Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse vs Zerocopter Recon: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse

Mid-market and enterprise security teams drowning in unmanaged assets will find Cortex Xpanse's value in its continuous internet-wide scanning of 500 billion ports daily, which surfaces shadow infrastructure and unknown cloud accounts that traditional inventory tools miss. The platform's strength in asset discovery and attribution maps directly to NIST ID.AM compliance, a gap most organizations fail to close. Skip this if you need post-breach forensics or threat hunting; Xpanse is attack surface management, not incident response, and assumes you have remediation workflows ready to act on what it finds.

Zerocopter Recon

Mid-market and enterprise security teams drowning in shadow IT will find real value in Zerocopter Recon's human-led reconnaissance model, which catches forgotten assets and misconfigurations that automated scanners routinely miss. The vendor's 31-person structure and Netherlands-based operations mean slower response cycles than US-based competitors, but the expert-led approach maps both NIST ID.AM and ID.RA functions in one pass, eliminating the typical workflow tax of stitching together separate asset discovery and risk assessment tools. Skip this if your organization has already achieved 95% asset visibility or runs a mature continuous scanning program; Zerocopter is built for the messy middle, not for hardening what you already know.