Your Detectify Alternative: How Does Escape DAST Stack Up?

Detectify is one of the known DAST tool that helps users identify how attackers might exploit vulnerabilities in their Internet-facing applications. Detectify offers two key products: Surface Monitoring, which continuously discovers and monitors all of your Internet-facing assets, and Application Scanning, designed to identify and remediate critical vulnerabilities that could impact your business.

However, while Detectify used to be a popular choice, many businesses are looking for alternatives to Detectify, and Escape DAST presents itself as a strong contender. Escape focuses on identifying vulnerabilities, including business logic flaws, with a proprietary algorithm. It integrates seamlessly into modern technology stacks, supporting a wide range of web frameworks, APIs, CI/CD pipelines, and Wiz. Escape also automates the discovery of both external and internal applications from code and natively handles APIs, providing a comprehensive solution for modern application security.

But how does it compare to Detectify? In this article, we’ll get straight to the point, comparing the two solutions and breaking down the differences to help you make an informed decision. Let's dive in!

Detectify vs. Escape DAST: A Quick Comparison

Now, let's dive into how Escape compares to Detectify. We've decided to build this comparison mainly based on the feedback from former Detectify clients who decided to evaluate Escape as its alternative, but also based on the following sources:

• Detectify's official website & resources
• Detectify's documentation
• Detectify's publicly accessible demos

TL;DR

Detectify

Pros

✅ Comprehensive web application vulnerability scanning

✅ According to the docs, easy to set up and start testing

✅ Support for business-critical vulnerabilities in web applications

Cons

❌ No native API support. No additional discovery options to provide business context related to the APIs (publicly exposed on the internet, whether they can be reproduced with or without authentication...)

❌ No ability to scan internal applications (ex. behind the VPN..)

❌ Lack of handling complex authentication flows and lack of visibility into Authentication Debug (Knowing if the authentication worked or failed)

❌ Platform does not support multi-user testing in a single scan profile
handling

❌ Remediation suggestions are generic and, according to former users, lack any specificity for different development frameworks

❌ Limited reporting features make it hard to prioritize business-relevant risks in a consolidated view

Escape

Pros

✅ Proprietary business logic security testing algorithm for web applications and APIs that's able to detect BOLA, IDOR, and Access Control issues

✅ Ability to secure detection, fingerprinting, and scanning of internal applications behind your organization's firewall or VPN via the Private locations feature

✅ Agentless application discovery in addition to DAST testing for both externally exposed and internal applications - clear distinction between APIs and web apps

✅ Native API security support (even for GraphQL) and automated API schema generation for API-focused scans (especially those without UI)

✅ OpenAPI specification generation from automated API schema generation. It continuously monitors for and detects any changes or versions in the API schema over time — no need to upload specs manually to set up DAST scans.

✅ Developer-ready remediation code snippets that are tailored to each development framework

✅ Ability to handle very specific custom authentication flows and visibility into authentication debug

✅ Ability to prioritize the most critical applications by exploitability, business context, data sensitivity, and exposure

✅ Integration with well-known security platforms like Wiz

Cons

❌ Advanced feature sets require specialized knowledge, potentially presenting a learning curve for some users. While it is powerful, users might need to take their time to understand its advanced configuration options, custom YAML-based tests, or complex authentication setup for maximum benefit.

❌ Unlike some other DAST tools, Escape DAST doesn't offer integration with IDEs (e.g., Visual Studio Code or JetBrains)

❌ While Escape DAST allows for custom security testing using YAML files, which can easily adapt to the evolution of your existing APIs, it does require initial human effort to set up these configurations. However, once the initial setup is done, there is minimal ongoing maintenance needed for the custom tests. It's important to note that Escape DAST's core strength lies in its in-depth business logic testing. For these business logic tests, custom configurations are generally not necessary.

In-Depth Comparison: Escape DAST as an alternative to Detectify

Attack surface

Detectify focuses primarily on monitoring and securing internet-facing assets, such as websites and subdomains: "You can just provide the main domains, and it keeps scanning all those subdomains for like a basic header, related issues, SSL issues, and dangling DNS that comes under service monitoring". You can add some connectors like AWS Route53, Azure, Google Cloud DNS, Cloudflare, IMB NS1, Alibaba Cloud, DigitalOcean, and GoDaddy. Domains stored in these connectors will be synced with your Detectify team continuously. 

While Detectify can discover vulnerabilities on external web applications and subdomains, it lacks support for scanning internal assets, particularly those behind VPNs or firewalls. Additionally, the platform does not offer visibility into APIs. Detectify's crawler, which is designed for web applications, doesn't typically interact with or gather necessary information from API endpoints. While they might incidentally detect some API endpoints during the crawling and fuzzing of the web application, they aren't actively scanning APIs for vulnerabilities.

Alternatively to Detectify, Escape DAST takes a more comprehensive approach by offering agentless discovery of both external and internal assets. Through integrations with tools like Wiz, Akamai, and AWS and your developer tools like Postman, GitHub, and GitLab (you can find the full list here), Escape continuously monitors and scans external and internal applications. To scan internal applications behind your organization's firewall or VPN, you can connect Escape's repeater proxy.

Despite making it easy to discover all APIs, Escape doesn't fall short in the depth of the information it uncovers, shows all available context and even an application owner when connected to developer tools.

Authentication

Detectify supports various authentication mechanisms, including basic authentication, session cookies, and can automate login via recorded sessions via Chrome plugin. However, it lacks support for more complex authentication flows, multi-user support, custom workflows, or advanced session handling. Users often face difficulties when trying to authenticate through sophisticated login systems or dynamic authentication processes. This limitation results in gaps in scanning where complex authentication is required for access.

You also "can't know if the authentication worked or failed" when the scanning doesn't work.

For common authentication methods, Escape provides Standard Authentication Workflow Presets, including Basic, REST, Digest, GraphQL, OAuth, AWS Cognito, Playwright, etc. Detailed instructions for these presets are available in the "Preset" Section. For more complex needs, users can combine multiple workflows, like Playwright and HTTP Requests, to create advanced authentication procedures.

Going beyond, when you set up your scans and you have a login section, instead of manually entering credentials, Escape’s proprietary AI agent detects login fields and fills them in automatically, ensuring seamless logins.

Once logged in, you can view screenshots at each step, helping you verify the authentication process or troubleshoot any issues.

Be certain — with this internal and secure technology, credentials are never sent to any external AI provider, ensuring complete privacy.

You can learn more about different authentication presets in Escape's documentation.

Security testing

Detectify focuses on identifying vulnerabilities in web applications through fuzzing techniques. It is able to detect issues such as XSS, SQL injection, and security misconfigurations. However, it lacks native support for API testing and may not effectively identify business logic vulnerabilities.

Detectify's crawler, which is designed for web applications, doesn't typically interact with or gather necessary information from API endpoints. While they might incidentally detect some API endpoints during the crawling and fuzzing of the web application, they aren't actively scanning APIs for vulnerabilities.

One feature we're also lacking is like the able to scan the APIs because they're currently not in their scope...

On the other hand, Escape uses a proprietary business logic security testing algorithm (learn here how it works), enabling it to detect complex vulnerabilities like Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) and Insecure Direct Object References (IDOR). It supports both web applications and APIs, including GraphQL, and integrates with modern development tools and platforms, ensuring comprehensive security testing across diverse environments .

“Escape is an innovative tool, and its results and algorithms are truly impressive. It was able to find GraphQL vulnerabilities that their competitors haven't seen. It also provides me with extensive testing capabilities." - Pierre Charbel, Product Security Engineer, Lightspeed

Triaging issues & compliance

While Detectify provides robust security testing for web apps, the main reason why users are considering Detectify alternatives is that users have reported challenges with false positives, working through the noise, and the need for manual triaging of findings.

Escape offers advanced triaging capabilities, automatically reducing false positives and prioritizing vulnerabilities based on exploitability and business context.

We moved away from the traditional CVSS score-based system and adopted a new approach that highlights Escape Severity, which considers various factors such as the type of vulnerability, its exploitability, CVSS score, and other risk factors.

This comprehensive approach helps us better align issue prioritization with real-world risks and ensures you tackle the most critical issues more effectively.

Scoring and categorization take into account factors such as

• whether they can be reproduced with or without authentication,
• if the endpoint is publicly exposed on the internet
• if the API schema is public

Remediation guidance for developers

According to former Detectify users, the tool provides recommendations how to fix vulnerabilities, "but it's very generic and not catered to exactly what the issue was found. And it's a very generic recommendation."

Here you can find an example from the Detectify documentation on what details look like:

Escape offers detailed remediation code snippets that are tailor-made for each development framework — whether for APIs or for front-end applications:

For each vulnerability, security teams can automatically share these code snippets with engineers with pre-filled remediation steps in Jira, saving time and ensuring faster resolution. Your developers can hit the ground running with the fix already in hand.

Conclusion: Is Escape DAST the right alternative to Detectify?

In conclusion, both Detectify and Escape DAST provide powerful DAST solutions designed for modern applications. Detectify is good at securing web applications and could be a choice for teams looking for straightforward vulnerability scanning and surface monitoring for public-facing assets. However, Detectify has limitations in areas like API testing, complex authentication flows, and internal asset scanning.

On the other hand, Escape DAST stands out with its proprietary business logic security testing algorithm, native API support, and agentless application discovery. These features enable it to offer a more comprehensive security posture for organizations with complex, modern infrastructures. If you're looking for in-depth API security, seamless integration into modern tech stacks, or the ability to scan both internal and external assets, Escape DAST is the more suitable choice.

If you still have doubts about whether Escape DAST is the best Detectify alternative, take a moment with our team.

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