Comparisons · Five vendors, sourced from their own published material

How ShadowMap compares to the vendors you are actually evaluating.

Two things decide these evaluations, and neither of them is a feature grid. The first is where a platform sits on two axes — how much of your external estate it watches, and how far past “we found it” it is able to go. The second is how the requirement was written before anyone was invited, which settles some of these before a demo is booked.

Both maps are below, including the frames we lose. Every strength, gap and figure on this page and on the five beneath it comes from the vendor’s own published material.

How to evaluate this properly What the alternative stack costs

The first map

Coverage is one axis. What happens next is the other.

Most category maps plot one dimension and call it a landscape, which flatters whoever covers the most ground. Two axes are needed here, because a platform that watches everything and only ever tells you about it is a different purchase from one that watches less and acts. Horizontally: how much of the external estate is under coverage. Vertically: how far a finding travels — observed, scored, routed to somebody, or tested and removed.

Where the five vendors sit on external coverage and depth of action
Vendor	Breadth of external-risk coverage	Depth of action	Note
Cyble	Several exposure surfaces	Route and orchestrate	Genuine breadth
CloudSEK	Several exposure surfaces	Route and orchestrate	First on exposed AI
SecurityScorecard	Ratings and posture	Route and orchestrate	Questionnaire automation
UpGuard	Several exposure surfaces	Route and orchestrate	Real data-leak detection
RiskRecon	Ratings and posture	Route and orchestrate	Published methodology
ShadowMap — us	Several exposure surfaces	Validate and remove	Validation and removal

External risk coverage against depth of action, ShadowMap and the five vendors we meet in evaluations Positions are our reading of each vendor’s published capability as of August 2026, not a score. No vendor was contacted and none has reviewed this page.

Read the horizontal axis honestly and Cyble and CloudSEK sit close to us. That is the correct reading: the overlap is real across most of what we do, both are well funded and growing, and CloudSEK is first to market on exposed AI infrastructure with nothing on our side to answer it. The three ratings vendors sit further left not because they are weaker but because they are instruments for a different job, and RiskRecon in particular does that job with more published rigour than anyone else in the set.

The vertical axis is where the set separates, and it separates in one place. All five alert, and several route and orchestrate properly — RiskRecon publishes vendor-visible action plans with continuous remediation verification, SecurityScorecard has an established integration surface, UpGuard automates risk workflow. None of the five publishes anything that tests whether a discovered exposure can actually be used. That is what Continuous Automated Red-Teaming does, where it is safe and authorised, and it is the reason the top of the vertical axis is otherwise empty.

The second map

The frame decides more of this than the product does

This is the most useful thing in our whole competitive study, and it is uncomfortable enough that most vendors would not publish it. How a requirement is written determines which vendors are in the room and which capabilities get scored, and two of the five framings below are ones we lose regardless of how good the product is. Not because the evaluation was unfair — because the thing being scored is genuinely not the thing we are best at.

How the requirement is framed, who else is in the room, and how it goes for us
How the requirement is framed	Who you meet	How it goes for us
Security ratings / board scorecard	BitSight, SecurityScorecard, RiskRecon, UpGuard	We lose this one
The requirement is a comparable number. Depth of action is not being scored, so our advantage is invisible.
Third-party risk / vendor assessment	UpGuard, SecurityScorecard, RiskRecon	We lose this one
Questionnaire workflow and vendor-network effects dominate the scoring, and both are genuinely stronger elsewhere.
Digital risk protection / external exposure	Cyble, CloudSEK	Genuinely even
Comparable breadth. The decision turns on whether the buyer values validation and removal.
Attack surface management	Cyble Odin, CloudSEK BeVigil	Genuinely even
Comparable discovery. Origin-behind-WAF discovery and validation are the separators.
Find what attackers can reach, and prove what they can use	Nobody	Nobody else is in this frame
No vendor in the set combines this breadth of coverage with validation and removal.

How the requirement is framed, who else is in the room, and how it goes for us

Security ratings / board scorecard

Who you meet: BitSight, SecurityScorecard, RiskRecon, UpGuard
How it goes for us: We lose this one

The requirement is a comparable number. Depth of action is not being scored, so our advantage is invisible.

Third-party risk / vendor assessment

Who you meet: UpGuard, SecurityScorecard, RiskRecon
How it goes for us: We lose this one

Questionnaire workflow and vendor-network effects dominate the scoring, and both are genuinely stronger elsewhere.

Digital risk protection / external exposure

Who you meet: Cyble, CloudSEK
How it goes for us: Genuinely even

Comparable breadth. The decision turns on whether the buyer values validation and removal.

Attack surface management

Who you meet: Cyble Odin, CloudSEK BeVigil
How it goes for us: Genuinely even

Comparable discovery. Origin-behind-WAF discovery and validation are the separators.

Find what attackers can reach, and prove what they can use

Who you meet: Nobody
How it goes for us: Nobody else is in this frame

No vendor in the set combines this breadth of coverage with validation and removal.

The practical use of this table is not to argue with a scoring sheet after it has been written. It is to notice which row you are in before the shortlist is drawn. If the deliverable is a comparable number across a vendor portfolio, the first two rows are the honest answer and a ratings vendor is the right purchase — we would rather say so here than lose slowly over six weeks of everyone’s time.

The last row is the one nobody else in the set occupies, and it is a requirement you can write down: find what an attacker can reach from outside, prove which of it can actually be used, and remove what should not be there. If that is the question, the evaluation guide turns it into criteria you can put in an RFP without naming a vendor.

Two companies wearing five names

These are not five competitors. They are two.

The five sort cleanly into two groups that behave nothing alike in an evaluation. Treating them as one shortlist is how a scoring sheet ends up with columns that mean different things for different vendors — and it is how a ratings vendor gets marked down for not doing something it never claimed to do.

01 Two of the five

Broad digital-risk platforms

Who is in it: Cyble and CloudSEK. Both overlap most of what ShadowMap covers, and the overlap is real rather than a marketing claim — Cyble ships nine named products across intelligence, attack surface, brand protection and endpoint, and CloudSEK covers external monitoring, mobile and API exposure, supply chain and, newly, exposed AI infrastructure.
What the evaluation feels like: A breadth conversation. Coverage maps get compared surface by surface, everybody ticks most boxes, and the shortlist is decided on things a datasheet cannot show — how a finding arrives, who acts on it, and what the second year costs. Neither of these vendors is a point tool, and an evaluation that treats them as one ends badly.
Where the decision actually turns: Whether the buyer values validation and removal. Nothing in either product line tests whether a discovered exposure can be used, which is the question that changes what a team does on Monday. If that is not being scored, this is a coin-flip between three good platforms.

02 Three of the five

Security-ratings and third-party-risk companies

Who is in it: SecurityScorecard, UpGuard and RiskRecon. They are in the same evaluations as us but they are not in the same business: the instrument is a comparable score across a vendor portfolio, and it is genuinely good at that. RiskRecon is the most technically rigorous ratings vendor in the market and holds a third-party attribution certification; UpGuard ships real data-leak detection and typosquatting monitoring; SecurityScorecard’s questionnaire automation is better than ours.
What the evaluation feels like: A procurement conversation, usually already scoped. The requirement names a score, a vendor count and a board report, and the scoring sheet was written around those. Depth of action is not on it, so the thing we are better at is not being measured — see the frame table above, where two of the five rows are ones we lose before the demo.
Where the decision actually turns: Whether the programme is a portfolio instrument or a first-party exposure programme. If a vendor score is the deliverable, buy a ratings vendor and buy a good one. If the question is what an attacker can reach in your own estate and what they could actually use with it, a rating does not answer it and was never meant to.

The five pages

One page each, and each one concedes first

Each page opens on what that vendor is genuinely better at, because a comparison that concedes nothing is not believed and does not get read. The column below is the concession, not the attack — and the note under each row is what we have no answer to. Every one of these should be handable to somebody currently using that vendor without embarrassment.

The five vendors ShadowMap meets in evaluations
Vendor	Which group	What they are genuinely good at	Where we differ
Cyble	Digital-risk platform	Genuine breadth — the overlap with us is real across most capability groups	Evidence over prediction: a tested key is an answer, a predicted risk is a better alert
We do not contest analyst or review density. Thirty-six G2 badges in one season and 4.8/5 across 400+ Gartner Peer Insights reviewers is a record we cannot match on paper, and Cyble is not a point tool. Publishes no pricing anywhere.
CloudSEK	Digital-risk platform	AIVigil is genuinely first to market: exposed AI infrastructure, MCP servers, leaked AI credentials, vector databases, shadow AI. ShadowMap has no answer to it.	Correlation that terminates in a tested finding rather than a predicted path
AIVigil has no ShadowMap equivalent — exposed AI infrastructure, MCP servers, leaked AI credentials, vector databases — and their social-media data-leak coverage is better than ours. Attack-path vocabulary is theirs; we do not fight for it. Publishes no pricing anywhere.
SecurityScorecard	Ratings / TPRM	Questionnaire automation is genuinely strong and getting stronger — HyperComply and Driftnet were bought for exactly this	Ratings-platform-deep, not exposure-platform-deep — four capability groups have no equivalent
Questionnaire automation is theirs and ours is not better, they have a self-serve rung we do not, and the “behind on AI” argument is stale since TITAN displaced their previous line. Published pricing: Vendr median ~US$23,619; reported list US$25,000-50,000 (Ratings).
UpGuard	Ratings / TPRM	Real data-leak detection with genuine heritage — exposed storage, public repositories, exposed file services	UpGuard detects; it does not validate and it does not remove
Not a ratings-only vendor, and calling them one is simply wrong. Trust Exchange answers the inbound-assurance problem and we have no equivalent to it. Published pricing: US$21,000/yr published list (Standard, 50 vendor slots).
RiskRecon	Ratings / TPRM	Asset attribution independently certified at 99.1% by a third party — nobody else in the set has that	Their own published number is the honest contrast: asset profiles refresh every two weeks. Continuous, not fortnightly.
Their asset attribution carries third-party certification, we publish no equivalent figure of our own, and we do not contest theirs. The published methodology means a buyer can audit how a score was reached. Publishes no pricing anywhere.

The five vendors ShadowMap meets in evaluations

Cyble

Which group: Digital-risk platform
What they are genuinely good at: Genuine breadth — the overlap with us is real across most capability groups
Where we differ: Evidence over prediction: a tested key is an answer, a predicted risk is a better alert

We do not contest analyst or review density. Thirty-six G2 badges in one season and 4.8/5 across 400+ Gartner Peer Insights reviewers is a record we cannot match on paper, and Cyble is not a point tool. Publishes no pricing anywhere.

CloudSEK

Which group: Digital-risk platform
What they are genuinely good at: AIVigil is genuinely first to market: exposed AI infrastructure, MCP servers, leaked AI credentials, vector databases, shadow AI. ShadowMap has no answer to it.
Where we differ: Correlation that terminates in a tested finding rather than a predicted path

AIVigil has no ShadowMap equivalent — exposed AI infrastructure, MCP servers, leaked AI credentials, vector databases — and their social-media data-leak coverage is better than ours. Attack-path vocabulary is theirs; we do not fight for it. Publishes no pricing anywhere.

SecurityScorecard

Which group: Ratings / TPRM
What they are genuinely good at: Questionnaire automation is genuinely strong and getting stronger — HyperComply and Driftnet were bought for exactly this
Where we differ: Ratings-platform-deep, not exposure-platform-deep — four capability groups have no equivalent

Questionnaire automation is theirs and ours is not better, they have a self-serve rung we do not, and the “behind on AI” argument is stale since TITAN displaced their previous line. Published pricing: Vendr median ~US$23,619; reported list US$25,000-50,000 (Ratings).

UpGuard

Which group: Ratings / TPRM
What they are genuinely good at: Real data-leak detection with genuine heritage — exposed storage, public repositories, exposed file services
Where we differ: UpGuard detects; it does not validate and it does not remove

Not a ratings-only vendor, and calling them one is simply wrong. Trust Exchange answers the inbound-assurance problem and we have no equivalent to it. Published pricing: US$21,000/yr published list (Standard, 50 vendor slots).

RiskRecon

Which group: Ratings / TPRM
What they are genuinely good at: Asset attribution independently certified at 99.1% by a third party — nobody else in the set has that
Where we differ: Their own published number is the honest contrast: asset profiles refresh every two weeks. Continuous, not fortnightly.

Their asset attribution carries third-party certification, we publish no equivalent figure of our own, and we do not contest theirs. The published methodology means a buyer can audit how a score was reached. Publishes no pricing anywhere.

There is a sixth comparison that names no competitor at all. Assembling coverage of this shape out of point tools has a published price, and the arithmetic is on its own page — list prices and transaction medians only, with the three vendors that publish no pricing excluded rather than estimated.

Why these five

The vendors we have actually met

These are the five that turn up opposite us in live evaluations, confirmed against our own records rather than lifted from an analyst quadrant. That is the whole selection rule, and it is why the list is short.

Vendors we have researched but never met head-to-head are deliberately not here. There are plenty of them, several are excellent, and a page comparing us to a vendor we have never competed against implies a track record that a prospect can check in one question. An earlier comparison page on this site listed seven such vendors and not one of them was a company we had ever been in a deal with.

If you are evaluating somebody who is not on this list, ask us directly. The answer is sometimes that we do not know them well enough to write a fair page, which is a more useful answer than a page written anyway.

How these comparisons are built, and what we will not do in one As of August 2026

The five are the vendors ShadowMap meets in live evaluations, confirmed against our own records rather than against an analyst quadrant.
Every strength, gap and figure on these pages comes from the vendor’s own published material — product pages, pricing pages, methodology documents and listings they themselves cite.
Positions on the capability map are our reading of published capability, not a score and not a measurement. No vendor was contacted and none has reviewed these pages.
Where a vendor is better than us, it is conceded in the first paragraph of their page rather than in a footnote at the bottom of this one.
We publish no accuracy or suppression statistic of our own, so we do not contest anyone else’s.

Deliberately excluded

Vendors we have researched but never met head-to-head are not listed. Implying a head-to-head record that does not exist is a claim a prospect can check in one question.
No star ratings, review scores or aggregate ratings appear anywhere in these comparisons. They belong to the platforms that collected them, and republishing them as our own markup would be dishonest.
Nothing about a competitor’s workforce, funding trouble or internal difficulties. It is beneath the brand and it invites the same in return.
Pricing arithmetic lives on its own page, and three of the five publish no pricing at all — they are excluded from it rather than estimated.

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