CyberGRXvsWhisticUpGuard

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

Compare the capabilities and features of CyberGRX 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?

CyberGRX vs Whistic
CyberGRX 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.
Provides a security questionnaire and vendor due diligence information exchange to help reduce the operational overhead of traditionally manual and point in time assessments.
Relies on standardized security questionnaires.
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.
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.
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.
Risks detailed on point-in-time vendor assessment coupled with continuous monitoring of inherent risk, threat intelligence, and risk scoring. The exchange model forces more frequent point in time assessments, as many as 2-3 times each year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ProcessUnity (formerly CyberGRX) offers extensive community support sharing best platform and program practices via regularly updated podcasts, webinars, whitepapers, and strategic partnerships.
Offers a company and product blog.
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.
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.
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.
ProcessUnity (formerly CyberGRX) offers a fully functional bidirectional API.
Integrates with RiskRecon, Active Directory, Okta, and OneLogin.
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.
ProcessUnity (formerly CyberGRX) lists typical engagements as starting at around $120,000 USD. This includes validated assessments data, and unlimited access to the CyberGRX Exchange.
Public pricing information is not available.
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 Medibank Private, Mass Mutual, QBE, Solix, and McAfee.
Customers include Betterment, Invision, Airbnb, Zynga, and Robinhood
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.
4.5, based on 19 reviews.
4.5, based on 46 reviews.
Security rating
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950

CyberGRX vs Whistic product overview

CyberGRX vs UpGuard product overview

Learn more about the products and how they compare.

The amount of cyber risk the average organization is taking on has never been higher, a big part of it in the form of third-party and fourth-party risk. A household name reporting a data breach or data leak feels like a daily occurrence. And with the average cost of a data breach reaching close to $4 million dollars according to a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, organizations are looking for new ways to prevent them.

The unfortunate truth is third-parties cause a lot of data breaches. That's why cybersecurity and Vendor Risk Management (VRM) has become a top priority for CISOs, Vice Presidents of Security, and other members of senior management, even at the Board level.

Beyond avoiding costs, third-party risk management is quickly becoming a regulatory requirement for many industries. Governments are enacting laws and regulations designed to promote or require the use of third-party cyber risk management programs to identify, assess, mitigate and oversee risks created by vendors, fourth-parties, and customers.

This is business-as-usual for financial services, healthcare, energy, military, and government organizations. But it's a new problem for other industries.  

The introduction of general data protection laws with extraterritorial application means most organizations need to invest in developing vendor risk management practices.

For example in the United States California has introduced CCPA and Florida has introduced FIPA to protect the personally identifiable information of their constituents. Outside of the United States, GDPR, LGPD, and PIPEDA are three important extraterritorial laws from the European Union, Brazil, and Canada respectively.

Alongside the protection of PII and PHI, many of these laws have introduced mandatory data breach notification requirements which have greatly increased the reputational impact of inadequate vendor and cybersecurity risk management practices.

To add to this, security teams have more expected to not only manage and improve security postures and information security policies, but to translate technical details from cybersecurity risk assessments and vendor questionnaires into terms that non-technical stakeholders can understand.

The good news is third-party risk management tools can help you do exactly that. The issue is it's hard to decide on which ones to assess, let alone what criteria to assess them against.  

That's why we wrote this post to provide you with a clear comparison between CyberGRX, Whistic, and UpGuard, so you can make an informed decision and choose the tool that is right for you.  

CyberGRX Overview

CyberGRX is a Denver-based company that was founded by Fred Kneip in 2015. It provides organizations and third-parties with a cost-effective, scalable approach to third-party risk management.

The CyberGRX Exchange collects standardized data and cyber risk assessments, sharing them for others to use. This means assessors can access information about a vendor and vendors no longer need to answer the same questionnaires over and over.

In December 2019, CyberGRX announced it had raised $40 million in a Series D funding round led by ICONIQ Capital.

CyberGRX UI
CyberGRX UI. Source: cybergrx.com

Whistic Overview

Whistic is based in Salt Lake City, Utah and aims to help companies hold each other accountable for protecting their shared data. Whistic's CEO is Nick Sorensen.

Whistic helps its customers conduct and respond to security reviews.

Their platform has tools to help you onboard, assess, and track vendors, allowing you to compare third-parties against a set of predefined criteria based on vendor questionnaires, documentation, and metadata.

Vendors can assess themselves against one of the top vendor questionnaires and publish it to their profile, along with supporting documentation including audits and certifications.

Whistic UI
Whistic UI. Source: whistic.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

How easy a product is to use depends on the quality of the organization's product, design, and engineering teams, and will play a large part in how quickly you can get up to speed and start using the tool to its potential.  

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

  • CyberGRX: Risks detailed on point-in-time vendor assessment coupled with continuous monitoring of inherent risk, threat intelligence, and risk scoring. The exchange model forces more frequent point in time assessments, as many as 2-3 times each year.
  • 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 our in-house security team, and where possible remediation and protection suggestions are provided. Additionally, we have a library of pre-built questionnaires that can be sent and managed with the UpGuard platform including a pandemic (e.g. COVID-19), ISO 27001, PCI DSS, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, CCPA, and Modern Slavery questionnaires. Read our full guide on the top security questionnaires here.

Capabilities

CyberGRX and Whistic rely on point-in-time risk assessments to determine risk, primarily focusing on internal security controls and policies of third-party vendors or service providers.

UpGuard also uses cyber risk assessments but augments them with security ratings based on thousands of individual checks. The benefit of security ratings is that they are always up-to-date and continually refined based on new data.

As you know, getting a time-poor vendor to complete a questionnaire can take time. And the results can be subjective and are rendered inaccurate over time as new security issues emerge.  

That doesn't mean questionnaires don't have a place. They provide valuable information that security ratings cannot generally provide, that is, information about internal security issues and controls.

When paired, security ratings and risk assessments provide a holistic view of an organization's internal and external security posture.

According to Gartner, cybersecurity ratings will become as important as credit ratings when assessing the risk of existing and new business relationships…these services will become a precondition for business relationships and part of the standard of due care for providers and procurers of services. Additionally, the services will have expanded their scope to assess other areas, such as cyber insurance, due diligence for M&A and even as a raw metric for internal security programs.

Read our full guide on security ratings to understand all their use cases.

  • CyberGRX: Relies on a shared library of point-in-time risk assessments.
  • Whistic: Relies on standardized security questionnaires.
  • UpGuard: Provides a 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 request your free security rating by clicking here.

CyberGRX vs. Whistic: Risk Assessment Methodology

CyberGRX provides a risk exchange platform that leverages a storehouse of validated third-party risk assessments. It is designed to remove inefficiencies in the assessors and the assessed's third-party risk management program by allowing vendors to complete a single assessment and then share it on the platform.

Whistic takes a similar approach to CyberGRX, and is focused on conducting and responding to security reviews. Their platform 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.

At UpGuard, we believe the standardization of security assessments practices against recognized security frameworks and making attestations easily shareable helps everyone save time, resources, and increases trust across the supply chain.  

That's why, like Whistic and CyberGRX, UpGuard has developed a way for organizations to publish their security information and attestations by publishing it to completed security questionnaires and supporting documentation to a secure UpGuard security profile.

In addition to completed security questionnaires, security profiles use security ratings to provide real-time critical risk monitoring capabilities. And the UpGuard platform also has integrated vendor and remediation processes to provide you with a complete solution.  

  • CyberGRX: 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 NIST and ISO 27001.
  • 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.

CyberGRX vs. Whistic: Scope

As you know, even small vendors can lead to large data breaches, e.g. the HVAC vendor that eventually led to Target's exposure of credit card and personal data on more than 110 million consumers.

CyberGRX has 63,883 companies on their exchange while Whistic relies on manual point-in-time risk assessment, so they may not cover small or specialist service providers. In contrast, UpGuard scans over 2 million companies every day.

Not every solution provides the same level of coverage. If your organization employs small specialist vendors they may not be covered by a solution. As you know, any vendor that handles sensitive data is a potential risk that should be continuously monitored and accounted for.

  • CyberGRX: 100,000+ companies on the exchange.
  • Whistic: Unknown
  • UpGuard: 2,000,000 organizations scanned daily and new vendors can be automatically added by customers.

Predictive capabilities

The main reason we all invest in security tools is to prevent incidents from happening in the first place.

This makes a solution's ability to prevent data breaches and other cyber attacks the most important thing.

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

Community Support

CyberGRX, Whistic, and UpGuard all invest in their community and try to make it as easy as possible for customers and prospects to get up to speed, reduce operational overhead, and decide on the right product for them.

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.

Release rate

Security controls need to constantly adapt and change to keep up with changes with the information and technology it is designed to protect. New vulnerabilities are added to CVE on a daily basis, attackers find new ways to exploit programming errors, and security controls become invalid constantly.

This means vendor risk management best practices are constantly changing too.

To be able to rely on a third-party risk management tool, you need to be sure they can incorporate changes quickly.

UpGuard has adopted DevOps principles internally to develop, test, and release software on a continuous basis, ensuring fast, consistent, and safe releases that are thoroughly tested.

Pricing & Support

Third-party risk management software can be expensive. The industry uses opaque pricing policies designed to take power away from the purchaser. Vendor risk solutions are typically priced on a per vendor, per year basis except in some cases where reports can be generated for a fixed price.

Whistic is more expensive than UpGuard while CyberGRX provides no transparency on their pricing and we weren't able to find any information online. High prices mean small to medium-size businesses cannot afford their solutions and even large organizations can only manage their most at-risk vendors.

  • CyberGRX: There is no public pricing available for CyberGRX, making it hard to know how much you would pay without talking to them.
  • 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 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

While each service has its own platform, API access can help you pull data to a different platform or consolidate reporting into a centralized dashboard.

The good news is CyberGRX, Whistic, and UpGuard all offer APIs to pull data.

Third-party integrations

If you don't have technical staff or the resources to hire them, and not everyone does, standard integrations can become an important part of decision-making.

  • CyberGRX: Integrates with multiple GRC platforms (using connectors), visualization tools, ticketing systems, and SOC tools.
  • Whistic: Integrates with RiskRecon, Active Directory, Okta, and onelogin.
  • UpGuard: Integrates with GRC platforms, ticketing systems like ServiceNow, and more.

Customers

Sometimes the best proof is who is using the software and their testimonials. CyberGRX, Whistic, and UpGuard all have impressive customer lists, none more distinguished than the other.

  • CyberGRX: Major customers include Medibank Private, Mass Mutual, QBE, Solix, and McAfee.
  • Whistic: Customers include Betterment, Invision, Airbnb, Zynga, and Robinhood.
  • UpGuard: Customers include NASA, the New York Stock Exchange (ICE), Morningstar, Akamai, Bill.com, IAG, and ADP. Read our customer case studies here and our Gartner reviews 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 to 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

Finally, let's take a look at how CyberGRX, Whistic, and UpGuard compare when assessed by UpGuard's platform on July 20, 2020. It's important to note that UpGuard adheres to the Principles of Fair and Accurate Security Ratings:

  • Transparency: UpGuard believes in providing full and timely transparency not only to our customers but to any organization that wants to understand their security posture, which is why you can request your free security rating here and you can book a free trial of our platform here.
  • Dispute, Correction, and Appeal: UpGuard is committed to working with customers, vendors and any organization that believes their score is not accurate or outdated.
  • Accuracy and Validation: UpGuard's security ratings are empirical, data-driven and based on independently verifiable and accessible information.
  • Model Governance: While the datasets and methodologies used to calculate our security ratings can change from time to time to better reflect our understanding of how to mitigate cybersecurity risk, we provide reasonable notice and explanation to our customers about how their security rating may be impacted.
  • Independence: No commercial agreement or lack thereof, gives an organization the ability to improve its security rating without improving their security posture.
  • Confidentiality: Any information disclosed to UpGuard during the course of 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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