3rdRisk vs. BitSight: Third-Party Risk Platforms Compared

Summary

• ‍BitSight offers a quick, outside-in view of a vendor’s cybersecurity posture. Some CISOs love it, others remain sceptical. It provides a glimpse into the perimeter — the digital façade of an organisation — but says little about what’s happening internally. On its own, BitSight is a snapshot, not a full diagnosis. It highlights risk, but doesn’t help you manage it.‍
• 3rdRisk (yes, that's us), by contrast, delivers the full third-party risk management lifecycle. From risk identification and control assessments to remediation tracking, reporting, and regulatory alignment — the 3rdRisk platform is built for multidisciplinary, end-to-end risk oversight. And the best part? 3rdRisk integrates BitSight ratings directly, meaning you can combine external cyber insights with internal workflows, controls, and context.
• If you’re looking for a standalone cyber score, BitSight does the job. But if you want to operationalise third-party risk management, only within cyber or across multiple risk domains, 3rdRisk is the platform to build on.

Introduction

Third-party risk management (TPRM) is a growing priority as organisations grapple with breaches and supply chain attacks. An alarming 83% of organisations experienced more than one data breach in 2022, and cyber incidents increasingly originate from vendors – ENISA reports about 58% of analysed supply chain incidents involved third-party compromises. In this landscape, both 3rdRisk and BitSight aim to improve risk visibility and oversight of suppliers. BitSight is best known for its cybersecurity risk ratings, providing an outside-in view of a vendor’s security posture. 3rdRisk, by contrast, offers a comprehensive third-party risk management platform that goes beyond scoring to manage the full lifecycle of vendor risk (covering compliance, IT security, operational resilience, ESG and more). Crucially, these approaches are not mutually exclusive: 3rdRisk can even integrate BitSight data directly via an official partnership, marrying BitSight’s external cyber insights with 3rdRisk’s internal risk workflows. In this comparison, we’ll examine how BitSight and 3rdRisk differ in risk scoring versus risk management, their support for decision-making and compliance, and which might better suit your organisation’s needs.

Third-Party Risk: Scoring vs. Managing

Scoring vs. managing encapsulates the key difference between BitSight and 3rdRisk. BitSight focuses on risk scoring and ratings – it continuously monitors a company’s cybersecurity posture and distills it into a numerical score (much like a credit score for cyber risk). This score provides a quick, objective snapshot of a vendor’s security performance, which can be useful for initial risk assessment or ongoing monitoring. However, a standalone score doesn’t manage the risk; it highlights issues without prescribing how to address them or tracking remediation. 3rdRisk, on the other hand, is built to manage third-party risk end-to-end. That means not only identifying risks (which it can do using data feeds like BitSight’s ratings) but also facilitating due diligence questionnaires, internal control checks, issue remediation, and continuous oversight through workflows and audits. In short, BitSight excels at measuring cyber risk, whereas 3rdRisk helps you operationalise and mitigate all types of third-party risks through a structured management process. BitSight’s one-dimensional scoring is a starting point; 3rdRisk’s multidisciplinary platform ensures those risk insights lead to concrete actions, accountability, and compliance.

It’s worth noting that many organisations use BitSight within broader TPRM programs rather than as a standalone solution. In fact, BitSight claims its ratings help improve companies’ cybersecurity performance significantly (customers engaging on its platform have notably increased their security ratings over time). This underscores that risk scoring can drive better outcomes – but only if coupled with processes to act on that information. That is exactly 3rdRisk’s territory: turning risk scores and signals into a managed workflow of assessments, decisions, and mitigations. Next, we’ll compare how each platform approaches risk visibility and contextual data, and how 3rdRisk incorporates BitSight’s scoring to enhance decision-making.

How BitSight and 3rdRisk Approach Risk Visibility

Risk visibility is achieved differently by BitSight and 3rdRisk. BitSight takes an outside-in view: it continuously scans and analyses external data on a third party’s IT footprint – detecting issues like exposed systems, malware traffic, insecure configurations, leaked credentials, and past breaches. It then translates these findings into an easy-to-understand security rating (on a scale roughly 300 to 820) along with letter-grade risk categories. This gives you and your stakeholders a quick visibility into a vendor’s cyber health at any given moment. BitSight’s ratings are widely used by security teams, cyber insurers, even regulators as a gauge of risk. By monitoring a broad range of threat indicators (botnet infections, open ports, patching cadence, etc.), BitSight can often spot vulnerabilities or compromises in a supplier before that supplier discloses them – a valuable heads-up for your security team.

However, BitSight’s visibility is limited to cybersecurity factors. It won’t reveal non-cyber risks (like financial instability, compliance gaps, or operational resilience issues), nor does it know the context of the vendor’s role in your organisation. That’s where 3rdRisk provides a more inside-out, 360° view. The 3rdRisk platform acts as a central hub for all risk information on a third party, combining external intelligence feeds and internal data. When you view a vendor in 3rdRisk, you might see their BitSight cyber rating alongside other risk metrics – e.g. business continuity scores, ESG ratings from providers like EcoVadis, financial health from CreditSafe, sanctions or adverse media hits from sources like LexisNexis. 3rdRisk’s native tooling also captures inputs from questionnaires, audit results, and incidents. This means risk visibility in 3rdRisk is contextual and multilayered: you’re not just seeing a cyber score, but also whether that vendor has open compliance issues, what critical data they handle, what contracts and SLAs are in place, and so on. The platform’s dashboards provide a unified risk profile for each third party, which decision-makers can slice by risk domain or drill into specifics. In essence, BitSight shines a flashlight on a vendor’s external cyber risks, while 3rdRisk turns on the floodlights for all relevant risks, internal and external, giving a comprehensive view that supports more informed decision-making.

Risk Scoring and Ratings

Cyber risk ratings are BitSight’s hallmark. BitSight was a pioneer in developing a quantitative scoring method for cybersecurity – it collects billions of security-relevant events (e.g. malware signals from botnets, spam, misconfigured systems) and uses a proprietary algorithm to rate an organisation’s security on a scale (historically 250–900, now roughly 300–820 after recent updates). This single score encapsulates the vendor’s overall cyber hygiene, and BitSight also provides sub-ratings or grades on risk vectors like compromised systems, diligence (configuration/hygiene), user behavior (e.g. credential leaks or P2P file sharing), and any public disclosures/breaches. The value of BitSight’s scoring is that it offers an objective, third-party measurement that is updated continuously – enabling at-a-glance comparisons between vendors and tracking of improvement or deterioration over time. For example, a vendor with a “B” grade or a score of 600 might be considered higher risk than a vendor scoring 750 (“A” grade), and if one of your critical suppliers suddenly drops in rating, you get an alert to investigate why (perhaps a new vulnerability or incident). These ratings have proven meaningful: independent studies have found BitSight scores correlate with breach likelihood (lower-rated companies tend to experience more incidents). In practice, many firms set thresholds (e.g. “we only onboard vendors with a BitSight score above X”) or use the score as a KPI in vendor risk scorecards.

3rdRisk, by design, does not rely on a single “universal” score for third parties – rather, it allows multi-faceted risk scoring tailored to each organisation’s framework. Within 3rdRisk, you can assess a vendor’s inherent risk (based on factors like the vendor’s access to data, criticality of service, geographic risk, etc.) and residual risk after controls, yielding a risk rating in your own terms (e.g. High/Medium/Low or a numeric scale). 3rdRisk also has AI-powered automatic risk profiles. The platform comes with templates aligned to common standards (ISO 27001, GDPR, DORA, etc.), which include scoring logic for questionnaires and controls. For instance, if a vendor fails certain key controls in a due diligence assessment, that might raise their residual risk score in 3rdRisk. In addition, 3rdRisk can ingest external scores like BitSight’s and display them alongside these internal assessments. This means you’re not losing BitSight’s rating – you’re contextualising it. Rather than saying “Vendor X = 720 (BitSight)”, 3rdRisk lets you say “Vendor X has a 720 BitSight cyber score, a medium inherent risk to our business, and a residual risk of ‘High’ in compliance but ‘Low’ in financial stability,” for example. These nuanced ratings are more actionable internally. Moreover, 3rdRisk’s scoring extends beyond cyber: you might have an ESG risk rating for a supplier, or a concentration risk score if you rely too much on one provider, etc. Ultimately, BitSight gives you a standardised external cyber score, whereas 3rdRisk provides a flexible scoring framework – incorporating cybersecurity ratings as one data point among many to derive a holistic risk evaluation. For organisations that need to report to regulators or executives, 3rdRisk’s approach means you can generate risk scores aligned to regulatory impact or business impact, not just technical scores.

Contextualised Risk Management

A critical advantage of 3rdRisk is contextualising risk – something a standalone rating tool like BitSight cannot fully do. BitSight provides excellent outside data but operates largely in isolation from your internal risk context. If a vendor gets a poor security rating, BitSight will highlight the technical reasons (e.g. “obsolete software” or “infection detected”), but it won’t know how important that vendor is to you, what data they handle, whether you have compensating controls, or if there are contractual protections in place. In other words, BitSight can tell you Vendor A has a problem, but not how worried you should be about it. This often forces risk managers to manually combine BitSight information with internal knowledge to decide next steps.

3rdRisk was built to bridge that gap by linking third-party risks to internal business context and controls. Every vendor profile in 3rdRisk carries contextual data: the vendor’s criticality tier, which business owner is responsible for it, what information assets or processes the vendor is involved in, and which internal controls or requirements apply to that relationship. For example, a cloud provider might be tagged as supporting “customer-facing website – high availability required” and mapped to controls for uptime and incident response. If BitSight (integrated into 3rdRisk) flags a new vulnerability on that cloud provider, the platform can immediately show context – e.g., this is a critical supplier in our IT continuity plan, and we have an open risk mitigation task on them already. 3rdRisk allows users to attach evidence and assessments to each vendor, creating an audit trail and knowledge base over the life of the contract. It tracks things like: when was the last risk assessment done? What were the findings? Have all high-risk issues been mitigated or accepted by the risk committee? BitSight by itself doesn’t maintain that kind of audit trail; it’s focused on the live risk indicators, not the documentation of your due diligence process.

This contextual approach greatly enhances decision-making. 3rdRisk’s platform can, for instance, automatically flag if a vendor’s BitSight score drops below your risk appetite and that vendor is handling sensitive data – triggering a workflow to review or escalate the issue. It embeds risk management into organisational processes: integration with Microsoft Teams and email means when a risk needs attention or an assessment is due, the relevant stakeholder gets a notification in their normal workflow. The result is that third-party risk management becomes a collaborative, continuous process, not a periodic checklist. In summary, BitSight offers raw risk signals, whereas 3rdRisk provides the interpretive lens and management framework. The platform ensures that every risk rating or alert is seen in context – who owns the risk, what’s being done, how it maps to compliance requirements – thereby enabling effective and accountable risk reduction, not just risk observation.

Integration of BitSight Data in 3rdRisk

Rather than viewing 3rdRisk and BitSight as competitors, it’s important to recognise they can work hand-in-hand. 3rdRisk has a formal partnership with BitSight and offers out-of-the-box integration for BitSight’s security ratings. This means that if your organisation uses BitSight, you can plug those ratings directly into the 3rdRisk platform with minimal effort. Vendor profiles in 3rdRisk can automatically pull in the latest BitSight score and alert data for that company, updating on a continuous basis just as in BitSight’s own portal. The benefit is consolidation: your team doesn’t have to toggle between a BitSight dashboard for cyber risk and a separate spreadsheet or tool for other vendor risks – 3rdRisk becomes a single pane of glass. For example, a risk manager logging into 3rdRisk can see a list of all third parties with their current BitSight ratings next to other risk metrics, and can sort or filter vendors by rating to focus on the riskiest ones.

This integration also enables combined reporting. You could generate a report for management or regulators through 3rdRisk that includes external cyber risk scores (from BitSight) as well as your internal risk assessments and remediation status. The partnership ensures the data flows are seamless and validated – BitSight’s data feeds into 3rdRisk via API, so you get the same up-to-date information as you would on BitSight’s platform, but contextualised in 3rdRisk’s workflows. Notably, 3rdRisk doesn’t just integrate BitSight; it also connects with other rating services (e.g. SecurityScorecard) and threat intelligence sources. This reflects 3rdRisk’s philosophy of being an open hub for third-party risk data. If BitSight is your chosen cyber ratings provider, 3rdRisk will amplify its value by linking it to action: a low BitSight score can trigger an automated questionnaire to that vendor, a ticket in your ITSM system, or an alert to compliance officers – all managed through 3rdRisk.

From a strategic viewpoint, integrating BitSight into 3rdRisk lets you leverage the best of both worlds: BitSight’s unparalleled external cyber risk intelligence, and 3rdRisk’s comprehensive risk management capabilities. This is particularly useful for organisations that appreciate BitSight’s data (many do – BitSight is an industry leader in cyber ratings) but need more than just a rating. Instead of treating BitSight as a separate tool, you make it a data source feeding into your broader TPRM program. The official partnership also means 3rdRisk stays up-to-date with any enhancements BitSight makes (for instance, if BitSight adds a new risk vector or scoring model, it will be reflected in the integration). In summary, BitSight is often a component rather than a full solution for third-party risk – and 3rdRisk’s platform is built to incorporate such components, allowing organisations to create a richer risk intelligence ecosystem. By doing so, 3rdRisk turns BitSight’s ratings into actionable risk workflows, closing the loop from identification to mitigation.

Compliance and Regulatory Alignment

Both 3rdRisk and BitSight can play a role in helping organisations meet regulatory requirements for third-party risk, but their contributions differ greatly. 3rdRisk was designed with compliance and regulatory alignment at its core, especially for stringent EU regulations like DORA and NIS2, as well as industry guidelines like the EBA (European Banking Authority) outsourcing guidelines. The platform provides pre-mapped control libraries and assessment templates for major frameworks. For example, 3rdRisk includes a full DORA compliance solution – with modules to maintain the DORA-required Register of Information for ICT third-party risk, and templates to assess ICT providers against DORA’s resilience and cybersecurity requirements. It similarly offers an out-of-the-box NIS-2 solution to help critical entities map their third-party risks and security measures to the NIS2 directive’s obligations. This means if you’re a financial institution or critical infrastructure provider, 3rdRisk accelerates alignment with these laws by providing built-in content and reports. A bank using 3rdRisk can, for instance, quickly generate an audit-ready report of all its critical suppliers and risk statuses to satisfy an EBA or DORA inquiry. One client case noted that an organisation achieved compliance with Germany’s Supply Chain Act (LkSG) in 5 weeks using 3rdRisk’s automation and templates. Additionally, 3rdRisk’s continuous monitoring integrations (such as sanctions list checks, adverse media, and BitSight’s cyber alerts) help fulfill ongoing due diligence duties mandated by regulators. The platform also logs every action (creating an audit trail), which is invaluable during regulatory inspections or internal audits – you can show who approved what, when risk reviews occurred, and what remediation was done, all within the system.

BitSight, by contrast, is not a compliance management tool but can be a useful data source for compliance. Regulatory guidelines (like DORA, NIS2, EBA, and others globally) increasingly call for continuous monitoring of third-party cyber risk and objective risk assessments. BitSight’s ratings are one way to fulfill the requirement to monitor vendor security on an ongoing basis. For instance, under DORA’s ICT risk management rules, firms must assess and monitor third-party ICT providers’ cyber resilience – using BitSight to track a vendor’s security rating over time could be cited as one control mechanism. Indeed, some regulators and industry frameworks mention or endorse the use of independent security ratings as part of vendor risk due diligence. However, BitSight alone will not make you compliant. It doesn’t provide the full documentation or control coverage that frameworks demand. BitSight won’t maintain your Register of Information, map controls to ISO or NIST, or ensure you have remediation plans for identified gaps. You would need a platform (or manual processes) around it to do those things. This is where 3rdRisk clearly outpaces BitSight: 3rdRisk can serve as a system-of-record for compliance – e.g. storing contracts, tracking SLA reviews, linking each vendor risk to specific regulatory articles (DORA and NIS2 mappings are built in). It even helps produce evidence like audit trails of risk decisions and reports that demonstrate compliance with regulations at the click of a button.

To summarise, 3rdRisk offers comprehensive regulatory alignment (with dedicated solutions for DORA, NIS2, GDPR, ESG laws, etc., and an audit trail of all risk management activities), whereas BitSight provides a narrower contribution – mainly helping to satisfy the cybersecurity monitoring aspect of third-party risk rules. Many organisations will use BitSight as part of their compliance toolkit (to show they are keeping tabs on vendor cyber health), but they will rely on 3rdRisk or similar platforms to orchestrate the overall compliance process (e.g. ensuring all required due diligence steps are taken and evidenced). If your goal is to meet frameworks like DORA or the EBA Guidelines, 3rdRisk is equipped out-of-the-box to map to those requirements, from policy to technical controls. BitSight would be an adjunct – a provider of risk data that feeds into your compliance process. In fact, by integrating BitSight into 3rdRisk, you get the assurance that your compliance monitoring (like checking vendor cyber posture continuously) is automated and logged, satisfying regulators while freeing up your team.

Lastly, on control frameworks and standards: 3rdRisk aligns with best-practice frameworks (ISO 27001, SOC 2, COSO, etc.) and allows you to map vendor controls to your internal control framework. BitSight doesn’t handle control frameworks – it’s agnostic, focusing instead on outcomes (security incidents, misconfigurations). Thus, 3rdRisk is the better choice if you need to demonstrate a controls-based approach to third-party risk (common in regulated industries), whereas BitSight’s ratings can be one metric within that approach.

Collaboration, Workflows, and Reporting

Another stark difference is in how each solution supports team collaboration, workflow automation, and reporting in third-party risk management. 3rdRisk was built as a collaborative workflow platform from the ground up. It facilitates the full lifecycle of third-party risk management with clearly defined processes. For example, when onboarding a new vendor, 3rdRisk can automatically trigger a sequence: gather basic info, classify the vendor’s criticality, send out a security questionnaire or an ESG survey via the platform’s vendor portal, and require internal approvals before the vendor is accepted. These steps are all managed within 3rdRisk, with tasks assigned to the relevant owners and automatic reminders sent (integrating with email or Microsoft Teams to nudge people). The vendor portal is a particularly user-friendly aspect – your suppliers get a link to a branded portal where they can securely fill out assessments or upload certifications, and they only see their own info. This not only streamlines data collection but also fosters cooperation from vendors (the process is clear and professional, versus ad-hoc spreadsheets). Throughout the relationship, 3rdRisk supports workflow for things like issue remediation (e.g. if a vendor fails a control, the platform can log a finding, assign it to the vendor or an internal owner to remediate, and track it to closure), risk acceptance approvals (if you choose to accept a vendor risk, an approval flow is documented), and periodic reviews.

Because 3rdRisk consolidates all of this, it naturally produces rich reporting: you can generate real-time dashboards for different stakeholders – procurement can see onboarding status, IT can see security gaps, compliance can see which vendors lack certain documents, etc. There are heat maps of vendor risk by department, trend charts of risk reduction over time, and executive summary reports. The platform can output reports tailored to regulatory needs as well (e.g. a DORA compliance report, or an ISO 27001 annex of third-party controls). Importantly, every action is logged, so if an auditor asks “prove that you assessed vendor X last year and what was the result,” 3rdRisk can pull that record in seconds.

BitSight, in contrast, has a much lighter touch on workflow and collaboration. Its primary use-case is monitoring and alerting, which is mostly handled by the risk or security team. BitSight does allow a form of collaboration with vendors: you can invite a third-party to access their BitSight rating and see what issues are affecting their score. BitSight’s data shows that vendors who engage via these invitations often improve their security (the platform notes invited companies are twice as likely to remediate and raise their score by 50+ points). This is a useful feature – essentially, you’re nudging your supplier to fix things by giving them visibility into their own rating. However, beyond this, BitSight’s built-in workflow is limited. If you want to send a full questionnaire to a vendor or manage a remediation project, BitSight alone isn’t enough. (BitSight has offered additional modules or partnerships for questionnaire exchange, but those often come as separate products or integrations.) Many BitSight users export data or use BitSight’s API to feed into GRC tools like ServiceNow, Archer, or OneTrust for running the actual workflow. In terms of reporting, BitSight provides dashboards of your vendor portfolio’s risk ratings, and you can schedule reports (for example, a weekly report of all your vendors’ scores and any changes). These are helpful for keeping leadership informed of cyber risk trends. Yet, the scope of BitSight’s reports is inherently focused on cyber risk rating metrics. You won’t get a report from BitSight that covers, say, “third-party risk status across cyber, privacy, and financial risk” or “comprehensive vendor dossier for audit” – those are outside its purview.

In summary, if we talk about managing the full lifecycle of third-party risks – from onboarding to offboarding, including contract reviews, risk assessments, mitigation tracking, and ongoing monitoring – 3rdRisk covers that continuum comprehensively within one platform. BitSight addresses one slice (continuous cyber monitoring) and relies on either the customer’s internal processes or other tools to handle the rest. Organisations that already have a mature TPRM workflow might slot BitSight in as the monitoring tool for cyber risk. But organizations looking to establish or modernise their third-party risk process often find that 3rdRisk can serve as the backbone system, with BitSight integrated for additional data.

When it comes to collaboration and ease of use, 3rdRisk is often praised by users for making risk management “pleasant” and accessible. Its interface is clean and customisable, and non-experts (like business unit managers or vendors themselves) can engage with it easily. BitSight’s interface is also user-friendly for security professionals – the rating dashboard is straightforward – but it’s not really meant for a broad audience in your company. A procurement officer or compliance manager might not glean much from a BitSight portal without interpretation by the security team, whereas 3rdRisk is designed so that any stakeholder (IT, compliance, procurement, executive) can log in and see a relevant view of third-party risk in plain language. Moreover, 3rdRisk’s integration with common enterprise tools (Teams, Slack, Jira, etc.) means people can collaborate on vendor risk tasks without having to learn a new system in depth. BitSight, being specialised, is typically used by a smaller group (risk/IT staff) and doesn’t integrate with collaboration platforms in the same way (aside from sending notifications or API outputs).

Platform Flexibility and User Interface

Platform flexibility and the user interface are important practical considerations when comparing 3rdRisk and BitSight. 3rdRisk offers a high degree of flexibility because it’s a purpose-built TPRM SaaS platform. It’s multi-tenant cloud, so deployment is quick (the vendor touts being up and running in as little as 10 days) and it’s continuously updated with new features and regulatory content. The platform is configurable to your needs – you can customize assessment forms, scoring models, risk categories, and workflow settings without needing custom code. Many organisations also appreciate that 3rdRisk can be white-labeled: the interface can be styled in the company’s branding, and the vendor portal can use a custom URL, giving a seamless experience to third parties. From a UI standpoint, 3rdRisk is modern and intuitive, with an emphasis on simplicity. Users report that the learning curve is minimal. Dashboards are graphical and can be tailored (you might have a board for “Top 10 High Risk Vendors” and another for “TPRM KPI Metrics” for example). Navigation in 3rdRisk is built around common tasks – e.g. a section for onboarding new third parties, a section for ongoing assessments, a central repository for documents, etc. This logical design helps drive adoption across different departments; in fact, 3rdRisk’s collaborative features (like tagging a colleague in a risk comment, or sending a questionnaire directly from the platform) encourage cross-functional use. Because 3rdRisk also integrates with single sign-on (Azure AD, Okta), users can jump in easily using their corporate credentials and even get notifications via tools like Teams, which lowers barriers to use. Overall, the UX philosophy of 3rdRisk is to make risk management as frictionless as possible – a notable point when many legacy GRC tools are criticised for being clunky.

BitSight’s platform is less flexible simply because it has a narrower scope. It is also cloud-based and easy to deploy (activate your account and you can start seeing ratings), but its customisation options are limited to the domain of security ratings. You can configure alert thresholds, choose which risk vectors to focus on, or add your own internal metadata tags to vendors in BitSight, but you cannot transform BitSight into a broader risk management tool – it stays focused on cyber rating and associated analytics. BitSight’s user interface is generally regarded as polished and straightforward for what it does. The main dashboard typically shows your portfolio average rating, distribution of vendor ratings, and alerts for changes. Drilling into a specific organisation gives detailed findings (like a list of observed vulnerabilities or incidents contributing to the score). For a technical user or risk analyst, this is quite informative and fairly easy to navigate. However, for non-technical stakeholders, BitSight’s UI might be a bit too specialised – it assumes the user understands terms like system compromise, DNSSEC, TLS strength, etc. BitSight has tried to bridge this by providing high-level grades and business risk insights (and they’ve even added features for board reporting, which translate scores into risk terms). Still, the platform is inherently about cyber risk data. In contrast, 3rdRisk’s UI speaks in the language of risks, controls, and compliance which might resonate more with a broad user base in risk committees or procurement.

When it comes to extensibility: 3rdRisk being an open platform means if you have new requirements, you can often configure the solution to accommodate them. Need to add a new risk domain (e.g. geopolitical risk)? You could add a section or field in 3rdRisk. BitSight wouldn’t allow that – it evolves at the pace and direction BitSight sets (for instance, BitSight expanding into attack surface management as a module). If BitSight doesn’t track a certain risk vector, you have to wait for them to include it (or use another tool).

One area of flexibility to highlight is integration with internal systems. 3rdRisk provides a robust API and pre-built connectors to many systems like SAP, ServiceNow, Jira, and procurement tools. This means the platform can fit into your IT ecosystem – e.g. automatically importing your vendor master from an ERP, or creating risk issues in Jira for IT teams to resolve. BitSight also offers integrations (especially with ITSM and GRC platforms), but those are usually feeding BitSight data out rather than pulling broad data in. 3rdRisk’s integrations work both ways (ingesting data from external sources and exporting data to dashboards or other apps). If your organisation values a flexible, integrative solution that can adapt as your third-party risk program matures, 3rdRisk checks that box more strongly.

In summary, BitSight’s platform is excellent at what it does but purposely limited in scope and customisation, whereas 3rdRisk’s platform is built to be a flexible, all-in-one workspace for third-party risk and compliance. The UI of both is modern SaaS; BitSight is arguably more geared to cybersecurity professionals, while 3rdRisk aims to be user-friendly for a diverse set of business users. As a result, companies often use BitSight for the security team’s analytics and 3rdRisk as the enterprise-wide risk management interface – again showing how BitSight can complement a platform like 3rdRisk rather than replace it.

Data Sources and Automation Capabilities

A significant differentiator between 3rdRisk and BitSight lies in the breadth of data sources and use of automation/AI. Starting with external data integrations:

• BitSight primarily leverages its own curated external data feeds for cybersecurity. These include threat intelligence sources like malware telemetry, botnet sensors, scan data for vulnerabilities, breach records, etc. BitSight has spent years building these feeds (ingesting over 400 billion events per day by its account), and this is a key strength – you don’t need to integrate dosens of threat intel sources yourself; BitSight aggregates them into one rating. Beyond its own data, BitSight can integrate into other systems via API. Many organisations pipe BitSight alerts into SIEMs or SOAR tools to automate responses (for example, increasing monitoring on a vendor when their score drops). BitSight also integrates with vendor risk management solutions (often through partnerships) – for instance, it can plug into OneTrust, ProcessUnity, or RSA Archer so that the rating shows up in those dashboards. However, BitSight does not natively pull in other types of risk data like financial ratings or ESG scores; its domain is cyber. If you wanted to correlate a vendor’s cyber rating with, say, their financial health or compliance status, you’d have to do that outside BitSight.
• 3rdRisk was built with a philosophy of data source agnosticism and automation. Out of the box, 3rdRisk comes with a catalog of integrations to various third-party risk data providers. We’ve mentioned a few: BitSight for cyber ratings, SecurityScorecard as an alternative cyber rating, OpenSanctions for sanctions and PEP checks, Creditsafe for credit risk, EcoVadis for sustainability/ESG scores, LexisNexis for adverse media checks, etc.. This means the platform can automatically pull in a wealth of data on a schedule or in real-time. For example, when you onboard a new vendor, 3rdRisk could automatically fetch their credit score and latest sanctions screening results, and continuously update these. Such automation saves risk managers from manually checking multiple databases. Internally, 3rdRisk can also connect to your own IT systems to gather data – e.g., integrate with an asset management database to see what systems a vendor can access, or tie into an incident management system to log if a vendor-related incident occurred. Automation in 3rdRisk isn’t just about data collection; it’s about process as well. You can set rules like “if a vendor’s risk rating goes above a certain threshold, trigger a re-assessment” or “auto-send an annual compliance questionnaire every 12 months to critical suppliers.” The platform’s workflow engine handles these repetitive tasks, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

Now, a highlight of 3rdRisk is its use of AI-powered profiling and document analysis. 3rdRisk has embedded artificial intelligence in several features to reduce manual effort. For example, the platform can use AI to analyse uploaded documents from third parties – such as SOC 2 reports, certifications, or policies – and automatically extract key risks or compliance gaps. Instead of an analyst reading a 50-page audit report, 3rdRisk’s AI can flag sections that indicate issues (maybe a missing encryption control) and even answer queries about the document’s content. Another AI feature is inherent risk profiling: when you register a new vendor, 3rdRisk can utilise AI models to suggest that vendor’s inherent risk level by cross-referencing similar companies or industry data. It’s essentially learning from patterns – e.g. a cloud software vendor handling personal data might inherently be “High” risk in privacy – and giving you a head start on risk classification. Furthermore, 3rdRisk’s AI can help fill out assessments (for instance, if a vendor provides an unclear answer, the AI might highlight inconsistency or even recommend follow-up questions). All these AI capabilities aim to augment the risk team, letting humans focus on judgment and decision, while the AI does first-pass analysis. Notably, 3rdRisk allows companies to choose AI models (European privacy-conscious models vs. others), showing a level of maturity in how AI is integrated responsibly into the workflow.

What about BitSight and AI? BitSight has been incorporating AI mainly on the back-end – for improving its risk models and predictions. They’ve mentioned a proprietary AI (nicknamed “Groma”) that helps identify and attribute digital assets and refine risk scoring. For customers, this may manifest in more accurate ratings or the addition of predictive analytics (e.g. BitSight has offered some breach likelihood forecasting, which presumably uses machine learning on historical data). However, BitSight’s AI is not something the user directly interacts with to automate their work; it’s built into the product’s secret sauce. The platform does not read your documents or do multi-domain analysis – its AI is laser-focused on cybersecurity signals. BitSight is reportedly also exploring AI in TPRM workflows (perhaps automating parts of vendor evaluation), but those are likely in early stages or part of their extended offerings.

In essence, 3rdRisk leverages automation and AI to reduce manual workloads across the entire TPRM process, whereas BitSight uses automation/AI primarily to enhance its cyber risk data. If your goal is to automate third-party risk management tasks (data gathering, analysis, reminders), 3rdRisk is far more equipped out-of-the-box. BitSight will automate the collection of cyber risk evidence, but you’ll still need to automate the surrounding processes yourself or via another tool. Many organisations integrate BitSight’s feed into something like ServiceNow so they can kick off workflows when an alert comes – again pointing to the need for a platform like 3rdRisk to handle holistic automation.

Conclusion: Which Platform Suits Your Organisation?

Choosing between 3rdRisk and BitSight ultimately comes down to your organisation’s needs and approach to third-party risk management. If your primary concern is obtaining an independent cybersecurity rating for your vendors – a quick, standardised measure of cyber risk that can feed into your security monitoring – then BitSight excels in that niche. It has become a de facto standard for cyber risk scoring, and its data can give you confidence (and evidence) that you are keeping an eye on vendor security in an objective way. Companies with very mature security teams often use BitSight as a critical tool for vendor risk measurement. However, BitSight by itself is not a full TPRM solution. As we’ve seen, it doesn’t manage compliance tasks, doesn’t track mitigation workflows, and doesn’t address non-cyber dimensions of third-party risk. Organisations that treated BitSight as a one-stop TPRM tool often find they still need to rely on emails, spreadsheets, or additional software to handle the “management” part of third-party risk.

This is where 3rdRisk offers a compelling advantage. For organisations seeking a comprehensive third-party risk management platform – one that can operationalise TPRM across departments and risk domains – 3rdRisk is a better fit. It provides end-to-end functionality to identify, assess, mitigate, and monitor third-party risks in a single system. Crucially, it covers cyber and beyond: not just cyber ratings, but also compliance checks, financial due diligence, ESG compliance, resilience testing, and so on. If you have to adhere to regulations (DORA, NIS2, etc.) or you want a strong audit trail and workflow around vendor risk, 3rdRisk is built for that purpose. Its ease-of-use and automation mean you can involve all relevant stakeholders in the process and scale your program efficiently (important if you have hundreds or thousands of suppliers).

It’s also not an either/or decision in many cases. 3rdRisk can incorporate BitSight’s ratings, so you don’t lose the value of BitSight by choosing 3rdRisk – in fact, you enhance it. Many organisations might start with BitSight to get a handle on cyber risk and later adopt 3rdRisk to mature their program, bringing BitSight data into the fold. For those who are currently using BitSight and finding gaps in broader risk management, 3rdRisk can seamlessly fill those gaps while leveraging the BitSight insights you’ve already invested in. Conversely, if you have 3rdRisk, plugging in BitSight (or an alternative like SecurityScorecard) will enrich your platform’s external risk intelligence.

Finally, consider the message each choice sends to your stakeholders: Using BitSight alone says “we are monitoring cyber risk”, whereas using 3rdRisk (with BitSight integrated) says “we are managing third-party risk holistically and proactively.” The latter likely provides greater assurance to boards, regulators, and customers that you have a robust TPRM program. Given that third-party risk management is a multidisciplinary challenge, most mid-to-large organisations will lean towards a platform approach. In summary, 3rdRisk is suited for organizations looking for a full-service TPRM platform that can be tailored to their enterprise and compliance needs, while BitSight is suited as a specialised tool for cyber risk rating – often complementary to platforms like 3rdRisk rather than a substitute.

For those evaluating solutions, a sensible path may be: use BitSight’s ratings to enhance cyber risk visibility, but employ 3rdRisk to drive the overall third-party risk management process. This way, you achieve the best of both: quantifiable cyber risk metrics and a comprehensive risk management framework to act on them. Ultimately, the goal is to protect your organisation from vendor-related risks and ensure compliance, and the right combination of tools can significantly improve your third-party risk posture. With 3rdRisk’s multidisciplinary platform integrating BitSight’s expert data, you can move from simply scoring vendor risk to truly managing it.

Overall, when comparing third-party risk management platforms, consider that BitSight offers a strong but narrow capability (cyber risk scoring), whereas 3rdRisk delivers a wide-ranging TPRM solution that can incorporate such scores. For organizations serious about managing third-party risk in a structured, continuous, and compliant manner, 3rdRisk (with the ability to plug in BitSight’s ratings) will likely provide more value and peace of mind in the long run.