Cobalt Pentest Alternative: Continuous Autonomous Testing With Sekura

A Cobalt pentest alternative has to deliver what buyers go to Cobalt for: a credible pentest, scheduled quickly, with results a customer or auditor will accept. Cobalt is a pentest-as-a-service platform that delivers human pentesters through a marketplace, faster to schedule than traditional consultancies. Sekura removes the scheduling problem entirely: autonomous agents that test continuously instead of point-in-time engagements.

Details about third-party products reflect their public materials as of August 2026; verify with the vendor.

What Cobalt does well

Cobalt fixed the worst part of buying a pentest: the wait. Its marketplace model gets human testers onto your application faster than a traditional consultancy's booking cycle, and you still get what humans are uniquely good at.

Human creativity matters. A skilled tester notices when a business process can be abused in ways no rule anticipated. If your application's risk is concentrated in novel business logic, or your customers and auditors specifically require human-led testing, a PtaaS platform like Cobalt is a sensible buy. We say more about that trade in autonomous vs manual pentesting.

Where Sekura differs

A point-in-time pentest is a photograph. Your codebase is a video. Every engagement, human or not, starts going stale on the next deploy. We built Sekura for continuous pentesting: the pipeline runs on every push if you want it to, not once or twice a year.

Four differences shape the comparison:

1. Proof standard. Every Sekura finding ships with a deterministic proof-of-exploit. If our exploit agents cannot reproduce it, it is not reported.
2. Coverage. One scan covers app-sec, LLM security testing, and post-quantum crypto review, with findings mapped to 14 compliance frameworks.
3. Environment. Sekura runs inside your GitHub Actions runner or fully on-prem and air-gapped. Your code never leaves; there is no tester onboarding or access provisioning.
4. Economics. Pricing is public and continuous, not per engagement. You know the annual cost before you talk to anyone.

	Cobalt	Sekura
Approach	Human pentesters delivered through a PtaaS platform	7-phase autonomous multi-agent pipeline from SAST through exploitation
Proof of exploit	Human-written findings and reports; see vendor materials for format	Deterministic proof-of-exploit required for every reported finding
Surfaces covered	Scoped per engagement with human testers	App-sec, LLM security, and post-quantum crypto review in one scan
Deployment	Testers access your scoped targets; see vendor materials	Your GitHub Actions runner, or fully on-prem and air-gapped
Pricing model	Per engagement; see vendor materials	Public: free first scan, $199 managed scan, $49/mo Developer, plans to $120,000+/yr
Best for	Human creativity on business logic; buyers who require human-led reports	Continuous, proof-backed testing wired into how you ship software

How to choose a Cobalt pentest alternative

Be honest about why you buy pentests. Three questions expose the answer:

1. Do you test to satisfy a point-in-time requirement, or to know your current deploy is safe?
2. Is your risk concentrated in novel business logic, or in the broad surface of code, dependencies, and configuration that changes weekly?
3. Do your auditors or customers require a human-led report, or will proof-of-exploit evidence satisfy them?

If your answers favor point-in-time, business logic, and human-led, Cobalt and its peers remain the right call. If they favor continuous, broad surface, and evidence, Sekura is built for you, and the first scan is free; see pricing.

Human testers and autonomous agents are converging on the same standard: show the exploit or do not report it. The cadence, not the headcount, is becoming the real difference.