SecurityScorecardvsRiskReconUpGuard

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

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

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

SecurityScorecard vs RiskRecon
SecurityScorecard vs UpGuard

See how they compare side-by-side.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Community support
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 our breach research blog has uncovered and secured some of the largest data breaches.
Generally supportive for enterprise levels, with a community of free users. However, customers at lower licensing tiers report slower responses and less personalized support.
RiskRecon offers stable support with detailed product documentation and guides available.
Release rate
4 stars
UpGuard has adopted DevOps principles internally to develop, test, and release software continuously, ensuring fast, consistent, and safe releases.
Star rating
Makes releases as needed throughout the year, consistently enabling customer users to access information logs of beneficial changes.
Star rating
RiskRecon does not appear to publicly share regular release rates, roadmaps, or documentation for solution updates.
Pricing and support
5 stars
UpGuard has a transparent pricing model which you can view here. UpGuard pricing starts at $5,999/year and scales with your company.
Star rating
Public pricing information is not available. Offers a free plan and a 14-day free trial for paid plans.
Star rating
Public pricing is not available. Does not publically offer a free trial.
API and extensibility
4 stars
UpGuard offers a standard API to pull data into other enterprise applications.
Star rating
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.
Star rating
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.
Third-party integrations
4 stars
Connect UpGuard with over 4,000+ apps using our Zapier integration.
Star rating
Offers integrations with several third party platforms, such as RSA Archer, ServiceNow, and more.
Star rating
Offers integrations with GRC platforms, such as RSA Archer, Sigma Ratings, Whistic, and more.
Predictive capabilities
5 stars
As UpGuard checks for misconfigurations across your Internet footprint, many important breach vectors are covered, including phishing, ransomware susceptibility (like WannaCry), man-in-the-middle attacks, DNSSEC, vulnerabilities, email spoofing, domain hijacking, and DNS issues. Data leaks are automatically surfaced by the platform for your team to assess and close before they become breaches.
Star rating
SecurityScorecard utilizes active and passive data collection methods that are publicly available. The data collected provides indicators of risk relating to open ports, DNS, HSTS, SSL (and more) that are processed via their proprietary algorithm to produce individual security ratings.
Star rating
Allows users to implement a baseline configuration within the RiskRecon portal to match risk structures being used to manage enterprise and third-party risk. Risks monitored provide visibility into email security, application security, network filtering, and more.
Customers
5 stars
The New York Stock Exchange (ICE), Morningstar, TDK, PagerDuty, Hopin, and IAG. Read our customer stories.
Star rating
Major customers include Symantec, Pepsico, Two Sigma, and Stony Brook University.
Star rating
Major customers include Informatica, Tufts Health Plan, the University of San Francisco, and Sentara.
G2 rating
Accurate as of March 2025
5 stars
4.5, based on 383 reviews. Named a G2 Market Leader for Third Party & Supplier Risk Management Software.
Star rating
4.2, based on 75 reviews.
Star rating
4.5, based on 2 reviews.
Security rating
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950
X
950
/ 950

SecurityScorecard vs RiskRecon product overview

SecurityScorecard 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 surveyfrom 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, SecurityScorecard, RiskRecon, and UpGuard, to help you make an informed decision before investing in the right solution for your needs.

SecurityScorecard Overview

SecurityScorecard is a New York-based security ratings platform that uses traffic and other publicly accessible data to build security ratings to evaluate vendors and manage cyber risk among other use cases.

SecurityScoreCard also monitors "hacker chatter" and other public data feeds for indicators of compromise.

SecurityScorecard UI
SecurityScorecard UI. Source: securityscorecard.com


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.

Riskrecon UI
Riskrecon UI. Source: riskrecon.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. 

UpGuard’s platform uses proprietary security ratings, data leak detection capabilities, and remediation workflows to proactively identify security exposures.

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.

SecurityScorecard and UpGuard offer their services via SaaS and are accessible from web-based platforms that can help users monitor and manage vendor risks.

SecurityScorecard: Simple interface for quick grade reports and charts.

RiskRecon: Provides dashboard visibility for risk prioritization based on configured policy. Cloud based platform offers minimal need for installation.

UpGuard: Clean interface offers intuitive navigation to precise risk insights, workflow management, and reporting. Cloud-based platform provides turnkey deployment with no installation required.

Capabilities

SecurityScorecard, RiskRecon, and UpGuard help organizations stay informed about their vendors’ information security risks as part of a third-party risk management (TPRM) program.

SecurityScorecard: Provides security ratings that aggregate different risks into a single score, allowing for the comparison of different third-party vendors and service providers.

RiskRecon: Offers cybersecurity ratings and deep reporting capabilities to help businesses surface and manage cyber risks

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.

A significant point of difference between SecurityScorecard and UpGuard is the amount of time required to perform a non-intrusive scan.

SecurityScorecard takes 10 days to perform a non-intrusive scan across the entire IPv4 web space, whereas UpGuard's scan is completed in just 24 hours. Shorter scanning times mean open ports and misconfigured services have less chance of being exploited by cybercriminals,

Smaller scan frequencies help you discover critical data breach risks, like open ports, faster.

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.

SecurityScorecard, RiskRecon, and UpGuard all identify risks using passive scans on a third party’s public-facing attack surfaces.

SecurityScorecard: SecurityScorecard utilizes active and passive data collection methods that are publicly available.
The data collected provides indicators of risk relating to open ports, DNS, HSTS, SSL (and more) that are processed via their proprietary algorithm to produce individual security ratings.

RiskRecon: Allows users to implement a baseline configuration within the RiskRecon portal to match risk structures being used to manage enterprise and third-party risk.

Risks monitored provide visibility into email security, application security, network filtering, and more.

UpGuard: Reviews many important breach vectors to assess the supply chain attack surface, including phishing, ransomware susceptibility, man-in-the-middle attacks, DNSSEC, vulnerabilities, email spoofing, domain hijacking, and DNS issues.

Provides threat and risk intelligence, enabling greater visibility into supply chain data leakages, compromised corporate identities, and brand fraud.

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.

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

SecurityScorecard: SecurityScoreCard offers a user Academy for customer users along with a regularly updated company blog, webinar series, and resource center.

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.

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.

UpGuard’s free weekly Breach Newsletter informs 20,000+ subscribers of the latest global data breaches.

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.

SecurityScorecard: SecurityScoreCard makes releases as needed throughout the year, consistently enabling customer users to access information logs of beneficial changes.

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.

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.

SecurityScorecard: Public pricing information is not available. Reports say SecurityScorecard's pricing starts at $16,500 for self-assessment plus five vendors, and additional vendors cost $1,500-$2,000 per vendor per year.

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

UpGuard: UpGuard has a fully transparent and publicly accessible pricing model which you can view here. If you have any questions, please email sales@upguard.com.

API & Extensibility

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.

SecurityScorecard, RiskRecon, and UpGuard offer APIs.

SecurityScorecard: SecurityScoreCard offers API connections for users seeking greater security ratings extensibility.

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

UpGuard: Offers a standard API to pull data from UpGuard’s platform into other enterprise applications.

Third-party integrations

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.  

SecurityScorecard, RiskRecon, and UpGuard offer integrations into other platforms.

SecurityScorecard: Offers integrations with several third party platforms such as RSA Archer, ServiceNow, and more.

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

UpGuard: Integrates with Zapier to enable connections to 3,000+ apps; GRC platforms, ticketing systems like JIRA; VRM solutions like ServiceNow, and more.

Customers

SecurityScorecard: Major customers include Symantec, Pepsico, Two Sigma, and Stony Brook University.

RiskRecon: Major customers include Informatica, Tufts Health Plan, University of San Francisco, and Sentara.

UpGuard: Major customers across highly regulated sectors include Accenture, New York Stock Exchange, Tech Mahindra, & Morningstar.

Customer Reviews

Gartner Peer Insights

Overall ratings for the IT VRM Solutions market. Accurate as of January 2024
UpGuard logo

SecurityScorecard

RiskRecon

Gartner Peer Insights

Overall ratings for the IT VRM Solutions market. Accurate as of January 2024
5 stars
4.4, based on 160 reviews. Named a Representative Vendor in the 2022 Gartner Market Guide for IT VRM Solutions
Star rating
4.5, based on 259 reviews.
Star rating
4.2, based on 61 reviews
UpGuard logo

SecurityScorecard

Gartner Peer Insights

Overall ratings for the IT VRM Solutions market. Accurate as of January 2024
5 stars
4.4, based on 160 reviews. Named a Representative Vendor in the 2022 Gartner Market Guide for IT VRM Solutions
Star rating
4.5, based on 259 reviews.
UpGuard logo
5 stars
4.4, based on 160 reviews. Named a Representative Vendor in the 2022 Gartner Market Guide for IT VRM Solutions
SecurityScorecard
4.5, based on 259 reviews.
RiskRecon
4.2, based on 61 reviews

G2

Accurate as of March 2025
UpGuard logo

SecurityScorecard

RiskRecon

G2

Accurate as of March 2025
5 stars
4.5, based on 383 reviews. Named a G2 Market Leader for Third Party & Supplier Risk Management Software.
Star rating
4.2, based on 75 reviews.
Star rating
4.5, based on 2 reviews.
UpGuard logo

SecurityScorecard

G2
Accurate as of March 2025
5 stars
4.5, based on 383 reviews. Named a G2 Market Leader for Third Party & Supplier Risk Management Software.
Star rating
4.2, based on 75 reviews.
UpGuard logo
5 stars
4.5, based on 383 reviews. Named a G2 Market Leader for Third Party & Supplier Risk Management Software.
SecurityScorecard
4.2, based on 75 reviews.
RiskRecon
4.5, based on 2 reviews.

Glassdoor

Accurate as of January 2024
UpGuard logo

SecurityScorecard

RiskRecon

Glassdoor

Accurate as of January 2024
5 stars
4.6
Star rating
2.7, based on 306 reviews.
Star rating
3.8, based on 19 reviews.
UpGuard logo

SecurityScorecard

Glassdoor
Accurate as of January 2024
5 stars
4.6
Star rating
2.7, based on 306 reviews.
UpGuard logo
5 stars
4.6
SecurityScorecard
2.7, based on 306 reviews.
RiskRecon
3.8, based on 19 reviews.

Security rating

SecurityScorecard: Provides a security rating on a numerical scale from 0-100 with letter scale breakdowns ranged within an A - F report card based scale.

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

UpGuard: Security rating scale of 0-950, ranked as A: 801-950, B: 601-800, C: 401-600, D: 201-400, F: 0-200. You can request your free security rating by clicking here.

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