Recorded Future vs UpGuard Product Overview

Recorded Future is a threat intelligence platform that uses machine learning and natural language processes AI intelligence to collect data from sources including open source, dark web, technical sources, and original research.

The platform’s Security Intelligence Graph provides brand, threat, third-party, SecOps, vulnerability, and geopolitical intelligence. It models relevant security information, collected from billions of entities in real-time. Their team of analysts also independently collect data to complement their AI findings.

UpGuard is a cybersecurity platform that helps global organizations prevent data breaches, monitor third-party vendors, and improve their security posture. 

UpGuard proactively identifies security exposures using proprietary security ratings, data leak detection capabilities, and remediation workflows. The platform processes over 800 billion data points each day to provide real-time insights.

Recorded Future: Continuously monitors 150,000+ companies.

UpGuard: Continuously monitors  2,000,000+ organizations.

The usability, design, and learning curve of a product can play a large role in deciding which solution is right for you. The faster you and your team can get up to speed, the faster you can get your money's worth. 

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

Recorded Future: Combines machine analytics with human expertise to produce intelligence for risk mitigation. Recorded Future’s platform categories, links, and analyses this intelligence in real-time to provide clear insights for users via its Security Intelligence Graph.

The platform’s Intelligence Cards™ provide real-time insights on each entity available in the Intelligence Graph, including information like the risk score, further information on identified risks, in-house research, and more.

UpGuard: UpGuard's integrated cyber risk platform combines security ratings, security assessment questionnaires, and threat intelligence capabilities to give businesses a full and comprehensive view of their risk surface.

UpGuard provides a high-level summation of risk with the ability to drill down into precise technical details. Risks are prioritized based on in-house research, with the provision of further remediation and protection suggestions, where possible. The platform has a library of pre-built vendor questionnaires that can be sent and managed via the platform. Read our full guide on the top security questionnaires here.

Recorded Future vs. UpGuard: Scope

Most organizations deal with a large inventory of vendors which makes vendor risk management an increasingly difficult feat. You need a wide coverage of third-party organizations to gain visibility over who has access to your sensitive data and to enact the right strategies to improve your security posture.

Recorded Future: Continuously monitors 150,000+ companies.

UpGuard: Continuously monitors 2,000,000+ organizations.

Keeping informed on product updates and the latest cyber security developments is paramount, with new vulnerabilities and 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 Recorded Future and UpGuard offer comprehensive online resources to educate and inform customers.

Recorded Future: The Recorded Future Podcast deep dives into cyber threat intelligence and provides industry insights. The Recorded Future Blog covers Intelligence analysis, industry perspectives, product updates, and company news.

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. 

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.

Recorded Future: The frequency of Recorded Future’s updates is not stated on the website.

UpGuard: UpGuard has adopted DevOps principles internally to develop, test, and release software continuously, ensuring fast, consistent, and safe releases. UpGuard has a regular fortnightly release rate, with all features, changes, and improvements listed under UpGuard Release Notes. 

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.

Recorded Future: Pricing for Recorded Future’s platform is not available on the website. Online product reviews suggest that it's priced higher than some competitors.

UpGuard: UpGuard has a transparent pricing model which you can view here. UpGuard pricing starts at $5,249/year and scales with your company. If you have any questions, please email sales@upguard.com.

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. 

Both Recorded Future and UpGuard offer APIs.

Recorded Future: Offers RESTful APIs to allow integration to Recorded Future’s automated intelligence.

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

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 Recorded Future and UpGuard offer integrations into other platforms.

Recorded Future: Integrates with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM); Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR); endpoint security (EDR); incident response systems; vulnerability management tools, like AWS, Splunk, ServiceNow, Slack, 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. 

Recorded Future: Major customers include Accenture, DuPont, Fujitsu, GAP, and McAfee.

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UpGuard: Customers include the New York Stock Exchange (ICE), Morningstar, Bill.com, IAG, PagerDuty, and Hopin. Read customer case studies here and Gartner reviews here.

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

A solution's ability to prevent data breaches and other cyber attacks should be front of mind when choosing a security platform. 

Recorded Future and UpGuard both detect potential threats using different sources.

Recorded Future: The Recorded Future Intelligence Platform delivers real-time insights from open source, dark web, technical sources, and original research. Users can access these insights via the Security Intelligence Graph to proactively mitigate identified risks.

UpGuard: As UpGuard checks for misconfigurations across an organization’s Internet footprint, many important breach vectors are covered, including phishing, ransomware susceptibility (like WannaCry), man-in-the-middle attacks, DNSSEC, vulnerabilities, email spoofing, domain hijacking, and DNS issues. Data leaks are automatically surfaced by the platform for security teams to assess and close before they become breaches.

Recorded Future’s risk scoring methodology uses a combination of machine-learning techniques and in-house research. The platform takes into account potential risks, such as company mentions on the dark web, domain abuse, incident reports, leaded credentials, infrastructure abuse, and web application security to calculate risk scores.  

The UpGuard platform generates security ratings through proprietary algorithms that take in and analyze trusted commercial and open-source data sets to non-intrusively collect data that can quantitatively evaluate cybersecurity risk. Ratings are based on the analysis of 70+ vectors including email spoofing and phishing risk, vulnerabilities, malware susceptibility, network security, results of intelligent security questionnaires, exposure to known data breaches and data leaks, and more.

Recorded Future: Provides a score between 0-100 along with a level of criticality, labeled as Informational (5-24), Moderate (25-64), or High (65-99).

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. You can request your free security rating by clicking here.