Whistic vs UpGuard: 2023 Comparison and Review

The usability and design of a product play a large part in how quickly you can get up to speed and start getting your money's worth.

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

• Whistic: Interface is easy to understand, 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.

Whistic relies on point-in-time risk assessment to determine enterprise risk and primarily focuses on the results of standardized questionnaires.

The problem, however, with a point-in-time risk management model is that doesn't account for security risks emerging between risk assessments, creating an ever-present lag between collected data and actual risk exposure. Because remediation efforts are then based on outdated attack surface data, an organization remains at high risk of suffering a breach despite the relentless efforts of internal security teams.  

In contrast, UpGuard augments standardized security questionnaires with data-driven, instantaneous security ratings to provide organizations with the most up-to-date data on the state of their attack surface at any time.

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.

Additionally, both platforms offer the ability to create a public security profile to streamline risk assessments with external partners.

• Whistic: Relies on point-in-time risk assessments that can become outdated until the next assessment process.‍
• UpGuard: Combines industry-leading risk assessments with a proprietary security rating solution for always up-to-date coverage of third-party risk exposure.

Whistic vs. UpGuard: Risk Assessment Methodology

Whistic is focused on reducing the amount of time spent on conducting vendor risk assessments. This is primarily achieved by making it possible to share security documentation with existing and prospective partners through public profiles. 

By making commonly requested security information readily available to authorized parties, the data collection phase of the risk assessment process - arguably one of the most time-consuming, is significantly reduced.

Like Whistic, UpGuard also offers a public profile feature allowing organizations to easily share security information commonly requested during risk assessments. In addition, UpGuard also offers the option of sharing your organization's security rating - a feature that makes it possible to use your exemplary cybersecurity posture to win new business relationships.

Both Whisitc and UpGuard offer security questionnaires based on popular cyber frameworks and regulations. UpGuard, however, also offers a customizable questionnaire builder, allowing you to create bespoke questionnaires for highly-targeted security risk queries.

• Whistic: Offers the ability to share security information in a public profile to expedite the risk assessment process. However, because the solution operates on a point-in-time assessment model, this data quickly becomes outdated. Also offers security questionnaires based on popular cyber frameworks and regulations.
• UpGuard: Also offers a shared profile feature with the option of also sharing risk ratings to encourage new business relationships. Also offers security questionnaires based on popular cyber frameworks and regulations, with the addition of a customizable questionnaire builder for highly targeted security queries.

Whistic 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.

As Whistic relies on manual point-in-time risk assessment, it may not be capable of addressing new security risks arising from such third-party relationships. 

• Whistic: 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.‍
• 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, remediation and protection suggestions are provided. Additionally, we have a library of pre-built questionnaires that can be sent and managed with the UpGuard platform including a pandemic (e.g. coronavirus), ISO 27001, PCI DSS, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, CCPA, and Modern Slavery questionnaires.

This is where the difference between Whistic and UpGuard becomes most obvious. Whistic relies on a point-in-time risk assessment model, which cannot account for security risks emerging between assessments. As a result, there's a perpetual lag between risk assessment results and the actual state of an organization's attack surface, making it very difficult to ever completely remove the threat of a data breach.

UpGuard, on the other hand, combines security ratings with risk assessments to offer an always up-to-date reflection of an organization's attack surface. This combination keeps security teams continuously informed of their organization's real-time risk of suffering a data breach, making true data breach resilience a real possibility.

• Whistic: 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.
• ‍UpGuard: Supports the complete Vendor Risk Management lifecycle with multiple features, including security ratings, third-party data leak detection, security questionnaire management, domain hijacking prevention, attack surface monitoring, compromised credential detection, etc.

Whistic and UpGuard both invest in their community and try to make it as easy as possible for customers and prospects to get up to speed, reduce operational overhead, and decide on the right product for them.

Each company has a cybersecurity blog, but UpGuard's blog content is reviewed by industry experts to verify trustworthiness. UpGuard's VRM blog content has also been regarded as more in-depth and helpful. In addition to its VRM blog, UpGuard regularly hosts a virtual summit to keep the global cybersecurity community updated with the latest VRM developments.

• Whistic: 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 Whistic is unknown.

Whistic is more expensive than UpGuard, which can exclude small to medium-sized businesses and even limit large organizations to managing only their most at-risk vendors.

Both products offer professional services to help you determine your needs and can create custom questionnaires.

• Whistic: Reported to start at $25,000 and is based on the number of vendors managed in the platform or the number of security questionnaires to which you're responding.‍
• 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, let us know via sales@upguard.com.

While both services have their own platforms, customers may want to access the resources on a different platform or consolidate reporting into a centralized dashboard.

The good news is both services offer standard APIs facilitating integrations with other internal software solutions.

APIs are useful for technical staff, but not all vendor risk management teams have access to developers. This is why standard third-party integrations are an important part of decision-making.  

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

The best proof comes from each solution's customers. Whistic and UpGuard both have impressive customer lists.

• Whistic: Customers include Betterment, Invision, Airbnb, Zynga, and Robinhood.
• UpGuard: Customers include the New York Stock Exchange (ICE), Pagerduty, TDK, IAG, Tech Mahindra, and many more.

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."

Finally, here's a comparison of the security ratings for UpGuard and Whistic when assessed on the UpGuard 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 transparency 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 and you can 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: While 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, we provide reasonable notice and explanation to our customers about how their security rating may be impacted.
• Independence: No commercial agreement or lack thereof, gives an organization the ability to improve its security rating without improving their security posture.
• Confidentiality: Any information disclosed to UpGuard during the course of 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.