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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
28
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (9th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (14th), Penetration Testing Services (1st), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (3rd), AI-Powered Penetration Testing (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) category, the mindshare of Fortra's Cobalt Strike is 2.9%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai is 13.1%, up from 10.3% 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.ai13.1%
Fortra's Cobalt Strike2.9%
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

"Cobalt Strike offers significant customization capabilities."
"It also made a lot of post-exploitation activities easier."
"The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai has allowed us to quickly and easily identify the exploits in our environment that are greatly increasing our risk, simplified that process and also our remediation process, allowing us to more easily work with teams to show how it is exploitable and what they need to do to fix those issues, significantly improving our finding discovery and remediation process of vulnerabilities and overall decreasing our risk."
"The NodeZero Platform's real attack capabilities help identify vulnerabilities on my on-premise systems by adding an element of validation and offensive security testing on top of known vulnerabilities. The feature that allows security teams to fix and retest vulnerabilities instantly is very useful, even though it may not happen literally 'instantly.' It's a necessary tool for any organization to understand whether vulnerabilities are genuinely exploitable by attackers. With its near-real-time testing capabilities, it's an essential part of any security portfolio."
"What I appreciate the most about The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai is its distinctive competitive advantage, which is the ability to bundle multiple security solutions into one single tool."
"We experienced a threat that could have severely crippled us, but we were able to shut it down before it escalated, thanks to internal vulnerability testing and addressing critical vulnerabilities using their tool."
"The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai is better than manual penetration test scans, definitely worth trying if you are considering using it because it reduces the time and cost associated with manual scans and presents the data in a very clear way that even non-technical people can understand."
"We chose The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai because, first, of its superior technical capability for the use cases we were looking for, second, the cost, which we believe was much more affordable than the other products, and third, the customer and technical support was very good for us."
"The NodeZero Platform's real attack capabilities help in identifying vulnerabilities on our on-prem systems because it provides actual vulnerabilities by attacking our systems."
"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 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."
"I think The NodeZero Platform could improve by leveraging GPUs for password cracking, which would be pretty good."
"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."
"The reports are quite useless."
"The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai can be improved in some ways, particularly regarding the test scan sometimes."
"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."
"I feel there could be improvements in scalability, although at this point I have no specific negative points to report."
"We did hundreds of tests, so that is why we did not continue, as it was very expensive for a very low yield."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Healthcare Company
10%
Transportation Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
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?
The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai could be improved if automated fixes could be implemented, which would be fantastic. I rate it an eight because speeding up the penetration test time for runnin...
What is your primary use case for Horizon3.ai?
My main use case for The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai is penetration testing for cybersecurity. A specific example of how I have used The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai for penetration testin...
What advice do you have for others considering Horizon3.ai?
The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai's AI capabilities demonstrate very good governance and security, which I like very much as it has been helpful to my team and it really allows us to tackle the ...
 

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.
914,322 professionals have used our research since 2012.