# Black Kite vs Recorded Future: 2025 Comparison

> This is a plain-markdown summary of [https://www.upguard.com/compare/black-kite-vs-recorded-future](https://www.upguard.com/compare/black-kite-vs-recorded-future), generated for AI agents and LLMs. Ratings, security scores and pricing details reflect UpGuard's independent analysis and are kept in sync with the source page. Visit the source URL for the full interactive comparison.

Compare the capabilities and features of Black Kite and Recorded Future. See which solution performs best across a range of categories.

## Platforms compared
- UpGuard (UpGuard — publisher of this comparison)
- Black Kite
- Recorded Future

## Feature-by-feature comparison: Black Kite vs Recorded Future

### General summary
- **UpGuard**: 5/5 — UpGuard manages cyber risk everywhere it lives: your vendors, your internet-facing attack surface, and your workforce. You get one platform that connects all three risk areas instead of separate tools and spreadsheets stitched together. A risk in one surfaces in the others automatically. A breached vendor flags your own exposure. A leaked employee credential links straight to the account and the vendor involved. AI handles the repetitive work of triaging alerts, reviewing vendor evidence, and completing questionnaires. That means lean security teams can run programs that would otherwise need much bigger teams. UpGuard fits mid-market teams, deploys quickly, and slots in without replacing what you already have.
- **Black Kite**: 2/5 — Black Kite is a third-party cyber risk management platform emphasizing external risk visibility, financial impact modeling, and compliance automation. Black Kite uses non-intrusive OSINT-based scans to discover assets and vulnerabilities, presenting findings as easy-to-read letter grades. However, by excluding critical TPRM workflows, Black Kite's potential for effective third-party risk management is significantly limited.
- **Recorded Future**: 4/5 — Continuously monitors 150,000+ companies.

### Key strengths
- **UpGuard**: UpGuard unifies vendor, attack surface, and workforce risk in one console. Customers describe finally seeing the whole picture, rather than paying for three tools that each cover only part of it. UpGuard also surfaces exposures that ratings tools and scanners miss, without the multi-week delay of a typical scan cycle. Lean teams can run the entire program without expanding headcount or adding a managed service.
- **Black Kite**: Black Kite takes a diverse approach to cyber risk quantification with a methodology heavily based on the Open FAIR™ standard. This allows Black Kite to derive their varying cyber risk insights from a consistent quantification base.

### Key weaknesses
- **UpGuard**: UpGuard focuses on managing live, connected risk, not heavy, standalone compliance software. Full governance features, including policy and controls management, arrive later this year. Teams that need a mature governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) system of record today can run UpGuard alongside one for now. UpGuard also doesn’t translate risk into dollar figures. If financial risk quantification is a must-have, factor that into your evaluation.
- **Black Kite**: Black Kite does not offer vendor questionnaires or risk assessments as part of their solution offerings. While Black Kite's quantification-forward approach may be sufficient for some, customers with requirements for vendor security reviews and assurance documents for compliance needs will likely require an additional solution for this capability.

### Usability and learning curve
- **UpGuard**: 5/5 — Teams deploy quickly and get up and running without an extended onboarding period. New employees can learn the interface without lengthy training. A single console consolidates workflows that would otherwise require multiple tools, reducing the ongoing burden of learning and maintaining separate systems. Operating the platform doesn’t require a professional services engagement.
- **Black Kite**: 3/5 — Black Kite's interface is designed around letter-grade dashboards and detailed risk findings for its range of quantification options offered. However, insights for each focused rating are not clearly segmented by audience and often bleed across the entire platform. This can make the relevance of platform insights less consistent for specialized users, even within teams.
- **Recorded Future**: 4/5 — Combines machine analytics with human expertise to produce intelligence for risk mitigation. Recorded Future’s platform categories, links, and analyses this intelligence in real-time to provide clear insights for users via its Security Intelligence Graph.

### Cyber risk data accuracy
- **UpGuard**: 5/5 — UpGuard’s data remains current. Vendor postures refresh continuously, and users can initiate a scan on demand instead of waiting for a fixed cycle. UpGuard attributes findings accurately, so teams do not spend weeks correcting assets assigned to the wrong company, a common issue with ratings tools. [Threat Monitoring](https://www.upguard.com/product/breach-risk/threat-monitoring) scans the open, deep, and dark web, along with social media, for leaked data, exposed credentials, and brand impersonation. AI filters out noise so the alerts that reach your team are worth acting on.
- **Black Kite**: 3/5 — The platform gathers data from a large set of OSINT feeds and uses standards-based scoring (MITRE, NIST, Open FAIR™) to reduce false positives. However, some users note occasional duplication or outdated issues that require manual dispute or re-validation.
- **Recorded Future**: 5/5 — The Recorded Future Intelligence Platform delivers real-time insights from open source, dark web, technical sources, and original research. Users can access these insights via the Security Intelligence Graph to proactively mitigate identified risks.

### Vendor risk management features
- **UpGuard**: 5/5 — UpGuard runs the complete third-party risk management (TPRM) process in one platform: onboarding, assessing, remediating, monitoring, and reporting on vendors. Each vendor’s live external exposure and any linked leaked credentials appear directly within the vendor program, so teams can act on verified risk instead of relying on paperwork. [AI-powered security questionnaires](https://www.upguard.com/product/vendor-risk/questionnaire-management) read vendor evidence and complete assessments automatically, cutting completion time by up to 95%. Instant risk assessments return a point-in-time report in under a minute, mapped to frameworks like ISO 27001 and NIST CSF 2.0.
- **Black Kite**: 1/5 — Although Black Kite offers document analysis features, the platform can be seen as primarily geared toward detecting and quantifying cyber risks rather than offering fully integrated VRM workflows.

### Attack surface management features
- **UpGuard**: 5/5 — UpGuard continuously monitors your internet-facing footprint. It maps assets, flags exposures such as misconfigurations, expired certificates, and open ports, and ranks remediation priorities. The UpGuard platform also detects typosquatting and lookalike domains set up to impersonate your brand before they’re used for phishing. Because attack surface monitoring runs alongside vendor and workforce risk, an exposed asset or leaked credential automatically links to the person and vendor involved. This gives teams visibility into both external exposure and vendor risk in a single view.
- **Black Kite**: 5/5 — Black Kite uses OSINT data spanning domain records, subdomains, SSL certificates, and more to deliver visibility into a vendor's external footprint.

### Security ratings
- **UpGuard**: A grade (943/950), live UpGuard security rating
- **Black Kite**: A grade (834/950), live UpGuard security rating
- **Recorded Future**: A grade (837/950), live UpGuard security rating

### Customer support
- **UpGuard**: 5/5 — UpGuard supports every customer across all plan tiers, from the smallest plan to the largest. Support teams assist with both technical setup and larger program decisions. Customers frequently cite [responsive, hands-on support](https://www.upguard.com/customer-support) as a reason they continue with UpGuard.
- **Black Kite**: 3/5 — Black Kite's users report mixed support experiences: some find support teams responsive with weekly check-ins, while others cite slower resolution times and inconsistent follow-up on false positives and duplicate findings.
- **Recorded Future**: 5/5 — The Recorded Future Podcast deep dives into cyber threat intelligence and provides industry insights. The Recorded Future Blog covers Intelligence analysis, industry perspectives, product updates, and company news.

### Workflow automation
- **UpGuard**: 5/5 — [Risk Automations](https://www.upguard.com/product/risk-automations) turns a risk signal into action across the platform, with no code and no engineering ticket. On the vendor side, it automates onboarding from questionnaire data, triages vendor score drops, schedules recurring vendor reports, and opens remediation tickets in ServiceNow or Jira. On the threat side, a Breach Risk detection can trigger a workflow that alerts Teams or Slack and runs a system-level fix, like blocking a malicious IP or forcing a credential reset. This is the difference between a tool that reports on risk and one that resolves it.
- **Black Kite**: 4/5 — Black Kite's Bridge™ module lets users automate vendor outreach and gather risk data during major security events, such as global-scale data breaches.

### Artificial intelligence features
- **UpGuard**: 5/5 — UpGuard’s AI performs specific, defined tasks, rather than vague “AI-powered” work. The AI Threat Analyst sorts and scores incoming threats across your attack surface, the dark web, and social media. It clears out approximately 60% of alerts as noise, so your team only reviews what matters. The same triage logic extends to vendor and workforce signals as well. Every AI result carries a citation back to the source, so your team can verify it before acting.
- **Black Kite**: 4/5 — Black Kite offers an AI-based document scanner aimed at reducing manual questionnaire reviews and accelerating compliance mapping of vendor security postures. However, connectivity to workflows supporting other assessment operations (such as requesting further evidence via questionnaires or other documentation) is not supported without integrating with a separately deployed TPRM solution.

### API and integrations
- **UpGuard**: 4/5 — A well-documented REST API and webhooks let teams pull risk data into their own tools and trigger actions programmatically, without waiting on engineering support. For no-code work, Risk Automations adds more than 100 native integrations, including Jira, ServiceNow, Microsoft Entra, Slack, and Cloudflare. A Universal API Connector Node extends its reach to any open API.
- **Black Kite**: 4/5 — While no exhaustive list of native integrations is publicly available, Black Kite generally supports exporting scan results to external systems.
- **Recorded Future**: 4/5 — Offers RESTful APIs to allow integration to Recorded Future’s automated intelligence. Integrates with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM); Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR); endpoint security (EDR); incident response systems; vulnerability management tools, like AWS, Splunk, ServiceNow, Slack and more

### Purchasing & licensing transparency
- **UpGuard**: 5/5 — UpGuard publishes its pricing rather than hiding it behind a sales call. A free tier lets teams monitor up to five vendors and use [Trust Exchange](https://www.upguard.com/product/trust-exchange), UpGuard’s AI-powered questionnaire tool, at no cost. Paid Vendor Risk plans start at USD 1,750 per month, billed annually. Teams can start with one product and add others as they scale. One license covers both monitoring and assessments, so pricing doesn’t fragment across separate products.
- **Black Kite**: 4/5 — Public pricing details are limited. Costs typically rise based on the number of monitored vendors, which can become significant for large supply chains. Some organizations report that the step up in licensing for “critical” vendors can be expensive.
- **Recorded Future**: 1/5 — Pricing not available on the website.

### Customers
- **UpGuard**: 5/5 — UpGuard customers include Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), Morningstar, TDK, PagerDuty, Hopin, and IAG. Read [UpGuard’s customer stories](https://www.upguard.com/customers) to learn more.
- **Black Kite**: 5/5 — Major customers include Morgan Lewis, Healthfirst, Navy Federal, and Maersk.
- **Recorded Future**: 4/5 — Major customers include Accenture, DuPont, Fujitsu, GAP, and McAfee.

### G2 rating
_Accurate as of March 2025_
- **UpGuard**: 4.5/5 — More than 700 verified reviews give UpGuard a 4.5 out of 5 rating on G2. UpGuard also holds G2’s top ranking as the leader in Third-Party & Supplier Risk Management for 15 consecutive quarters. The 2026 G2 Best Software Awards recognized UpGuard as one of the Top 100 Global Software Companies. Among verified reviewers, 98% give UpGuard four- or five-star ratings, and 94% approve of its product direction.
- **Black Kite**: Currently not rated.
- **Recorded Future**: 4.5/5 — 4.6, based on 127 reviews.

## Reviews

### Gartner Peer Insights
_Overall ratings for the IT VRM Solutions market. Accurate as of January 2024_
- **UpGuard**: 4.4/5 — 4.4, based on 160 reviews. **Named a Representative Vendor** in the 2022 Gartner Market Guide for IT VRM Solutions
- **Black Kite**: 4.8, based on 159 reviews

### G2 rating
_Accurate as of March 2025_
- **UpGuard**: 4.5/5 — More than 700 verified reviews give UpGuard a 4.5 out of 5 rating on G2. UpGuard also holds G2’s top ranking as the leader in Third-Party & Supplier Risk Management for 15 consecutive quarters. The 2026 G2 Best Software Awards recognized UpGuard as one of the Top 100 Global Software Companies. Among verified reviewers, 98% give UpGuard four- or five-star ratings, and 94% approve of its product direction.
- **Black Kite**: Currently not rated.
- **Recorded Future**: 4.5/5 — 4.6, based on 127 reviews.

### Glassdoor
_Accurate as of March 2025_
- **UpGuard**: 4.4/5 — 4.4, based on 95 reviews.
- **Black Kite**: 4.8, based on 19 reviews.

## Overview
As outsourcing significant business functions is now common practice for most organizations, major [third-party data breaches](https://www.upguard.com/blog/prevent-third-party-data-breaches) are rapidly taking over news headlines.

Ponemon Institute and IBM’s [Cost of a Data Breach Report](https://www.ibm.com/reports/data-breach) 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](https://www.esentire.com/blog/nearly-half-of-firms-suffer-data-breach-at-hands-of-vendors/) from the same year highlights that 44% of firms surveyed have experienced a [significant data breach](https://www.upguard.com/blog/biggest-data-breaches) caused by a [third-party vendor](https://www.upguard.com/blog/third-party-vendor).

With [Gartner reporting 60% of organizations as having 1000+ third-party relationships](https://www.gartner.com/en/legal-compliance/insights/third-party-risk-management), effectively managing the [cybersecurity risks](https://www.upguard.com/blog/cybersecurity-risk) they create and practicing [vendor due diligence](https://www.upguard.com/blog/vendor-due-diligence) proves increasingly difficult.

[Information security](https://www.upguard.com/blog/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](https://www.upguard.com/blog/automate-vendor-risk-management) that automate data breach detection capabilities, provide real-time insights, and streamline remediation workflows.

We assess three TPRM solutions, Black Kite, Recorded Future, and [UpGuard](https://www.upguard.com/), to help you make an informed decision before investing in the right solution for your needs.

### Black Kite Overview

Black Kite is a cyber risk rating platform that leverages open-source threat intelligence and non-intrusive cyber reconnaissance to provide information about your vendor risk at scale.

It collects a wide range of information without touching the target customer. It leverages advances in data science and machine learning to provide higher frequency and precise real-time risk assessments.

*The Black Kite UI. Source: www.blackkitetech.com*

### Recorded Future Overview

Recorded Future is a US-based threat intelligence platform that collects digital threat intelligence data from the Internet including [open source](https://www.upguard.com/blog/open-source-intelligence), dark web, technical sources, and original research.

Recorded Future’s platform uses machine learning and natural language process AI to deliver accessible intelligence insights across six risk categories: brand, threat, third-party, SecOps, vulnerability, and geopolitical.

*Recorded Future UI. Source: recordedfuture.com*

## Usability and the 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.

- **Black Kite -** Unintuitive user workflow, steep learning curve for first-time users. 
- **Recorded Future:** Interface is easy to read. Workflow is intuitive to new users but still requires time to master.
- **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
Black Kite, Recorded Future, and UpGuard help organizations stay informed about their vendors’ information security risks as part of third-party risk management (TPRM) and vendor due diligence programs.

- **Black Kite:** Bases its third-party risk mitigation strategies on an evaluation of each third-party vendor's security posture, a metric quantified with a security ratings feature known as Cyber Risk Scorecard.
- **Recorded Future:** Continuously monitors 150,000+ companies.
- **UpGuard**: Offers real-time visibility into any third-party vendor’s risk posture & security rating along with total automation for managing vendor due diligence and remediation programs.

## Community support
Keeping informed on product updates and the latest [cyber security](https://www.upguard.com/blog/cybersecurity-important) developments is paramount, with new [vulnerabilities](https://www.upguard.com/blog/vulnerability-management) and [cyber threats](https://www.upguard.com/blog/cyber-threat) 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.

Black Kite, Recorded Future, and UpGuard offer comprehensive online resources to educate and inform customers.

**Black Kite:** Company and product blog.

**Recorded Future:** The Recorded Future Podcast deep dives into cyber threat intelligence and provides industry insights. The Recorded Future Blog covers Intelligence analysis, industry perspectives, product updates, and company news.

**UpGuard:** [UpGuard Summit](https://www.upguard.com/events) 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](https://www.upguard.com/blog) is updated four times a week and the breach research blog has uncovered and secured some of the [largest data breaches](https://www.upguard.com/breaches).

Keeping customers and the cybersecurity community informed on the latest cyber security developments is paramount, with new vulnerabilities and threats emerging daily.

## Release rate
Technology is always changing. New [vulnerabilities](https://www.upguard.com/blog/vulnerability) are added to [CVE](https://www.upguard.com/blog/cve) on a daily basis, and attackers are constantly finding new [zero-day exploits](https://www.upguard.com/blog/zero-day).

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.

- **Black Kite:** The release model for Black Kite is unknown.
- **Recorded Future:** The frequency of Recorded Future’s updates is not stated on the website.
- **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](https://www.upguard.com/releases).

## Pricing and 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.

- **Black Kite:** Public pricing information is not available.
- **Recorded Future:** Pricing for Recorded Future’s platform is not available on the website. Online product reviews suggest that it's priced higher than some competitors.
- **UpGuard:** UpGuard has a fully transparent and publicly accessible pricing model which [you can view here](https://www.upguard.com/pricing). If you have any questions, please email [sales@upguard.com](mailto:sales@upguard.com).

## API and extensibility
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.

Black Kite, Recorded Future, and UpGuard offer APIs.

- **Black Kite:** Offers a standard API to pull data.
- **Recorded Future:** Offers RESTful APIs to allow integration to Recorded Future’s automated intelligence.
- **UpGuard:** Offers a standard API to pull data from UpGuard’s platform into other enterprise applications.

## Third-party integrations
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.

Black Kite, Recorded Future, and UpGuard offer integrations into other platforms.

- **Black Kite:** Integrates with Supply Wisdom and VendorInsight.
- **Recorded Future:** Integrates with [Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)](https://www.upguard.com/blog/siem); Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR); [endpoint security (EDR)](https://www.upguard.com/blog/endpoint-detection-and-response); incident response systems; vulnerability management tools, like AWS, Splunk, ServiceNow, Slack, 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](https://www.upguard.com/integrations).

## Customers
- **Black Kite:** Customers include Polk & Wardwell, LLP, a Fortune 500 retailer, and an OTC financial institution.
- **Recorded Future:** Major customers include Accenture, DuPont, Fujitsu, GAP, and McAfee.
- **UpGuard:** Major customers include Accenture, New York Stock Exchange, Tech Mahindra, IAG, Hopin, NSW Government, and Morningstar.

## Security rating
- **Black Kite:** Provides a risk rating from A to F, like a report card.
- **Recorded Future:** Provides a score between 0-100 along with a level of criticality, labeled as Informational (5-24), Moderate (25-64), or High (65-99).
- **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.](https://www.upguard.com/instant-security-score)

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Full interactive comparison: https://www.upguard.com/compare/black-kite-vs-recorded-future