CISO Tribune

Vendor comparison · 2 companies

Alphabet vs Censys

Alphabet sells a full suite of security products and services to protect workloads and meet digital sovereignty requirements. Censys supports investigations with real-time Internet infrastructure visibility and historical context. CISO Tribune files both under Threat intelligence. This page sets the two records side by side: what each sells, where it is based, who owns and funds it, the customers it names and its recent news, each fact numbered to its source.

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  • Alphabet
  • Censys
Alphabet vs Censys: Products, Customers and Funding Compared
AlphabetAlphabet sells a full suite of security products and services to protect workloads and meet digital sovereignty requirements.cloud.google.comCensysCensys supports investigations with real-time Internet infrastructure visibility and historical context.censys.com
What it sells
  • Google Threat Intelligence[1][2]Threat intelligence for understanding threat actors and potential attack vectors.
  • Mandiant Consulting Services[2]Consulting services for understanding threat actors and potential attack vectors.
  • Security Command Center[1][3]A platform for defending against threats to Google Cloud assets.
  • Identity Platform[3][5]A customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform for apps.
  • reCAPTCHA Enterprise[3][5]Helps protect a website from fraudulent activity, spam and abuse.
  • Google Cloud Armor[3]Helps protect applications and websites against denial of service and web attacks.
  • Censys Platform[3][8][17][18][19][20][21]Delivers visibility and intelligence for triage, threat investigation, adversary hunting and Internet exposure management.
  • Censys ASM[8]Reveals Internet-facing assets, services and exposures across all 65,535 ports.
  • Adversary Investigation[3][4][5][9][17][19]An add-on module to the Censys Platform to detect, analyze and track threat infrastructure.
  • cencli[20]A command line tool for running search queries, looking up assets and performing aggregations.
Categories
Headquarters
Not stated on its pagesAnn Arbor, United States[2][21]
Founded
Not stated on its pages2017[1]
Ownership and funding
Not stated on its pagesNot stated on its pages
Named customers
Not stated on its pagesNot stated on its pages
Recent news
  • December 22, 2025Alphabet said it would buy clean energy developer Intersect for $4.75 billion in cash, plus assumed debt.[7]
  • September 22, 2026Censys announced an expanded global Channel Partner Program and investments to accelerate its channel-first growth strategy.[14]
  • July 22, 2026Censys announced record first half 2026 growth, reflecting growing enterprise adoption of Internet intelligence.[13]
  • July 8, 2026Censys expanded its Internet Map to include real-time DNS visibility.[25]
  • June 18, 2026Censys announced its expansion into security operations, enabling organizations to use its internet intelligence across security workflows.[26]
  • June 18, 2026Censys announced its expansion into security operations, enabling organizations to use its Internet intelligence across security workflows.[12]
G2 and Gartner Peer Insights
  • G2: Not stated on its pages
  • Gartner Peer Insights: Not stated on its pages
  • G2: listed, seen November 10, 2026[6]
  • Gartner Peer Insights: Not stated on its pages
Who it fits
From its own pages, Google Cloud addresses organisations that own intellectual property in the form of highly sensitive data or that handle sensitive data subject to data protection regulations such as PCI DSS. Our reading is that Google Cloud addresses organisations migrating from on-premises to the cloud that want to replicate their on-premises network based security architecture as they move data to Google Cloud. Alphabet addresses customers that, as part of a migration to the cloud, may need to validate its compliance documentation, certifications and controls. Alphabet publishes regional compliance papers on the telecommunications industry. Alphabet's industry solutions range from improving retail product discovery to detecting bank fraud.From its own pages, Censys sells to private and public sector security teams. Censys describes a plan for threat hunting and CTI teams looking to hunt, track and engineer detections for adversary campaigns and infrastructure. Censys describes a plan for enterprises that want to use Censys data across alert triage, IR, threat intel and detection engineering. Censys offers purpose-built internet intelligence with specialized datasets for government specific investigations and exposure management requirements. Censys offers Single Sign-On through a SAML-based integration to Enterprise and Government users.
Last verified
November 2, 2026September 27, 2026

Where they overlap

  • Alphabet and Censys are both filed under Threat intelligence.

Where they differ, field by field

  • Alphabet's primary category is SIEM; Censys's is External attack surface management.
  • Alphabet is also filed under Incident response and forensics and Cloud-native application protection (CNAPP).
  • Alphabet lists Google Threat Intelligence, Mandiant Consulting Services, Security Command Center, Identity Platform, reCAPTCHA Enterprise and 1 more. Censys lists Censys Platform, Censys ASM, Adversary Investigation and cencli.
  • Censys is headquartered in Ann Arbor, United States.
  • Censys was founded in 2017.

What it sells: Alphabet

What Google Threat Intelligence does[1][2]
Google Threat Intelligence is used to understand threat actors and potential attack vectors. Google Threat Intelligence is offered alongside Mandiant Consulting Services.
What Mandiant Consulting Services does[2]
Mandiant Consulting Services is offered to understand threat actors and potential attack vectors. Mandiant Consulting Services is offered alongside Google Threat Intelligence.
What Security Command Center does[1][3]
Security Command Center is a platform for defending against threats. Security Command Center covers Google Cloud assets.
What Identity Platform does[3][5]
Identity Platform is a customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform for adding identity and access management to apps. Identity Platform integrates with the reCAPTCHA Enterprise API to enhance security for users. With bot protection, Identity Platform provisions score-based reCAPTCHA keys in the customer's project.
What Google Cloud Armor does[3]
Google Cloud Armor helps protect applications and websites against denial of service attacks. Google Cloud Armor covers web attacks against applications and websites.

What it sells: Censys

What Censys Platform does[3][8][17][18][19][20][21]
Censys Platform has API endpoints for integrating Platform functionality with a customer tech stack. Censys Platform uses a language called Censys Query Language. Censys Platform includes a web property dataset covering name-based assets on the internet, including websites, APIs and web-based applications.
What Censys ASM does[8]
Censys ASM uses first-party scanning to find Internet-exposed assets, including services on nonstandard ports, self-signed certificates, hosts in residential networks and dangling DNS records. Censys ASM sends alerts on changes such as new hosts and services, open ports and reissued certificates. Censys ranks risks by severity, category and affected asset.
What Adversary Investigation does[3][4][5][9][17][19]
The Adversary Investigation module is an add-on to the Censys Platform for organizations to detect, analyze and track threat infrastructure. Actions that use CensEye to discover related infrastructure for a host, web property or certificate are only available to users with access to the Adversary Investigation module.

Questions about Alphabet and Censys

What do Alphabet and Censys sell?
Alphabet sells Google Threat Intelligence, Mandiant Consulting Services, Security Command Center, Identity Platform, reCAPTCHA Enterprise and 1 more. Censys sells Censys Platform, Censys ASM, Adversary Investigation and cencli.
Are Alphabet and Censys in the same category?
They share Threat intelligence. Alphabet's primary category is SIEM and Censys's is External attack surface management.
Where are Alphabet and Censys headquartered?
Censys is headquartered in Ann Arbor, United States.
When were Alphabet and Censys founded?
Censys was founded in 2017.
Who are Alphabet and Censys sold to?
From its own pages, Google Cloud addresses organisations that own intellectual property in the form of highly sensitive data or that handle sensitive data subject to data protection regulations such as PCI DSS. From its own pages, Censys sells to private and public sector security teams.
What have Alphabet and Censys announced recently?
December 22, 2025: Alphabet said it would buy clean energy developer Intersect for $4.75 billion in cash, plus assumed debt. September 22, 2026: Censys announced an expanded global Channel Partner Program and investments to accelerate its channel-first growth strategy.

About Alphabet

Alphabet sells a full suite of security products and services to protect workloads and meet digital sovereignty requirements. Alphabet offers security products that help customers meet policy, regulatory and business objectives. Google Threat Intelligence and Mandiant Consulting Services are offered to understand threat actors and potential attack vectors. Google Security Operations is used to detect, investigate and respond to threats.[1][2][3]

Security Command Center is a platform for defending against threats to Google Cloud assets. Assured Workloads provides compliance and security controls for sensitive workloads. Identity and Access Management is a permissions management system for Google Cloud resources. Google Cloud Armor helps protect applications and websites against denial of service and web attacks. Cloud Key Management is used to manage encryption keys on Google Cloud. Confidential Computing encrypts data in use with Confidential VMs. Cloud NGFW is a global firewall to protect cloud resources. Shielded VMs are virtual machines hardened with security controls and defenses. Secret Manager stores API keys, passwords, certificates and other sensitive data.[1][3]

Cloud Data Loss Prevention is a platform for inspecting, classifying and redacting sensitive data. Sensitive Data Protection is a fully managed sensitive data protection service. Access Transparency provides cloud provider visibility through near real-time logs. Cloud Asset Inventory is used to view, monitor and analyze Google Cloud and Anthos assets across projects and services. Secure Web Proxy monitors and secures egress web traffic to help protect cloud workloads. Web Risk detects malicious URLs on a website and in client applications. Chrome Enterprise Premium is a zero-trust platform with integrated threat and data protection. Assured Open Source Software lets developers incorporate the same OSS packages that Google uses into their own developer workflows. Sovereign Controls by Partners provides partner-operated sovereignty controls for Google Cloud to meet digital sovereignty requirements.[3]

VPC Service Controls protects sensitive data in Google Cloud services using security perimeters. VPC Service Controls helps protect against accidental or targeted action by external or insider entities, to minimize data exfiltration risks from Google Cloud services such as Cloud Storage and BigQuery. VPC Service Controls is used to create perimeters that protect the resources and data of services that are explicitly specified. By allowing private access only from authorized VPC networks, VPC Service Controls helps protect against data exfiltration by clients using stolen OAuth or service account credentials. VPC Service Controls adds a layer of security defense for Google Cloud services that is independent of Identity and Access Management (IAM). Google Cloud provides a restricted virtual IP that is integrated with VPC Service Controls. VPC Service Controls lets administrators monitor resource access patterns across service perimeters using Cloud Audit Logs. VPC Service Controls can run in dry run mode to monitor requests to protected services without preventing access. VPC Service Controls configurations are managed at the organization level by default.[3]

Identity Platform is a customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform for adding identity and access management to apps. Identity Platform integrates with the reCAPTCHA Enterprise API to enhance security for users. With bot protection, Identity Platform provisions score-based reCAPTCHA keys in the customer's project. In audit mode for email-password sign-in, Identity Platform creates reCAPTCHA keys that assess traffic to Identity Platform APIs without blocking any requests. For phone authentication, Identity Platform blocks a request that fails the toll fraud assessment and does not send an SMS verification code. reCAPTCHA Enterprise helps protect a website from fraudulent activity, spam and abuse. Identity-Aware Proxy uses identity and context to guard access to applications and VMs. Cloud Identity is a unified platform for IT admins to manage user devices and apps.[3][5]

Google Cloud creates and shares mappings of its security, privacy and compliance controls to standards from around the world. Alphabet regularly undergoes independent verification to achieve certifications, attestations and audit reports. An independent third-party auditor has granted formal certifications, attestations or audit reports covering Alphabet's compliance offerings. Alphabet's certifications and attestations include ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27017, ISO/IEC 27018, ISO/IEC 27701, ISO/IEC 42001, PCI DSS, SOC 1, SOC 2 and SOC 3. Alphabet's compliance offerings include FedRAMP, FIPS 140-2 Validated and HITRUST CSF. Alphabet's compliance offerings include Protected B in Canada, StateRAMP, TruSight and the U.S. Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC). Cloud service providers cannot formally certify a customer's compliance with laws and regulations. Alphabet reviews laws and regulations and, where possible, provides guidance documents, mappings and papers that outline its technical capabilities and legal commitments.[6]

Alphabet's industry solutions range from improving retail product discovery to detecting bank fraud. Gemini platform is a fully managed AI development platform for building and managing AI applications and agents, with access to Agent Studio and 200+ foundation models.[1][2][6]

Alphabet on the record

Sources

Alphabet full record

  1. [1]SecurityGoogle Cloud · cloud.google.com · undated page, accessed November 2, 2026 · Tier A
  2. [2]AI and Cloud Computing Services | Google CloudGoogle Cloud · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  3. [3]Security and identity products | Google CloudGoogle Cloud · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  4. [4]Overview of VPC Service Controls | Google Cloud DocumentationGoogle Cloud Documentation · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  5. [5]Integrate Identity Platform with the reCAPTCHA Enterprise API | Google Cloud DocumentationGoogle Cloud Documentation · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  6. [6]Cloud compliance and regulations resources | Google CloudGoogle Cloud · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  7. [7]Alphabet to buy clean energy developer Intersect in $4.75 billion deal amid AI pushReuters · published December 22, 2025 · Tier B

Censys full record

  1. [1]Censys introduces the ground truth for internet intelligence the censys internet map 301938734Censys via PR Newswire · prnewswire.com · published September 26, 2023 · Tier A
  2. [2]CareersCensys · censys.com · undated page, accessed September 27, 2026 · Tier A
  3. [3]Censys | The Authority for Internet Intelligence and InsightsCensys · undated page, accessed October 23, 2026 · Tier A
  4. [4]Platform API Transition GuideCensys · published October 5, 2026 · Tier A
  5. [5]SAML AuthenticationCensys · undated page, accessed October 23, 2026 · Tier A
  6. [6]Censys Attack Surface Management Reviews & Product Details - G2G2 · undated page, accessed October 23, 2026 · Tier C
  7. [7]Censys Search - CensysCensys · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier A
  8. [8]Censys | Attack Surface Management | Internet VisibilityCensys · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier A
  9. [9]Adversary Investigation - CensysCensys · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier A
  10. [10]Critical Infrastructure Monitoring - CensysCensys · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier A
  11. [11]Trusted by Global Leaders for VisibilityCensys · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier A
  12. [12]Censys Expands Into Security Operations with Internet Intelligence-Powered WorkflowsCensys · published June 18, 2026 · Tier A
  13. [13]Censys Delivers Record First Half 2026 Growth as AI Driven Demand for Internet Intelligence AcceleratesCensys · published July 22, 2026 · Tier A
  14. [14]Censys Transforms Global Channel Program to Accelerate Partner-Led GrowthCensys · published September 22, 2026 · Tier A
  15. [15]Censys Reviews, Ratings & Features 2026 | Gartner Peer InsightsGartner Peer Insights · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier C
  16. [16]Censys | External Exposure Management & Attack Surface MappingCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  17. [17]Platform API Transition GuideCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  18. [18]Platform FAQsCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  19. [19]Google SecOps SOAR IntegrationCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  20. [20]Platform CLI ToolCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  21. [21]Pricing | CensysCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  22. [22]Censys Built by Cybersecurity Experts for Real-Time Threat IntelligenceCensys · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  23. [23]Censys Unveils Censys ARC, Formalizing Its Global Internet Threat Research TeamCensys · published March 10, 2026 · Tier A
  24. [24]Censys Powers SOC Modernization with Real-Time Internet Context and Risk ScoringCensys · published April 9, 2026 · Tier A
  25. [25]Censys Expands Its Internet Map to Include DNS IntelligenceCensys · published July 8, 2026 · Tier A
  26. [26]Censys Expands Into Security Operations with Internet Intelligence-Powered WorkflowsCensys · published June 18, 2026 · Tier A

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