Black Kite: Top Competitors, Alternatives and Reviews
A side-by-side comparison of Black Kite with its main competitors. Easily compare performance across multiple categories and understand what the market is saying with independent reviews.
A side-by-side comparison of Black Kite with its main competitors. Easily compare performance across multiple categories and understand what the market is saying with independent reviews.
UpGuard manages cyber risk everywhere it lives: your vendors, your internet-facing attack surface, and your workforce. You get one platform that connects all three risk areas instead of separate tools and spreadsheets stitched together. A risk in one surfaces in the others automatically. A breached vendor flags your own exposure. A leaked employee credential links straight to the account and the vendor involved. AI handles the repetitive work of triaging alerts, reviewing vendor evidence, and completing questionnaires. That means lean security teams can run programs that would otherwise need much bigger teams. UpGuard fits mid-market teams, deploys quickly, and slots in without replacing what you already have.
Black Kite is a third-party cyber risk management platform emphasizing external risk visibility, financial impact modeling, and compliance automation. Black Kite uses non-intrusive OSINT-based scans to discover assets and vulnerabilities, presenting findings as easy-to-read letter grades. However, by excluding critical TPRM workflows, Black Kite's potential for effective third-party risk management is significantly limited.
SecurityScorecard is a cybersecurity ratings platform that monitors external-facing vendor networks. It aggregates risk signals from various sources to produce vendor security ratings. SecurityScorecard integrates with SIEM and GRC tools and provides insights that mitigate supply chain attacks. However, risk assessment workflows are managed separately via the Atlas module, which can lead to fragmented processes that could delay vendor assessment delivery and impact program efficiency.
Bitsight is a cybersecurity ratings platform that continuously monitors organizational and vendor security postures. It collects and analyzes data from multiple sources—including botnet and malware intelligence—to offer evidence-based risk insights. Bitsight also integrates with GRC and TPRM workflows, allowing teams to proactively mitigate threats across their extended supply chain. However, Bitsight's pricing structure can complicate scalability.
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.
Key strengths
UpGuard unifies vendor, attack surface, and workforce risk in one console. Customers describe finally seeing the whole picture, rather than paying for three tools that each cover only part of it. UpGuard also surfaces exposures that ratings tools and scanners miss, without the multi-week delay of a typical scan cycle. Lean teams can run the entire program without expanding headcount or adding a managed service.
Black Kite takes a diverse approach to cyber risk quantification with a methodology heavily based on the Open FAIR™ standard. This allows Black Kite to derive their varying cyber risk insights from a consistent quantification base.
SecurityScorecard covers an extensive range of cyber intelligence, drawing from open, proprietary, and dark web sources to identify vendor security risks and assess IP reputation risks. SecurityScorecard's well-known A-F letter grade system makes it approachable for executives and large enterprises.
In addition to risk monitoring, Bitsight employs analytical forecasting to estimate future security trajectories. It integrates with platforms like ServiceNow, JIRA, and PowerBI to suit more advanced workflows. This network of partnerships, coupled with strong institutional acceptance, reinforces Bitsight's profile with complex organizations.
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 focuses on managing live, connected risk, not heavy, standalone compliance software. Full governance features, including policy and controls management, arrive later this year. Teams that need a mature governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) system of record today can run UpGuard alongside one for now. UpGuard also doesn’t translate risk into dollar figures. If financial risk quantification is a must-have, factor that into your evaluation.
Black Kite does not offer vendor questionnaires or risk assessments as part of their solution offerings. While Black Kite's quantification-forward approach may be sufficient for some, customers with requirements for vendor security reviews and assurance documents for compliance needs will likely require an additional solution for this capability.
SecurityScorecard's staggered scan cycles disrupts real-time vendor security posture visibility. IP attribution issues are also cited as common scanning problems. Additionally, vendor monitoring and risk assessments are licensed separately, which may increase purchasing complexity and limit coverage of end-to-end visibility of supply chain vendors.
Bitsight's pricing structures can quickly escalate operational expenses for TPRM programs and create complicated decisions regarding the extent of risk visibility that can be deployed for vendors within a supply chain. Customers additionally cite attribution challenges for risks and assets within shared IP and cloud environments, which require support request submissions to address. Monitoring and assessment capabilities are also separately licensed, which may increase purchasing complexity and limit end-to-end coverage to several vendors within supply chains.
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
Teams deploy quickly and get up and running without an extended onboarding period. New employees can learn the interface without lengthy training. A single console consolidates workflows that would otherwise require multiple tools, reducing the ongoing burden of learning and maintaining separate systems. Operating the platform doesn’t require a professional services engagement.
Black Kite's interface is designed around letter-grade dashboards and detailed risk findings for its range of quantification options offered. However, insights for each focused rating are not clearly segmented by audience and often bleed across the entire platform. This can make the relevance of platform insights less consistent for specialized users, even within teams.
SecurityScorecard's dashboards and clear A-F grading help non-technical stakeholders quickly grasp vendor risk exposure. However, some users report multiple drill-down steps required to reach specific risk insights, which could lengthen new user learning curves.
Bitsight is generally intuitive for professionals familiar with security ratings, with an interface offering clear vendor risk summaries. However, some advanced features require more expertise and time to leverage effectively, particularly when deploying Bitsight's separate modules for monitoring and risk assessments.
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.
Cyber risk data accuracy
UpGuard’s data remains current. Vendor postures refresh continuously, and users can initiate a scan on demand instead of waiting for a fixed cycle. UpGuard attributes findings accurately, so teams do not spend weeks correcting assets assigned to the wrong company, a common issue with ratings tools. Threat Monitoring scans the open, deep, and dark web, along with social media, for leaked data, exposed credentials, and brand impersonation. AI filters out noise so the alerts that reach your team are worth acting on.
The platform gathers data from a large set of OSINT feeds and uses standards-based scoring (MITRE, NIST, Open FAIR™) to reduce false positives. However, some users note occasional duplication or outdated issues that require manual dispute or re-validation.
SecurityScorecard offers extensive data collection across public-facing and dark web sources, though users occasionally report inaccurate attribution or misflagged IPs requiring support.
Bitsight is widely recognized for malware and botnet reporting, though attribution to hosting providers or shared IP ranges can lead to accuracy challenges requiring correction support.
RiskRecon is well regarded for accurate asset attribution, resulting in reliable and actionable insights.
Vendor risk management features
UpGuard runs the complete third-party risk management (TPRM) process in one platform: onboarding, assessing, remediating, monitoring, and reporting on vendors. Each vendor’s live external exposure and any linked leaked credentials appear directly within the vendor program, so teams can act on verified risk instead of relying on paperwork. AI-powered security questionnaires read vendor evidence and complete assessments automatically, cutting completion time by up to 95%. Instant risk assessments return a point-in-time report in under a minute, mapped to frameworks like ISO 27001 and NIST CSF 2.0.
Although Black Kite offers document analysis features, the platform can be seen as primarily geared toward detecting and quantifying cyber risks rather than offering fully integrated VRM workflows.
SecurityScorecard's VRM workflow requires a separate module named Atlas for security questionnaire and risk assessment processes. This can introduce complexity into this process.
Bitsight supports third-party monitoring and risk workflows, including vendor onboarding, but relies on a separately licensed module for vendor risk assessments and workflows.
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 continuously monitors your internet-facing footprint. It maps assets, flags exposures such as misconfigurations, expired certificates, and open ports, and ranks remediation priorities. The UpGuard platform also detects typosquatting and lookalike domains set up to impersonate your brand before they’re used for phishing. Because attack surface monitoring runs alongside vendor and workforce risk, an exposed asset or leaked credential automatically links to the person and vendor involved. This gives teams visibility into both external exposure and vendor risk in a single view.
Black Kite uses OSINT data spanning domain records, subdomains, SSL certificates, and more to deliver visibility into a vendor's external footprint.
SecurityScorecard offers views into an organization's attack surface by leveraging IP scanning and attribution of identified domains and assets. The platform's approach helps users identify potential weaknesses in their digital footprint that an attacker might exploit.
Bitsight's External Attack Surface Management module is designed to discover hidden assets, provide detailed digital asset insights, and detect vulnerabilities such as unsupported product versions.
RiskRecon focuses on high-accuracy external scanning and asset discovery, offering precise identification of vulnerabilities.
Customer support
UpGuard supports every customer across all plan tiers, from the smallest plan to the largest. Support teams assist with both technical setup and larger program decisions. Customers frequently cite responsive, hands-on support as a reason they continue with UpGuard.
Black Kite's users report mixed support experiences: some find support teams responsive with weekly check-ins, while others cite slower resolution times and inconsistent follow-up on false positives and duplicate findings.
Generally supportive for enterprise levels, with a community of free users. However, customers at lower licensing tiers report slower responses and less personalized support.
Bitsight provides reputable support, particularly for large enterprises with dedicated account teams. Smaller organizations may experience less responsiveness and find self-service documentation limited.
RiskRecon offers stable support with detailed product documentation and guides available.
Workflow automation
Risk Automations turns a risk signal into action across the platform, with no code and no engineering ticket. On the vendor side, it automates onboarding from questionnaire data, triages vendor score drops, schedules recurring vendor reports, and opens remediation tickets in ServiceNow or Jira. On the threat side, a Breach Risk detection can trigger a workflow that alerts Teams or Slack and runs a system-level fix, like blocking a malicious IP or forcing a credential reset. This is the difference between a tool that reports on risk and one that resolves it.
Black Kite's Bridge™ module lets users automate vendor outreach and gather risk data during major security events, such as global-scale data breaches.
SecurityScorecard's workflow automation features let users create rule-based triggers that automatically respond to security events, such as score drops, new high-severity issues, or breaches. Users can choose from a range of automated response actions, including alert activation, report sharing, and reassigning scorecards for further review
Bitsight integrates with SOAR platforms, allowing users to automate responses to newly discovered risks. However, advanced automation requirements, such as those addressing Vendor Risk Management workflows, require add-on services or third-party tools for complete automation.
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 performs specific, defined tasks, rather than vague “AI-powered” work. The AI Threat Analyst sorts and scores incoming threats across your attack surface, the dark web, and social media. It clears out approximately 60% of alerts as noise, so your team only reviews what matters. The same triage logic extends to vendor and workforce signals as well. Every AI result carries a citation back to the source, so your team can verify it before acting.
Black Kite offers an AI-based document scanner aimed at reducing manual questionnaire reviews and accelerating compliance mapping of vendor security postures. However, connectivity to workflows supporting other assessment operations (such as requesting further evidence via questionnaires or other documentation) is not supported without integrating with a separately deployed TPRM solution.
SecurityScorecard offers a branded AI capability named HEID. HEID’s operational workflows are primarily geared toward SecurityScoreCard's MAX managed service offering, with claims that AI can generate automated remediation and questionnaire requests as risks arise. SecurityScorecard claims that HEID AI is available as a backend capability for customers with non-service plans, and it is used in its algorithms for risk scoring and classification of issue criticality.
Bitsight offers a branded AI capability named Groma. Groma is primarily built to support improved risk scoring, identification and attribution of digital assets, and enhanced criticality classification of risk findings. Bitsight is additionally investing in AI development for TPRM workflows and threat detection capabilities. However, whether this will add to their Groma-branded capability or be released as integrated, separate offerings is unclear.
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
A well-documented REST API and webhooks let teams pull risk data into their own tools and trigger actions programmatically, without waiting on engineering support. For no-code work, Risk Automations adds more than 100 native integrations, including Jira, ServiceNow, Microsoft Entra, Slack, and Cloudflare. A Universal API Connector Node extends its reach to any open API.
While no exhaustive list of native integrations is publicly available, Black Kite generally supports exporting scan results to external systems.
SecurityScoreCard offers an extensive marketplace of integrations with security, GRC, and workflow platforms. However, integrations tend to primarily focus on score visibility in other platforms rather than workflow extensibility. Offers integrations with several third-party platforms, such as RSA Archer, ServiceNow, and more.
Bitsight integrates with popular platforms like ServiceNow and Splunk, offering APIs for custom reporting and automation. Offers integrations with RSA Archer GRC, CyberGRX, OneTrust Vendorpedia, ProcessUnity, MetricStream, and more.
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.
Purchasing & licensing transparency
UpGuard publishes its pricing rather than hiding it behind a sales call. A free tier lets teams monitor up to five vendors and use Trust Exchange, UpGuard’s AI-powered questionnaire tool, at no cost. Paid Vendor Risk plans start at USD 1,750 per month, billed annually. Teams can start with one product and add others as they scale. One license covers both monitoring and assessments, so pricing doesn’t fragment across separate products.
Public pricing details are limited. Costs typically rise based on the number of monitored vendors, which can become significant for large supply chains. Some organizations report that the step up in licensing for “critical” vendors can be expensive.
Public pricing information is not available. Offers a free plan and a 14-day free trial for paid plans.
Public pricing is not available. Does not publically offer a free trial.
Public pricing is not available. Does not publically offer a free trial.
Customers
UpGuard customers include Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), Morningstar, TDK, PagerDuty, Hopin, and IAG. Read UpGuard’s customer stories to learn more.
Major customers include Morgan Lewis, Healthfirst, Navy Federal, and Maersk.
Major customers include Symantec, Pepsico, Two Sigma, and Stony Brook University.
Major customers include Optus / Singtel, The University of North Florida, Snam, and PROSA.
Major customers include Informatica, Tufts Health Plan, the University of San Francisco, and Sentara.
G2 rating Accurate as of March 2025
More than 700 verified reviews give UpGuard a 4.5 out of 5 rating on G2. UpGuard also holds G2’s top ranking as the leader in Third-Party & Supplier Risk Management for 15 consecutive quarters. The 2026 G2 Best Software Awards recognized UpGuard as one of the Top 100 Global Software Companies. Among verified reviewers, 98% give UpGuard four- or five-star ratings, and 94% approve of its product direction.
Black Kite’s pricing model is structured around different tiers and licensing strategies designed to support various TPRM requirements.
Black Kite does not publicly disclose its pricing. Prospects need to book a demo of the product and speak with a sales representative to receive a quote.
Here’s an overview of Black Kite’s plans and services:
No free plan
Black Kite does not offer an ongoing free plan.
No free trial
Black Kite does not publicly offer a free trial. Instead, prospects can book a demo of the platform’s capabilities with the sales team.
Standard monitoring
Pricing reportedly higher than other competitors at this service tier.
Large-scale / enterprise options
Oriented towards larger organizations with more broad TPRM requirements. Bulk licensing slightly discounts pricing for each monitored vendor.
Add-ons and additional costs
The following additional features and services could increase costs:
Subscription Adjustments: Costs can rise with usage growth (e.g., adding vendors mid-contract),
Unexpected Costs: Users have mentioned surprises like costs escalating with vendor count or fees for premium features (e.g., Bridge™, advanced analytics). Some users reported costs doubling when scaling from small to mid-tier usage.
How does Black Kite’s pricing compare to its competitors?
UpGuard
UpGuard’s pricing starts at USD 1,750 per month. Its natively integrated end-to-end workflows keep investment costs at a minimum—customers don’t need to pay for additional tools to fill TPRM workflow gaps.
It also offers:
A free-access tier that lets you monitor up to five vendors, which also includes access to risk ratings, as well as risk assessment and remediation workflows.
Unlimited free access to its vendor questionnaire and trust management tool, Trust Exchange
SecurityScorecard does not publicly disclose pricing information. Though it offers a free plan, it is limited to self-monitoring and excludes third-party vendors.
A 14-day free trial of the Business Plan is available, which includes daily security notifications and limited vendor monitoring. Larger entities often opt for the Enterprise, or MAX managed service tier, which can run into the mid-to high-priced range.
Bitsight does not disclose any pricing information. While it does not provide a traditional free trial, Bitsight does issue a complimentary security rating and benchmark report for first-time users. Because Bitsight’s pricing often correlates with the number of monitored entities or advanced features (like deeper data analytics), costs can scale dramatically in larger enterprise contexts.
Without natively integrated TPRM workflows, customers typically need to supplement TPRM process gaps with additional module purchases or separate tools.
RiskRecon does not publically disclose its pricing. Costs reportedly increase as the number of vendors grows. A free trial is offered, supporting monitoring up to 50 vendors. However, this trial automatically upgrades to a paid 12-month subscription unless a written cancellation notice is provided 15 days prior to the trial’s end.
Public pricing for OneTrust is not available. Its cost structure is largely determined by the chosen modules—ranging from vendor risk management to privacy governance—and the scale of an organization’s deployment. Implementation charges and the need for specialized expansions (like AI governance or in-depth consent management) can also add considerably to the total.
Vanta does not disclose any pricing information. It has no free option and does not offer a free trial. Its standard offering only supports a single compliance framework, like ISO 27001. Charges apply for each additional framework, which can quickly add up for organizations with broad compliance requirements.
Because Vanta is primarily a compliance automation tool, customers need to augment the platform with separate solutions to build a complete TPRM workflow, which could substantially raise final costs.
Gartner Peer Insights Overall ratings for the IT VRM Solutions market. Accurate as of January 2024
4.4, based on 160 reviews. Named a Representative Vendor in the 2022 Gartner Market Guide for IT VRM Solutions
4.8, based on 159 reviews
4.5, based on 259 reviews.
4.5, based on 261 reviews
4.2, based on 61 reviews
G2 rating Accurate as of March 2025
More than 700 verified reviews give UpGuard a 4.5 out of 5 rating on G2. UpGuard also holds G2’s top ranking as the leader in Third-Party & Supplier Risk Management for 15 consecutive quarters. The 2026 G2 Best Software Awards recognized UpGuard as one of the Top 100 Global Software Companies. Among verified reviewers, 98% give UpGuard four- or five-star ratings, and 94% approve of its product direction.
