Product comparison: Detectify vs. Holm Security

Holm Security

Pros

• Covers the entire IT estate, including internal network, cloud, web, and human risk, simplifying vendor consolidation.
• It leverages a unified risk score that combines business criticality with threat intelligence to effectively prioritize remediation across all asset types.

Cons

• It reportedly suffers from a higher rate of false positives and occasional technical issues with the scanner engines, increasing the manual triage workload.
• The reported lack of a robust public API creates a maturity ceiling, limiting deep integration into automated AppSec workflows.

Detectify

Pros

• It delivers high-fidelity, low-noise findings by using 100% payload-based testing, which confirms exploitability and reduces manual triage time.
• Its vulnerability intelligence is continuously enhanced by a private ethical hacker community, enabling the discovery of novel and zero-day vulnerabilities.

Cons

• It is exclusively focused on the external attack surface.
• It does not offer a self-service feature for advanced engineers to write and run their own custom scan logic or vulnerability templates.

In-depth comparison: Visibility and Context

The core challenge for AppSec teams regarding attack surface visibility is filling the gap between what they think they have exposed and what an attacker actually sees, then translating that inventory into an effective testing scope without spending hours trying to figure out what they should scan. 

Holm Security’s recommendation model is implicit: it discovers all external assets, but its value is their proprietary unified risk score that tells the user which of those discovered assets are the most critical based on user inputted business context. This breadth of scope covering internal and external assets is their primary visibility strength.

Detectify is a specialized DAST and EASM solution that focuses on the external, application-facing perimeter. Detectify’s Asset Classification capability, which analyzes the characteristics of every discovered domain (e.g., complexity, technology stack, interactive elements) and automatically categorizes it (e.g., “Rich Webapp,” “API”). This classification directly informs the Scan Recommendations, guiding the user on which assets are complex enough to warrant a deep DAST scan, therefore helping AppSec teams confidently direct their testing resources.

In-depth comparison: Assessment

The greatest challenge in vulnerability assessment is generating findings that are trusted by developers. When tools produce false positives, AppSec loses credibility and engineers begin to ignore tickets, defeating the goal of aligning security work with development velocity. The reliability of the assessment method directly impacts the efficiency of the entire remediation workflow.

Holm Security’s assessment capabilities prioritize wide coverage across systems, networks, and applications. To manage the resulting volume, their strategy is to enrich findings with internal context (business impact tags) and external threat intelligence. This risk-based model is designed to prioritize remediation efforts effectively, telling the team which issues matter most. However, the reliance on a broad, multi-vector scanning engine means the platform inherently accepts a higher, unconfirmed volume of findings, requiring the customer to use the prioritization features to handle the subsequent triage workload caused by lower signal fidelity.

Detectify’s primary goal is to provide findings that are immediately actionable and trusted. They achieve low noise and high exploitability by exclusively relying on their 100% payload-based testing. This ensures that every reported vulnerability has been verified by the scanner to be exploitable, minimizing the need for manual validation. Furthermore, their vulnerability intelligence is proprietary, continuously sourced from a community of ethical hackers, giving them a unique advantage in discovering novel and zero-day vulnerabilities that signature-based scanners would miss, thus focusing the AppSec team purely on remediation.

Holm Security’s broad, integrated VMP is strong for consolidated risk reporting, but its higher potential for false positives slows the remediation loop. Detectify’s specialized, high-fidelity DAST significantly reduces triage time. In API testing, Holm Security provides solid, schema-based checks necessary for governance. Detectify offers a dynamic API fuzzing engine, which is methodologically superior for finding complex, business-logic flaws in modern APIs, as it continually probes the API with varied payloads, challenging the application in ways that a simple set of static checks cannot replicate.

In-depth comparison: Usability

A complex tool forces AppSec engineers to act as tool administrators rather than doing their job. A non-intuitive UI or excessive manual configuration delays productivity. For the team, poor API support creates a maturity ceiling, preventing the organization from scaling the tool as they evolve.

Holm Security excels at simplifying the management overhead for teams that want several products, making the solution great for operators. Deployment time is reasonable, and the unified asset view helps new team members quickly grasp the entire security scope across internal systems, cloud, and external web. This simplicity in initial setup and scope management reduces the complexity of managing multiple vendor solutions since some buyers might be able to rely on Holm Security to cover several use cases.

Detectify’s usability is driven by its focus on the AppSec practitioner’s workflow. The interface is designed to be clean and intuitive, facilitating speed from finding to fix. The primary usability benefit is indirect but profound: the platform’s high signal fidelity reduces the time spent on the most frustrating part of an AppSec engineer’s job—spending hours and hours validating findings. This makes the tool feel lighter and more productive from day one. For long-term viability, Detectify provides a versatile API that empowers the practitioner, providing the means to integrate and automate, securing their long-term value to the organization.

Conclusion: Which product should I choose?

The core difference between Holm Security and Detectify is based on what your team’s goal is. Holm Security offers a broad tool that is good for teams that are consolidating. In contrast, Detectify is an application-centric DAST and EASM solution that uses 100% payload-based testing. While Holm Security is ideal for management consolidation and compliance reporting, Detectify’s 100% payload-based engine and Detectify Crowdsource community deliver a high-fidelity signal of confirmed, exploitable findings. This allows AppSec teams to bypass the noise of theoretical CVEs, find novel, non-CVE flaws, and focus on remediating the vulnerabilities that actually matter.