IT AI Index

Index › Vendors › Practical Assurance · September 2026 Edition

1 category · Named, not ranked

Practical Assurance

3Judge labels

0First choices

0Negative labels

3 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

1 label, too few to rank

A product needs 10 labels in a category before a share or quadrant is stated. Practical Assurance was named 1 time 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 business21 of 57

under the label threshold

Mid-market48 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 Practical Assurance 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	0%	48 of 76	0%	1	under 10 labels · led by Cobalt at 44%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Practical Assurance 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 Practical Assurance across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

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

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-constrained2 labelsNone

Scale-constrained0 labelsNone

Negative0 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative3 labels in all, every segment counted; 0 of the 0 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.

“Practical Assurance (Best for SOC 2/Compliance-Focused SMBs)” 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 Practical Assurance, over the 3 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Practical Assurance was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Astra Security2 of 31Not in the top three

BreachLock2 of 31Not in the top three

Cobalt2 of 30Not in the top three

UnderDefense2 of 30Not in the top three

Acunetix1 of 31Not in the top three

Bug Circuit1 of 31Not in the top three

Affordable Pentesting1 of 30Not in the top three

Bright Defense1 of 30Not in the top three

Bugcrowd1 of 30Not in the top three

Intruder1 of 30Not 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 Practical Assurance. 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 3 of the 3 answers that named Practical Assurance and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

defendify.com3

reddit.com3

soc2auditors.org3

techrepublic.com3

underdefense.com3

deepstrike.io2

g2.com2

getastra.com2

softwaresecured.com2

softwaretestinghelp.com2

Twenty-five of the twenty-five domain citations in answers naming Practical Assurance came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

defendify.com/blog/penetration-testing-companies3

reddit.com/r/msp/comments/znf99o/small_business_pen_testing3

soc2auditors.org/soc-2-penetration-testing-firms3

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

softwaresecured.com/post/top-10-penetration-testing-vendors2

softwaretestinghelp.com/top-pen-testing-as-a-service-providers2

synack.com/blog/best-penetration-testing-companies2

terra.security/blog/top-10-penetration-testing-as-a-service-ptaas-providers2

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

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 Practical Assurance'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 Practical Assurance, 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 practicalassurance.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.