Ironwood Cyber Enlight vs Principal Mapper: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Ironwood Cyber Enlight is a commercial penetration testing tool by Ironwood Cyber. Principal Mapper 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, integrations, company size fit, here is our conclusion:
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.
AWS penetration testers and red teamers who need to map privilege escalation chains across IAM configurations will find Principal Mapper indispensable; it visualizes attack paths that manual role analysis misses, and the 1,544 GitHub stars reflect active adoption by practitioners who've built workflows around it. The tool excels at identifying lateral movement vectors, though it requires hands-on graph interpretation and won't automate remediation decisions. Skip this if your team lacks Python familiarity or needs a point-and-click interface; Principal Mapper rewards operators comfortable reading code and debugging their own edge cases.
