XBOW is the autonomous penetration testing partner available inside Vanta. If you are already a Vanta customer, it is the path of least resistance, and for a lot of teams that is the right answer. This page exists to help you tell when it is not.
| What you’re comparing | Pilum.io | XBOW | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Distribution | Direct, or through your compliance consultant. You have to find us. | One click inside Vanta. Zero procurement friction if you already use it. | Vanta/XBOW announcement |
| Brand recognition with your security reviewer | None yet. We are new and we are not going to pretend otherwise. | Well funded and widely covered. Your reviewer may already know the name. | xbow.com |
| Tested surface | Web, API, auth flows, access control, plus cloud and infrastructure signals. | Scoped to web applications and their APIs — explicitly not wider infrastructure, cloud, or identity. | xbow.com/pentest |
| Prompt injection and LLM-specific testing | Included. Prompt injection, agent tool surface, MCP exposure. | Listed as a future roadmap item, not a shipped capability. | xbow.com/pentest |
| Retest after you ship fixes | Not offered today. Re-scans are available under a Guardian subscription, not bundled with a one-off audit. | Check current terms — retest scope is commonly limited or time-boxed in this band. | xbow.com/pentest |
| Published price | $3,500–$5,000 by scope. | Quote-gated. Secondary sources report a ~$4,000 floor rising to ~$8,000 for complex apps. | third-party pricing writeup |
| Human review before the report ships | Mandatory. A human reads every report and adjudicates every uncertain finding before delivery. | Positioned as autonomous. Check current terms for the human review step. | xbow.com/pentest |
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 Found something out of date or unfair?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.
We would rather say this plainly than have you discover it later. XBOW is better for you if: you are already inside Vanta and value that integration; your security reviewer recognises vendor names and that recognition carries weight internally; your application is a conventional web app with no AI or agent surface; or you want a company with funding and a support org behind it rather than a small team. Those are real advantages and no amount of our copy changes them.
Your product has AI features, an agent, or an MCP server, and you want that surface actually tested rather than noted. Your reviewer asked for the reasoning behind a finding rather than just its severity. Or you want a named human accountable for the findings — every Critical and High we report has survived three independent adversarial passes, and a person reads the whole report before it goes out. Unproven findings are withheld rather than padded in.
We try to be accurate about exposure rather than alarming. Browser-side agent tool surfaces are an emerging area: the specification is live and the controls are available, but real-world exposure today is low and depends on a visitor bringing a tool-consuming agent. We test for it and we report what we find. We do not claim your checkout is one prompt away from being drained.
Our internal check identifiers are ours. They are not W3C, OWASP, or any other standards-body designation, and we never present them as though they were.