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Fortra's Cobalt Strike vs The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortra's Cobalt Strike
Ranking in Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS)
7th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
The NodeZero Platform by Ho...
Ranking in Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS)
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (6th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (14th), Penetration Testing Services (1st), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (3rd), AI-Powered Penetration Testing (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) category, the mindshare of Fortra's Cobalt Strike is 3.0%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai is 13.0%, up from 11.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai13.0%
Fortra's Cobalt Strike3.0%
Other84.0%
Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS)
 

Featured Reviews

CB
Tech Cyber Security Specialist, Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Advanced customization empowers offensive security operations
Cobalt Strike offers significant customization capabilities. It allows for the freedom to implement personalized approaches to security tasks, along with easy integrations with scripting tools. The solution provides a high level of automation for attackers, making it a crucial tool for offensive security. Additionally, it can be used by real threat actors, increasing its credibility in emulating real-world scenarios.
Brent Hamlin - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager at a construction company with 501-1,000 employees
Continuous threat scanning has improved remediation time and strengthened executive reporting
The best features that The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai offers include the automated scans, which are great to use; you set it, scope it, and let it go, which works really well. The executive reporting feature is impactful for me as a manager, providing a strong foundation to give quarterly and yearly reports to our executives and board to see the state of our infrastructure from a security standpoint. The level of detail and clarity in the executive reports from The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai absolutely helps me communicate effectively with leadership. They are detailed enough for me to extract the necessary information tailored for the executives and to provide a broader perspective on our mitigation efforts or accepted risk stance and where additional controls exist. The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai has positively impacted my organization by giving us a better continuous picture of our security posture, what's exploitable, and what can be used against the organization. It allows us to run scans whenever needed, unlike a single third-party system that only provides a snapshot in time; our processes must be ongoing as the security landscape is dynamic. NodeZero's endpoint security effectiveness feature impacts my understanding of potential security threats by providing a clear picture of both the external and internal landscapes within my organization, enabling me to prioritize and adjust as needed for vulnerabilities such as WordPress plugin issues or user enumerations and software code version assessments. I have built The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai into our weekly and monthly workflows for security CI/CD, and we scan our externally accessible assets every week to address anything quickly if it comes up. That includes our firewalls, websites, and anything that is an external web server, which we scan weekly, while the monthly scans are for internal systems that feed our security CI/CD pipeline, enabling us to action across and prioritize any vulnerabilities caught by The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It also made a lot of post-exploitation activities easier."
"Cobalt Strike offers significant customization capabilities."
"We realized that the approach with the simple deployment and the pricing are better than with the competitors, and Horizon puts a lot of focus on AI, which simply shows that the solution is future-proof."
"The best feature of The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai is that it is an autonomous pen testing tool that knows how to penetrate into the system automatically and perform lateral movement inside the network without the need for scripting."
"Honestly, it's one of the most transformational technologies we've implemented in our company."
"The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai has positively impacted my organization by allowing my security team to be more efficient and focus on the most valuable work at the highest criticality."
"Using The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai has helped us close more deals and speed up our sales cycle, as it is well-known that we sell to customers within the Horizon company through the partner portal and deal registration."
"Overall, I'd rate NodeZero at nine to 9.5 out of ten."
"The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai has positively impacted my organization by catching vulnerabilities and exploits that we wouldn't otherwise be able to find as easily or as quickly, so I'd say it helps better our cybersecurity posture."
"After the third party conducts the pen test, The NodeZero Platform is run, and it finds the same things they found and sometimes a few other things that they did not even identify."
 

Cons

"The stability of the tool can be improved."
"Probably its delivery methods could be improved."
"I haven't really come across anything that I say needs to be improved with it, other than the container runner, which tends to lose time."
"The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai could be improved by speeding up the time from initializing a test to actually starting the test, as the deployment of the underlying infrastructure can take several minutes, sometimes over 10 minutes."
"The areas for improvement for The NodeZero Platform involve integration and automation. It would be beneficial if it could integrate directly with vulnerability management tools that would allow the platform to automatically import data, identify vulnerable systems, and test targets immediately, potentially even enabling automated feedback loops for rescanning since the process is currently manual."
"We did hundreds of tests, so that is why we did not continue, as it was very expensive for a very low yield."
"I encountered challenges with patch management, as we struggled to test and implement patches due to time constraints. This led to our patch management process being ineffective."
"When it comes to the stability of The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai, I would rate it around seven to eight because the stability is not that high initially due to the need for daily updates and modifications as new vulnerabilities appear."
"They've added a chatbot which isn't particularly useful, but when it can't answer questions, it forwards messages to human support."
"The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai can be improved in some ways, particularly regarding the test scan sometimes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's expensive."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Healthcare Company
10%
Transportation Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra's Cobalt Strike?
While not inexpensive, Cobalt Strike is a comprehensive platform. Its pricing reflects the capabilities and flexibility it offers. The solution can be cost-effective when utilizing its full potenti...
What needs improvement with Fortra's Cobalt Strike?
The stability of the tool can be improved. There are some limitations, but they tend to be more from outside of the tool rather than within it. The limitations often come from operators who may lac...
What is your primary use case for Fortra's Cobalt Strike?
I use Cobalt Strike to emulate threat actor activities.
What needs improvement with Horizon3.ai?
In my opinion, The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai could be improved by continuing to add new features, such as cloud pentesting, which is currently one of the buzzwords. Kubernetes has just been ...
What is your primary use case for Horizon3.ai?
We use The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai to perform pentests for our customers, and we have built services around it so that customers can book a one-off pentest or continuous pentesting with us...
What advice do you have for others considering Horizon3.ai?
I would actually give The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai a ten out of ten. I am giving it a ten because we have come from other vendors that do something similar, and we simply noticed that the c...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Horizon3.ai
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Government agencies, Defense Industrial Base organizations, and enterprises in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and criticalinfrastructure rely on NodeZero to meet rigorous security and compliance requirements with continuous, scheduled, and on-demand testing.
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortra's Cobalt Strike vs. The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.