Automated Pentesting Cost in 2026: Pentera, NodeZero, XBOW vs Manual Pentests

None of the main automated pentesting vendors publishes a dollar price. As of September 30, 2026:

• Horizon3.ai lists four NodeZero packages on its pricing page: Flex for episodic pentesting, Core for continuous pentesting, and Pro and Elite with added threat-intelligence and exposure-management features. No amounts are shown; buyers are sent to a demo.
• XBOW says on its pricing page that pricing is “scoped to your environment” and “usage-based”, and that it can be bought through the AWS, Google, Oracle and Microsoft cloud marketplaces.
• Pentera has no pricing page on pentera.io; most of the public contracts below went through resellers.

So every figure on this page is either a public procurement record or a third-party estimate. None is a vendor quote, and your price will depend on scope, term and negotiation.

Federal contract awards are published on USAspending.gov. A search of award descriptions for Pentera and Horizon3 over fiscal years 2023 to 2026 returns these orders, all placed with resellers or integrators rather than with the vendor (descriptions are the agencies' own):

• USDA, Office of the Chief Financial Officer, Pentera. Three consecutive annual orders: $198,863.64 for a “penetration tool Pentera license renewal” (December 2023 to December 2024), $214,406.25 for a “Pentera Core software consultant license” (December 2024 to December 2025) and $226,288.14 for a “Pentera software subscription” (December 2025 to December 2026).
• National Institutes of Health, Pentera. $90,100.06 for “Pentera Core software 3000” (June 2023 to June 2024), then $112,276.12 for a one-year “Pentera Core/Pentool software renewal” (June 2024 to June 2025).
• US Air Force, Pentera. $100,000 for a “Pentera ASV 24 month subscription” (January 2023 to January 2025).
• USDA, Office of the Chief Financial Officer, Horizon3.ai. $444,086 for “licenses for consulting plus / annual Horizon3 software” (April 2026 to March 2027).

How to read them: these are obligated amounts on orders placed with resellers, and none of the records says how many IPs, assets or users are covered or what else is bundled. They show the order of magnitude a large organization pays and how renewals move (the USDA Pentera order rose about 7.8% and then 5.5% year on year). They do not tell you what your quote will be.

Contract notices above the EU procurement thresholds are published on TED. A full-text search for Pentera, Horizon3 and NodeZero since 2022 returns several tenders; two Polish award notices publish a value:

• NASK, a Polish state research institute, awarded reseller Softinet a contract for “Pentera Core Software, RansomwareReady Module, Credential Exposure, Security Validation Advisor, Pentera Surface or equivalent” with licenses and a 36-month subscription, for PLN 1,379,430.89, about PLN 460,000 a year, according to TED notice 487621-2026, published July 2026. The notice does not name the product delivered.
• Narodowy Bank Polski, the Polish central bank, awarded reseller CUMULUSIT a 37-month subscription to an automated penetration testing platform with support services for PLN 1,031,999.02, according to TED notice 854627-2025, published December 2025. The contract notice asked for support staff certified on Pentera or an equivalent system and put the bank's estimate at PLN 832,020.

Other public buyers have tendered Pentera without publishing the value: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Germany awarded a Pentera Core contract running to August 2028 (TED 565975-2025), and a German public buyer awarded Pentera Security GmbH a 12-month automated pentest platform in 2023 (TED 761787-2023). We found no TED notice naming XBOW.

Two estimates circulate widely. Both are useful as a range check, neither is a vendor price:

• According to Vendr's Horizon3 page, read September 30, 2026, the median Horizon3 buyer pays $18,600 a year, in a range Vendr shows as $18,600 to $59,720, and NodeZero is “priced on a per-asset (or per-IP) basis”. Vendr builds these figures from purchase data it collects and does not state the sample size. Its Pentera and XBOW pages showed no price data.
• According to a Synack blog post of June 24, 2026, NodeZero costs about $35K a year, Pentera “around $50K or more per year” and XBOW “around €5,500 per test”. Synack sells a competing service and gives no source or method for these numbers, so treat them as a competitor's rough estimate.

The spread between these estimates and the public contracts, from under $20,000 to over $400,000 a year, is the real lesson: price follows scope. A mid-size company testing a few hundred assets and a federal department licensing a whole estate are not buying the same thing.

Ask every vendor to price the same scope, then check these factors line by line:

• Assets or IPs in scope. According to Vendr, NodeZero is priced per asset or IP. Count live hosts rather than address space, and ask whether the limit applies to assets tested at the same time or over the year.
• Frequency and tier. Horizon3 separates episodic testing (Flex) from continuous testing (Core); XBOW prices by usage. The more often you test, the more a usage-based model costs, and the less an annual license costs per test.
• Modules. Suites are sold in parts: the NASK tender lists five separate Pentera components. Ask which ones your quote includes and which ones the use case needs.
• Term and renewal. Public buyers bought 12, 24, 36 and 37-month terms. Longer terms fix the price for longer; renewals rise, as the USDA orders show.
• Deployment model. A cloud-orchestrated platform bills as a subscription and needs a host or agent on your network; an on-premise appliance adds hardware, rack space and power but no per-use charge. Buying through a cloud marketplace can draw down spend you have already committed.
• Human tests you still need. Automation does not remove regulated tests. DORA requires the financial entities identified by their competent authority to carry out threat-led penetration testing at least every three years, and those using internal testers must contract external testers every three tests (Art. 26, Regulation (EU) 2022/2554); see the DORA TLPT engagement playbook. NYDFS §500.5 requires an annual penetration test by a qualified party (playbook). Budget those tester-days separately.
• Retests. In a manual engagement, a retest after remediation is extra days unless the contract includes it. On a platform it is another run, but under usage-based pricing it is another billable test.
• People. Someone has to set scope, approve risky actions, review findings and drive fixes. Put those hours in the model.

There is no official price for a penetration test, but the US government publishes the labor rates contractors may charge it. In GSA's CALC+ Labor Ceiling Rates data (queried through the CALC+ API on September 30, 2026), the keyword “penetration tester” returns 412 labor categories on the Multiple Award Schedule, most of them under the Highly Adaptive Cybersecurity Services SIN (54151HACS). Their current hourly ceiling rates:

• lowest $57, highest $321
• middle half between $126 and $197
• median $158

At eight hours a day that is roughly $1,000 to $1,600 per tester-day for the middle half, with the median at about $1,265 (our arithmetic). A 10-day engagement at the median rate would be about $12,650 in labor, before retest, reporting or travel days.

Two limits: these are ceiling rates, the most a contractor may charge on the schedule, not the price paid on a given order, and they describe the US federal market only. We did not find a public European rate card for penetration testing that we could verify, so this page quotes no EU day rates.

The price of one engagement and the annual fee of a platform are not comparable on their own. Put every option on the same three-year view:

1. Baseline: the human testing you must buy anyway. Regulated tests (DORA TLPT, the NYDFS annual test, tests your auditors or insurer ask for), in tester-days times rate, plus retest days.
2. Option A, annual manual testing only. The baseline plus any extra point-in-time tests after major changes. Count how many validated tests you get a year: usually one or two.
3. Option B, a subscription or usage-based platform. Three years of license at the quoted term with a renewal uplift (the USDA Pentera orders rose 5.5% to 7.8% a year), the host or agent it needs, staff hours to run it and review results, and the baseline human tests that remain.
4. Option C, an on-premise appliance. Hardware and license for the term, rack space and power, the same staff hours, and the same baseline human tests.
5. Divide by output. For each option, the cost per validated test run and per retest over three years. A platform run weekly produces about 150 runs in three years; an annual test produces three.
6. Add the evidence work. The hours spent turning results into audit evidence for NIS2, DORA, NYDFS, PCI DSS or your ISO 27001 auditor.

Two questions often decide it. Will you actually run and act on continuous tests? Continuous testing pays off only if someone fixes what it finds. And does the pricing model penalize you for testing more? Under per-test or usage-based pricing, every retest and every extra campaign adds cost.

Zero Hunt does not publish a price, and this page does not give one. What the public site states about the model:

• An appliance, not a SaaS subscription. Zero Hunt is an autonomous AI red team for networks and infrastructure that runs on hardware you rack, in two form factors, a desktop unit and a 2U rack unit, sized to the perimeter it has to cover. The same software runs on both, air-gapped if needed. See the on-premise AI red team.
• The license sets scope and term. Use is licensed within the scope and for the term specified in the License Agreement (terms).
• No per-token or per-test meter. The AI models run on the appliance (private AI), and no customer data leaves it. An appliance is a flat cost, so black-box and gray-box campaigns and re-runs after a fix do not add a charge within the licensed scope.
• Human in the loop. The operator authorizes scope and picks one of five autonomy levels, which set the actions, such as exploit tests, that wait for human approval.
• Evidence included. Findings are mapped to 34 compliance frameworks, and each evidence record is Ed25519-signed and SHA-256 hash-chained.

It does not replace the human tests regulators require, such as DORA TLPT with its tester rules or the NYDFS annual test; it changes how much evidence you have between them.

For side-by-side comparisons, see Zero Hunt alternatives, Zero Hunt vs Pentera, Zero Hunt vs Horizon3.ai NodeZero and Zero Hunt vs XBOW.

Request a quote. Tell us the sites and assets in scope, whether you need air-gapped operation and the frameworks you report against, and we will send a quote for your perimeter: request a quote.

• Horizon3.ai pricing page, read September 30, 2026
• XBOW pricing page, read September 30, 2026
• USAspending.gov award search and the award pages linked above (USDA, NIH, US Air Force), read September 30, 2026
• TED notice 487621-2026 (NASK award)
• TED notice 854627-2025 (Narodowy Bank Polski award) and TED notice 731936-2025 (contract notice)
• TED notice 565975-2025 (Fraunhofer) and TED notice 761787-2023
• Vendr, Horizon3 pricing, read September 30, 2026
• Synack, Best AI Pentesting Tools for Enterprises, Reviewed, June 24, 2026
• GSA CALC+ Labor Ceiling Rates and the CALC+ API, queried September 30, 2026
• Regulation (EU) 2022/2554 (DORA), Art. 26