IT AI Index

Index › Vendors › Affordable Pentesting · September 2026 Edition

1 category · Named, not ranked

Affordable Pentesting

8Judge labels

2First choices

0Negative labels

6 of 12Models named it

1Category

September 2026 Edition. Every number here is derived from the raw labels under vendor table vv2026-09.2, every buyer segment counted.

Standing

3 labels, too few to rank

A product needs 10 labels in a category before a share or quadrant is stated. Affordable Pentesting was named 3 times in PTaaS, where Cobalt led with 44%. The labels and the evidence are below, counted exactly.

By buyer segmentRead the same way at every buyer size.

Small business8 of 57

under the label threshold

Mid-market10 of 76

under the label threshold

Enterprisenot named

No model named it for this buyer.

In ptaas · each standing computed within its segment · bars are 0 to 100 · the accent bar is the product's own best reading

Standing by category

Every category where a model named Affordable Pentesting for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Penetration testing as a service	Security operations	2%	10 of 76	0%	3	under 10 labels · led by Cobalt at 44%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Affordable Pentesting yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Affordable Pentesting across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	0	0
GPT-5.4 mini	0	0	0
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	0	0
Perplexity Sonar	0	0	0
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	1	1
Mistral Small	0	0	0
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	0	0
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	0
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	0	0
Kimi K2	0	0	0
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	1	1
MiniMax M2.5	1	0	1

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct1 labelNone

Paraphrase0 labelsNone

Comparative0 labelsNone

Budget-constrained7 labels2

Scale-constrained0 labelsNone

Negative0 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative8 labels in all, every segment counted; 2 of the 2 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“### 1. Affordable Penetration Testing (affordablepentesting.com) - Specifically targets startups and SMBs” MiniMax M2.5 · PTaaS · budget prompt · first choice

“Manual, compliance‑ready, scalable: Affordable Pentesting – starts at $2,000.” GLM 4.7 FlashX · PTaaS · budget prompt · alternative

“Affordable Pentesting (Strong Manual Budget Option)” Grok 4.1 Fast · PTaaS · budget prompt · alternative

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

No model argued against it.

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Affordable Pentesting, over the 8 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Affordable Pentesting was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Bug Circuit5 of 84Not in the top three

Cobalt5 of 81Not in the top three

BreachLock4 of 81Not in the top three

Astra Security3 of 81Not in the top three

TurboPentest2 of 82Not in the top three

CyberSuite2 of 80Not in the top three

OWASP ZAP2 of 80Not in the top three

OpenVAS2 of 80Not in the top three

Pentest-Tools.com2 of 80Not in the top three

Synack2 of 80Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Affordable Pentesting. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 8 of the 8 answers that named Affordable Pentesting and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

affordablepentesting.comYour site7

bugcircuit.com5

pentestingproviders.com5

reddit.com5

getastra.com4

invadel.com4

deepstrike.io3

synack.com3

techrepublic.com3

compassitc.com2

Thirty-four of the forty-one domain citations in answers naming Affordable Pentesting came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

affordablepentesting.com/5

bugcircuit.com/services/penetration-testing-small-business5

pentestingproviders.com/best/affordable-penetration-testing5

reddit.com/r/msp/comments/znf99o/small_business_pen_testing5

getastra.com/blog/penetration-testing/top-providers4

affordablepentesting.com/post/low-cost-penetration-testing3

synack.com/blog/best-penetration-testing-companies3

techrepublic.com/article/best-penetration-testing-companies3

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Affordable Pentesting

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Affordable Pentesting; a claim can dispute any of them.

Affordable Penetration Testing 1

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Affordable Pentesting's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Affordable Pentesting, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at affordablepentesting.com is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.