Features, pricing, ratings, and pros and cons, compared head to head.
cnames is a free external attack surface management tool. SurfaceDiff is a commercial external attack surface management tool by SurfaceDiff. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best external attack surface management fit for your security stack. Independent and vendor-neutral: our scores and rankings are earned, never bought — sponsored placement is always labeled.
Based on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Security teams managing large subdomain inventories who need to quickly identify third-party service dependencies will find cnames valuable for that single, unglamorous job. The tool does one thing well: bulk CNAME resolution at no cost, which means you can run it repeatedly without justifying recurring spend to procurement. This is a CLI utility, not a platform; it won't replace your external attack surface management tool, but it will save time in the reconnaissance phase before you feed results into one.
A tool for taking a list of resolved subdomains and outputting any corresponding CNAMES en masse.
Continuous external attack surface monitoring that shows what changed between scans.
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Common questions about comparing cnames vs SurfaceDiff for your external attack surface management needs.
cnames: A tool for taking a list of resolved subdomains and outputting any corresponding CNAMES en masse..
SurfaceDiff: Continuous external attack surface monitoring that shows what changed between scans. built by SurfaceDiff. Core capabilities include Domain baseline scan for publicly exposed assets, Subdomain discovery, DNS record enumeration..
Both serve the External Attack Surface Management market but differ in approach, feature depth, and target audience.
cnames and SurfaceDiff serve similar External Attack Surface Management use cases: both are External Attack Surface Management tools, both cover DNS Security, Subdomain Enumeration. Key differences: cnames is Free while SurfaceDiff is Commercial, cnames is open-source. Review the feature comparison above to determine which fits your requirements.
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