Bugcrowd vs. Cobalt Emergency & Mass Notification Platform vs. HackerOne

Bugcrowd is great for bug bounty programs and as a cheaper alternative to a full-blown penetration test. Small to medium-sized companies who are serious about security, but don't have the budget for a $40,000 penetration test, this is a great solution. Bugcrowd isn't going to be able to do much of the white-box penetration testing (code reviews), as they are more suited for grey-box and black-box. A program like this will need at least one dedicated person to work with the moderator, verify findings, and decide on the severity of the finding.

Incentivized

It is one of the good platforms for security researchers to submit bugs and other vulnerabilities, it however, has some challenges, in terms of un-verified and duplicate submissions.

Incentivized

• Having a pool of security researchers helps keep the penetration tests broad, getting the most bang for your buck.
• The integration with Slack makes it easy to keep tabs on the program and when new findings are submitted.
• The interface is pretty simple to use and fairly intuitive.

Incentivized

• Filter for spammy bug reports
• Nice central interface
• Payment/reward system is nice

Incentivized

• The success of your program highly depends on the moderator that is assigned to your project. A good moderator will continue to find researchers until the quota is full. Less than stellar moderators will send out one invite and sees what sticks.
• Not all researchers are as professional as one might hope. This can ruin the experience.

Incentivized

• A lot of duplicate bugs get reported, although it does offer automatic suggestion of previously reported bugs that may be duplicates, it is far from perfect.
• Anyone can report bugs, a lot of them are not verified before submission. This sometimes leads to a lot of time spent in verifying if the bug is really actionable.
• Each submission has to be treated with equal potential, a lot of time, some time gets invested in vulnerabilities that aren't as important as some others.

Incentivized

Budget was ultimately the reason we went with Bugcrowd initially. Bugcrowd allowed for us to come up with our own bounty scale to fit out budget. Most other companies had a fixed scale, or the scale was not as flexible as we wanted it. Traditional penetration testing companies were very expensive.

Incentivized

These were very close and we liked HackerOne better. For a time we did have both and we felt the need to consolidate the information into one platform and end of life our internal offering. Overall we've been fairly happy with HackerOne.

Incentivized

• We have received some great results for a great price. We've also received some poor results at the same price.
• Bugcrowd is not always recognized as a "real" penetration test, but for the most part, we have not had any problems with customer accepting our reports.
• Overall, Bugcrowd has been an overall good experience, but we have had a poor moderator from time-to-time that has resulted in less than ideal results.

Incentivized

• Bugs that can't be tracked internally are submitted by external researchers, which is an important factor for security vulnerabilities.
• Even if the bugs reported are duplicates, there still is provision to award reputation points, that keep the researchers engaged.
• It also requires a lot of verification and validation, as a lot of the submissions are unverified to begin with.

Incentivized