Honest comparison. We'll tell you when they're the right answer.
Cobalt.io: Pentest-as-a-Service platform — crowdsourced from a vetted bench of ~400 pentesters with real-time finding delivery.
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Side by side
Six rows. Same row, same definition. The orange column is us — the grey column is Cobalt.io.
Capability
Hayaiti
you are hereCobalt.io
If you need a recurring quarterly pentest cadence with compliance-evidence pipelines and exotic stack coverage, pick Cobalt.io. If you need one pentest where the findings get fixed by the same team that found them, on a fixed price and date, pick Hayaiti.
We won't oversell. If Cobalt.iois the right answer for your situation, we'd rather you know that now — even if it costs us the lead.
If you're still comparing vendors, start with the full comparison matrix. If you're already using Cobalt.io, the switching guide below shows how to transition.
Frequently asked
Real questions we get from teams comparing the two. If yours isn't here, we'll answer it on the 15-minute call.
Where Hayaiti wins
Specific, not generic. Each one of these maps to a structural difference in how the two models are built — not a marketing adjective.
Cobalt's deliverable is the finding plus a retest. The remediation is your engineering team's job. Our pentest SKU includes remediation pull requests in your repo for every High/Critical finding — same engineers who found the issue write the fix, with a clean commit message and a written explanation of the root cause.
Cobalt's first engagement requires a discovery + scoping call to land on a credit count. Our pentest SKU is published at $14,995 / 21 days. You can pay the deposit and we kick off — no proposal cycle.
Cobalt's pricing bundles the pentester's time with a SaaS platform fee. For a one-off engagement, that fee structure is harder to justify than a single fixed-price line item.
Cobalt rotates pentesters per engagement from their bench. The pentester who found your finding may not be the one available for retest. Our team is fixed: the engineer who found the issue is the one writing the PR and confirming the fix held.
Cobalt SLAs cover platform availability; the pentest window itself is best-effort. We commit to a calendar date for the pentest report and remediation PRs — slip it and you get 25% back, in dollars.
Where Cobalt.io wins
We're not going to pretend they don't win some shapes of problem. If your situation matches one of these, pick them — we mean it.
If you need quarterly pentests across 10+ products with consistent reporting and a compliance-evidence pipeline (PCI quarterly attestations, SOC 2 Type 2 evidence collection), Cobalt's platform is built for that cadence. Our SKU is one engagement at a time.
Cobalt's bench of ~400 vetted pentesters means they can cover exotic stacks (mainframe, ICS/SCADA, niche cryptography) that we can't. If your scope is unusual, their breadth wins.
Cobalt's reports map findings directly to PCI DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 controls in their default template. We do this on request, not by default — if compliance evidence is the deliverable, theirs is more polished.
Cobalt streams findings into their dashboard as testers confirm them, with Jira/Slack push integrations. Our delivery is end-of-engagement (report + PRs together). For ops teams that want to triage during the test window, theirs is more responsive.
If any of the above describes your project, the honest move is to evaluate Cobalt.iofirst. We'd rather you find the right fit than buy the wrong tool from us.
Migration path
Most of the time you don't need to fully switch — you peel off the SKU-shaped slice and keep what already works. Here's the honest playbook.
Cobalt's pricing model favors recurring engagements across multiple products. If you're paying for credits you're not using on satellite products, those are SKU-shaped — peel them off and ship them through Hayaiti's fixed-price pentest, keep Cobalt for the products that do need quarterly cadence.
If your auditor expects Cobalt-format reports for SOC 2 / PCI evidence, don't churn that. Use Hayaiti for products outside the audit scope, or for one-off remediation cycles where the fix work is the deliverable.
Saves the scoping call. We can re-quote a remediation-focused engagement directly from your last Cobalt findings list — turn the unfixed High/Critical items into a fixed-price remediation SKU instead of waiting for the next pentest cycle to retest them.
Teams that move work to us typically keep their Cobalt subscription — the two layers are complementary, not all-or-nothing. The decision is per-product.
Decision time
Grab a free 15-minute call. We'll look at your scope and tell you straight up which one fits — even if the answer is Cobalt.io.
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