Security ratings platforms

Security ratings platforms: pricing, and what you are buying.

Three of the four best-known security ratings platforms do not publish a price. This page sets out how each one actually charges, what is publicly verifiable about the numbers, and what genuinely differs between them — including where competitors are stronger than us. If you are mid-shortlist, the pricing model matters more than the headline figure, because the unit of charge is what decides your cost in year three.

Last reviewed 23 August 2026

How to read the figures below

Only UpGuard publishes a list price. SecurityScorecard, Bitsight and Panorays quote privately, so any specific number for them comes from third-party reporting rather than the vendor. Where we quote one, we say where it came from. Where nothing credible is public, we say that instead of estimating — a made-up range would be worse than no range, because it would look authoritative. Figures checked 23 August 2026; pricing changes, so confirm directly before budgeting.

How each platform charges

The pricing model is the durable fact; the number is a snapshot. This is the part worth understanding before you take any quote.

Platform	Model	What is publicly verifiable
UpGuard	Per vendor monitored, in tiers, with paid overage	The only one publishing list pricing. Its pricing page shows a Standard plan at $1,750/month billed annually covering 50 vendor slots, with additional vendors at $79/month each; Professional (150 slots), Corporate (500 slots) and Enterprise+ (unlimited) are all “contact us”.
SecurityScorecard	Quoted; scales with vendors monitored and modules	Not published. The negotiation platform Vendr reports list pricing around $40,000–$60,000 a year for 150 vendors, commonly negotiated below list. Treat as third-party reporting, not a vendor figure.
Bitsight	Quoted; scales with vendors monitored and modules	Not published. Vendr reports list pricing around $50,000–$70,000 a year for 150 vendors, again commonly negotiated down, and generally positions Bitsight at the higher end for comparable counts.
Panorays	Quoted; scales with vendors and assessment volume	Not published, and the public reporting we could find varies too widely to quote responsibly. Ask directly, and ask specifically whether assessments are metered separately from monitoring.
RiskXchange	Published tiers; unlimited user seats	Three tiers — Essentials, Professional and Enterprise — with unlimited user seats on every tier and no setup fees. See platform pricing.

The single most useful question to ask any vendor in this category: what happens at renewal when my monitored vendor count has grown? Per-vendor models price the behaviour you are trying to encourage, and the second-year increase is where budgets get broken.

The costs that are not in the headline

Applies to every vendor here, ours included.

Seat licensing
If stakeholders outside the security team have to be licensed to see findings, remediation stalls. Ask whether seats are capped and what an extra one costs.
Metered assessments
Some platforms separate continuous monitoring from questionnaire-based assessments and charge for the latter by volume. Ask for both units explicitly.
Vendor slot overage
Per-vendor tiers have an overage rate. UpGuard publishes theirs at $79/month per additional vendor above the Standard plan’s 50; others quote it.
Modules sold separately
Fourth-party discovery, breach and dark-web monitoring, and framework reporting are frequently priced as add-ons rather than included.
Implementation and data onboarding
Ask whether it is included, and what it costs if not.
Multi-year commitment
Discounts below list generally require one. Weigh that against how quickly this market changes.

What actually differs between them

Feature grids in this category converge to the point of uselessness. These are the axes on which the products genuinely diverge.

Rating methodology and disputes

Every platform scores companies from outside-in data, and every platform sometimes attributes an asset to the wrong owner. What differs is how transparent the methodology is and how quickly a disputed finding can be corrected. If you will be rated by your own customers as well as rating suppliers — and most organisations eventually are — the dispute process matters as much as the score.

Ratings-only versus full TPRM

Bitsight and SecurityScorecard originate as ratings businesses and have added assessment workflow. Panorays originates closer to the questionnaire and assessment side. UpGuard sits between, with a strong self-serve product. Whether you need a rating feed or a whole programme is the first fork in the decision, and it is frequently skipped.

Questionnaire automation

The largest labour cost in third-party risk is collecting and reviewing questionnaires, not reading scores. Ask each vendor to pre-populate a questionnaire from a real SOC 2 report you supply, in the demo. The differences here are much larger than the differences in rating accuracy.

Fourth-party discovery

Available across the category at varying depth, and frequently an add-on. Ask whether fourth parties are discovered independently or only recorded when a supplier declares them.

Where RiskXchange is and is not the answer

We publish this page, so treat our self-assessment with appropriate scepticism. Here is the honest version.

Choose a competitor if

They are the better fit

You want the most widely recognised rating for board or customer-facing reporting — Bitsight and SecurityScorecard have longer market presence and their scores are more often already known to your stakeholders
You want a pure ratings feed to embed in tooling you have already built
You want to self-serve a small deployment on a published price today — UpGuard’s Standard plan is genuinely the easiest entry point in the category
You need a full enterprise GRC suite spanning operational, financial and ESG risk

Choose us if

We are the better fit

Capacity is the binding constraint — a small team accountable for hundreds of suppliers
You want questionnaire answers pre-populated from supplier documents and then validated against outside-in evidence, rather than stored beside it
You want chasing, follow-up and contact-change handling done for you rather than assigned to you
You want unlimited seats so remediation owners outside security can actually see findings
You need DORA, NIS2 or CPS 230 reporting generated from live data

Alternatives, briefly and fairly

If you are searching for alternatives to one of these, it usually means one specific thing has gone wrong. Here is what typically drives each switch.

SecurityScorecard alternatives are usually sought over cost at renewal as monitored vendor counts grow, or over score disputes. Consider what you actually use beyond the rating before replacing it.
Bitsight alternatives are usually sought on price — it sits at the higher end for comparable vendor counts — or where a team wants assessment workflow rather than ratings depth.
UpGuard alternatives are usually sought when an organisation outgrows self-serve and needs framework reporting and per-supplier autonomy controls.
Panorays alternatives are usually sought where outside-in breadth matters more than questionnaire workflow.

In every case the useful exercise is the same: list what you actually used in the last twelve months, then check which of those things the replacement does better. Switching platform for a lower price and losing the workflow your team relies on is the common regret.

Questions

Pricing, answered.

How much does SecurityScorecard cost?

SecurityScorecard does not publish pricing; it is quoted and scales with the number of vendors monitored and the modules selected. The negotiation platform Vendr reports list pricing in the region of $40,000–$60,000 a year for 150 vendors, and notes deals commonly close below list. That is third-party reporting rather than a vendor figure, so use it to frame a conversation, not to build a budget.

How much does UpGuard cost?

UpGuard is the only major platform in this category publishing a list price. Its pricing page shows a Standard plan at $1,750 per month billed annually, covering 50 monitored vendors, with additional vendors at $79 per month. Professional, Corporate and Enterprise+ tiers — 150, 500 and unlimited vendor slots — are quoted on request.

How much does Bitsight cost?

Bitsight does not publish pricing. Vendr reports list pricing around $50,000–$70,000 a year for 150 vendors and generally places Bitsight at the higher end of the category for comparable vendor counts, with multi-year commitments used to negotiate below list.

How much does Panorays cost?

Panorays does not publish pricing, and the public reporting we could find varies too widely to quote responsibly. If you are evaluating it, ask specifically whether questionnaire-based assessments are metered separately from continuous monitoring, since that distinction drives the total more than the headline.

Bitsight vs SecurityScorecard — which is better?

Neither dominates. Both are established ratings businesses that have added assessment workflow, and for most buyers the deciding factors are which score your own customers and board already recognise, how each handles disputed findings on your own estate, and the renewal economics as your monitored count grows. Run both against the same ten suppliers and compare what they disagree about.

Why do so few vendors publish pricing?

Because pricing scales with vendor count and module mix, and because per-vendor models make list prices look alarming at enterprise scale. The practical consequence for you is that the pricing model — the unit you are charged on — is more predictive of your three-year cost than any first-year quote.

Keep reading

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