Solvbeat vs Detectify

The short version: Detectify is an external attack-surface and web-application scanner, well known for using payloads sourced from a community of ethical hackers, and it's aimed at security and AppSec teams managing a broad external footprint. Solvbeat answers the same “what's exposed and exploitable” question, but explains it in plain English and offers to fix and monitor it for you, with Cyber Essentials in mind.

If you have an AppSec function that wants deep, research-driven web testing across many domains and subdomains, Detectify is a strong choice. If you're a business owner or IT lead who wants to know what's wrong and get it sorted without becoming a security expert, that's where Solvbeat is designed to fit.

Detectify's strength is depth at the web and external-attack-surface layer. It leans on crowdsourced research — a community of ethical hackers who feed real-world exploit knowledge into the scanner — and on continuously mapping the domains, subdomains and internet-facing assets an organisation exposes. For an application-security team that owns a lot of web estate and wants payload-based testing informed by how attackers actually break in, that is a serious capability.

Solvbeat covers the web layer too, but its scope is deliberately wider and its output deliberately calmer. Alongside checking your website, it looks at the servers behind it — open ports, exposed services, tired software and misconfigurations — and, with a lightweight agent, keeps watching them. The goal isn't to out-research a crowdsourced platform; it's to give a non-specialist a single, trustworthy picture of "am I exposed, and what do I do about it?"

Detectify prices as an asset- and domain-based platform aimed at organisations with a meaningful web footprint; it is built to be operated by a security function and its commercial model reflects that. That's entirely reasonable for its audience — but for a small company with one website and a couple of servers, you can end up paying for surface-management scale you don't yet have, and doing the interpretation yourself.

Solvbeat starts free, with no card, and its paid tiers are sized for a single business rather than a security programme. You're paying for coverage plus the plain-English explanation, the help fixing issues and the ongoing monitoring — not per subdomain. As always, compare on fit: the right question isn't "which is cheaper per asset" but "which one actually leaves my business more secure next month."

Choose Detectify if web application security is a core discipline for you and you have the people to run it. Product companies, SaaS teams and agencies with large, fast-changing web estates get real value from its crowdsourced testing and continuous external-surface discovery — especially where finding an unknown subdomain or a subtle web vulnerability early genuinely matters. It expects a technically fluent operator, and rewards one.

It is a less natural fit where the web app is only part of the picture. If you also care about the servers, need something a non-expert can read, or have to demonstrate baseline controls for Cyber Essentials, a web-first platform leaves gaps that someone still has to fill.

Solvbeat is aimed at the UK SME that wants one place to check website and servers, findings written for humans, and the option to have the fixing and monitoring handled for them. Because it maps to the controls Cyber Essentials and the NCSC emphasise, the everyday security work also moves you toward certification via an accredited body — the kind of proof clients and insurers increasingly ask for.

This isn't a knock on Detectify, which is excellent at what it sets out to do. It's a difference of scope and audience: Detectify goes deep on web and external surface for security teams; Solvbeat goes broad and guided for businesses that don't have one.