Black KitevsUpGuard

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

Compare the capabilities and features of Black Kite 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?

Black Kite vs
Black Kite 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
Black Kite uses OSINT data spanning domain records, subdomains, SSL certificates, and more to deliver visibility into a vendor's external footprint.
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.
Uses an A–F letter-grade rating based on standardized models (e.g., MITRE CTSA). The score is supplemented by a separate financial risk metric that ties vulnerabilities to potential financial impact, a key differentiator for stakeholders concerned with breach damage costs.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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
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.
While no exhaustive list of native integrations is publicly available, Black Kite generally supports exporting scan results to external systems.
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 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.
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 Morgan Lewis, Healthfirst, Navy Federal, and Maersk.
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.
Currently not rated.
Security rating
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950

Black Kite vs product overview

Black Kite vs UpGuard product overview

Learn more about the products and how they compare.

At a surface level, Black Kite and UpGuard might seem to be very similar products - both aim to prevent data breaches by mitigating third-party security risks. But a deeper analysis highlights stark differences in their approaches, revealing the option offering a more trustworthy Vendor Risk Management strategy. 

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.

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

Mastering the VRM workflow within Black Kite is a challenge. Black Kite users have said that the platform is unintuitive and difficult to navigate, which elevates the learning curve of the solution. 

The UpGuard platform, on the other hand, is well regarded for its ease-of-use and shallow learning curve, which accelerated the implementation of a VRM program.

  • Black Kite - Unintuitive user workflow, steep learning curve for first-time users. 
  • UpGuard - Highly intuitive workflow and shallow learning curve for faster VRM program implementation and even faster vendor onboarding.
"UpGuard has improved the customer experience, reduced vendor onboarding times and introduced an industry-leading security posture, to elevate our customer well above all of its competitors."

- UpGuard customer.

Capabilities

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.

According to Gartner, cybersecurity ratings are becoming as important as credit ratings when it comes to assessing the security risks of potential vendors. However, because security ratings don't reflect the complete context of a vendor's threat landscape, using this feature alone could lead to underlying security risks being overlooked.

To overcome this, UpGuard offers a holistic approach to security posture analysis, combining the real-time measurements of security ratings with the contextualized insights of risk assessments. Together, UpGuard's risk assessments and security ratings offer an excellent overview of each third-party vendor's internal and external security performance.

UpGuard and Black Kite have different methods of representing an organization's calculated security posture:

Black Kite: Provides a risk rating from A to F, like a report card.

UpGuard: Provides a FICO-like score between 0 and 950 along with the following letter grades, A: 801-950, B: 601-800, C: 401-600, D: 201-400, F: 0-200. You can see how tt

To see an example of an application of UpGuard's rating system, request a free security score for your organization.

Black Kite vs. UpGuard: Risk Assessment Methodology

UpGuard and Black Kite use different risk assessment methodologies to assess the potential risk of an IT vendor.

Black Kite bases its Cyber Risk ratings on ten risk categories and 250+ control items. It gathers data through open-source intelligence tools and techniques hackers use, like data collectors, crawlers, honeypots, as well as continuous scanning of databases, reputation sites, cyber events, hacker shares, and public vulnerability databases like CVE.

However, Black Kite's list of security risk categories discovered in scans includes items of questionable accuracy, which calls into question the reliability of its risk calculation methods. 

Including ambiguous risks in security reports burden security teams with unnecessary investigation efforts, making the risk management process more complex and cumbersome rather than streamlined and efficient.

UpGuard's security rating feature evaluates security postures based on 70+ critical attack vector categories. In addition to risk assessments contextualizing each vendor's threat landscape, 

UpGuard also offers real-time critical risk monitoring capabilities, such as data leak detection and identify breach detection, for the most comprehensive and accurate analysis of each vendor's cybersecurity risk profile. The reliable vendor risk data generated from UpGuard's holistic approach to third-party risk detection creates a foundation for a scalable and efficient Vendor Risk Management program.

Black Kite: Based on ten risk categories and 250+ control items

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 network 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). We give each identified issue a risk prioritization category to help you address the most critical risk first.

Black Kite vs. UpGuard: Scope

Every third-party vendor is a potential attack vector, even those with little to no access to sensitive data. Adopting a Vendor Risk Management solution with limited scope will overlook third-party attack vectors increasing your risk of suffering a data breach.

As such, an ideal Vendor Risk Management solution should be capable of monitoring all the vendors in your third-party network, no matter how extensive that network is. 

Black Kite: Unknown

UpGuard: 2,000,000 organizations scanned daily, and customers can automatically add new vendors

Predictive capabilities

The predictive capabilities of Black Kite and UpGuard differ quite extensively:

Black Kite: Performs non-intrusive checks, including passive DNS, attack surface detection, passive vulnerability scanning, DNS health, SSL/TLS strength, and email security, as well as asset reputation, credential compromises, hacktivist shares, social media monitoring, dark web search, cloud delivery network security, fraudulent apps, and DDoS detection. They do not, however, provide absolute transparency into the efficacy of these checks.

UpGuard: UpGuard continuously scans for critical breach vectors, including phishing susceptibility, man-in-the-middle attacks, DNSSEC, vulnerabilities, email spoofing, domain hijacking, DNS issues, and more. Using its advanced attack surface scanning solution, UpGuard detected data exposed in a GitHub repository by an AWS engineer in 30 minutes. This exposure was reported to AWS, and the repo was secured the same day. This repo contained personal identity documents and system credentials, including passwords, AWS key pairs, and private keys. We can do this because we actively discover exposed datasets on the open and deep web, scouring open S3 buckets, public Github Repos, and unsecured RSync and FTP servers. Our data leak discovery engine continuously searches for keyword lists provided by our customers. The effectiveness of UpGuard's breach prevention methodology is evident through the scope of breaches and data leaks UpGuard has discovered and reported to the world in the New York Times, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Forbes, and TechCrunch.

Community Support

Both Black Kite and UpGuard invest in the ongoing development of the cybersecurity community through a steady stream of blog content. 

UpGuard's blog content, however, is reviewed by industry experts to verify trustworthiness. UpGuard's VRM blog content has also been regarded as more in-depth and helpful. In addition to its VRM blog, UpGuard regularly hosts a virtual summit to keep the global cybersecurity community updated with the latest VRM developments.

Black Kite: Company and product blog.

UpGuard: UpGuard keeps the VRM community continuously updated with the latest industry developments through its blog content and quarterly summit event.

Release rate

UpGuard has adopted DevOps principles internally to continuously develop, test, and release software, ensuring fast, consistent, and safe releases. UpGuard's regularly updated product release notes make these releases available to the public.

On the other hand, Black Kite doesn't seem to have a public notification stream solely devoted to product releases.

Pricing & Support

UpGuard is upfront and transparent with its pricing to help prospects gauge financial suitability before booking e demo call.

We were not able to find any information about Black Kite's pricing. High costs can price out small to medium-size businesses and relegate large companies to managing only their most at-risk vendors.

Black Kite: Public pricing information is not available. View estimates of Black Kite's costs.

UpGuard: UpGuard has a transparent pricing model which you can view here. UpGuard pricing starts at $5k/year and scales with your company. If you have any questions, please let us know via sales@upguard.com and we will follow up.

API & Extensibility

UpGuard and Black Kite offer standard APIs for seamless communication with other internal systems.

Third-party integrations

Both UpGuard and Black Kite integrate with third-party services to streamline Vendor Risk Management. UpGuard, however, also supports connections with over 4,000+ apps through its Zapier integration.

Black Kite: Integrates with Supply Wisdom and VendorInsight.

UpGuard: Integrates with GRC platforms, ticketing systems like ServiceNow, and more.

Customers

The best proof of the superiority of a solution comes directly from its customers. White Black Kite services many known brands, UpGuard's customer base includes more distinguished companies.

Black Kite: Customers include Polk & Wardwell, LLP, a Fortune 500 retailer, and an OTC financial institution.

UpGuard: Customers include the New York Stock Exchange (ICE), Pagerduty, TDK, IAG, and Tech Mahindra. 

Read UpGuard's customer case studies here.

Here's what a few UpGuard customers had to say about their experience. You can read more on Gartner reviews.

"UpGuard has given us a view of our vendor security posture. The ability to launch a questionnaire or ask for a plan of remediation for items that show as vulnerable is also a great added value and a time saver. UpGuard is also very customer-focused. They respond quickly to issues and questions and welcome any input that could improve the product. Overall it is one of the best value add tools we have."
"The simplicity of the product is fantastic. My team and I were able to be up and running in minutes. We monitor risks on over 25 vendors in near real-time and use these statistics to report to the C suite and Board of Directors. UpGuard has become part of the critical cybersecurity metrics that we monitor and report upon."
"The ease of use and simplicity of the product is excellent. We were able to be up and running with 50 vendors within minutes, not hours. The reporting is used for monthly statistics and is reported to our Senior Management. UpGuard has become an integral part of our critical cybersecurity metrics that we monitor and report upon."

Security rating

Let's take a look at how Black Kite and UpGuard compare when assessed with the security rating solution on UpGuard's platform on July 28, 2020. It's important to note that UpGuard adheres to the Principles of Fair and Accurate Security Ratings, removing all biases in this analysis.

  • Accuracy and Validation: UpGuard's security ratings are empirical, data-driven, and based on independently verifiable and accessible information.
  • Model Governance: The datasets and methodologies used to calculate our security ratings can change in line with our improving understanding of cybersecurity risk mitigation. When this happens, we provide reasonable notice and explanation to our customers about the impact on their security rating.
  • Independence: No commercial agreement or lack thereof allows an organization to improve its security rating outside of the unbiased measurements of UpGuard's security ratings.
  • Confidentiality: Any information disclosed to UpGuard during a challenged rating or dispute is appropriately protected. Nor do we provide third parties with sensitive or confidential information on rated organizations that could lead to system compromise.

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