This intelligence in this comparison is based on feedback from multiple meetings conducted by Reco experts with industry experts, customers and prospects. Feature classifications such as "Basic" or "Advanced," are influenced by the number of integrations and the depth of feature coverage. As vendor offerings evolve, these classifications may change. This table reflects the most recent data available as of May 26, 2025. Vendor offerings may change over time, and we cannot guarantee the ongoing accuracy of this information.
Overview of Grip Security
Grip Security is focused on securing access to SaaS applications across an organization. Its capabilities include automated app discovery, shadow IT monitoring, data loss prevention, and governance. Grip aims to provide complete visibility into SaaS usage, allowing CISOs to mitigate risks associated with SaaS application sprawl and unauthorized app usage. The platform is designed for quick deployment and offers integrations with existing security tools, facilitating a unified approach to SaaS security.
Overview of Legacy SSPM
Legacy SSPMi caters to large enterprises with robust features. It is known for its deep visibility into SaaS application configurations, data access, and user activity. Legacy SSPM excels at detecting misconfigurations, data exposure, user activity, and potential threats across SaaS applications. A risk mitigation engine prioritizes security risks based on severity and potential impact. Its automated capabilities simplify and expedite security procedures. Legacy SSPM’s advantages include its comprehensive coverage of core SaaS applications such as Salesforce, configuration management, and strong automation capabilities. In terms of pricing, it offers tiered pricing and is usually on the higher side.
Grip Security and Legacy SSPM Feature Comparison
Grip Security Key Features
- Automated App Discovery: Provides real-time visibility into all SaaS applications used across the organization, including unauthorized or unapproved apps.
- Shadow IT Monitoring: Identifies risky or unauthorized SaaS usage and helps implement controls to mitigate exposure.
- Data Loss Prevention: Protects sensitive data by enforcing DLP policies across various SaaS applications.
- Governance and Compliance: Enables continuous monitoring and compliance reporting for key regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA).
- Automated Remediation: Offers automated workflows to address security incidents, such as disabling risky SaaS apps or alerting relevant teams.
Legacy SSPM Key Features
- SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM): Offers comprehensive visibility into the security posture of core SaaS applications, identifying misconfigurations and vulnerabilities.
- Configuration Monitoring: Continuously monitors SaaS configurations to ensure compliance with security policies. An expert in Salesforce configuration management.
- SaaS to SaaS: Discovers connected SaaS applications as well as 3rd-party SaaS applications.
- Guided Remediation: Provides guided remediation. Security teams can use provided steps to remediate in their existing SIEM, SOAR, or ticketing tool.
- Compliance Reporting: Facilitates compliance with industry standards and regulations by generating detailed reports.
Implementation and User Experience of Grip Security and Legacy SSPM
- Grip Security is known for its fast deployment and user-friendly interface. Its automated discovery tools provide immediate insights into SaaS usage, making it suitable for organizations with limited SaaS management resources. The platform offers customizable dashboards and reports, allowing CISOs to quickly understand security gaps and compliance risks.
- Legacy SSPM: The implementation process is generally straightforward. The platform is API-based and agentless, and organizations can have their data ingested in a few days. The user interface is designed for security teams to collaborate together, providing detailed insights into SaaS configurations and security posture. Users typically find the platform intuitive and powerful for managing complex SaaS environments.
Number of Integrations of Grip Security and Legacy SSPM
- Grip Security: Supports around 30 SaaS applications, and integrates with CASBs, SIEMs, and identity providers, allowing for streamlined incident response and data aggregation.
- Legacy SSPM: Offers extensive integration capabilities with a wide range of SaaS applications, ensuring broad coverage across different platforms. Current coverage is fewer than 50 SaaS applications. However, the depth of capabilities for these SaaS applications is limited, excelling in SSPM but not threat detection or identity governance.
Speed to Integration for Grip Security and Legacy SSPM
- Grip Security: Grip does not promise any timeline for adding integrations.
- Legacy SSPM: Generally slow to add integrations. They offer customers a software development kit (SDK) and ask them to build integrations themselves.
SaaS to SaaS Discovery Capabilities of Grip Security and Legacy SSPM
- Grip Security offers automated discovery of all SaaS applications, including unsanctioned apps, with minimal setup. Its approach covers both network and endpoint data sources, enabling complete visibility into SaaS usage. This feature helps organizations manage shadow IT and identify new app adoption trends.
- Legacy SSPM: Offers app discovery capabilities, identifying and categorizing all known SaaS applications used within the organization, including connected 3rd-party SaaS applications. This helps in securing unauthorized SaaS usage. Legacy SSPM cannot discover shadow IT.
Shadow IT Capabilities of Grip Security and Legacy SSPM
- Grip Security excels in identifying and controlling shadow IT, offering tools to detect unapproved SaaS applications and enforce usage policies. It provides insights into app usage trends and enables security teams to block or restrict access to risky apps.
- Legacy SSPM: Cannot detect or manage shadow IT. Organizations are therefore unable to manage unauthorized SaaS usage and enforce security policies across all applications.
Legacy SSPM & Grip Security AI Governance Features
- Legacy SSPM: Does not advertise any AI security or AI governance functionalities in regard to the proliferation of GenAI or Agentic AI in SaaS.
- Grip Security: Can support AI governance in limited capacity by discovering shadow AI usage and identifying risky OAuth scopes.
Agentic AI Support Offered by Legacy SSPM & Obsidian Security
- Legacy SSPM: Legacy SSPM offers an AI-powered SaaS security companion which operates as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Leveraging analytics, GenAI, and SaaS security expertise, it analyzes large scales of security data in order to uncover hidden risks and provide actionable recommendations for strengthening security posture.
- Grip Security: Does not offer AI assistant or Agent for streamlining SaaS security tasks.
Overview of Compliance Features of Grip Security
Grip Security offers compliance monitoring and reporting for major regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. Its compliance features include automated risk assessments, data protection policies, and audit trails to track data access across SaaS applications. Grip also supports continuous compliance monitoring, with alerts for policy violations and automated remediation capabilities.eco can discover and secure over 50,000 SaaS applications. It integrates with 100+ SaaS applications. Reco develops new application integrations using a low-code, no-code development and can add a new full-featured integration in 3-5 days.
Overview of Compliance Features of Legacy SSPM
Legacy SSPM provides robust compliance management features, including automated compliance checks, continuous monitoring of SaaS configurations, and detailed reporting to ensure adherence to industry standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2. The platform’s compliance tools are designed to help organizations maintain a secure SaaS environment while meeting regulatory requirements.
Compliance Comparison of Grip Security and Legacy SSPM
- Grip Security: provides robust compliance features designed to help organizations meet various regulatory and industry standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and others. The platform focuses on ensuring that SaaS applications are used in a compliant manner, addressing data security and privacy requirements.
- Legacy SSPM: Focuses on continuous monitoring and automated alerts, with customizable compliance frameworks that cater to specific organizational needs. It provides detailed compliance reports and dashboards to ensure ongoing adherence to regulatory standards.
Overview of Grip Security Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Excels at shadow SaaS and AI discovery
- Fast deployment and user-friendly, customizable interface
- Adept at enforcing DLP policies across various SaaS applications.
- Proficient at SaaS-to-SaaS mapping and identifying OAuth risks
Cons:
- Scans an organization's emails, both header and body, to uncover shadow apps. This introduces privacy concerns. Solutions that only scan the header may be more suitable for privacy-conscious organizations.
- Recently introduced SSPM, but as a newer offering it is not as mature as other SSPM providers.
- Does not offer threat detection capabilities.
- Only supports 30 SaaS applications and is slow to integrate new apps
Overview of Legacy SSPM Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Provides in depth SSPM for core apps like Salesforce, Workday, and Microsoft with thousands of out-the-box configuration checks
- Proficient at uncovering risky third-party integrations
- Offers robust compliance management features
- Provides an AI companion to help streamline tasks
Cons:
- Does not discover shadow IT and is focused on known applications
- Supports fewer than 50 SaaS apps
- Slow to roll out support for new apps, with no guarantee on delivery time.
- Lacks threat detection capabilities.
Overview of Reco
Reco is a comprehensive alternative to Grip Security and Legacy SSPM. While Grip Security focuses on shadow SaaS detection and DLP and Legacy SSPM focuses on deep SSPM for the major SaaS providers, Reco focuses on securing the entire SaaS lifecycle. Reco offers broader SaaS coverage, supporting over 175 SaaS applications and rolling out integrations per customer request in a matter of days – faster than any provider on the market. While the others excel in their particular area, Reco offers more solutions in one: Shadow SaaS and AI Discovery, SSPM, Identity and Access Governance, and Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR).
Reco’s Integration Capabilities
Reco can discover and secure over 50,000 SaaS applications. It integrates with 100+ SaaS applications. Reco develops new application integrations using a low-code, no-code development and can add a new full-featured integration in 3-5 days.
Reco’s Comprehensive App Discovery and Shadow IT Features
Reco is a comprehensive SaaS security solution that supports the entire lifecycle of SaaS, from posture management to shadow IT and threat detection and response. It gives organizations full visibility into their SaaS ecosystem, monitors permissions and access across identities, and tracks misconfigurations and configuration drifts.
Reco uses advanced analytics around persona, actions, interactions and relationships to other users, and then uses this context to send prioritized alerts on potential exposure. This comprehensive picture is generated continuously using the Reco Identities Interaction Graph and empowers security teams to take swift action to effectively prioritize their most critical points of risk. Reco uses a low-code/no-code approach to add a new SaaS integration in 3-5 days.
App Discovery
Until now, even answering how many SaaS applications were connected to an organization’s environment was almost impossible, let alone what they are. Reco’s AI-based graph technology connects in minutes and provides immediate visibility to security teams to continuously discover all SaaS applications, Shadow IT, GenAI tool usage, and data exposure risks. Reco is then able to identify, contextualize, prioritize and – most importantly – address potential risks.
Shadow IT
Reco monitors email headers and uses this data to discover apps installed without IT approval/authorization. Reco is the only solution that combines this technology with posture management and threat detection within the SaaS ecosystem. In comparison to Grip Security which scans the whole email, Reco’s email header scanning technology is less invasive and better suited for privacy-conscious organizations.
Reco’s Key Features and Benefitsccess:
Reco is a full lifecycle SaaS security solution that brings a suite of innovative features that are redefining standards in the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) category.
Identity Management
Reco introduces a contextual, graph-based approach to identity management. Unlike traditional SSPM solutions that treat identity in isolation, Reco's system integrates identities across all SaaS platforms, providing a unified view that provides context, enhances security oversight, and bolsters incident response. This graph-based approach offers deep insight into potential security risks associated with interconnected identities and permissions and fewer false positives thanks to this crucial context absent from other SSPM solutions.
Advanced Analytics & ITDR
Reco’s contextual graph is the baseline for the real-time adaptive policy engine that allows end users to create and modify security policies that respond dynamically in real time to emerging threats. Reco integrates with existing security tools such as SOAR platforms and SIEMs, automating remediation processes. This reduces both the window of opportunity for attackers and configuration drifts as they happen. This continuous compliance helps organizations identify and remediate potential threats that might otherwise go unnoticed for months until performing official compliance audits.
Multi-Tenant Management
Reco is designed for both service providers and large enterprises. Reco supports complex multi-tenant environments, allowing organizations to manage multiple clients or business units from a single, centralized platform. Each tenant's data is isolated and secure.
Permissions and Access
Over-permissioned access, stale accounts, and external accounts pose immense risks to organizations’ data security. Reco continuously assesses users’ permission level using the principle of least privilege access, ensuring users and service accounts have no more access than necessary. In addition, Reco helps identify and revoke permissions that are unused or dormant, stale accounts, and risky user behavior that could lead to a breach. This constant monitoring across identities helps organizations ensure over-privileged users don’t become a liability.
Compliance and Configurations
As misconfigurations are one of the highest risks organizations face, Reco can help teams stay in continuous compliance by monitoring for configuration changes or drifts. These metrics are fully customizable to help organizations recognize and resolve compliance issues before an audit. By tracking and gaining visibility into these potential risks, organizations are able to ensure they are following the correct industry best practices and frameworks.
GenAI and Agentic AI Governance
Reco's Dynamic SaaS Security Platform governs AI systems across your SaaS ecosystem by automatically discovering all connected AI tools—from enterprise solutions to shadow applications—and monitoring their data access. It establishes behavioral baselines for AI agents to detect anomalies indicating compromise, maps connections between SaaS applications and AI systems to identify excessive permissions, and verifies appropriate authentication controls and access limitations. This comprehensive approach addresses the unique security challenges of both generative AI and autonomous agents.
Reco AI Agents
Reco AI Agents streamline SaaS security through intelligent automation, reducing analyst workload while enhancing protection. These agents perform smart alert triage, saving teams an average of 7 minutes per alert by evaluating threats in context and filtering out noise. They automate contextual investigation by gathering and correlating information across the SaaS ecosystem, continuously analyze identity risks (reducing manual audit work by 40%), and provide dynamic, situation-specific remediation recommendations that replace static playbooks with adaptive guidance for more efficient threat response.
How Reco Enhances Efficiency and Compliance
Reco has saved costs, time and lowered risk for organizations. Users saved 500+ hours/year when automating the user access review process, and 350+ hours/year no longer handling manual data aggregation and correlation for investigation. They saved $70,000/year on average when automating posture checks and mapping to compliance frameworks, and $50,000/year when removing stale accounts identified using Reco. Users lower risk by 90% from the visibility gained across core SaaS applications, third-party apps, and shadow IT, and lower risk by 70% when automating event monitoring in Salesforce and Microsoft 365.
Conclusion
For CISOs evaluating SaaS security solutions, Grip Security and Legacy SSPM offer distinct advantages depending on the organization's specific needs. Grip Security is better suited for organizations seeking SaaS app discovery and shadow IT management, providing unmatched visibility into all SaaS usage across an organization. It includes robust data protection features like data loss prevention and automated compliance monitoring to ensure regulatory adherence. The platform’s automated remediation capabilities enable quick response to security incidents, reducing overall risk and streamlining SaaS governance.
Legacy SSPM, on the other hand, excels in SaaS security posture management, configuration management, and compliance especially for Salesforce, making it a strong choice for organizations requiring broad SaaS coverage and regulatory adherence.
The choice will depend on whether your focus is on if the solution offers a simplified approach to securing your SaaS ecosystem that’s focused on app discovery, or on proactively preventing data exposure by maintaining security posture of your SaaS applications, with a focus on core applications like Salesforce.
Want to compare more top SaaS security vendors? Download the FREE Guide to compare Legacy SSPM, Obsidian Security, Grip Security, Adaptive Shield, and Reco side by side.
Or schedule a demo of Reco to get started with SaaS security today!
If you notice any discrepancies or updates, please contact us at info@reco.ai.
