Aikido Attack vs vaf: 2026 Comparison
Aikido Attack is a commercial penetration testing tool by Aikido Security. vaf 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 who need to rapidly iterate fuzzing payloads across multiple endpoints will appreciate vaf's speed and cross-platform portability; the lightweight Nim implementation outpaces Python-based fuzzers on CPU-constrained lab environments by 3-5x. With 321 GitHub stars and active maintenance, it's stable enough for repeatable test runs. Skip this if you need a commercial UI, integrated reporting, or support contracts; vaf is a CLI tool for practitioners comfortable reading source code and troubleshooting their own builds.
