Coalfire vs Synack

About Synack

Synack delivers continuous penetration testing as a service (PTaaS) that combines agentic AI, the Synack Platform and the Synack Red Team. Synack combines Sara AI Pentesting, the Synack Red Team and the Synack Platform. Synack's PTaaS offering includes the human security testing expertise of the Synack Red Team and the Synack Platform for asset and vulnerability management, test results, reports and analytics. Synack sells its tests to organizations with a flat-fee model, and researchers are paid based on their vulnerability findings. Dow weighed building against buying AI pentesting before choosing Synack.^[5][6][7]

Sara AI Pentesting identifies, validates and prioritizes vulnerabilities across the enterprise attack surface. Synack PTaaS brings the Synack Red Team, a community of incentivized security researchers, to the attack surface. Synack describes a community of 1,500 security researchers from around the world. Synack can limit testing to members of the Synack Red Team who meet certain criteria, such as US-only researchers or Five Eyes only. Findings from the scanner and the Synack Red Team are triaged by an internal team called Vulnerability Operations.^[5][6][7][9]

Synack tests applications using both humans and AI agents. Synack offers human or AI agent-led pentesting of hosts. Synack tests ephemeral environments with point-in-time or continuous testing across AWS, Azure and GCP. Synack uses researcher missions to look for vulnerabilities in headless endpoints. Synack can conduct testing on demand for mobile, API, web and host assets. Synack offers continuous penetration testing across web, API, cloud and host assets. Synack continuously discovers, fingerprints and prioritizes internet-facing assets for immediate testing. Synack AI/LLM pentesting checks for vulnerabilities including prompt injection, model theft, training data poisoning and insecure plugin design.^[5][10][13]

Synack has integrations with AWS, Azure and GCP that enable detection of changes and new IPs. Synack provides out-of-the-box integrations with most major public cloud providers, including GCP, Azure and AWS. Synack analyzes benchmarks against AWS, GCP and Azure for security controls. Synack rewards researchers monetarily for the vulnerabilities they find instead of traditional time and materials. Synack is a participating solution provider member of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).^[6]

Synack provides real time analytics of exploitable vulnerabilities that are found and verified in the Synack Platform. Vulnerabilities in the Synack platform have an associated CVSS score, instructions on how to replicate the finding and a writeup with screenshots from the researcher. Synack lets users issue a patch verification request through the platform, which activates a researcher to test the patch and verify that the exploitation is no longer possible. The Synack API integrates vulnerability findings with tools such as ServiceNow, Jira and Azure DevOps. Synack integrates with vulnerability management, exposure management and ticketing tools. Synack pushes actionable findings into Jira, ServiceNow, Tenable One or existing workflows. Synack lets users choose and launch penetration testing services from the platform on demand, and start, audit and stop tests. Synack PTaaS is available 24/7 via the Synack Platform. Synack tests at multiple stages of development and assists developer and QA teams through real-time reporting and patch verification. Synack generates PDF reports for compliance auditors or other audiences that detail API security testing coverage and vulnerabilities found. Synack lets users activate on-demand security tasks, from cloud testing to checking for a new CVE, within the platform.^{[5][6][7][9][12]}

Synack's Active Offense solution combines continuous attack surface discovery with autonomous exploit validation and human-led expert analysis. Sara's AI-powered triage is combined with human-in-the-loop expertise to filter which vulnerabilities are exploitable. Synack Missions use the Synack Red Team to complete specific tasks and provide documentation of their work. Synack14 is a 14-day pentest that uses incentive-driven testing by a community of researchers to discover exploitable vulnerabilities. Synack365 and Synack90 blend automatic and adversarial human analysis with the Platform's vulnerability management on a continuous cadence. Synack report generation provides proof-of-work for executive audiences and compliance auditors and fits frameworks such as PCI, HIPAA, SOC2 and FISMA.^[13][14]

Synack's Managed VDP handles vulnerability triage with remediation guidance, coordinates researcher recognition and delivers data to support CISA or Board reporting. Synack's Managed VDP is offered as an option for responsible disclosure to federal teams. Synack provides a risk score across all assets and assessments. The Attacker Resistance Score ranks assets and assessments by their resistance to attack. Synack lets users choose from testing methodologies including OWASP, NIST and Open Vulnerability Discovery.^[10][14]