OneTrust vs UpGuard: 2025 Comparison

OneTrust vs UpGuard
Category	UpGuard	OneTrust
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.	OneTrust offers TPRM workflow capabilities within a more extensive compliance and privacy suite. OneTrust features include customizable questionnaire workflows and extensive regulatory coverage. OneTrust excels in flexible automation and strong integrations, though it relies on external security ratings partners for comprehensive continuous monitoring and can be complex to implement.
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.	OneTrust provides a suite of solutions enabling integrated privacy management, data governance, and security assurance for supplier compliance and risk management. OneTrust provides a range of customization options for customers seeking a tailored approach to their risk and compliance processes.
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.	OneTrust takes an integration and partnership-focused approach to enabling customers to have end-to-end vendor visibility. This approach requires additional licensing, adoption, and technical configuration of a separate vendor monitoring solution for customers desiring inside/out visibility into any given vendor's security posture. Additionally, teams with larger staff sizes should take advantage of OneTrust's modular approach and wide array of potential customizations.
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.	OneTrust offers a range of customization options that can increase the learning curve and overall adoption for smaller teams or those with impacted staffing levels. OneTrust reportedly charges for implementation, typically as a professional services fee for initial setup and configuration. The need for implementation support could be indicative of the platform's complexity and steep learning curve
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.	OneTrust relies on integration partners for external risk insights. As such, accuracy is fully dependent on the quality and accuracy of insights provided by whichever additional supplier customers choose to deploy for this purpose.
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.	OneTrust covers vendor onboarding and offboarding with dedicated TPRM workflows. Continuous monitoring is possible only when combined with external security rating providers.
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.	OneTrust relies on external integrations for external security monitoring. As such, its native attack surface management features are limited, making it less suitable for organizations requiring robust ASM capabilities.
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.	OneTrust implementations can be complex for larger deployments, so dedicated success teams are commonplace. Response times vary based on subscription levels.
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.	Strong automation throughout GRC workflows automates third-party onboarding, risk assessments, and due diligence. It can also automatically trigger follow-up actions or compliance checks, though it depends on external security data to automate technical risk discovery.
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.	OneTrust augments its data discovery and governance capabilities with AI-based classification of unstructured files, helping organizations pinpoint sensitive content and enforce retention or deletion policies. Additional capabilities include AI-guided questionnaires and a compliance mapping document scanner to accelerate vendor security reviews.
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.	OneTrust offers a range of out-of-the-box integrations with popular solutions, such as RSA Archer, ServiceNow, Adobe, and others. Also offers an open API, enabling custom workflows and data sharing with GRC suites, HR platforms, and security systems to centralize and automate compliance processes.
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 is not available. Does not publically offer a free trial.
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 Allianz, PUMA, and Samsun.
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.	4.5, based on 96 reviews
Security ratings	943 / 950	874 / 950

OneTrust vs UpGuard product overview

Learn more about the products and how they compare.

Organizations are relying more heavily than ever on third-party data handling, and this trend is on the rise. The IT outsourcing market is set to reach US$425.19 billion by 2026, according to a 2021 report by Mordor Intelligence.

The steady increase of these third-party relationships comes with a major downfall — third-party risk.

IBM and Ponemon Institute’s 2021 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that third-party data breaches cost organizations an average of US$4.33 million.

Executives must manage third-party risk throughout the entire vendor life cycle, from pre-purchase to onboarding to continuous monitoring once vendors are active.

Handling a Vendor Risk Management (VRM) program effectively is a labor-intensive task for information security teams. Your organization must dedicate the significant time and resources needed to develop a comprehensive VRM program.

Alternatively, you can invest in automated VRM tools that allow you to continuously monitor your entire third-party attack surface and perform regular vendor assessments throughout the lifecycle.

We assess two VRM solutions, OneTrust Vendorpedia and UpGuard, to help you make an informed decision before investing in the right solution for your needs.

OneTrust Overview

OneTrust is a US incorporated company with primary operating offices based in Atlanta and London. The OneTrust platform helps users assess and manage cyber risk from third-party vendors in their digital supply chain.

The OneTrust solution leverages security questionnaires and remediation workflows through both an exchange and ad-hoc model to help customers reduce risk and improve due diligence efficiency across vendor relationships.

OneTrust Vendorpedia UI

OneTrust Vendorpedia UI. Source: onetrust.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

Minimizing the amount of time and effort in learning to use a new solution is a critical aspect of delivering on any value proposition.

OneTrust and UpGuard both offer their services via SaaS and are accessible from web-based platforms that can help you find, assess, and remediate risk.

OneTrust: A fully cloud-based service with minimal installation criteria required. The OneTrust platform also features an easy-to-use navigation interface, workflow customization, and dashboard reporting functionality.

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

The core capability of OneTrust’s third-party risk offering is the ability to create and automate workflows for onboarding and offboarding vendors. This helps users maintain an inventory of their vendors along with relevant information such as risk tiers, service types, and commercial timeframes.

UpGuard can help organizations automate their third-party risk assessment and vendor compliance due diligence processes. UpGuard’s solution capabilities work to optimize third-party risk management workflows.

Security Questionnaire Workflows & Exchange

OneTrust: Allows users to automate the security questionnaire process with pre-built questionnaires aligned with common security frameworks, standards, and regulations, Users are also able to create custom-built questionnaires that can be sent to vendors via the same automated process with multi-language support included.

OneTrust offers customers access to an exchange of pre-completed security questionnaires and other vendor due diligence information, such as relevant certifications. OneTrust’s exchange aims to reduce the operational overhead and time costs of gathering questionnaire responses.

By using this information, customers can better understand the risk impacts of a given vendor’s internally managed security policies, controls, and practices.

UpGuard: Also automates the security questionnaire process, allowing users to choose from a library of pre-built questionnaires, including recognized security frameworks like ISO 27001, PCI DSS, NIST CSF, GDPR, and CCPA.

Users can create and send custom questionnaires to vendors using the assessment builder. Users may also access UpGuard’s database of pre-completed vendor security questionnaires from the Shared Assessments Exchange.

UpGuard’s Compliance Reporting feature enables users to easily identify which areas of these security frameworks their vendors do or don’t comply with by mapping results from these questionnaires to their respective frameworks.

Attack Surface Monitoring

Attack surface monitoring capabilities allow security teams to discover, measure, and monitor the security risks associated with a vendor’s public-facing domains, subdomains, and IP spaces.

Unlike OneTrust, UpGuard allows for the monitoring of such risks with continuous checks for the presence of standard security configurations and controls, such as SPF, HTTPS. Additionally, UpGuard monitors public-facing ports for any changes, highlighting areas of inconsistency with best practice settings.

Furthermore, UpGuard’s platform gathers risk intelligence on third-party data leaks, identity breaches, potential fraud from typosquatting, and compromised corporate email accounts. These intelligence sources are indispensable to gaining a comprehensive view of supply chain and third-party risk.

Remediation

OneTrust: Offers remediation planning capabilities based on risks identified in vendor questionnaires, but does not provide remediation tracking for security risks present on a vendor’s external attack surface.

UpGuard: Also offers remediation planning capabilities. Users can create a remediation plan which projects security ratings based on the remediation of specified risks.

The platform also allows users to request remediation based on automated scanning and questionnaire risks identified in monitored vendors, with real-time updates highlighting when vendors fix any identified issues.

Community support

Keeping informed on product updates and the latest cyber security developments is paramount, with new vulnerabilities and cyber threats 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.

Both OneTrust and UpGuard offer comprehensive online resources to educate and inform customers.

OneTrust: Engages their user community with regular blog posts on topics covering relevant security incidents, global privacy regulations, new feature updates, and industry developments.

Offers live and recorded webinars that help viewers align their programs to best security practices. In addition to these webinars, OneTrust also provides certification and training programs for customers to maximize the value of using the platform.

UpGuard: UpGuard Summit brings together a community of security leaders from leading companies, explores the future of security, and helps businesses stay secure.

The UpGuard cybersecurity and risk management blog is updated four times a week and the breach research blog has uncovered and secured some of the largest data breaches.

UpGuard’s free weekly Breach Newsletter informs 20,000+ subscribers of the latest global data breaches.

Release rate

Technology is always changing. New vulnerabilities are added to CVE on a daily basis, and attackers are constantly finding new zero-day exploits.

The speed at which a security platform can incorporate changes determines how well it can respond to new threats and customer requests.

Additionally, they should continue to update, adjust, and improve their threat detection methodology to reflect changes to the threat landscape.

OneTrust: States that they make at least monthly updates to their suite of product offerings. OneTrust clearly documents product release notes and guides for customers looking to better understand and use changes in the platform.

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.

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.

OneTrust: For established businesses with more advanced needs, OneTrust offers Standard & Advanced packages ranging in annual price from $6,000 - $18,000 USD. For more details, view estimates of OneTrust’s pricing model.

Pricing for more complex deployments requiring API and integrations access can only be accessed by speaking to a OneTrust representative.

UpGuard: UpGuard has a fully transparent and publicly accessible pricing model which you can view here. If you have any questions, please email sales@upguard.com.

API and extensibility

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.

OneTrust and UpGuard offer APIs.

OneTrust: Offers REST API and SDK for data feed connectivity and workflow management options with external applications.

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

Third-party integrations

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.

Both OneTrust and UpGuard offer integrations into other platforms.

OneTrust: Offers out-of-the-box integrations with a broad range of third-party platforms. OneTrust’s healthy ecosystem of integration options includes third-party platforms such as ServiceNow, UpGuard, Adobe, RSA Archer, 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.

Customers

OneTrust: Notable listed OneTrust customers include Air Canada, DHL, and Drax.

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

Security rating

OneTrust: Calculates and assigns risk tier categorizations of Critical, High, Medium, and Low based on the security questionnaire information collected from vendors in the platform.

However, OneTrust risk calculations do not incorporate insights from a vendor’s external attack surfaces and their associated risks in the same manner offered by conventional security ratings services.

UpGuard: Provides a cyber risk 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. Security rating scores are a weighted average of the risk rating of all externally facing assets and completed vendor questionnaire scores.

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.