hakrawler vs Pentesting Payloads: 2026 Comparison
hakrawler is a free penetration testing tool. Pentesting Payloads 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:
Penetration testers and bug bounty hunters who need fast endpoint discovery during reconnaissance should start with hakrawler; it crawls web applications an order of magnitude quicker than manual mapping, with 4,841 GitHub stars reflecting sustained adoption by practitioners who run it continuously across engagement kickoffs. The tool's speed comes from its parallelized crawling architecture, which surfaces forgotten endpoints and asset exposure before deeper testing begins. Skip this if your mandate is vulnerability scoring or compliance reporting; hakrawler is reconnaissance-only, and you'll need separate tools for exploitation and risk quantification.
Pentesters at startups and small consultancies running time-constrained assessments will move fastest with Pentesting Payloads; the web-based payload library eliminates the friction of hunting, encoding, and formatting exploits across SQLi, XSS, LFI, and command injection vectors. It's free and cloud-deployed, so there's no infrastructure lift. Skip this if you need payload generation tied to active reconnaissance data or custom encoding chains; Pentesting Payloads is a static reference tool, not an exploitation framework.
