RiskIQ: Top Competitors, Alternatives and Reviews

A side-by-side comparison of RiskIQ with its main competitors. Easily compare performance across multiple categories and understand what the market is saying with independent reviews.

RiskIQ feature-by-feature comparisons

Here are a couple of handy feature-by-feature comparisons to help you compare RiskIQ to the competition.
General summary
Primarily focuses on first-party risk rather than taking a holistic view of cybersecurity.
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.
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.
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
Provides a security questionnaire and vendor due diligence information exchange to help reduce the operational overhead of traditionally manual and point in time assessments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Usability and learning curve
Its threat intelligence tool maps internet-facing assets and provides insights and prioritized remediation recommendations based on asset criticality, context, and threat severity.
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.
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.
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
Risks detailed on point-in-time vendor assessment coupled with continuous monitoring of inherent risk, threat intelligence, and risk scoring. The exchange model forces more frequent point in time assessments, as many as 2-3 times each year.
Cyber risk data accuracy
Relies on first-party attack surface management by monitoring your digital footprint (websites, domains, public-facing assets, as well as javascript resources, and typosquatted domains), as well as external threats like phishing, deep and dark web discussions, email spoofing, and other cyber threats.
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.
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.
SecurityScorecard offers extensive data collection across public-facing and dark web sources, though users occasionally report inaccurate attribution or misflagged IPs requiring support.
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.
Bitsight supports third-party monitoring and risk workflows, including vendor onboarding, but relies on a separately licensed module for vendor risk assessments and 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.
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.
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. .
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.
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.
Offers a respected rating system correlated with breach likelihood and is used widely by insurers and financial institutions. Observed security events influence scores, but shared IP misattribution can occasionally skew results.
Employs an A-F rating with a 0–100 scale, penalizing breaches and factoring patching cadences, though some risk categories could have a disproportional impact on scoring. Large-scale data collection across the clear and dark web ensures broad coverage, updated roughly every 10 days for IPv4.
Customer support
Offers a company and product blog.
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.
Bitsight provides reputable support, particularly for large enterprises with dedicated account teams. Smaller organizations may experience less responsiveness and find self-service documentation limited.
Generally supportive for enterprise levels, with a community of free users. However, customers at lower licensing tiers report slower responses and less personalized support.
ProcessUnity (formerly CyberGRX) offers extensive community support sharing best platform and program practices via regularly updated podcasts, webinars, whitepapers, and strategic partnerships.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
API and Integrations
Integrates with Cloudflare, Splunk, Crowdstrike, Qualys, Rapid7, ServiceNow, and more.
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.
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.
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.
ProcessUnity (formerly CyberGRX) offers a fully functional bidirectional API.
Purchasing & Licensing Transparency
Pricing not available on the website.
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.
Public pricing information is not available. Offers a free plan and a 14-day free trial for paid plans.
ProcessUnity (formerly CyberGRX) lists typical engagements as starting at around $120,000 USD. This includes validated assessments data, and unlimited access to the CyberGRX Exchange.
Customers
Major customers include Amazon, Disney, Box, Facebook, McKesson, Toyota, United, Pepsi, Rackspace, DocuSign, and American Express.
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 Optus / Singtel, The University of North Florida, Snam, and PROSA.
Major customers include Symantec, Pepsico, Two Sigma, and Stony Brook University.
Major customers include Medibank Private, Mass Mutual, QBE, Solix, and McAfee.
G2 rating
Accurate as of March 2025
4.8, based on 4 reviews.
4.5, based on 383 reviews. Named a G2 Market Leader for Third Party & Supplier Risk Management Software.
4.6, based on 44 reviews.
4.2, based on 75 reviews.
4.5, based on 19 reviews.
Security rating
X
950
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X
950
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950
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X
950
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950
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Competitor Comparison Guide

A transparent comparison of top solutions

RiskIQ Features

RiskIQ's platform provides insight and automation needed to map and monitor your organization's internet-exposed digital attack surface, understand and mitigate exposures, and expedite external threat investigation.

RiskIQ's threat detection and asset management platform finds known assets like your corporate website, microsites, and any other public-facing internet assets, unknown assets like third-party JavaScript resources, and rogue or malicious assets like typosquatted domains and abandoned servers.

RiskIQ Use Cases

RiskIQ ocuses on first-party attack surface management and does not provide a real solution for third-party risk management.

While RiskIQ is useful for assessing your own attack surface and may be sufficient to complete other assessment techniques when evaluating first-party risk, it has real limitations when applied to improving your organization's complete security posture.

You can't manage what you don't know about. An accurate and up to date inventory of you and your vendors' public-facing digital assets is a must for any cybersecurity program. It's no longer enough to only manage your own security posture. You need to know that your vendors are keeping the data you provide them safe too.

RiskIQ Demo / Trial

Potential RiskIQ (now Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence and Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management) customers can contact Microsoft Azure Sales to learn more about the products’ capabilities. 

RiskIQ API

RiskIQ provides a standard API.

RiskIQ reviews

Reviews of the SecurityScoreard platform and its top competitors, based on indendant third-party sources and customer insights.

Gartner Peer Insights
Overall ratings for the IT VRM Solutions market. Accurate as of January 2024
4.5, based on 12 reviews.
5 stars
4.4, based on 160 reviews. Named a Representative Vendor in the 2022 Gartner Market Guide for IT VRM Solutions
4.5, based on 261 reviews
4.5, based on 259 reviews.
4.5, based on 45 reviews.
G2 rating
Accurate as of March 2025
4.8, based on 4 reviews.
4.5, based on 383 reviews. Named a G2 Market Leader for Third Party & Supplier Risk Management Software.
4.6, based on 44 reviews.
4.2, based on 75 reviews.
4.5, based on 19 reviews.
Glassdoor
Accurate as of March 2025
3.9, based on 70 reviews.
4.4, based on 95 reviews.
3.8, based on 222 reviews.
2.7, based on 306 reviews.
4.3

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