Aikido Attack vs jwt-heartbreaker: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Aikido Attack is a commercial penetration testing tool by Aikido Security. jwt-heartbreaker is a free penetration testing tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best penetration testing fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Startups and SMBs that need pen testing but lack in-house expertise will move fastest with Aikido Attack; same-day reports and automated remediation pull requests compress what normally takes weeks into hours. The platform covers OWASP Top 10 and business logic flaws across whitebox, greybox, and blackbox modes with 90-day free re-testing, removing the friction of scheduling and paying for repeat assessments. Skip this if your team needs deep manual testing for complex threat modeling or custom attack scenarios; the AI agents excel at finding known vulnerability classes, not novel ones.
Penetration testers and AppSec engineers who routinely audit REST APIs will find jwt-heartbreaker indispensable for JWT validation testing inside Burp; it automates the tedious checks for unsigned tokens, weak secrets, and algorithm confusion that manual review misses. The 135 GitHub stars and active maintenance show real adoption among practitioners who integrate it into their standard Burp workflows rather than reaching for heavier, closed-source alternatives. Skip this if your threat model doesn't involve JWT-authenticated APIs or if you need post-exploitation JWT manipulation; jwt-heartbreaker focuses narrowly on the discovery and validation phase.
