Cortex Xpanse vs Censys ASM: attack surface management compared

Cortex Xpanse

• Owner or subsidiary attributedPartial
• Exploitability provenNot documented
• Ticket or workflow createdDocumented
• Compensating control appliedDocumented
• Fix retestedNot documented

Censys ASM

• Owner or subsidiary attributedNot documented
• Exploitability provenPartial
• Ticket or workflow createdDocumented
• Compensating control appliedNot documented
• Fix retestedNot documented

Cortex Xpanse wins on

• Discovery of unknown assets and subsidiaries: 8 vs 7

  Palo Alto Networks says Xpanse scans the full IPv4 space several times a day (4.3 billion addresses; 500 billion+ ports scanned daily).

• Attribution accuracy and false-positive handling: 7 vs 6

  Identifies the relevant stakeholders for third-party exposures; subsidiary attribution detail is not published on the pages reviewed.

• Remediation and mitigation support: 8 vs 5

  Active Response runs built-in automated playbooks, with routing and remediation through Cortex XSOAR playbooks.

• Integrations and platform reach: 9 vs 8

  Native ties to Cortex XSOAR and Prisma Cloud inside the Palo Alto Networks Cortex portfolio.

• Time to value: 7 vs 6

  Internet-wide scan data exists before onboarding; onboarding inputs and trial terms are not published.

Censys ASM wins on

• Pricing transparency: 4 vs 2

  A free Censys platform account exists; ASM itself is contact sales.

Choose Cortex Xpanse if

• The tool has to fit a wider security platform or many existing tools. Cortex Xpanse scores 9 on integrations: Native ties to Cortex XSOAR and Prisma Cloud inside the Palo Alto Networks Cortex portfolio.
• You want help closing exposures, not only a longer list of them. Cortex Xpanse scores 8 on remediation: Active Response runs built-in automated playbooks, with routing and remediation through Cortex XSOAR playbooks.

Choose Censys ASM if

• The tool has to fit a wider security platform or many existing tools. Censys ASM scores 8 on integrations: Jira, ServiceNow ITSM and CMDB, Tenable VM, Google Security Operations, Microsoft Sentinel, Axonius, Brinqa, Slack, Webex, plus AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
• Finding unknown assets, subsidiaries and acquired infrastructure is your main gap. Censys ASM scores 7 on discovery: First-party scanning across all 65K ports finds services on nonstandard ports and hosts with self-signed certificates; discovery expands from seeds the customer supplies.