AttackForge vs PlexTrac Comparison: Differences, Similarities, and Alternatives

AttackForge and PlexTrac are penetration testing management and reporting platforms. These pentest tools provide a centralized dashboard to facilitate security testing within small and large organizations. However, despite having the same purpose, AttackForge and PlexTrac still have differences that could make you choose one or the other. In this article, we’ll compare the differences, similarities, and features of AttackForge vs PlexTrac.

By the end, you’ll be able to make an informed decision on which platform offers the best value for your team’s needs. Let’s get right into it then.

What is AttackForge?

AttackForge is a budget-friendly pentest management and reporting platform that allows you to manage pentesting workflows. It offers core services that promise to improve productivity, collaboration, and visibility without breaking the bank. This includes helping you manage different stages of your penetration test, such as:

• Requesting, reviewing, and approving a pentest.
• Gathering necessary entry criteria.
• Registering security vulnerabilities and pentest findings.
• Tracking testing against methodologies and test cases
• Automated reporting for different stakeholders.
• Generating automated reports through custom-built templates for reporting.
• Integrating pentest findings into third-party systems.
• Streamlined remediation and retesting workflows.

Although some of the features from AttackForge are consistent with what other pentesting management platforms like PlexTrac offers, the former is still an industry standard for many reasons.

AttackForge Strengths

• Cost-Effective: AttackForge’s Pro plan of $50/month is a good deal for an individual, while $150/month is also cost-effective for a startup or small team. Mid-sized consultancies and large MSSPs will need to spend $300 and $800 monthly, respectively, but this is still a relatively good price point. Enterprises can also purchase the Enterprise product which comes with custom pricing based on their needs.
• Consistency: AttackForge’s pentesting processes and vulnerability language are consistent.
• Retesting Made Easy: AttackForge simplifies the process of requesting and performing a retest, saving you valuable time.
• Great for Small to Large Companies: AttackForge is built for companies running between 10 to 10,000 penetration tests yearly.
• Documentation: AttackForge has extensive and comprehensive documentation with an active and open GitHub for contributors.
• Test Suites: AttackForge comes preloaded with Test Suites from industry-standard methodologies like OWASP, MITRE, NIST, OSSTMM, etc.

AttackForge Weaknesses

• No AI Features: AttackForge is yet to explore the use of AI, which would ideally have taken some manual work away from users.
• Limited Integration: Imports from a handful of security tools are supported, but broader coverage will be beneficial.
• Multi-language Hurdle: AttackForge doesn’t natively support multi-language reporting.

What is PlexTrac?

PlexTrac is a penetration testing and vulnerability data management platform that helps with offensive security reporting, workflow automation, and remediation prioritization.

Much like other pentesting management platforms like AttackForge, PlexTrac also helps you manage different stages of your test.

The AI-powered platform provides a centralized hub that combines features like:

• Standardized Runbooks that have preloaded curated content, test plan, and integrated procedures from MITRE and Atomic Red Team.
• Integrations with apps like Jira to ensure your company’s existing project management processes continue.
• Analytics Module that visualizes your security posture shows critical issues that need to be addressed and helps you communicate better with non-technical stakeholders.
• Bulk Actions like pasting affected assets to quickly upload a list of assets directly into the finding, bulk edit status, delete, or assign asset findings.
• CSV Import to import CSV findings into your PlexTrac report with a CSV parser
• Prioritization to improve your resource allocation to the most critical areas.

While you may find some of these features in other pentesting management platforms, PlexTrac has some strengths that make it a cut above most others.

PlexTrac Strengths

• Advanced Editor that accurately parses values into the report easily and refines texts, making report creation more polished.
• Granular Reporting Control provides custom templates to help you generate on-demand reports.
• Plex AI: PlexTrac’s AI-powered assistant is great for content contextualization, generating executive summaries within the portal, remediation steps, analyzing large datasets, and generating vulnerability descriptions, which removes a lot of the manual work. This virtual report authoring reportedly slashes pentesting reporting time by 70%, resulting in huge time savings throughout the cycle.
• Project Management Powerhouse helps you manage projects and resources with features like calendars, allocation tracking, and an assessments module to create questionnaires for pre-engagement scoping.
• Red Teaming vs Blue Teaming: PlexTrac supports red teaming and blue teaming procedures.
• Broader coverage of imports supports a wider variety of security tooling imports.
• Real-time collaboration features make it an ideal tool for geographically dispersed teams.

PlexTrac Weaknesses

• Pricing Pinch: PlexTrac’s Essential package starts at a hefty $8000/year, making it a tough sell for smaller teams.
• Multi-language Hurdle: Currently, PlexTrac doesn’t natively support multi-language reporting. It requires separate templates for each language. Thankfully, AI-powered translation is on the horizon.
• No Direct Test Suites/Test Cases: PlexTrac doesn’t have direct test suites/test cases, although test plans are available.

What are the Core Functionalities for a Penetration Testing Platform?

There are many penetesting platforms available to penetration testers today—AttackForge and PlexTrac are only two of them. Each platform offers distinctive features and functionalities.

For most pentesters, the preference comes down to the tool they find particularly effective or intuitive for their needs. Just as a well-fitting glove feels perfect, a pentesting tool that aligns with your workflow and style feels indispensable to you and your team.

However, the penetration testing field is constantly evolving. New vulnerabilities are discovered regularly, meaning you need to be open to exploring new methodologies and tools. Moreover, the complexity of modern systems and applications requires having a feature-rich platform to manage all aspects of your pentests effectively.

Below, we’ll run through the key functionalities that a penetration testing management platform worth its salt should have.

Reporting

It’s one thing to find security loopholes, but it’s an entirely different thing to have an extensive and thorough report.

According to CoreSecurity’s Penetration Testing Report, reporting is the most sought-after feature in paid penetration testing software. This makes sense considering many pentesters and organizations use pen testing for compliance. Having consistent reports is not only useful internally but also meets the needs of regulatory auditors.

Therefore, when choosing a penetration testing platform, look out for one that allows you to create professional reports with findings, recommendations, and remediation plans.

Vulnerability Library/Management

A good number of organizations use pentesting management platforms to support their vulnerability management programs. If that sounds like you, then it goes without saying that this is also a core function to look out for. That is, the tool must simplify the discovery, prioritization, and remediation tracking of vulnerabilities discovered during pentest.

Additionally, having a vulnerability management functionality provides a single source of truth for all identified vulnerabilities and allows you to create an exhaustive risk assessment based on these vulnerabilities.

By offering this feature, a good pentesting management platform becomes the hub for identifying security issues and managing the process of fixing them throughout the pentesting lifecycle.

Project Management

You always want a pentesting platform with reliable project management functionality. This allows your team to organize and execute pentests in a controlled and efficient way. What project management entails here is a tool that can do the following:

• Scoping: defining the pentest’s boundaries and scope, such as the testing intensity (black box, white box, grey box) and the systems, applications, or data to be tested.
• Scheduling: planning and assigning deadlines for different stages of the pentest to meet established timelines.
• Resource allocation: optimizing resource utilization by assigning pentesters to specific tasks based on their expertise and workload.
• Task tracking: monitoring progress to identify potential delays and manage dependencies.

Ultimately, you need a tool that can provide extensive access to information about the entire pentesting process.

Collaboration

It’s also important to have a tool that provides secure communication channels between pentesters and stakeholders. This includes comment functionality, version control, task assignment and tracking, etc.

Because pentesting is often a collaborative effort, you need a tool that can facilitate that process and improve transparency.

Third-party Integrations

Another core functionality of a penetration testing platform is the ability to connect and interact with other security tools. This makes your workflow streamlined and automated. Integrations can happen between the pentesting platform and bug bounty platforms, SIEM systems, third-party vulnerability scanners, and development tools like code repositories.

In the end, having a tool that can do this will reduce manual workload, such as data entry, and provide better visibility.

Compatibility

Most penetration testing software is compatible with Linux OS. Some of them come preinstalled on the OS. However, pentesting tools are also required to find vulnerabilities on other devices like those running on macOS, Windows OS, and Android smartphones. This makes it important to find multi-device-compatible pentesting software.

Other features like fast response time and delivery speed, as well as compliance management features like multi-language reporting, can

also be invaluable.

AttackForge vs PlexTrac Comparison

Comparison Table

Choosing Your Champion: AttackForge vs PlexTrac

Now, here’s where things get even more interesting. Deciding between AttackForge vs PlexTrac depends on your needs.

For Startups, AttackForge offers unbeatable prices, making it a budget-friendly champion for cash-conscious startups. It also provides good features and functionalities for that price.

For medium to large companies, both tools have potential. Consider exploring AttackForge’s higher tiers that are tailored to enterprises and weigh them against PlexTrac’s features.

For Automation: PlexTrac excels in automating report generation and summarizing findings through AI, which AttackForge doesn’t offer yet. However, AttackForge offers greater flexibility for programmatic integrations by providing a robust set of self-service APIs with granular access control. This allows you to grant specific permissions per endpoint/event, ensuring security while enabling automation through service accounts.

For Developers: AttackForge’s active presence on GitHub with open-source code and extensive APIs offers an edge for devs.

Frequently Asked Questions for AttackForge vs PlexTrac

Which is better between AttackForge vs PlexTrac?

The choice between AttackForge vs PlexTrac depends on individual and team preferences and needs. AttackForge shines for affordability and core functionalities with great customer support, making it a great fit for various team sizes and projects. PlexTrac's power lies in features like AI reporting and robust project management, ideal for larger, collaborative efforts, but at a premium cost.

What are other alternatives besides AttackForge vs PlexTrac?

There are several other penetration testing management platforms that are alternatives to AttackForge and PlexTrac. Some are Dradis, Sysreport, Ghostwriter, Kroll Cyber Risk, Security Reporter, and Cyver Core.

How much does AttackForge cost?

AttackForge has different pricing tiers based on your team size. Plans start at $50/month and go up to $800/month for large consultancies and SMEs. Large enterprises, government, and Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs) will need to contact the sales team for a full-featured product with custom pricing.

How much does PlexTrac cost?

PlexTrac’s lowest tier, Essential, starts at $8,000/year.

Conclusion

Both AttackForge and PlexTrac are valuable tools, but there's no single winner. It all boils down to your specific requirements and budget. At WebSec, we have used AttackForge internally for the last four years, and it shines in terms of affordability, familiarity, and core functionalities.

PlexTrac also offers some advanced features and a collaborative environment, although it comes at a price. Unfortunately, these additional features still don’t justify the difference in price with AttackForge. However, if you have a huge team working on a project simultaneously, PlexTrac could be a valuable consideration.