PrevalentvsWhisticUpGuard

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

Compare the capabilities and features of Prevalent 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?

Prevalent vs Whistic
Prevalent 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 risk rating between 0 and 100 but unknown number of companies covered.
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 each point-in-time vendor assessment, as well as cybersecurity risk ratings.
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 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.
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.
Offers a company and product blog.
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.
Integrates with ServiceNow.
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.
Pricing not available on the website.
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.
Customers include Iron Mountain, Pfizer, London Stock Exchange, Herbert Smith Freehills, and Ford.
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 21 reviews.
4.5, based on 46 reviews.
Security rating
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950

Prevalent vs Whistic product overview

Prevalent vs UpGuard product overview

Learn more about the products and how they compare.

The news cycle is full of third-party data breaches and data leaks. And for a good reason, they often expose the protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII) of thousands or even hundreds of millions of people.

Cyber attacks and misconfiguration are more common than ever before. Organizations need to invest in tools to prevent data breaches and reduce cybersecurity risk: particularly risks that involve third and fourth-parties.

Third-party data breaches put significant strain on organizations' resources, with recent estimates of the average cost of a third-party data breach as high as $4.29 million.

It's safe to say vendor risk management (VRM) has become a top priority for CISOs and other members of senior management, even at the Board level. Beyond financial costs, breaches also cause significant regulatory and reputational impact, driven by the introduction of general data protection laws.

In the United States, California has introduced CCPA, Florida has introduced FIPA, and New York has launched the SHIELD Act.

Every state, territory, and country wants to protect the PII and PHI of its constituents. The European Union's GDPR has been the driver, and countries like Brazil with LGPD are following the EU's lead by introducing their general data protection laws.

The other trend to consider is these laws have broadened the scope of what sensitive data is. Small security incidents are becoming reportable data breaches. Data breach notification laws are increasing the impact of poor cybersecurity risk management.

Outside of these macro trends, InfoSec and security teams have more than ever before. Not only must you develop vendor management programs, manage security postures, and develop information security policies. You now need to translate vendor risk assessments, standardized questionnaires, and self-assessments into terms non-technical stakeholders can understand.  

The good news for many security professionals is there is a load of tools that can help. A quick Google search will produce thousands of results, and the issue is deciding on which ones to assess.  

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

Prevalent Overview

Prevalent is a Phoenix-based company that enables you to reveal and reduce vendor risk with its 360-degree third-party risk management platform.

Prevalent's cybersecurity risk rating solution helps organizations manage and monitor the security threats and risks associated with third and fourth-party vendors.

Third-party risk management, vendor risk management, data privacy, internal IT & cybersecurity assessment, and vendors use their tools.

Prevalent Interface
Prevalent UI. Source: prevalent.net

Whistic Overview

Whistic, Inc 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.

The Whistic platform helps customers conduct and respond to security reviews in a single platform.

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 evaluate 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

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

  • Prevalent: Risks detailed on each point-in-time vendor assessment, as well as cybersecurity risk ratings.
  • Whistic: Surfacing risks rely on point-in-time vendor assessments, which means new threats can go unidentified until the next assessment process. Remediation requests are not available. Their risk assessments align with the VSA questionnaire, The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA)'s 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, we provide remediation and protection suggestions. 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

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.

In contrast, Whistic relies on point-in-time risk assessment of third-party vendors to determine enterprise risk and primarily focuses on the results of vendor security assessments.

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

As you know, it can be hard to get risk assessments completed by time-poor vendors, and when they do, the results can be subjective and are rendered inaccurate over time as new security issues emerge.

Risk assessments do provide valuable information that can be missed by security ratings, which is why a combined approach is best.

For reference, security ratings provide a data-driven, instantaneous, and always up-to-date measurement of an organization's external security posture. When paired with risk assessments, they offer a comprehensive overview of an organization's internal and external security performance.  

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.

And 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).

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

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

Prevalent vs. Whistic: 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.

In contrast, Whistic focuses on conducting and responding to security reviews. Whistic helps 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.

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 and Whistic, has introduced a way for customers to save time and money by publishing completed security assessments and supporting documentation to the platform.

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

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

Prevalent vs. Whistic: Scope

Even small vendors can lead to significant data breaches. Just look at Target's HVAC vendor that eventually led to the exposure of credit card and personal data on more than 110 million consumers.

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

Predictive capabilities

The real reason we invest in security tools is to prevent cyber attacks from happening, which is why a solution's ability to predict and to avoid data breaches and cyber threats is the most important thing.

Prevalent, Whistic, and UpGuard genuinely differ in predictive capabilities.

  • 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.
  • Whistic: Relies on risk assessments, which can quickly become out of date as attackers discover new zero-day exploits and companies deploy new IT infrastructure. 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.
  • 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.

Community Support

Prevalent, Whistic, and UpGuard all 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.

Each company has its blog that is a useful source of information for cybersecurity awareness training and vendor risk management best practices. Only UpGuard has published robust data breach and data leak research.

Release rate

Information technology is in constant flux, so the information security controls designed to protect it need to adapt to keep up with it, and this is why vendor risk management best practices are always changing.

New vulnerabilities are added to CVE every day, and attackers find new zero-day exploits that make traditional security controls invalid.

CVE adds new vulnerabilities daily, attackers find new ways to exploit programming errors, and security controls become invalid regularly.

Your security tools need to be able to incorporate further information for you to be able to rely on them.  

UpGuard has adopted DevOps principles internally to develop, test, and release software continuously, ensuring fast, consistent, and thoroughly tested releases.

Pricing & Support

The third-party risk management software industry is expensive. Vendors often use opaque pricing policies designed to take power away from the purchaser.

With that said, most vendor risk solutions will be priced on a per vendor, per year basis except for fixed-price, one-off reports.

We weren't able to find any publicly available pricing on Prevalent. Whistic's pricing appears to start at $25,000, so if you're a small company, you may not be able to afford what seems to be an enterprise pricing strategy.

  • Prevalent: Public pricing information is not available.
  • Whistic: Reported to start at $25,000 and based on the number of vendors managed in the platform or the number of security questionnaires you're responding to.
  • 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 Prevalent, Whistic, 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.  

Third-party integrations

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.
  • Whistic: Integrates with RiskRecon, Active Directory, Okta, and OneLogin.
  • UpGuard: Integrates with GRC platforms, ticketing systems like ServiceNow, and more.

Customers

Often the proof comes from the customer. Prevalent, Whistic, and UpGuard all have impressive customer lists, and none are more impressive than the other.

  • Prevalent: Customers include Iron Mountain, Pfizer, London Stock Exchange, Herbert Smith Freehills, and Ford.
  • 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 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 Prevalent, Whistic, and UpGuard compare when assessed by UpGuard's platform on July 28, 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 openness 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. You can also 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: 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. When they do, we provide reasonable notice and explanation to our customers about the impact on their security rating.
  • Independence: No commercial agreement or lack thereof, gives an organization the ability to improve its security rating without enhancing their security posture.
  • 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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