Cymulate vs Pentera

You don’t need another pen test. Proactively validate your controls and optimize security.

Why Automated Pen Testing Is Not Enough

Threat exposure validation requires optimizing defenses, scaling offensive testing and increasing exposure awareness. While Pentera is useful for identifying security gaps with automated penetration testing, it lacks the depth needed to fully assess and strengthen defenses.

Validate Controls to Focus on True Exposures

Cymulate offers a more comprehensive approach to identifying and fixing security gaps through breach simulation and automated red teaming. By testing the overall effectiveness of security controls, it reveals unmitigated exposures and provides actionable guidance to strengthen defenses before the next attack.

“Automated and regular penetration testing can identify vulnerabilities that might be exploited to achieve a certain objective. However, it can be too narrow in scope and infrequent to be leveraged as an alternative.”

– Gartner, A Guidance Framework for Developing and Implementing Vulnerability Management, Jan. 2025

Cymulate vs Pentera Comparison Chart

Use Case

Capabilities

Pentera

Defensive Posture Optimization	Security controls integrations	Deep control integrations to validate detection and prevention.	No control integrations.
Defensive Posture Optimization	Threat-informed defenses	Automates IoC updates to controls. Custom detection rules for EDR, SIEM and XDR Control tuning guidance.	No IoCs updates. No detection rules. No control optimization.
Scale Offensive Testing	Attack Scenario creation workbench	Build custom attack chains from a library of >100,000 attack actions. Create custom scenarios/ attack actions. AI attack planner converts threat advisories and plain language prompts into custom attack chains.	Built for easy point and test but operates as a “black box” to users with no ability to build custom scenarios or attack chains.
	Automation, extensible testing	Out-of-the box templates for threats, controls, cloud, Kubernetes and more. Modify templates and best practices for your specific environment (OS, cloud, databases, SaaS, etc.)	Users are limited to Pentera templates. Very limited customization to adapt tests for specific environments (OS, cloud, databases, SaaS, etc.)
	Attack paths	Automated red teaming provides white box and grey box testing to validate attack paths.	Automated pen testing provides white box and black box testing to validate attack paths.
Exposure Awareness	Automated & continuous testing	Easy and automated testing for continuous validation of threats, security controls, threats and response capabilities.	Testing that identifies vulnerabilities and executes attacks but cannot identify control gaps.
Exposure Awareness	Always current attack scenario knowledge	Daily updates of the latest threats and continuously adding new assessments.	No daily updates of the latest threats and infrequent updates of attack techniques.

Exposure validation that filters out the noise, so you can focus on the exploitable.

Validate Controls

Find and fix your gaps

Validate Threats

Know your risk

Validate Response

Battle test your SOC

Cymulate Hardens Defenses and Optimizes Controls

Cymulate Hardens Defenses and Optimizes Controls

Pentera has limited customization to adapt tests for specific scenarios or environments. Cymulate provides out-of-the-box assessments and an advanced attack scenario workbench for building attack actions and complex attack chains.

Pentera doesn’t integrate with your controls. Cymulate integrates with top security vendors to extensively evaluate the controls you already have in place.

Pentera doesn’t offer guidance to optimize your controls. Cymulate provides mitigation guidance and rule recommendations to fine-tune security configurations and strengthen your defenses.

Pentera doesn’t provide updated assessments of the latest threats.
With Cymulate, automatically validate your security controls against the latest emergent threats identified across the threat intelligence community.

Why Companies Choose Cymulate Over Pentera

Automated security validation

Automated continuous testing of security controls and policies against the latest immediate threats.

Identify gaps and weaknesses

Find gaps and weaknesses in your security defenses that could expose you to a cyber breach.

Optimize security controls

Configure and fine-tune your security controls with mitigation guidance and rule recommendations.

Reduce exposure risk

Continuously measure and improve your security controls to reduce the risk of exposure to cyber threats.

Backed by the Industry

Cymulate Named
a G2 Leader

Cymulate Recognized as Leader for Security and Exposure Validation

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Cymulate Named a Customer’s Choice

2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer for BAS Tools Report

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What our customers say about us

Organizations across all industries choose Cymulate for exposure validation, proactively confirming that defenses are robust and reliable-before an attack occurs.

"Cymulate gives us end-to-end visibility of our security posture, helps prove compliance, and saves my team a lot of time and effort."

– Adam Champion, Head of InfoSec

Singapore Bank

“Cymulate is a great solution for organizations interested in both security control validation and automated pen testing.”

- Senior Security Manager

Utility Organization

“Cymulate is the best-in-class for automated security validation. It offers the most breadth and depth of attack simulations, provides assessments against emerging threats, and enables us to manage our attack surface.”

– SOC Manager

“We no longer have to wait for a periodic pen test every six months. With the same small security team, Cymulate allows us to optimize our resources and use automation to run more assessments continuously.”

- Renaldo Jack, Group Cybersecurity Head

Upgrading from Pentera
to Cymulate is easy.

We’ve helped numerous clients upgrade from Pentera to Cymulate. We’ll help you build and customize production-safe assessments for all your environments (adding to the ones that Pentera covered), optimize your controls and reduce exposure risk.

See Our Intergations