Ironwood Cyber Enlight vs Pentera Pentera Core: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Ironwood Cyber Enlight

Security teams responsible for validating whether their network can actually resist lateral movement and privilege escalation should run Ironwood Cyber Enlight; it simulates the full attack chain autonomously rather than stopping at vulnerability discovery. The platform covers ID.RA and DE.AE functions well, but NIST RS.AN (incident analysis and forensics) sits outside its scope, meaning it's built for continuous attack simulation and remediation validation, not incident response integration. Skip this if you need a tool that hunts active compromises or correlates findings across your existing detection stack.

Pentera Pentera Core

Mid-market and enterprise security teams that need to validate whether their network segmentation actually stops lateral movement should pick Pentera Pentera Core; most pentesting tools report vulnerabilities, but this one runs complete attack chains to prove what an attacker can reach from a compromised workstation. The platform aligns to four NIST CSF 2.0 functions including Risk Assessment and Incident Mitigation, and its Remote Attack Nodes let you test distributed infrastructure without shipping hardware everywhere. Skip this if your team lacks the ops bandwidth to act on findings quickly; Pentera generates noise without rapid remediation workflows in place.