Black Kite vs UpGuard: 2025 Comparison

Black Kite vs UpGuard
Category	UpGuard	Black Kite
General summary	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 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 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 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 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 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	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'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 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 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.	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 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 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.	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 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 uses OSINT data spanning domain records, subdomains, SSL certificates, and more to deliver visibility into a vendor's external footprint.
Customer support	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 as a reason they continue with UpGuard.	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	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'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 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 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	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.	While no exhaustive list of native integrations is publicly available, Black Kite generally supports exporting scan results to external systems.
Purchasing & licensing transparency	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, 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.	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	UpGuard customers include Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), Morningstar, TDK, PagerDuty, Hopin, and IAG. Read UpGuard’s customer stories to learn more.	Major customers include Morgan Lewis, Healthfirst, Navy Federal, and Maersk.
G2 rating Accurate as of March 2025	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.	Currently not rated.
Security ratings	943 / 950	834 / 950

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 and the 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

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 and 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 and 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.