GigaOm’s 2026 Attack Surface Management Radar: The Vendors That Stood Out

The GigaOm Radar for Attack Surface Management v5, published February 2026 and authored by analysts Chris Ray and Whit Walters, is one of the most comprehensive independent assessments of the EASM market. Now in its fifth year, the report evaluated 32 vendors against a rigorous set of key features, emerging capabilities and business criteria. This year’s findings reflect a decisive market shift from raw asset discovery toward exposure management and alignment with continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) frameworks. Buyers are no longer satisfied with tools that simply enumerate what they own. They want platforms that contextualise risk, validate exploitability and drive remediation at enterprise scale.

How the Radar Works

The Radar plots vendors across concentric rings, with those closest to the centre judged as having the most complete solutions. It characterises each vendor on two axes, balancing Maturity versus Innovation and Feature Play versus Platform Play, while projecting each solution’s expected trajectory over the coming 12 to 18 months. Only 13 of the 32 vendors achieved Leader status in the innermost ring, with the majority sitting in the Challenger tier. The report also assigns movement designations: Fast Movers are evolving steadily, while Outperformers are advancing at a pace that outstrips the competitive field.

What the Report Revealed

The most significant trend visible in this year’s Radar is the overwhelming shift toward Platform Plays. The density of vendors on the platform side of the chart versus the sparse feature-play side indicates the market has moved well past the era of point solutions. Buyers are favouring consolidated suites that deliver broad, integrated functionality over niche tools designed to solve isolated problems. The Maturity half of the chart is populated by established industry giants focused on stability and enterprise-grade continuity, while the Innovation half is crowded with aggressive movers where newer vendors are challenging the status quo by remaining flexible and responsive to emerging threats.

Most Notable Vendors

Among the 32 evaluated platforms, several stood out for the breadth and maturity of their approaches. Notable vendors include:

• Armis earned Leader and Fast Mover status in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant. Its Centrix platform tracks over 6.5 billion asset profiles across IT, OT, IoT and IoMT environments through passive monitoring, active querying and extensive API integrations. The analysts highlighted its AI-driven asset classification system, which categorises devices based on behaviour and network activity rather than static attributes.
• CyCognito was named both a Leader and an Outperformer, one of only four vendors out of 32 evaluated to earn both distinctions. Analysts highlighted its automated testing engines, robust integrations, support for the full CTEM lifecycle, and a graph-based discovery model that maps organizational structures without requiring seed data. They also noted the entreprise scale, including the ability to manage complex environments with more than 100 million assets.
• Palo Alto Networks reinforced its position as a Leader and Fast Mover in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant. Cortex Xpanse operates as a massive-scale outside-in discovery engine that continuously indexes the entire IPv4 space multiple times daily to identify unknown assets without seed data. The platform feeds discovery data into the broader Cortex ecosystem for orchestration and automated remediation.
• Qualys earned Leader and Fast Mover status in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant. Its Enterprise TruRisk Platform unifies EASM and cybersecurity asset management under a single code base, indexing over 18 trillion data points and processing 2 trillion security events annually. The analysts praised its TruRisk quantification engine, which translates technical vulnerabilities into business risk metrics.
• Tenable was positioned as a Leader and Fast Mover in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant. Its Tenable One platform unifies outside-in discovery with market-leading Nessus technology for inside-out vulnerability management, drawing on a data lake of over 5 billion internet-facing assets. The analysts highlighted its Predictive Prioritisation methodology, which dynamically analyses exploit maturity and threat landscape data to move beyond static CVSS scoring.

Where the ASM Market Is Heading

The ASM market is maturing rapidly, and the density of vendors in the Challenger ring signals that differentiation is increasingly difficult to achieve. For cybersecurity leaders evaluating EASM solutions, the GigaOm Radar v5 offers one of the clearest independent benchmarks available, and the shift toward platform consolidation and exposure validation suggests the category still has significant room to evolve.

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This story was distributed as a release by Jon Stojan under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program.

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