Best Security Compass Alternatives (2026): Penetration Testing and AppSec Firms Compared

Security Compass sells four products and none of them is a penetration test. Its about page states that the company "helps organizations build secure, compliant software by bringing security requirements, threat modeling, and developer training directly into modern development workflows", and the product menu lists SD Elements, Devici, Kontra hands-on labs and AppSec training modules. The reason is on the record: Security Compass Advisory, the consulting arm that delivered penetration testing and adversary simulation, was acquired by Kroll on 15 December 2021.

That single fact reframes the shortlist. This guide ranks eight penetration testing and application security alternatives, and says plainly where Security Compass is still the right purchase. Every claim about Security Compass below is drawn from its own pages or from the Kroll release, and where a figure is not published we write "not published" rather than estimating.

At a Glance: Security Compass and the Best Alternatives in 2026

All cells were verified on each vendor's own pages on 5 September 2026. Source links appear in the full comparison table further down.

What Security Compass Sells in 2026

Three products and a training catalogue, all aimed at the design and build phases rather than the test phase.

SD Elements. The product page describes "a security requirements platform for security teams and engineering organizations that need consistent, auditable security governance across their software portfolio." It takes the architecture and regulatory context of an application and "converts it into specific, actionable requirements developers can actually implement", automatically mapped to "PCI-DSS, NIST 800-53, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, and 100+ other frameworks" and pushed into Jira, GitHub and Azure DevOps. Published headline figures are 8,000+ security requirements, 100+ compliance frameworks and a claimed 50 to 70% reduction in audit preparation time. Validation runs "against the diff", and the page states that "If a requirement isn't met, the build doesn't ship."

Devici. Continuous threat modeling with a drag-and-drop diagram canvas, STRIDE, LINDDUN and MAESTRO framework support, MCP connectivity to Cursor, GitHub Copilot and Claude Code, and an integration that feeds identified threats into SD Elements as requirements. There is a genuinely free tier: three threat models and up to three users at $0 with no time limit.

Kontra and AppSec training. Hands-on labs and role-specific courses mapped to NIST, PCI and OWASP.

What is published about price. More than almost anyone in this category. The SD Elements pricing page lists an Enterprise tier "Starting at $75K" annually, notes the figure "is in USD and only valid for new Security Compass customers headquartered within North America", and adds US Federal and Canadian Federal Government tiers priced on request. Devici publishes a free tier and quotes Enterprise. The company states it is "certified by ISO/IEC 27001 and AICPA SOC".

Why Buyers Look for Security Compass Alternatives

None of these are defects. They are the consequences of a deliberate decision to become a product company, and all four are verifiable on Security Compass's own pages or in the Kroll release.

1. There is no penetration testing service line. The Products menu lists SD Elements, Devici, Kontra and AppSec Modules. The Solutions menu is organised by industry and role. No page on securitycompass.com offers a scoped penetration test, a red team engagement or a pentest report. If your auditor asked for a penetration test, this is not the vendor that produces it.

2. The testing practice left in 2021. Kroll's release states that it acquired Security Compass Advisory, "a cyber security consulting company that helps organizations improve the security posture of their existing technology environments", describing a practice "focused on pragmatic security strategy, testing and adversarial simulation". Buyers who worked with Security Compass Advisory before December 2021 and go looking for the same team are now looking at Kroll.

3. The entry price is a platform commitment. "Starting at $75K" annually is honest and unusually transparent, but it is a platform budget line, not a test. A team that needs one application assessed against an audit date in six weeks is solving a different problem at a different order of magnitude.

4. Requirements are not evidence of exploitation. SD Elements generates traceable evidence that requirements were implemented and validated. That is real and useful. It is not the same artifact as a report showing that a tester chained a broken authorization check into cross-tenant data access. Most regulated programs need both, and only one of them comes from this vendor.

What Testing Actually Surfaces

Very few providers publish outcome data from their own engagements, which makes the shape of a real finding set hard to reason about during procurement. Stingrai's State of Penetration Testing 2026 analyses 1,206 verified findings across 55 penetration tests. Three numbers matter here. 92.7% of tests surfaced at least one High or Critical finding, which is the practical argument against treating a requirements program as coverage. The false-positive rate across those findings was 0.74%, the benchmark to hold any vendor to when it tells you validation is handled. And the median time to fix a Critical was 10.5 days, which is why fixes arriving as pull requests are worth pricing rather than treating as a nice-to-have.

The 8 Best Security Compass Alternatives in 2026

1. Stingrai

Toronto, Ontario, Canada, with a London, UK office at 1 Coldbath Square, Farringdon. Founded 2021. Offensive security only: penetration testing, red teaming, adversary emulation and AI-augmented PTaaS. Web application and API testing is driven by Snipe, an autonomous web application pentest agent that runs black-box dynamic testing and white-box source review, hunts IDOR, business logic flaws and broken authorization, opens AutoFix pull requests and gates every pull request. Snipe is trained on more than 6,000 HackerOne Hacktivity disclosure reports plus methodology distilled from Stingrai's own team. Certified penetration testers work the same engagement as Snipe at the same time, directing where it focuses and extending the attack paths it opens. Stingrai delivers both annual one-time tests and continuous programs. Reports provide evidence for SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS 4.0, HIPAA, NIST SP 800-53 and 800-171, DORA and NIS2 programs. Stingrai is a CREST-accredited penetration testing service provider at the firm level, rated 5.0/5.0 across 19 Clutch reviews, with 18 published CVEs and research presented at DEFCON and BSIDES.

The overlap with Security Compass is narrower than it looks and the complement is exact: SD Elements pushes requirements into the pull request, and Snipe pushes fixes and a merge gate into the same pull request. Teams that run both get the requirement, the test and the patch in one workflow.

Published pricing: Autonomous at US$3,000 per assessment or US$450 per month, Hybrid at US$6,800 or US$1,275 per month, each covering exactly one web application and its APIs, retesting included. Every other scope goes through the Get a Quote form. A "No High or Critical Finding = Don't Pay" guarantee applies to the Autonomous tier. Best for: business logic and authorization depth at a published price, annual or continuous, from a Toronto firm. Source: stingrai.io/pricing

2. NetSPI

Minneapolis, Minnesota, US. NetSPI describes itself as "the pioneer of Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS)" and states it "has led security innovation since its inception in 2001", with "more than 20 years of history, 350+ experts, and 50+ pentesting services". Coverage spans application, network, cloud, AI, mainframe, hardware and IoT, plus red team operations, attack surface management and secure code review. NetSPI and Synack announced a merger in September 2026, so ask how the combined roadmap affects your account if you shortlist either firm this quarter.

Published pricing: not published. Best for: enterprise application security programs that need one testing vendor across many asset classes. Source: netspi.com

3. Cobalt

San Francisco, US. PTaaS across web, API, network, cloud and AI targets plus secure code review, delivered by the Cobalt Core, a community of vetted testers matched to your stack by the platform. Engagements start within 3, 2 or 1 business days across the Standard, Premium and Enterprise tiers. Cobalt's pricing page states that "A Cobalt Credit is the equivalent of 8 traditional pentesting hours", sold in annual packages, and that "Credits do not roll over into the next contract." In-contract rollover runs 6 months on Standard and 12 months on Premium and Enterprise. Retest terms are the most generous published here: "Our PTaaS model provides unlimited on-demand retesting throughout your contract term."

Published pricing: not published. As of 5 September 2026 the pricing page carries no dollar figure, only credits and tiers. Best for: teams running many small tests a year across a product portfolio. Source: cobalt.io/platform/pricing

4. Trail of Bits

New York, US, per the mailing address at 228 Park Ave S, New York, NY 10003 on its contact page. Its about page states the firm has been independent "Since 2012" and publishes running counters of 946 publications, 620 audits and 200+ open-source repositories. Practice areas are "Application security, cryptography, blockchain, AI/ML, low-level systems, and software supply chain", and the firm states it runs "one of the largest consulting cryptography teams in the world" with "the people who maintain our open-source tools" also working client engagements. It was one of seven small-business-track teams selected to build an AI-powered Cyber Reasoning System and was awarded US$1M at the DARPA AIxCC semifinal.

Published pricing: not published. Best for: cryptography, protocol, compiler and machine learning review where the hard part is the design, not the endpoint. Source: trailofbits.com

5. Praetorian

United States; Praetorian publishes no head office address on its own pages. Offensive security engineering across application, cloud, network, AI and machine learning, IoT and hardware, and automotive targets including in-vehicle networks and V2X communications, delivered on what the company calls "our proprietary offensive security platform". Its published claims are "Zero False Positives, every finding verified by an expert", "70% Faster MTTR" and "100% Compliance Coverage, FDA, GLBA, HIPAA, NERC, PCI-DSS & more".

Published pricing: not published. Best for: engineering-grade testing of unusual targets, particularly embedded, automotive and machine learning systems. Source: praetorian.com

6. Forward Security

Vancouver, British Columbia, with a Toronto office. Its contact page states "We are headquartered in beautiful Vancouver, Canada with reach across North America and Europe", listing 555 W Hastings St, Suite 1200 in Vancouver and 1655 Dupont St, Suite 101 in Toronto. This is the closest structural analogue to what Security Compass used to sell as one company: a four-stage application security risk assessment covering discovery, threat modelling, penetration testing and finalisation, plus code security and vulnerable dependency analysis, security design review, AI security services against the OWASP LLM Top 10, and the Eureka DevSecOps platform for orchestrating scanners and correlating results.

Published pricing: not published. Best for: Canadian software teams that want threat modelling and code review wrapped around the pentest rather than bought from two vendors. Source: forwardsecurity.com

7. GoSecure

A North American cybersecurity company whose about page states it has been "pioneering the integration of endpoint, network, and email threat detection into a single Managed Extended Detection and Response (MXDR) service" for "over 20 years". Its professional services line covers penetration testing, PCI DSS services, incident response, security maturity assessment, privacy services and security operations, plus threat simulation and emulation and tabletop exercises. GoSecure positions professional services as "finding the problems" while GoSecure Titan MXDR "make sure to solve them".

Published pricing: not published. Best for: buyers who want testing and 24/7 detection and response on one contract. Source: gosecure.ai

8. Doyensec

San Francisco, US at 350 Townsend Street, Suite 840, with an EMEA office in San Marino. The homepage describes a firm that works "at the intersection of software development and offensive engineering", auditing web applications and APIs, mobile, desktop and server applications, GraphQL platforms, ElectronJS applications, cloud, smart contracts, large language models and IoT devices, and states it performs "in-depth analysis using manual source code auditing and dynamic testing". Its own summary is the useful one: "we're an offensive security firm working with the frame of reference of a blue team."

Published pricing: not published. Best for: deep, code-level review of a single complex application by a small specialist team. Source: doyensec.com

How It Compares: Security Compass Side by Side

Security Compass is compared here rather than ranked, because the post is about alternatives to it and a self-referential rank would be meaningless. Every cell below was read from the linked page on 5 September 2026.

Where Security Compass Is the Better Choice

Honest answer, and it is a genuinely strong category.

The problem is upstream. If your applications keep failing the same controls, the cheapest fix is not another test. It is getting the right requirements into the backlog before the code exists. SD Elements does that at portfolio scale, mapped to the frameworks your assessor cites, and no penetration testing firm on this list offers an equivalent.

Audit preparation is the pain. The published claim is a 50 to 70% reduction in audit preparation time, built on requirement-to-code traceability rather than evidence reconstructed the week before the audit. For a compliance team drowning in screenshots, that is the product.

AI agents are writing your code. Security Compass has aimed the whole platform at that shift, with MCP connectivity into Cursor, GitHub Copilot and Claude Code so requirements reach the agent rather than a wiki. If your engineering organisation has moved to agent-assisted development faster than your security program has, this is a well-targeted answer.

Threat modeling needs to be continuous. Devici's free tier lets a team try continuous threat modeling on three models before committing budget, which is rare in this category.

If your constraint is instead an auditor asking for a penetration test, depth on one application's authorization model, or a supplier who will demonstrate exploitation rather than confirm coverage, the eight firms above are built for that.

Buyer Checklist

Run these against every quote. Ask for written answers.

1. Am I buying a platform or an engagement? A per-seat annual subscription and a scoped test are different budget lines with different approvers.

2. Does the deliverable demonstrate exploitation? Coverage evidence and exploitation evidence satisfy different questions from an assessor.

3. Who performs the test, and are they employees? Get the staffing model, not just the certification list.

4. Is source code in scope? Black-box only, or dynamic testing plus white-box review.

5. What does the AI actually do? Generating requirements, triaging findings, or exploiting and chaining. Our AI pentesting tools comparison sets out how to tell.

6. How do fixes reach engineering? A ticket, a requirement, or a pull request with a patch and a gate on the next merge.

7. Are retests included, and for how long? Confirm before you sign, not at remediation time.

8. Which exact control does the artifact satisfy? Match it to the clause your assessor will cite, whether that is PCI DSS 4.0 Requirement 11.4 or SOC 2 CC4.1.

9. Is the firm accredited, or are individuals certified? Different claims. Read our guide to verifying CREST accreditation.

Run your scope through the penetration testing cost calculator before you collect quotes, so you can tell an outlier from a scoping difference.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best Security Compass alternatives in 2026?

It depends which half you are replacing. For penetration testing, the eight strongest alternatives are Stingrai, NetSPI, Cobalt, Trail of Bits, Praetorian, Forward Security, GoSecure and Doyensec, with Stingrai first for business logic and authorization depth at a published price. For the requirements and threat modeling platform itself, Security Compass has few direct equivalents, which is exactly why so many teams end up buying SD Elements for the design phase and a specialist testing firm for the test phase.

Does Security Compass do penetration testing?

No. As of 5 September 2026 the securitycompass.com product menu lists SD Elements, Devici, Kontra hands-on labs and AppSec training modules, and no page offers a scoped penetration test or red team engagement. The company describes itself as helping organizations "build secure, compliant software by bringing security requirements, threat modeling, and developer training directly into modern development workflows".

What happened to Security Compass Advisory?

Kroll acquired it on 15 December 2021. Kroll's release describes Security Compass Advisory as "a cyber security consulting company that helps organizations improve the security posture of their existing technology environments and accelerate adoption of new technology", "focused on pragmatic security strategy, testing and adversarial simulation". The practice's penetration testing, red team and cloud security capabilities moved to Kroll's cyber risk practice along with its leadership.

How much does SD Elements cost?

Security Compass publishes the figure. The SD Elements pricing page lists an Enterprise tier "Starting at $75K" annually and notes that "Pricing is in USD and only valid for new Security Compass customers headquartered within North America", with US Federal and Canadian Federal Government tiers priced on request. Devici publishes a free tier at $0 for three threat models and up to three users, with Enterprise quoted. That is more price transparency than most vendors in either category offer.

Is SD Elements a substitute for a penetration test?

No, and Security Compass does not claim it is. SD Elements generates security requirements, pushes them into developer tooling and produces traceable evidence that they were implemented and validated. A penetration test produces evidence that a tester attempted to break the application and either did or did not succeed, with severity ratings, proof of concept and retested findings. Assessors treat those as different artifacts. Most regulated programs need both.

Where is Security Compass headquartered?

Toronto. Its contact page lists the headquarters at 325 Front St. West, Suite 103, Toronto, ON M5V 2Y1, Canada, alongside a mailbox at 8 Lombardy Street, Newark, NJ and a satellite office at 600 Congress Street, Austin, TX.

Which alternative combines threat modelling with the penetration test?

Forward Security is the closest single-vendor answer. Its published four-stage application security risk assessment runs discovery, threat modelling, penetration testing and finalisation as one engagement, and the firm also sells code security analysis and security design review. Stingrai covers the testing half with source review inside the engagement, so a common pattern is SD Elements or Devici for requirements and threat models upstream, and Stingrai for testing, AutoFix pull requests and merge gating downstream.

Which Security Compass alternative publishes a fixed penetration testing price?

One. Stingrai publishes US$3,000 per Autonomous assessment and US$6,800 for Hybrid, each covering exactly one web application and its APIs, with monthly equivalents of US$450 and US$1,275 on a 12-month engagement and a "No High or Critical Finding = Don't Pay" guarantee on the Autonomous tier. NetSPI, Cobalt, Trail of Bits, Praetorian, Forward Security, GoSecure and Doyensec all quote every engagement.

Which alternative is best for compliance evidence?

All eight produce reports used as evidence in SOC 2, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS programs. Stingrai's penetration testing supports SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS 4.0, NIST SP 800-53 and 800-171, DORA and NIS2 programs, whether you buy a single annual engagement or a continuous program. NetSPI and Cobalt are the strongest fits where an enterprise portfolio needs many tests under one contract. Ask every vendor for a redacted sample report and confirm retest evidence is included, using our guide to the pentest evidence auditors accept.

Related Reading

• Top Penetration Testing Companies in Canada 2026

• Penetration Testing Companies in Toronto 2026

• Cobalt Alternatives 2026: PTaaS Platforms Compared

• CREST-Accredited Penetration Testing Companies 2026

• The State of Penetration Testing 2026

The Bottom Line

Security Compass is a good company solving a real problem, and the problem is not the one most people searching for an alternative are trying to solve. Requirements, threat models and developer training belong upstream of the build. SD Elements does that at portfolio scale, publishes its entry price, and has aimed itself squarely at a world where AI agents write a growing share of the code.

The testing half of the old Security Compass went to Kroll in December 2021 and has not come back. If that is the half you need, buy it from a firm whose entire business is offensive security. For business logic and authorization depth at a published price, with the patch proposed in the pull request and a guarantee on the Autonomous tier, Stingrai is the closest like-for-like answer and sits in the same city. Compare packages on the Stingrai pricing page, book a free scoping call, or send your scope through the Get a Quote form.