Prevalent vs UpGuard: 2023 Comparison and Review

The usability and learning curve of a product can play a large part in your decision. Not only can they help you get up to speed quicker, but they can also improve return on investment and general joy using the product.

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

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

• Prevalent: Simple implementation and Interface is easy to understand. However,  takes some time to completely master.‍
• UpGuard: Very intuitive workflow allows new users to master the functions of the platform very quickly. User-friendly workflow also expedites the vendor onboarding process.

"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.

Prevalent uses a combination of point-in-time risk assessments with automated monitoring for cyber threats to produce a security rating. They help automate parts of the risk assessment process and have an exchange where completed vendor risk reports can be shared.

Like Prevalent, UpGuard takes a combined approach using risk assessments and security ratings to provide a holistic view of an organization's security risk.

The use of security ratings demonstrates that both solutions are evolving alongside developing cybersecurity strategies. Security ratings are expected to play an increasingly authoritative role in the field of risk analysis.

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.

Forrester expects cybersecurity ratings to become a de facto standard in the boardroom by 2025. Investors and traditional debt ratings agencies will include cybersecurity as a risk factor for rating the ability to repay company debt (influenced in part by the cybersecurity ratings market).

Learn how UpGuard security ratings work >

Because both UpGuard and Prevalent augment risk assessment with security ratings, both solutions provide the most up-to-date reflection of the state of an organization's attack surface. 

UpGuard's security ratings, however, offer more details about identifed risks - providing a score between 0-950 with letter grades from A - F. Prevalent's security ratings range from 0-100. 

It is also unclear how many companies are covered in Prevalent's scanning efforts, whereas UpGuard scans 2,000,000+ organizations daily.

• Prevalent: Provides a risk rating between 0 and 100.
• 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.

Prevalent vs. UpGuard: Risk Assessment Methodology

Each service relies on its proprietary risk assessment methodology to assess the potential risk introduced by a vendor.

Prevalent uses a combination of point-in-time risk assessments with their security ratings to determine the level of risk presented by a vendor. Risk assessments can be shared on the platform by vendors for other customers to use.

The standardization of security assessment practices against recognized security frameworks and making the results easily shareable helps all businesses save time, resources and increases trust in the supply chain.

That's why UpGuard, like Prevalent, has introduced a way for customers to save time and money by publishing completed security assessments and supporting documentation in a Shared Profile.

Additionally, UpGuard's platform provides real-time risk monitoring capabilities, integrated vendor processes, and data leak detection to provide businesses with a complete Vendor Risk Management solution.

• Prevalent: Augments point-in-time risk assessments with security ratings to provide an overview of third and fourth-party risk.‍
• 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). We give each identified issue a risk prioritization category, so you know what to focus on first.

Prevalent vs. UpGuard: Scope

Every vendor is a potential data breach attack vector, even the smallest third-party services. In 2013, Target fell victim to a data breach exposing the credit card details and personal information of over 110 million shoppers. This monumental breach was facilitated by network credentials stolen from an HVAC company.

Not every solution provides the same level of coverage. If your organization employs small specialist vendors, ensure the solution covers them. As you know, it is best practice to monitor any vendor that handles sensitive data continuously.

• Prevalent: Unknown.‍
• UpGuard: 2,000,000 organizations scanned daily, and customers can automatically add new vendors

Both UpGuard and Prevalent combine point-in-time assessments with security ratings to provide the most up-to-date attack surface data, but the predictive capabilities of each solution differ.

• Prevalent: Relies on point-in-time risk assessments and cybersecurity risk ratings based on monitoring 1,500+ criminal forums; thousands of onion pages, 80+ dark web special access forums; 65+ threat intelligence feeds; and 50+ paste sites for leaked credentials and potentially targeted companies — as well as several security communities, code repositories, and vulnerability databases.‍
• UpGuard: As UpGuard checks for misconfigurations across your Internet footprint, many important breach vectors are covered, such as phishing, ransomware susceptibility (like WannaCry), man-in-the-middle attacks, DNSSEC, vulnerabilities, email spoofing, domain hijacking, network security, and DNS issues. For example, we were able to detect data exposed in a GitHub repository by an AWS engineer in 30 minutes. We reported it 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're able to do this because we actively discover exposed datasets on the open and deep web, scouring open S3 buckets, public Github repositories, and unsecured RSync and FTP servers. Our data leak discovery engine continuously searches for keyword lists provided by our customers. Additionally, it is continually refined by our team of analysts, using the expertise and techniques gleaned from years of breach research. The UpGuard methodology is continuously refined based on the actual data breaches we have discovered and reported to the world in the New York Times, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Forbes, and TechCrunch.

Both Prevalent and UpGuard invest heavily in community support and try to make it as easy as possible for customers and prospects to get up to speed, reduce their operational overhead, and decide on which tool is right for them.

Both have their own blog that is a useful sources of information for cybersecurity awareness training and vendor risk management best practices. However, only UpGuard publishes robust data breach and data leak research.

• Prevalent: 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.

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.

The release model for Prevalent is unknown.

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

Conversely. Prevalent does not make its pricing publically available. High costs can exclude small to medium-sized businesses and even limit large organizations to managing only their most at-risk vendors.

• Prevalent: Public pricing information is not available.‍
• 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.

While Prevalent and UpGuard have their platforms, you may want to access resources in a different platform or consolidate statistics into a proprietary centralized dashboard.

In this situation, an API can help. The good news is each provides a standard API.  

APIs are great if you have access to technical talent, but not all vendor risk management teams do. Without developers, you're more reliant on the company's partner ecosystem and third-party integrations.

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

The trust of prestigious companies is a powerful indicator of the effectiveness of a solution, Both UpGuard and Prevalent have an impressive customer base trusting each solution's vendor risk management capabilities.

• Prevalent: Customers include Iron Mountain, Pfizer, London Stock Exchange, Herbert Smith Freehills, and Ford.
• UpGuard: Customers include the New York Stock Exchange (ICE), Pagerduty, TDK, IAG, and Tech Mahindra. 

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."

Let's take a look at how Prevalent 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.