You bought Astra Security to close an audit item. The pentest certificate answers the SOC 2 or ISO 27001 control, the DAST scan answers the quarterly-scan requirement, and the customer security questionnaire finally gets a yes.
Except the report is written for an auditor. Not for the engineer who has to fix anything in it, who waits eleven months for the next test and files a support ticket where they expected a button.
Every tool below is judged on three things: the evidence it produces, how fast it retests, and whether the finding ever reaches a developer. The 10 best Astra Security alternatives in 2026:
CodeAnt AI returns a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 pentest PDF in 48 hours with free unlimited re-scans, and puts the same findings inline on the pull request.
Cobalt issues audit-quality attestation letters from CREST-accredited human testers and retests individual findings free for 6 to 12 months.
Aikido Security produces SOC 2 and ISO pentest-style reports and scans the repository Astra never opens, on a flat platform fee.
Synack carries FedRAMP Moderate and generates NIST 800-53 proof-of-work checklists on demand.
XBOW ships an audit-ready report inside five days, mapped to SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and 40-plus frameworks.
Intruder pairs continuous external scanning with a white-box pentest report from $3,500, and has a free-forever tier Astra does not.
Hadrian validates external exposures against SOC 2, ISO 27001 and NIS2 and re-tests when an asset changes rather than on a calendar.
NodeZero proves internal network and Active Directory exposure with FedRAMP High authorization and 12 months of retained retest proof.
StackHawk runs DAST inside CI on every pipeline, evidence one reviewer credited toward PCI certification.
Codacy maps the AI models and coding tools in your repo to EU AI Act and ISO 42001 evidence, per developer seat.
What Is Astra Security?
Astra Security is a Penetration Testing as a Service platform built around a compliance deliverable. Because a point-in-time test cannot keep pace with continuous deployment, its homepage promises that “security conscious companies trust Astra for continuous pentests.”
PTaaS. Manual and automated VAPT, run by testers holding OSCP, CEH, CREST and CERT-In credentials.
DAST scanner. More than 10,000 test cases against the running application.
API security platform. Coverage for the APIs behind that application.
Multi-cloud scanner. AWS, Azure and GCP in one pass.
Autonomous Pentest. Announced, but still behind a waitlist.
Astra states its reports are accepted by auditors for SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS and HIPAA. And findings map to SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, HIPAA and GDPR views, while a public Trust Center shares that posture with customers.
Astra runs no static analysis. It never scans a repository to find bugs, and even the MCP integration reads your code only to write a fix for something the DAST or pentest engines already surfaced at runtime.
One subscription covers the application, its APIs and the cloud underneath, which is why the per-target unit makes sense to a buyer counting products rather than assets.
How much does Astra Security cost?
Astra publishes full pricing on getastra.com/pricing. It bills per target, where one SaaS app plus its APIs and its underlying cloud all count as a single target.
Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
Scanner Lite | $69 per month | One target, three scans a month |
Scanner Agency | $499 per month | A five-target pool |
Pentest Auto | $1,999 per year, per target | Autonomous test plus one human re-scan |
Pentest Expert | $5,999 per year, per target | Manual test by certified experts plus two expert re-scans |
Enterprise | Custom | Scoped on a call |
Pentests are annual only. There is no per-engagement option at any tier.
15% off on annual billing for the scanner line.
10 to 15 working days for a manual engagement to come back.
No free tier. A $7 one-week trial covers the scanner but not the pentest, and the Pentest Expert card routes to “Schedule a call” rather than a checkout.
So one or two bundled re-scans is all you get to prove a fix held, and everything after that waits until next year. Our breakdown of how much penetration testing costs puts it against the wider market.
A single target bundles one SaaS app, its APIs and its cloud, so a company shipping four products pays four times over no matter how alike those products are.
What an Auditor Will Actually Accept
Four things separate a document an auditor signs off from a scanner export they hand back:
A credentialed tester behind the report. Astra backs its reports with OSCP, CEH, CREST and CERT-In credentials. Cobalt holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and CREST accreditation on its own side. Synack carries FedRAMP Moderate, ISO 27001 and testing at DoD impact levels 4, 5 and 6.
Proof of exploit, not a severity guess. NodeZero puts it plainly, that exploitability is “confirmed or ruled out with evidence, not vendor advisories or CVSS scores from vulnerability scanners that just check versions.” XBOW attaches a runnable exploit and an end-to-end trace to each finding, and Hadrian attaches step-by-step reproduction to every confirmed risk.
A retest that closes the loop. Astra bundles one re-scan on Pentest Auto and two on Pentest Expert. Cobalt retests individual findings free for 6 to 12 months with a 7-day retest SLA, CodeAnt AI gives free unlimited re-scans after fixes, and NodeZero’s 1-Click Verify retains proof for 12 months.
Framework mapping you did not build by hand. XBOW maps reports to SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and 40-plus frameworks, Hadrian’s Nova maps to SOC 2, ISO 27001 and NIS2, and Synack generates OWASP and NIST 800-53 mission checklists on demand.
Cadence is the fifth variable, and it decides your other eleven months. On paper an annual per-target engagement satisfies the control on the day it is issued, though a continuous model hands you a fresh artifact whenever a release changes the answer.
That argument runs in full in our comparison of continuous versus annual pentesting.
Code-quality output is not pentest evidence. A static rule hit shows a pattern in a file, not an attacker path through a running system. So it only changes how fast the next report comes back clean, which is why the code-side tools rank low here rather than high.
What matters is whether the artifact carries a name, a proof, a retest and a mapping. Which is why the list below mixes human-led and autonomous vendors instead of picking a side.
The 10 Best Astra Security Alternatives at a Glance
Ranked by how well each one produces evidence an auditor accepts and gets the same findings to a developer. CodeAnt AI leads because it does both from one engagement.
Read the retest column first. Of the five, that is the one Astra bounds most tightly, and the one where the spread between vendors runs widest.
# | Tool | Evidence it produces | Retest model | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | CodeAnt AI | SOC 2 or ISO 27001 PDF in 48 hours, exploit proof per finding | Free unlimited re-scans after fixes | Continuous on every PR, pentest on demand |
2 | Cobalt | Human pentest report plus attestation letter | Free retest 6 to 12 months, 7-day SLA | On-demand, roughly 14-day engagements |
3 | Aikido Security | SOC 2 and ISO pentest-style reports | Rightsized pentest, rescoped by Aikido | Continuous scanning, per-assessment pentest |
4 | Synack | FedRAMP Moderate testing, NIST 800-53 and OWASP checklists | Included inside the engagement window | Point-in-time or continuous, 14 to 365 days |
5 | XBOW | Audit-ready report in 5 days, 40-plus framework mappings | Re-run priced as a new test | On demand, continuous on Enterprise |
6 | Intruder | White-box pentest report from $3,500 | Rescan included in the subscription | Continuous scanning, pentest on demand |
7 | Hadrian | Validated findings mapped to SOC 2, ISO 27001 and NIS2 | Event-driven retest when an asset changes | Continuous discovery, Nova in 24 to 48 hours |
8 | NodeZero (Horizon3.ai) | Internal and AD exploit proof, FedRAMP High | 1-Click Verify retains proof for 12 months | Unlimited autonomous pentests |
9 | StackHawk | Runtime DAST evidence, credited toward PCI certification | Rescan on every pipeline run | Continuous, per pipeline |
10 | Codacy | SAST and SCA reports, plus an EU AI Act inventory | Rescan on every commit | Continuous, per commit |
The 10 Best Astra Security Alternatives in 2026
Each section carries the tool’s pricing against Astra’s, a real screenshot, and third-party review evidence, so nothing here rests on a vendor’s own marketing page.
Tools that produce an auditor-grade artifact and put the same findings in front of a developer rank above tools doing only one of the two. By contrast, a scanner with no report of its own ranks below both.
1. CodeAnt AI
Why it leads: one engagement produces both artifacts a compliance buyer needs. Agentic pen testing returns a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 PDF within 48 hours, with free unlimited re-scans after a fix. And the same findings arrive as inline pull-request comments, where the code actually gets changed.
Three testing modes. Blackbox maps everything publicly reachable, Whitebox works from the source, and Graybox with Code Memory combines the two.
The repository layer Astra skips. SAST, SCA, secret detection and IaC checks run on every pull request across GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps.
Its own posture is documented. The platform carries SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance, and the team has published three CVE disclosures.
Three engagements show what that reaches:
3.2M patient records. An unauthenticated API at a US healthcare provider, reached without credentials.
6M passenger records. A broken-object-level-authorization chain at an airline, followed end to end.
500K client files. Surfaced during a UK law firm engagement.
Jeson Patel, CTO at Series B startup 11x, said it “went deeper than any penetration test we’ve ever commissioned.”
Because engagements are priced on outcomes rather than seats, a clean run costs nothing, and the report and the pull-request comment come out of one scan instead of two separate purchases.
Code review: $24 per user per month on annual billing.
Free for open source. Public repositories run the whole platform at no cost.
14-day trial covering 100 PR reviews with unlimited seats.
Pen testing: $0 engagement fee. You are billed only for exploitable High and Critical findings that ship with proof, against Astra’s flat $1,999 or $5,999 per target per year.
The head-to-head lives on the CodeAnt AI vs Astra Security comparison, and the agentic pen testing page walks through scoping, proof and payment.
Strengths | Trade-offs |
|---|---|
Audit artifact in 48 hours. Re-scans after a fix are free and unlimited, not an allowance of one or two. | Onboarding takes tuning. A mid-market G2 reviewer found suggestions “too cautious or sometimes it needs manual adjustments, also onboarding takes time,” which Astra’s managed engagement skips. |
Findings land on the PR. An IT Services reviewer on Gartner Peer Insights called the feedback “highly accurate” for “edge cases, missed logic, and even mundane things that are easy to miss like naming inconsistencies and copy/paste errors.” | False positives exist. Aman B. on G2 accepted “occasional False positive though is small price to pay for actual bugs.” |
Reaches repos Astra will not. Aman B., a Director of Engineering, wrote on G2 it is “one of the few tools which works with BitBucket” and that it “reduced considerable time to review PR.” | A younger review corpus. Its 4.8 on G2 rests on far fewer entries than Astra’s 4.6 across 168 reviews, so weigh the trial over the star count. |
Best for: teams that need a dated compliance report and want the same findings caught in the pull request, without paying for a pentest that proves nothing.
2. Cobalt
Cobalt is the strongest pure-evidence alternative here. Its own accreditations sit underneath the engagement rather than beside it, and the deliverable enterprise procurement asks for by name, an attestation letter, comes as standard.
Plenty of vendors staff engagements with certified testers. Far fewer hold the certifications as a company, and it is the company-level answer an enterprise security questionnaire asks for.
Strengths | Trade-offs |
|---|---|
Accredited itself, not just staffed. Cobalt holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and CREST, and each engagement ends with a letter written for auditors. | No always-on scanner. Cobalt sells human engagements only, with no equivalent to Astra’s $199-a-month unlimited-scan DAST subscription. |
Retesting that outlasts the engagement. Findings retest free for 6 to 12 months on a 7-day SLA. | Credit minimums hurt small scopes. Michał M., a security specialist, wrote on G2 he dislikes “that there is a minimum of five credits” for tests needing far less. |
Findings engineers act on. Arpit G., a senior staff engineer, wrote on G2 Cobalt delivers “actionable findings that are easy for engineers to understand and fix,” making security “feel collaborative rather than audit-driven.” | The reports could be cleaner. Osher L., a mid-market reviewer in SaaS healthcare, said “the reporting and the interface of the reports could be better.” |
Where it beats Astra outright is the retest window. Individual findings retest free for 6 to 12 months depending on tier, and the pricing FAQ promises unlimited on-demand retesting for the length of the contract.
Speed cuts the same way: an engagement runs about 14 days and can begin in as little as 24 hours, against Astra’s 10-to-15-working-day cycle.
The testers come from Cobalt Core. It is a vetted community carrying OSCP, OSWE, CREST and some 30 other certifications, and its hybrid human-plus-SAST secure code review is the closest thing on this list to someone actually reading your source.
Custom quote, denominated in Cobalt Credits. One credit buys eight hours of tester time.
Annual contract, with unused credits expiring yearly.
No free tier and no scanner subscription. Budget it as a replacement for Astra’s pentest line, not for the $69-per-month scanner.
Our CodeAnt AI vs Cobalt comparison covers the matchup, and how PTaaS works explains the credit model in full.
None of that helps if what you need is a scanner running every week. Cobalt is engagement-shaped from end to end, so pairing it with something continuous is the usual answer rather than the exception.
Best for: teams whose auditor or largest customer wants a human tester’s signature, and who need retesting that stays open long after the report ships.
3. Aikido Security
Compliance reports. Aikido /Attack maps exploitable routes into attack graphs and produces SOC 2 and ISO pentest-style reports.
Repository scanning. SAST across 20-plus languages, SCA with reachability triage, secrets with git-history scanning and IaC checks, all on the code itself.
Noise control. Aikido claims a 90% cut in false positives, achieved by putting Opengrep results through reachability and exploitability checks before anything surfaces.
Wider Git support. Connectors reach GitHub, GitHub Enterprise Server, GitLab, self-managed GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps, against Astra’s GitHub and GitLab.
That puts the certificate-shaped report and the repository scan with one vendor, on one contract, at a flat fee instead of a per-target meter — though the pentest behind that report is machine-scoped, rather than a human deciding where to push next.
Platform: $350, $700 and $1,050 per month for Basic, Pro and Advanced, each bundling 10 users.
Free Developer plan for two users forever, against Astra’s $7 trial week.
Standard Pentest: a fixed €3,500 or $4,000 per assessment.
Rightsized Pentest carries a published “No High or Critical Finding = Don’t Pay” guarantee.
Aikido Infinite: $16 per agent for continuous pentesting.
See CodeAnt AI vs Aikido Security for the matchup, and our Aikido Security pricing guide for every tier and cap.
Because repos, containers, domains and cloud accounts each carry a limit, the flat monthly price only stays flat while your estate does.
Strengths | Trade-offs |
|---|---|
Compliance reports plus repository scanning. One vendor covers the certificate and the source-code control. | Pentest depth leans automated. Rightsized human tests are scoped by Aikido’s own analysis, not by a manual CREST engagement with a verifiable certificate. |
Quiet enough to live in the workflow. Cornelius at n8n wrote “with 92% noise reduction, we got used to ‘the quiet’ quickly,” calling it “a massive productivity and sanity boost.” | Tier caps replace the per-target meter. Each plan bundles 10 users plus hard limits on repos, containers, domains and cloud accounts, so growth forces a tier jump. |
Rolls out without a sales call. Marc Lehr of GEA wrote “in just 45 minutes, we onboarded 150+ developers with Aikido,” and Christian Schmidt, VP Security and IT at Go Autonomous, said “with Aikido, the triaging is just… done.” | A thin independent review base. Most cited praise comes from Aikido’s own customer pages rather than a G2 or Capterra corpus, so trial the pentest side first. |
Best for: teams that want one vendor covering the pentest report and the source-code scanning control, with a fixed-price assessment instead of an annual per-target fee.
4. Synack
Go here when the compliance bar is federal. Synack carries FedRAMP Moderate authorization, ISO 27001, and testing at DoD impact levels 4, 5 and 6, credentials that sit above the CREST and CERT-In backing on an Astra report.
Proof of work generates on demand as OWASP and NIST 800-53 mission checklists, while coverage runs either point-in-time or on rolling 14, 90 and 365-day cycles across web, host, API, mobile and cloud.
The Synack Red Team accepts under 10% of applicants, confirms what the Sara AI agent surfaces, and filters 99.98% of scanner noise. Every test then routes through the LaunchPoint VPN, with full packet capture and a one-click pause. Astra’s managed engagement never exposes that.
$4,181 per AI Sara pentest.
$10,283 for SynackST.
$27,120 for Synack14.
Prepaid credits with one-year expiry, bought through a purchase order. A free Basic platform tier exists, but running a test still costs credits.
This is a security-leadership purchase. For scoping the engagement itself, our external penetration testing methodology guide covers what a rolling cadence should include.
Since the entry number sits close to Astra’s top pentest tier and a platform fee sits underneath that, Synack becomes a line item you defend in a plan rather than one you slip through on a card.
Strengths | Trade-offs |
|---|---|
Federal-grade evidence. FedRAMP Moderate, ISO 27001 and DoD impact levels 4 to 6, plus checklists on demand. | No code review, and PO-only buying. Offensive testing with no SAST, bought through procurement rather than the self-serve checkout Astra takes. |
Remediation detail developers learn from. Todd E. said on G2 “Synack explains exactly how each flaw was exploited and provides a full detailed explanation on how to remediate,” calling it “like getting secure code training for free.” | Slow to spin up. The same reviewer called the launch “a little slow to spin up,” and warned that scoping turns “more complicated when API and/or multiple testing accounts are involved.” |
Researcher quality shows in the findings. A principal technology architect wrote on Gartner Peer Insights “I continue to be impressed with the quality of Synack’s findings, which speaks to the quality of their security researchers.” | Cost sits on top of a platform fee. Jason L. flagged “cost pressures” in a market that “has become more commoditized,” over a subscription that dwarfs Astra’s $5,999 pentest. |
Best for: enterprises and public-sector teams whose audit or customer contract names FedRAMP, and who can support a procurement-led purchase.
5. XBOW
XBOW turns the pentest into a line item. You buy it when the audit calendar demands it, and Lightspeed engagements return audit-ready reports within five days in blackbox, whitebox or greybox mode, mapped to SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and 40-plus frameworks.
Validated before it surfaces. Deterministic validators confirm exploitability, and each result ships with a runnable exploit and an end-to-end trace.
Long chains. Documented attack paths run up to 48 steps, with request and response detail attached.
Triggerable from CI. A REST API and webhooks can fire a test on merge or pre-deploy.
A public scoreboard. XBOW topped the HackerOne US leaderboard above human researchers.
Even so, scope stays narrow at web applications and their APIs, so XBOW complements Astra’s cloud scanning rather than replacing it.
That five-day turnaround is roughly a third of Astra’s manual cycle. Which means an audit finding can be re-evidenced inside the same week a customer asks about it.
Pricing is the part that has moved:
No published list price today. Every pricing call to action routes to a Request Pricing form, and XBOW scopes the number to your environment.
Historical figures only. XBOW’s pricing page previously listed Lightspeed Plus at $4,000 per test and Premium at $8,000, anchored respectively to two-week and four-week manual engagements, with Enterprise on request. The screenshot below captures that earlier page.
Treat those numbers as dated. They are useful for gauging where XBOW positioned itself against a manual pentest, not as a quote you can budget from.
Our CodeAnt AI vs XBOW comparison and our guide to automated penetration testing cover where autonomous testing holds up.
Losing the shelf price cuts both ways: you lose the ability to budget straight off a web page, and you gain a number scoped to what you actually want tested.
Strengths | Trade-offs |
|---|---|
Audit-ready in five days. Framework mapping arrives with the report, against Astra’s 10-to-15-day cycle. | No human validation or certificate. Autonomous AI, without Astra’s certified-human layer or the CREST and PCI-ASV certificate some auditors expect. |
Chains bugs into attack paths. The Deputy CISO at Moderna singled out the chaining behaviour as “something no other product is doing well in the web space.” | Doubts on depth. Amélie Koran read its HackerOne badges as “some of the more basic things you can find with automation,” and the co-founder of HackerOne has said business-logic flaws remain hard for AI. |
Results that stand up in public. Utku Sen, a security researcher, wrote that finding valid bugs across multiple programs using “just their software” is impressive, adding “topping the VDP leaderboard is still not an easy thing to do.” | Not self-serve, and no shelf price. Pricing runs through a form, and the CEO admits you must “give it a URL to start with, possibly… some additional information like credentials.” |
Best for: web and API products that want a framework-mapped report on five days’ notice, priced per engagement rather than per annual target.
6. Intruder
Intruder covers the scan half of the compliance requirement continuously, and sells the report half separately. Whatever comes back, GregAI prioritizes it and writes environment-specific remediation, which is the difference between a finding and a fix for teams with no security specialist on staff.
A report without a quote cycle. The white-box web-app pentest connects GitHub or GitLab and returns an audit-ready report from $3,500 per test, same day, with nothing to negotiate.
Four engines, one interface. OpenVAS, Nuclei, Tenable Nessus and OWASP ZAP, with 18,800-plus external checks on Pro.
Emerging Threat Scans land within hours of a disclosure.
Scope that grows itself. Continuous discovery finds subdomains, exposed services and shadow IT, and CloudBot auto-scans new AWS, GCP, Azure and Cloudflare assets rather than waiting for you to name a target.
Free forever: five infrastructure licences and three users, the entry point Astra has no equivalent for.
Cloud: $239 per month, billed annually at $2,870.
Pro: $399 per month, billed annually at $4,790, and internal scanning lives here.
AI pentests: $3,500 per test for subscribers, or $4,000 as a one-off.
Intruder holds 4.8 on G2 across 207 reviews, with a 2026 Best Software Award.
So you can sit on the free tier indefinitely, upgrade only when internal scanning starts to matter, and buy the report as a one-off without ever opening a contract negotiation.
The pentest is AI-run, though. If your auditor’s question is whose signature sits on the report, this is not the answer to it.
Strengths | Trade-offs |
|---|---|
Self-serve on both halves. Continuous scanning and an on-demand report, against Astra’s “Schedule a call” Pentest Expert tier. | No certified manual pentest team. Outside the AI add-on Intruder never reads a repo, and fields nothing like Astra’s CREST-approved testers. |
Surfaces what actually matters. Nic H., an operations director, wrote on G2 that “rather than overwhelming us with low-value noise, it highlights vulnerabilities that genuinely matter and explains why they are important.” | Uneven cloud coverage. One enterprise reviewer found the Azure integration “definitely still a little bit immature,” where Astra’s own cloud scanner spans all three major clouds. |
Fast to stand up and always watching. One enterprise reviewer ranked it “our number one, 100% vulnerability assessment tool,” said it displaced both open-source Nessus and Tenable, and found “the initial setup was super easy.” | Licences are consumed, not released. A licence is held for 30 days per scanned target and does not release early on deletion or cancellation, and internal scanning requires Pro. |
Best for: lean security or IT teams that need continuous external coverage all year and an auditor-acceptable report on demand, with a free way to start.
7. Hadrian
Hadrian answers a question Astra cannot. Because it discovers external assets with no supplied scope and then validates which of those exposures an attacker could actually reach, it can tell you whether the scope you declared is the scope you really have.
Nova pentests return validated findings against web apps, APIs and cloud within 24 to 48 hours, mapped to SOC 2, ISO 27001 and NIS2. And because scanning is contextually gated, only the checks matching the fingerprinted technology ever run.
Event-driven, not calendar-driven. The Sense engine runs hourly passive scans with ML trained by ethical hackers, and a change to an asset triggers the next test.
Verified Risks. Potential and confirmed stay separate, with step-by-step reproduction attached to everything confirmed.
Prioritization beyond CVSS. Asset criticality, CISA KEV data and dark web monitoring feed the ranking, and an AI Orchestrator claims 99% noise elimination.
Nova: €3,000 per test, where one test covers one URL.
Atlas: priced on total asset count, with no published figure.
Entitlements expire at the end of the contract year and do not roll over, so scope the buy against a cadence you already know.
Our roundup of the best AI penetration testing tools puts it beside the rest of the agentic field.
Because Nova is billed per URL and entitlements do not roll over, an estate made of many small applications can burn through a year’s allocation faster than the discovery engine turns up new ones.
Strengths | Trade-offs |
|---|---|
Finds the assets you never declared. Zero-scope discovery and event-driven testing on any change, where Astra tests only what you name. | External only, no code and no certificate. No source-code review, no SCM or CI integration, and no certified-human certificate. |
Reports you can trust. An enterprise reviewer noted “prior solutions generated a lot of false-positives,” while “when Hadrian reports a vulnerability you know it is real.” | Nova disclaims completeness. Its terms state Hadrian “does not warrant that Nova will identify every vulnerability,” which is worth reading before it becomes your only artifact. |
Replaces the wait for the next test. A mid-market G2 reviewer wrote “Hadrian provides real-time visibility of risks that we would have to wait until a penetration test to discover.” | Reporting gaps and a thin review base. G2 reviewers flagged “missing reporting or exporting functionalities,” and Hadrian has only four G2 reviews against Astra’s larger footprint. |
Best for: security leads at large or acquisitive companies who need to prove the external estate is fully scoped, not just that the declared targets came back clean.
8. NodeZero (Horizon3.ai)
If your framework requires internal network penetration testing, Astra reaches that surface only inside a custom Enterprise engagement. NodeZero makes it the entry tier.
Internal, external, AWS, Azure Entra ID, Kubernetes, segmentation and insider-threat testing all run agentlessly from that first plan. And Horizon3.ai holds FedRAMP High authorization outright.
Retest proof retained. 1-Click Verify re-runs a remediation and keeps the result for 12 months, currently for internal environments.
Evidence, not version checks. Horizon3.ai states exploitability is “confirmed or ruled out with evidence, not vendor advisories or CVSS scores from vulnerability scanners that just check versions.”
Where findings land. ServiceNow, Jira, Splunk and Microsoft Sentinel, plus a hosted MCP server, which is security-operations plumbing rather than a developer workflow.
Quote-only across four cumulative tiers: Flex, Core, Pro and Elite.
30-day free trial, self-serve, dropping to read-only when it ends.
Unlimited autonomous pentests come with the subscription, which is different economics from one test per annual target.
Our list of the best continuous pentest tools covers where that cadence fits.
This one sits next to Astra rather than instead of it. NodeZero owns the network and identity surface Astra reaches only at Enterprise, while Astra keeps the certified application engagement NodeZero does not sell at all.
Still, recurring scheduled pentests need Core or above and reporting analytics are Elite-only, which makes the entry tier a starting point rather than a destination.
Strengths | Trade-offs |
|---|---|
Internal and AD evidence at the entry tier. Multi-domain exploitation under FedRAMP High, a surface Astra reaches only at Enterprise. | Zero code-security surface. The packaging matrix has no code rows, GitHub appears only as a ticket destination, and web app pentesting sits behind a waitlist. |
Retest proof retained for a year. The evidence survives to the next audit window without a new engagement. | Reporting sits at the top tier. Recurring scheduled pentests require Core or above, and reporting analytics are Elite-only. |
Scope it once and let it run. Brent Hamlin, an infrastructure manager, wrote on PeerSpot the automated scans are “great to use” and you “set it, scope it, and let it go,” and Rudolf Oyakhire reported “the deployment is very easy, taking under ten minutes.” | A learning curve and a price floor. Rudolf Oyakhire also noted a “learning curve for advanced features” and that “cost may challenge smaller organizations.” |
Best for: teams carrying an internal network or Active Directory pentest requirement, or a FedRAMP High obligation, alongside Astra’s application testing.
9. StackHawk
StackHawk will not produce your pentest certificate. What it does is make the scan evidence continuous instead of quarterly, running HawkScan against a live application from inside CI on every pipeline.
A security-operations manager on PeerSpot valued its “ability to report any issues that may exist with code running live,” crediting it toward PCI certification.
Wingman closes the loop in the editor. Agent skills install into Claude Code, Cursor and Copilot to scan, fix in-codebase, then rescan to verify, all before a PR opens.
Broad API coverage. REST, GraphQL, gRPC, JSON-RPC, SOAP and WebSocket, with deep support for authenticated scanning.
Data mapping on Scale. Every app and API is mapped from source, flagging where PII, PCI or HIPAA data concentrates.
API Discovery rounds that out, generating OpenAPI specs straight from connected repositories. So the scanner knows the shape of what it is testing before the first request goes out.
None of that produces a certificate. What it produces is a continuous record that the running application was tested, which is the control most quarterly-scan requirements are actually written against.
Pair it with whatever produces your certificate: StackHawk proves the application was tested this week, and the pentest vendor proves a qualified person went looking.
Wingman: $10 per user per month for unlimited apps and 50 agentic scans per user.
StackHawk Scale: quote-based, with unlimited scans, attack surface discovery and SSO.
14-day trial, and no permanent free tier.
For teams weighing scanner evidence against engagement evidence, our comparison of AI pentesting versus traditional DAST and our SAST vs DAST breakdown lay out what each one proves.
Strengths | Trade-offs |
|---|---|
Continuous runtime evidence, per pipeline. That PCI credit came from evidence generated on every build, not once a year. | No pentest product or certificate. No penetration testing tier exists, so it delivers neither Astra’s manual engagement nor the certificate. |
Fixes verified inside the agent. Wingman scans, fixes and rescans from the editor, closing the remediation loop before review. | Authenticated scans can frustrate. On AWS Marketplace one reviewer put it bluntly, that “authenticated scans can be frustrating,” while a DevOps engineer judged the pipeline-dependency setup to still need “refinement.” |
A deeper rating pool than Astra’s. StackHawk holds 4.6 on G2 across 68 reviews against Astra’s 12 Capterra entries, and David M. called onboarding “one of the best I’ve seen.” | No SAST and no self-hosting. StackHawk hands static analysis to Semgrep, Snyk Code and CodeQL integrations, and there is no self-hosted platform. |
Best for: API-heavy teams that want the quarterly-scan control satisfied on every pipeline run, with remediation verified before the PR opens.
10. Codacy
AI-governance evidence. Codacy tracks every AI model, MCP server and coding tool in a codebase and maps them to EU AI Act and ISO 42001 evidence, a report a growing number of enterprise questionnaires now ask for.
The source-code control Astra leaves blank. SAST across 12,000-plus rules, SCA with daily CVE re-scans, secrets, IaC and container scanning, all under one shared standard.
Guardrails at the prompt. An MCP-driven extension for VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor and Windsurf enforces your standards before code reaches a PR.
Codacy ranks last here because it produces no pentest artifact at all. Its runtime layer is OWASP ZAP DAST on the Business tier and nothing more.
Even so, no other tool here generates an AI inventory. Enterprise questionnaires have started asking.
Team: $18 per developer per month on annual billing, with unlimited lines of code.
Free Developer IDE plugin, and free forever for open source.
Codacy Cloud connects to cloud-hosted GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, while Azure Repos waits on a list. The CodeAnt AI vs Codacy comparison covers the direct matchup, and our best SAST tools comparison places it in the wider field.
If Astra already produces your pentest evidence and you still have an empty source-code control plus an AI-usage question on the questionnaire, this is the cheapest way to close both.
At $18 a seat it competes with a tooling line item rather than with a pentest budget.
Strengths | Trade-offs |
|---|---|
Governance evidence nobody else produces. A live inventory of models, MCP servers and coding tools, alongside SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA on Codacy’s own side. | No certified human pentest. Its DAST is automated ZAP scanning, so neither the CREST-certified engagement nor the auditor certificate is on offer. |
Live on a repo in minutes. Amir B., a retail CTO, wrote on Capterra it “just takes a few mins to set up, and you start getting reports on a wide variety of languages. Leaves comments on PR’s for you.” | Cloud Git only. Cloud-hosted GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket only, and Azure Repos never came off the waitlist. |
Takes style arguments off senior reviewers. Graeme K., an IT Services CTO, noted it “frees up Senior Resources to add value instead of arguing about casing and low level standards.” | On-prem costs more and support drags. Chris M., a staff engineer in network security, noted the on-prem option is “2.5x more expensive than the hosted license per seat” and that support “is very slow to respond.” |
Best for: teams that already have their pentest sorted and need the source-code control plus AI-governance evidence, billed per developer.
Where This Leaves You
Astra Security produces a real compliance artifact. Certified testers, framework-mapped findings and a public Trust Center are all genuinely there. If a dated certificate once a year is the whole requirement, the price is defensible.
So the question is not whether that report is any good, but whether one report a year, plus one or two re-scans, matches how often your code actually changes.
The strain shows in the other eleven months:
A thin retest allowance. One or two bundled re-scans does not go far when remediation runs long.
A slow loop. Ten to fifteen working days is a long wait when a customer is holding on an answer.
No repository. A report that never touches your code leaves engineers guessing which commit to look at.
CodeAnt AI closes both ends of that. Pen testing returns a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 PDF in 48 hours with free unlimited re-scans, billed only when a working exploit lands, while inline SAST puts the same class of finding on the pull request that introduced it.
Start on the open-source plan or the 14-day trial, connect a repository, and compare the first report against your last Astra one. What you are looking for is not which document reads better. It is which one you could regenerate this afternoon.
If you are still mapping the category, our AI penetration testing guide covers how agentic engagements are scoped and priced, and the defensive and offensive platform breakdown explains why code context changes what an attack finds. On the code side, compare the field in our best AI code review tools roundup.
