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 Legacy SSPM
Legacy SSPM 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, compared with industry average.
Overview of Obsidian Security
Obsidian Security is a SaaS security solution with a focus on threat detection, compliance, and minimizing and protecting the overall attack surface area. It provides posture hardening, integration management, and threat remediation for SaaS applications. Obsidian Security’s integration and compliance features streamline security operations, making it easier to meet regulatory requirements and protect sensitive data. Its pros include strong integration with identity providers, AI-powered threat detection, and compliance reporting. The pricing is competitive, offering a balance between features and affordability.
Legacy SSPM & Obsidian Security Feature Comparison
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.
Obsidian Security Key Features
- User Event Behavior Analytics (UEBA): Utilizes machine learning to monitor user activity and detect anomalous behavior that could indicate a security threat.
- Insider Threat Detection: Focuses on identifying and mitigating risks associated with insider threats.
- Advanced Threat Detection: Uses behavior-based detection to identify and respond to potential security incidents.
- User-Centric Governance: Protects critical SaaS applications by monitoring user interactions and access patterns.
- Incident Response: Provides tools to investigate and respond to security incidents within SaaS environments.
Implementation & User Experience of Legacy SSPM and Obsidian Security
- Legacy SSPM: The implementation process is generally straightforward. The platform is API-based, and agentless. 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.
- Obsidian Security: The bulk of the platform is also API-based, and agentless. Ingesting data from SaaS applications, normalizing and deduplicating can take several business days. The platform's interface is geared toward monitoring and responding to user-centric threats, offering a streamlined experience for security teams focused on insider risk management. However, Obsidian offers a browser extension feature meant for SaaS discovery that requires an agent installation.
Number of Integrations of Legacy SSPM and Obsidian Security
- 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.
- Obsidian Security: Integration options are more limited, with a focus on key SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Microsoft, Workday, ServiceNow, Google, Okta, and Slack. Niche or industry-specific SaaS applications are not supported.
Speed to Integration of Legacy SSPM and Obsidian Security
- Legacy SSPM: Generally slow to add integrations. They offer customers a software development kit (SDK) and ask them to build integrations themselves.
- Obsidian Security: Extremely slow to add integrations. They put customer requests “on the roadmap” with no guarantees.
SaaS-to-SaaS Discovery Capabilities of Legacy SSPM & Obsidian Security
- Legacy SSPM: Offers app discovery capabilities, identifying and categorizing all authorized SaaS applications used within the organization, including connected 3rd-party SaaS applications. This helps in securing unauthorized SaaS usage. LegacySSPM cannot discover shadow IT.
- Obsidian Security: It analyzes email headers and access token duration to uncover app-to-app interactions and flag risky authorizations. It can’t distinguish when a connected app is federated, which can lead to false positives.
Shadow IT Capabilities of Legacy SSPM & Obsidian Security
- Legacy SSPM: Cannot detect or manage shadow IT or shadow AI. Organizations are therefore unable to manage unauthorized SaaS usage and enforce security policies across all applications.
- Obsidian Security: Obsidian Security's shadow discovery capabilities focus on finding and managing shadow SaaS. This involves identifying all SaaS applications, including those that bypass Identity Provider (IdP) controls, and assessing their risk level. Obsidian uses browser extension monitoring, email header scanning, and OAuth integration analysis to detect and understand app usage patterns. However, the agent-based browser extension can introduce new risks, such as supply chain vulnerabilities, new attack surfaces, performance issues, and privacy concerns. Organizations should weigh out the pros and cons before deploying a new agent.
→ Read Next: The Hidden Risks of Browser Extensions in SaaS Security (Blog)
Legacy SSPM & Obsidian 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.
- Obsidian Security: Obsidian focuses on shadow AI discovery and blocking usage with their browser extension technology. It allows customers to discover, inventory, and manage the GenAI apps employees are using. It analyzes how employees are using GenAI, what type of documents are being uploaded, and allows control and governance over GenAI access.
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.
- Obsidian Security: Does not offer AI assistant or Agent for streamlining SaaS security tasks.
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.
Overview of Compliance Features of Obsidian Security
Obsidian Security offers compliance features focused on monitoring user behavior and access patterns to ensure that SaaS environments adhere to internal policies and external regulations. While not as comprehensive as Legacy SSPM's compliance capabilities, Obsidian's tools provide valuable insights into potential compliance risks associated with user actions.
Compliance Comparison of Legacy SSPM & Obsidian Security
- Legacy SSPM: Excels in compliance management, offering extensive features for continuous monitoring, automated checks, and detailed reporting. It is well-suited for organizations with stringent regulatory requirements such as those in financial services or healthcare.
- Obsidian Security: Provides basic compliance features centered around user behavior and access monitoring. It is more focused on internal policy enforcement and insider risk management than on comprehensive regulatory compliance.
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 Obsidian Security Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Excels at AI-based threat detection, insider threat management, and is an excellent SOC tool.
- Excels at governing app-to-app data movement
- Strong integration with identity providers (IdP)
- Mature compliance capabilities
Cons:
- Can’t distinguish when a connected app is federated, which can lead to false positives.
- Agent-based, browser technology can introduce privacy, security, and performance issues
- Can discover shadow apps but may be limited to Chrome browser
- Limited SaaS integration support: supports 50 apps
Overview of Reco
Reco is a next-gen alternative to Legacy SSPM and Obsidian Security. While Legacy SSPM focuses primarily on SSPM and Obsidian focuses primarily on identity threat detection, Reco focuses on securing the entire SaaS lifecycle. Reco offers broader SaaS coverage, with a four-pronged solution that includes: Shadow SaaS and AI Discovery, SSPM, Identity and Access Governance, and Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR). Additionally, Reco offers support for over 175 SaaS applications and can roll out integrations per customer request in a matter of days – faster than any provider on the market.
Integration Capabilities of Reco
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.
Comprehensive App Discovery & Shadow IT Features of Reco
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.
Key Features & Benefits of Reco
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 & 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, Legacy SSPM and Obsidian Security offer distinct advantages depending on the organization's specific needs. Legacy SSPM excels in SaaS security posture management, configuration management, and compliance, making it a strong choice for organizations requiring broad SaaS coverage and regulatory adherence. Obsidian Security, on the other hand, is better suited for organizations prioritizing user behavior monitoring and insider threat protection. Reco is the most comprehensive SaaS security solution, and the only option offering posture management, shadow app discovery, and threat detection.
The choice between will depend on whether your primary focus is on securing SaaS configurations and compliance or reactively mitigating insider risks. Reco is a comprehensive alternative that focuses on both use cases.
Want to compare more top SaaS security vendors? Download the FREE Guide to compare Legacy SSPM, Obsidian Security, Grip Security, Crowdstrike Shield, and Reco side by side.
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