zynga, and Robinhood.

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

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

Whistic: Relies on standardized security questionnaires.

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.