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RiskReconvsRecorded FutureUpGuard

Compare the capabilities and features of RiskRecon and Recorded Future.
Also, see how they stack up against UpGuard.

Compare the capabilities and features of RiskRecon and UpGuard. See which solution performs best across a range of categories.

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Did you know UpGuard was voted #1 on G2 and has been for over two years?

RiskRecon vs Recorded Future
RiskRecon vs UpGuard

See how they compare side-by-side.
UpGuard logo

RiskRecon

Recorded Future

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.
RiskRecon specializes in external security monitoring and asset attribution with strong accuracy and strong cloud scanning capabilities, which are particularly valuable for IT-centric organizations. Owned by Mastercard, RiskRecon has stable financial backing and solid scanning accuracy. However, it remains primarily focused on external scan strengths and takes a partnership-first approach to TPRM workflows.
Continuously monitors 150,000+ companies.
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.
RiskRecon provides a notably accurate external scanning solution and offers practical remediation guidance. It even prioritizes vulnerabilities by asset value for IT teams.
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.
RiskRecon takes a partnership and integration-first approach to vendor assessment workflows. This necessitates the adoption of an additional solution provider to achieve an optimal assessment experience, as supported by the RiskRecon platform.
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.
RiskRecon is focused on delivering clear, actionable findings for IT and SecOps-centric security teams with a clean interface for surfacing and remediating risks. While its limited scope of purely external scan data can simplify usage, complications can quickly arise for those integrating RiskRecon with a partner provider for assessment workflows.
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.
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.
RiskRecon is well regarded for accurate asset attribution, resulting in reliable and actionable insights.
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.
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.
RiskRecon focuses on external scanning to calculate vendor risk and relies on partner integrations to offer risk assessment workflows, resulting in additional costs.
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.
RiskRecon focuses on high-accuracy external scanning and asset discovery, offering precise identification of vulnerabilities.
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.
Provides A-F ratings with a focus on asset-specific value. Accuracy is high due to minimal false positives, but it remains narrower, reflecting only external posture without factoring in questionnaires or breach penalties.
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.
RiskRecon offers stable support with detailed product documentation and guides available.
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.
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.
It primarily automates external scanning and asset discovery, generating action plans and prioritized remediations. However, it lacks built-in automation for the end-to-end assessment cycle, relying on integrations or manual processes.
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.
Risk Recon uses AI to primarily support the detection of potential risks and vulnerabilities in supplier security postures. However, its use of AI to support vendor assessments highly depends on capabilities made available by partner providers.
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.
RiskRecon features basic integration options for exporting findings and connecting with ticketing systems or GRC solutions. Offers integrations with GRC platforms, such as RSA Archer, Sigma Ratings, Whistic, and more.
Offers RESTful APIs to allow integration to Recorded Future’s automated intelligence. 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
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.
Public pricing is not available. Does not publically offer a free trial.
Pricing not available on the website.
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 Informatica, Tufts Health Plan, the University of San Francisco, and Sentara.
Major customers include Accenture, DuPont, Fujitsu, GAP, and McAfee.
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 2 reviews.
4.6, based on 127 reviews.
Security rating
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950
Overview
Usability & Learning Curve
Capabilities
Community Support
Release Rate
Pricing & Support
API & Extensibility
Third-Party Integrations
Customers

RiskRecon vs Recorded Future product overview

RiskRecon vs UpGuard product overview

Learn more about the products and how they compare.

As outsourcing significant business functions is now common practice for most organizations, major third-party data breaches are rapidly taking over news headlines.

Ponemon Institute and IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report found the average cost of a breach has increased from $370,000 to $4.35 million, with third-party involvement listed as one of the main reasons. An eSentire survey from the same year highlights that 44% of firms surveyed have experienced a significant data breach caused by a third-party vendor.

With Gartner reporting 60% of organizations as having 1000+ third-party relationships, effectively managing the cybersecurity risks they create and practicing vendor due diligence proves increasingly difficult.

Information security teams often also rely on manual risk reporting methods which are time and labor-intensive. Many organizations are now turning to automated third-party risk management (TPRM) solutions that automate data breach detection capabilities, provide real-time insights, and streamline remediation workflows.

We assess three TPRM solutions, RiskRecon, Recorded Future, and UpGuard, to help you make an informed decision before investing in the right solution for your needs.

RiskRecon Overview

RiskRecon is headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT, with a presence in Boston, MA, and representatives around the world. RiskRecon enables users to gain deep, risk-contextualized insight into the cybersecurity risk performance of all third parties by continuously monitoring across 11 security domains and 41 security criteria.

The platform can be used for third-party risk management, enterprise risk management, and mergers & acquisitions.

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Riskrecon UI
Riskrecon UI. Source: riskrecon.com

Recorded Future Overview

Recorded Future is a US-based threat intelligence platform that collects digital threat intelligence data from the Internet including open source, dark web, technical sources, and original research.

Recorded Future’s platform uses machine learning and natural language process AI to deliver accessible intelligence insights across six risk categories: brand, threat, third-party, SecOps, vulnerability, and geopolitical.

Recorded Future UI
Recorded Future UI. Source: recordedfuture.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. 
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UpGuard’s platform uses proprietary security ratings, data leak detection capabilities, and remediation workflows to proactively identify security exposures.
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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

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

  • ‍RiskRecon: Cloud-based platform offers minimal need for installation. Workflow requires time to master.
  • Recorded Future: Interface is easy to read. Workflow is intuitive to new users but still requires time to master.‍
  • 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

RiskRecon, Recorded Future, and UpGuard help organizations stay informed about their vendors’ information security risks as part of third-party risk management (TPRM) and vendor due diligence programs.

  • ‍RiskRecon: Offers cybersecurity ratings and deep reporting capabilities to help businesses surface and manage cyber risks.
  • ‍Recorded Future: Continuously monitors 150,000+ companies.‍
  • UpGuard: Offers real-time visibility into any third-party vendor’s risk posture & security rating along with total automation for managing vendor due diligence and remediation programs.

Predictive capabilities

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 before they happen should be front of mind when choosing a security platform.

‍RiskRecon: Primarily focuses on security risk ratings as a third-party risk mitigation strategy.

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: UpGuard scans the digital footprints of organizations and their vendors to ensure all breach vectors are covered and secured. Threats such as phishing, ransomware, MitM attacks, vulnerabilities, email spoofing, typosquatted domains, network security, DNS issues, and more are part of 70+ attack vectors that are monitored consistently. In addition, UpGuard scans millions of pages daily to quickly detect data leaks so organizations can secure their data exposures.

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.

RiskRecon, Recorded Future, and UpGuard offer comprehensive online resources to educate and inform customers.

‍RiskRecon: Offers a customer user academy, consistently updated company blog, coverage of critical global security events, and a regular webinar schedule for sharing best practices.

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. 

Keeping customers and the cybersecurity community informed on the latest cyber security developments is paramount, with new vulnerabilities and threats emerging daily. 

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.

  • ‍RiskRecon: RiskRecon does not appear to publicly share regular release rates, roadmaps, or documentation for solution updates.
  • 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 release rate every two weeks, with all features, changes, and improvements listed under UpGuard Release Notes.

Pricing & 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.

  • ‍RiskRecon: Public pricing information is not available. Pricing is reported to start at $10,000 and increases based on the number of vendors monitored.
  • 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.‍

API & Extensibility

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.  

RiskRecon, Recorded Future, and UpGuard offer APIs.

  • ‍RiskRecon: Offers a standard API to create extensibility for RiskRecon cybersecurity ratings.
  • 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.

Third-party integrations

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.

RiskRecon, Recorded Future, and UpGuard offer integrations into other platforms.

  • ‍RiskRecon: Offers integrations with GRC platforms such as RSA Archer, Sigma Ratings, Whistic, and more.

Customers

  • ‍RiskRecon: Customers include Informatica, Tufts Health Plan, University of San Francisco, and Sentara.
  • Recorded Future: Major customers include Accenture, DuPont, Fujitsu, GAP, and McAfee.‍
  • UpGuard: Major customers include Accenture, New York Stock Exchange, Tech Mahindra, IAG, Hopin, NSW Government, and Morningstar.

Security rating

  • ‍RiskRecon: Distils its assessment criteria into a simple score from 0-10 with letter breakdowns from A-F for corresponding ranges of scores.
  • 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).‍

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