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) has become a top priority for organisations of all sizes. As more companies outsource critical services, they also inherit new risks, from cybersecurity gaps to regulatory exposures. The landscape is evolving rapidly. According to ENISA, 58% of analysed supply chain incidents involved third-party compromise, and over 80% of organisations reported suffering more than one data breach in 2022 alone.

In this environment, teams need more than spreadsheets or siloed tools. They need visibility, control, and a way to keep pace with growing regulatory expectations. That’s where BitSight and 3rdRisk come in, offering two very different approaches to solving the same problem.

BitSight focuses on one domain: cybersecurity ratings. It collects data from external sources to continuously monitor vendors’ IT hygiene, flagging concerns before they become incidents. It’s fast, standardised, and works well for benchmarking and alerting.

3rdRisk, by contrast, tackles the full TPRM lifecycle. It helps teams assess vendors, track controls, ensure compliance, manage documentation, and respond to change. It’s flexible, multi-domain, and collaborative.

In this comparison, we’ll explore what each platform does well, how they differ, and how your organisation can use them, together or separately, to improve how you manage your third-party risks.

The rise of regulatory frameworks such as DORA and NIS2 has only intensified the need for structured TPRM. Financial institutions must now prove not only that they monitor vendor cyber posture, but that they maintain audit trails, assess resilience, and conduct regular due diligence. Manual processes and scattered tools are no longer sufficient. The choice of platform can shape how well your organisation meets these challenges, not just reactively, but proactively and sustainably.

Third-Party Risk: Scoring vs. Managing

BitSight is best known for scoring cybersecurity risk. It continuously monitors a vendor’s exposed digital assets, things like outdated software, open ports, or botnet traffic, and generates a numerical rating. This rating helps teams quickly spot vendors that may pose a higher risk. It’s a useful starting point, especially for organisations dealing with a long list of suppliers.

However, BitSight stops short of managing that risk. It doesn’t provide remediation plans, assign tasks, or track accountability. If a vendor’s score drops, you’ll see it, but what happens next is entirely up to you.

That’s where 3rdRisk offers real value. It doesn’t just identify issues; it helps resolve them. Teams can launch assessments, assign questionnaires, request documents, log remediation efforts, and track approvals. It creates a living record of each vendor relationship, so you’re not relying on scattered notes or disconnected tools to piece together a response.

3rdRisk also supports risk tiering, allowing you to select workflows and control depth based on a vendor’s risk level. Low-risk vendors can be fast-tracked; high-risk ones get full review and oversight. The result is a structured, repeatable approach that keeps you in control, not just risk-aware.

How BitSight and 3rdRisk Approach Risk Visibility

BitSight focuses on external cyber visibility. It scans a vendor’s public-facing IT assets, looking for open ports, malware traffic, poor patching, or leaked credentials, and rolls that data into a score. This score gives you a snapshot of a vendor’s cyber posture at any given time. It’s fast and objective, and often used to spot vulnerabilities before the vendor discloses them.

But BitSight’s visibility ends there. It doesn’t know your relationship with that vendor, the systems they access, or how critical they are to your operations. It can’t factor in other risks such as compliance gaps, ESG issues, or financial exposure.

3rdRisk takes things a step further. It combines external data feeds, including BitSight, with internal context. You can see a vendor’s cyber rating alongside their contract terms, business criticality, risk tier, and past assessments. The result is layered, contextual visibility, so you’re not just aware of risk, you understand it.

Risk Scoring and Ratings

BitSight helped define the market for external cyber risk ratings. Its scoring model converts a vast stream of threat data into a number roughly between 300 and 820, with updates occurring daily. This makes it easy to compare vendors, detect declines, and track improvements over time. Many organisations use BitSight scores to set onboarding thresholds or escalate reviews when a score drops.

However, one score doesn’t tell the full story. A vendor might have a high cyber score but pose compliance or reputational risks. Or they might be technically weak but pose little business impact. That’s why many teams look for a more flexible approach.

3rdRisk lets you define your scoring framework. You can combine inherent risk (based on factors like geography, service type, or access level) with residual risk (adjusted after evaluating controls). The platform supports different rating types, numeric, traffic-light, or qualitative, and aligns with standards like ISO 27001 or GDPR.

BitSight scores are part of the picture, but not the whole thing. In 3rdRisk, a vendor might show a 780 BitSight rating, a high privacy risk due to data handling, and a low ESG rating. This layered view helps stakeholders prioritise and act more effectively.

Another key benefit of 3rdRisk is how it allows teams to evolve their scoring methods over time. As your risk framework matures, you might move from simple qualitative ratings to more data-driven models. 3rdRisk supports this evolution. It also lets you weigh different domains based on business priorities, giving, for instance, more importance to data privacy for marketing vendors, or operational resilience for cloud providers. Lastly, 3rdRisk also has automated risk profiles, powered by AI, which can act as a starting point for your third-party risk management.

For stakeholders, a more holistic approach to scoring means that decisions aren’t based on a single number but a combination of factors that reflect real business impact. It helps prevent impulsive reactions to isolated data points and promotes smarter, more consistent vendor decisions across the board.

Contextualised Risk Management

Cyber risk ratings are useful, but without context, they can be misleading. BitSight may tell you that one of your vendors has a score of 590, which looks concerning. But how important are they to your business? What systems do they access? Is the risk already mitigated through other controls? BitSight doesn’t have this visibility.

3rdRisk fills in the missing information. It connects each risk signal to your internal context, like vendor tiering, owner responsibilities, contractual obligations, and data sensitivity. If BitSight flags an issue, 3rdRisk shows who needs to respond, what’s already been done, and how it affects your overall posture.

For example, if a cloud provider supporting your customer-facing platform gets flagged, 3rdRisk can escalate the issue automatically, linking it to service continuity controls and SLAs. If a marketing vendor with no data access gets flagged, the platform may log the event without triggering major concern.

The platform also records every step, from assessments and mitigations to risk acceptances and sign-offs. This audit trail ensures you can demonstrate not only that you saw the risk, but that you handled it responsibly and consistently.

Integration of BitSight Data in 3rdRisk

3rdRisk and BitSight aren’t competitors; they’re complementary. 3rdRisk offers native integration with BitSight, meaning your vendor risk profiles can automatically pull in live cyber ratings and alerts. This eliminates the need to jump between tools or manually update data.

More importantly, 3rdRisk turns those scores into action. A low BitSight rating can trigger a reassessment, launch a questionnaire, or create an internal task for follow-up. The data stays fresh, but more importantly, it becomes part of a workflow—not just a static report.

You can also combine BitSight scores with other data feeds like ESG ratings, sanctions checks, or financial risk indicators. 3rdRisk acts as a central hub for all of it. BitSight gives you great visibility into cyber risk. 3rdRisk ensures that visibility leads to decisions, documentation, and mitigation.

Compliance and Regulatory Alignment

As regulations become more demanding, organisations must demonstrate not just awareness of third-party risk, but active management. Frameworks like DORA, NIS2, the EBA Guidelines, and the German Supply Chain Act expect continuous oversight, formalised assessments, documented controls, and timely remediation.

BitSight supports a small but important part of this, the ongoing monitoring of cyber risk. A live, third-party score is helpful to show regulators that you're watching vendor security posture. However, BitSight doesn’t handle the governance side. It doesn’t map risks to compliance frameworks, track approvals, or generate the evidence required during an audit.

3rdRisk does all of that. It provides a full DORA compliance solution. It also includes frameworks for NIS2, EBA, and the German Supply Chain Act (LkSG). This means that 3rdRisk accelerates alignment with these laws by providing built-in templates and reports. Each step is logged. You can show regulators what controls you applied, when risks were accepted, and who signed off, all within a singular system.

If your organisation is in a regulated sector or preparing for audits, 3rdRisk provides the structured approach needed to stay ahead of compliance requirements and respond quickly when scrutiny arrives.

3rdRisk also allows organisations to run periodic reviews automatically, ensuring that controls remain up to date and aligned with new regulatory expectations. With new requirements emerging across Europe, including stricter guidelines on ICT supply chain oversight and ESG due diligence, being able to adapt quickly is critical.

Customisable reports make it easy to export evidence for audits or board updates. Whether it's a DORA-readiness report or an internal risk exposure summary, the platform lets you tell the full story of your risk posture. This is vital for institutions facing increased scrutiny, not only from regulators but also from investors and customers.

Collaboration, Workflows, and Reporting

Effective third-party risk management isn’t a solo activity; it’s a team effort. Security, compliance, procurement, IT, and legal all play a role. BitSight supports this collaboration only partially. You can invite vendors to view their scores and address issues, but the rest, questionnaires, assessments, and approvals, must happen elsewhere.

3rdRisk enables true cross-functional collaboration. When a vendor is onboarded, workflows can be triggered to collect key documents, assign internal approvers, and engage the vendor directly through a secure portal. Everyone, from risk managers to business owners, has visibility into what needs to happen, when, and why.

The platform integrates with Microsoft Teams, Jira, and Slack, so alerts and tasks appear where your teams already work. Dashboards are role-based: IT sees security gaps, procurement tracks onboarding, and execs get a clear summary.

Everything is tracked. You can report on overdue assessments, unresolved issues, and risk trends over time. For audits or board reporting, these logs provide hard evidence that your process is structured and accountable, not reactive or ad hoc.

Platform Flexibility and User Interface

BitSight is focused and polished. So, it delivers exactly what it promises: cyber risk ratings. It’s easy to use for security professionals, but also limited in scope. You can’t add custom workflows, track non-cyber risk, or configure the platform beyond a few filters and alerts.

3rdRisk is more adaptable. It’s a cloud platform built for scale and complexity. You can customise forms, scoring logic, dashboards, and workflows. Risk domains can be added as your program matures, from operational resilience to ESG and beyond.

The user interface is clean and accessible for all teams, not just IT. Business owners, compliance leads, and procurement managers can log in, complete tasks, and see insights in plain language. With integrations to tools like Jira, Teams, and ServiceNow, 3rdRisk becomes part of your existing ecosystem, not another silo.

Data Sources and Automation Capabilities

BitSight excels at cyber intelligence. It collects and processes large amounts of external data, threat indicators, malware traffic, and breach records to generate its ratings. For cybersecurity, it’s comprehensive. But it doesn’t pull in other types of risk data like financial health or ESG scores.

3rdRisk has a longer list of possible data sources. It integrates with BitSight, but also connects to services like EcoVadis (ESG), Creditsafe (financials), OpenSanctions, and more. You get a fuller picture of each vendor across domains. And once the data is in, 3rdRisk automates what comes next.

From triggering reviews to sending annual assessments or escalating risk alerts, 3rdRisk’s automation engine takes repetitive work off your plate. AI also helps summarise documents and flag missing answers. The platform doesn’t just show you risks; it helps you stay ahead of them.

Conclusion: Which Platform Suits Your Organisation?

Choosing between 3rdRisk and BitSight depends on your priorities. If your main concern is keeping an eye on vendors’ cybersecurity posture, by receiving alerts, tracking scores, and getting a standardised benchmark, BitSight is a great tool. It’s easy to deploy, provides valuable external data, and is widely recognised in the market.

But BitSight is not a full third-party risk management solution. It doesn’t help you onboard vendors, assess non-cyber risks, assign tasks, or prepare for audits. If your organisation needs to manage risk across departments, comply with regulations, or collaborate across teams, BitSight alone won’t be enough.

That’s where 3rdRisk excels. It brings everything into one place—cyber scores, compliance workflows, ESG data, and team collaboration. It helps you not only see risk, but act on it. Importantly, 3rdRisk doesn’t compete with BitSight—it amplifies its value. You get the alerts and the actions to follow them.

For many organisations, the right approach isn’t either/or. It’s both. Use BitSight to stay aware. Use 3rdRisk to stay in control.

This combined model is already in use at many organisations. BitSight offers a continuous signal and real-time view of where problems may emerge. 3rdRisk takes that signal and embeds it into a living, auditable workflow. Together, they allow teams to move from reaction to readiness.

For procurement leaders, this means smoother onboarding and fewer surprises post-contract. For compliance teams, it means clearer documentation and faster audit prep. For risk and IT teams, it means fewer blind spots and a way to prioritise limited resources on what matters most.

Ultimately, the best solution is the one that enables your organisation to stay secure, stay compliant, and stay ahead. That’s why 3rdRisk and BitSight are often stronger together than apart.

Ready to see it all in action? Then request a demo here, or you can check out our brief overview of the 3rdRisk platform first.