NovaPentest vs Detectify

Detectify discovers and monitors a large external surface. NovaPentest attacks a few registered web apps in depth, on a small monthly plan.

Detectify and NovaPentest both test internet-facing web applications from the outside, as a cloud service, without installing anything on your servers. Detectify presents itself as application security built and trusted by hackers. It combines external attack surface management, which discovers and continuously monitors the domains and assets an organization exposes, with application and API scanning, and it feeds its testing with research from a community of ethical hackers. It sells to a wide range of customers, from individual developers up to large enterprises and government bodies, on annual subscriptions.

NovaPentest is a smaller and more focused product: around sixty checks, including active injection probes, plus an LLM-driven adversary agent, pointed at the specific web applications and APIs you register, on a monthly plan sized for small teams.

This comparison sticks to slow-moving categories: company focus, delivery model and pricing model. It avoids feature checklists, which age quickly, and describes Detectify only as Detectify describes itself on its own website as of the date shown on this page.

Where NovaPentest fits

NovaPentest fits a small team that already knows which applications matter and wants them attacked properly, often. You register a target, and a full scan runs active probes for SQL, NoSQL, command, LDAP and template injection, cross-site scripting, SSRF, XXE, path traversal, request smuggling and more, together with checks on TLS, headers, cookies, CORS, JWTs and DNS. On paid plans an AI agent then reasons about what it has seen, follows leads within a fixed request budget, and can sign in with credentials you provide for that scan.

The commercial model is intentionally simple. There is a Free plan with one target and one scan a month, and a Pro plan with three targets and thirty scans a month, with monthly billing after a 14-day trial and no sales call required. Anyone can also run the free passive scan at /scan without an account and publish the resulting A to F grade as a README badge. Findings map to the OWASP Top 10 and CWE, reports export to PDF, and the product is fully available in Brazilian Portuguese with prices in reais.

Where the alternative is the better choice

Detectify is the better choice when you do not yet know everything you expose. Its surface monitoring is built to discover and continuously watch an organization's domains and subdomains, which matters for companies with many brands, campaign sites and forgotten hosts. NovaPentest starts from targets you register. It does look at certificate transparency logs and subdomain takeover risk around a target, but it is not an asset inventory and should not be used as one.

Detectify also draws on a community of ethical hackers whose research feeds its testing payloads. That is a genuinely different source of attack intelligence from a fixed set of modules plus an AI agent, and for some teams it will be the deciding factor.

Finally, Detectify is set up for larger organizations: its plans are organized around users and teams, it can be bought through AWS Marketplace, and its higher tiers include expert onboarding and dedicated support. If you are a mid-sized or larger company securing a big, changing external footprint with several teams involved, Detectify's focus fits that better than ours.

How to choose

Ask yourself whether your main problem is visibility or depth. If you are not confident you know every domain, subdomain and application your organization has on the internet, visibility comes first, and a product built around attack surface discovery, like Detectify, addresses that directly. If you already know the three or four applications that hold your customers' data and want to know whether they can be broken into, depth matters more, and that is where NovaPentest concentrates.

Next, look at how you want to buy. NovaPentest is a monthly self-service plan for a handful of targets. Detectify's model is an annual subscription that grows with domains, targets, users and teams, which suits organizations with procurement processes and several security stakeholders.

Both let you start before committing. Run NovaPentest's free passive scan at /scan against your main site, try Detectify's free starting option on the same domain, and compare which findings your developers would actually fix.

Claims about other products as of 2026-09-22