A lot of tools now put “AI” and “pentest” in the same sentence, and they are not selling the same thing. This page sorts them, and explains the one distinction that decides whether a report gets accepted.
Auditors and enterprise security reviewers do not have a rule about AI. What they push back on is a scanner relabelled as a penetration test — automated output with no adversarial reasoning, no reproduction steps, and no retest. That objection predates AI entirely and it is the one place a fully autonomous tool gets into trouble.
The practical consequence: every credible provider in this category foregrounds a human verification layer rather than hiding it. Cobalt markets human “Expert Direction” over its autonomous product. We run three independent adversarial passes and a person reads every report before it ships. Nobody serious is selling “100% autonomous, no human involved” into a compliance use case, and you should be wary of anyone who does.
Notably absent from that list: the price, and whether the tester holds a particular certification. We went looking for a case of a report rejected for being cheap and did not find one. Reports get rejected for thin evidence and missing retests.
| What you’re comparing | Pilum.io | What they offer | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cobalt — Autonomous Pentest | $3,500–$5,000. Three-pass adversarial review, and the argument is printed in the report. | $3,500 promotional through 2026-12-31, with named human "Expert Direction" from their pentester pool. Established PtaaS brand. | cobalt.io |
| XBOW | Web, API, auth, access control, cloud signals, plus AI and agent surface | Scoped to web apps and their APIs; prompt-injection/LLM coverage listed as roadmap. Available one-click inside Vanta. | xbow.com/pentest |
| ModernPentest | Adversarial 3-pass verification, human sign-off on every report | AI-powered, markets SOC 2-ready reports at roughly 76% below a traditional annual pentest. Exact pricing not published. | modernpentest.com |
| Compliance platforms (Vanta, Drata, Comp AI, Thoropass) | Produces the technical evidence — findings, CVSS vectors, three-level remediation | Automate the policy and documentation layer, including ISO 42001 modules. They are not a testing vendor and do not claim to be. | Comp AI ISO 42001 |
| Open-source self-serve (e.g. Promptfoo) | Delivered as a report your reviewer can accept, with a named methodology | Free and genuinely capable for LLM red-teaming if you have the time and skill to run it yourself. | promptfoo.dev |
Last verified: . Competitor capabilities and prices change — every claim above links to the vendor’s own public documentation so you can check it yourself. Found something out of date or unfair? Tell us and we’ll correct it.
If you have the skill and the time, Promptfoo is free and will do genuine LLM red-teaming. If your requirement is a policy and documentation gap rather than a technical one, a compliance platform solves it and a pentest will not. And if nobody has actually asked you for a report, the honest answer is that you probably do not need to buy one this month.