NovaPentest vs a penetration testing consultancy

Human testers win on business logic, chained attacks and formal attestation. NovaPentest covers the weeks between engagements, on every release.

A traditional penetration test is a project. A consultancy agrees a scope with you, one or more experienced testers spend days or weeks attacking your systems by hand, and you receive a written report, often with an attestation letter. NovaPentest is automated software that you run yourself, as often as your plan allows, against the web applications and APIs you register. It combines around sixty checks, including active injection probes, with an LLM-driven agent that explores the application the way an adversary would.

The two are often presented as competitors. In practice they answer different questions, and most teams that take security seriously end up needing both at different moments.

This page compares them on things that do not change quickly: who does the testing, how it is delivered, how it is priced, and what each is genuinely good at. It is written by NovaPentest, so read it with that in mind. We have tried to be specific about where a human team is simply the better option.

Where NovaPentest fits

A manual pentest is a snapshot. Your code, configuration and dependencies change every week, and a report from last spring says little about the release you shipped yesterday. NovaPentest is built for that gap. You can scan on demand, on a schedule, or from your CI/CD pipeline through the API, so a new endpoint or a changed header is tested the day it ships rather than at next year's engagement.

The pricing model is different too. A consultancy quotes each engagement based on scope and tester days; NovaPentest is a flat subscription, with a Free plan and a Pro plan of three targets and thirty scans a month. That makes it reasonable to test staging as well as production, and to scan again after every fix.

Every finding comes with evidence, severity, an OWASP Top 10 and CWE mapping and remediation steps, and scan history shows what was fixed and what regressed. Teams also use NovaPentest before a manual engagement to clear the obvious issues first, so the consultants' paid days go to the problems that need a human.

Where the alternative is the better choice

A skilled human team is the better choice, and often the only adequate one, in several situations. Business-logic flaws are the clearest case. A tester who understands that a discount should apply only once, that a user must not approve their own expense report, or that an order should not be refundable after it ships will find abuse that no automated check knows to look for. People are also far better at chaining several minor weaknesses into one serious compromise, and at improvising when an application behaves in an unexpected way.

Complex authenticated workflows favour humans as well: multi-step processes, several user roles, approval chains, multi-factor sign-in, and anything that requires judgement about what should be allowed. NovaPentest's agent can sign in with credentials you provide and explore, but it works within a fixed request budget and does not replace a tester who spends a week inside your application.

Finally, some compliance frameworks, enterprise customers and security questionnaires require a penetration test performed by an independent firm, with a formal report or attestation letter signed by the people who did the work. NovaPentest's reports are structured for audit reviews, but they are not an independent third-party attestation and should never be presented as one. If an auditor or a customer asks for that, hire a consultancy.

How to choose

Decide by timing and by what the result is for. If you need evidence for an audit, a customer's security review, or a major launch, and the application has meaningful business logic or several user roles, commission a human-led test. If you need to know, week after week, whether your latest release introduced an injection flaw, a weak TLS setting or an exposed debug endpoint, automated testing is the practical answer, because no one can afford a consultant for every deploy.

For most teams the sensible pattern is both: continuous automated testing all year, and a manual engagement once or twice a year or before significant releases. Run NovaPentest first so the obvious issues are gone before the consultants arrive, share its history with them so they can focus on logic and chained attacks, and keep scanning afterwards to confirm their findings stay fixed.

If you have never tested your application at all, start with the free passive scan at /scan. It needs no account and shows whether the basics are in place.

Claims about other products as of 2026-09-22