PlexTrac vs Dradis vs AttackForge: An Honest Comparison for Working Pentesters (2026)
Choosing a pentest reporting tool should be straightforward. It isn't.
Most comparison pages you'll find are written by vendors positioning against each other, or by aggregator sites like G2 and Capterra that compile star ratings without anyone having actually used the software under deadline pressure. The result is a lot of "Feature X: Yes" checkboxes and almost no signal about what it actually feels like to use these tools when you're staring down a 40-page deliverable due in 48 hours.
This is a practitioner-first comparison. It covers PlexTrac, Dradis, and AttackForge in enough depth to help you make a real decision — including where each tool genuinely falls short. We also cover the open-source options briefly, because for some teams they're the right answer.
If you're already familiar with the reporting bottleneck and just want the comparison, skip to the table below. If you want context on why reporting tools matter as much as they do, this piece on automating pentest report writing covers it in detail.
Quick Comparison Table
| PlexTrac | Dradis | AttackForge | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Cloud | Cloud + self-hosted | Cloud + self-hosted |
| Pricing model | Contact for pricing | Community (free, self-hosted) / Pro (contact) | Tiered; solo plan available |
| AI features | Yes (report assist) | Echo AI (Pro) | Limited |
| Burp Suite integration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Nessus / Tenable integration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cobalt Strike integration | Limited | No | No |
| Best fit | Enterprise / MSSP teams | Mid-size teams; OSS adopters | Team-workflow-focused consultancies |
| Solo pentester fit | Poor (pricing) | Good (community edition) | Moderate |
Pricing data based on publicly available information as of early 2026. Contact vendors directly for current quotes.
PlexTrac
What it does well
PlexTrac is the most polished of the three. The UI is genuinely good — clean, fast, and consistent. If you're demoing to a client or onboarding a junior consultant, it doesn't look like internal tooling that escaped into production.
The integrations are a real strength. PlexTrac connects with Burp Suite, Nessus, Veracode, and several others, which matters a lot if your workflow involves importing scanner output rather than writing findings from scratch. The finding library is solid — you can build up a reusable database of vulnerability descriptions, remediation guidance, and evidence templates, and the deduplication logic for imported scanner findings is better than most.
For large enterprise clients who want branded, consistent deliverables, PlexTrac's template system works well. Custom report templates, client branding, and section reordering are all supported. Report quality on output looks professional without heavy post-processing.
Real-time collaboration is functional. Multiple consultants working the same engagement don't step on each other's findings the way you'd expect with a shared document approach.
Where it falls short
The pricing model is the biggest practical barrier. PlexTrac doesn't publish pricing, and every account I've spoken to suggests it's enterprise-tier — meaning it makes sense if you're running a large MSSP or a mature consulting firm with high report volume. For a solo consultant or a 3-person team doing 10-15 engagements a year, the math likely doesn't work.
It's also firmly cloud-hosted. If you have clients with data residency requirements or you work in environments with strict data handling policies, that's a problem. There's no self-hosted option.
The enterprise orientation shows up in the product too. Some features feel like they were built for program managers coordinating across 10 consultants rather than for the consultant who needs to write a report. That's not a flaw exactly, but it means there's overhead that solo practitioners and small teams may not want.
PlexTrac alternatives worth considering
If you're evaluating PlexTrac but balking at the pricing or the cloud requirement, the two most common alternatives people land on are Dradis Pro (more accessible pricing, self-hosted option) and Pentellect (cloud-based, AI-native, seat-based pricing that works for smaller teams). More on that at the end.
Dradis
What it does well
Dradis is the most established tool in this category, and that age shows in both good and bad ways. On the good side: the community edition is genuinely useful, legitimately free, and self-hosted. If you have a small team that wants to avoid vendor lock-in and has the technical capacity to run a self-hosted instance, Dradis Community gives you a real working option at no licensing cost.
The Pro version adds client management, custom reporting, a plugin ecosystem, and support. The integration with Burp Suite is one of the better implementations — importing scanner output into structured findings is straightforward.
Dradis recently launched Echo AI, which handles AI-assisted finding descriptions and remediation text in the Pro product. It's a genuine addition to the workflow, not a checkbox feature. The fact that there's almost no public content about how Echo AI actually works is a gap — Dradis hasn't done much to explain it — but the underlying functionality is useful.
For teams with strong DevOps practices and a preference for self-managed tooling, Dradis Pro is probably the most complete self-hosted option currently available.
Where it falls short
The community-to-Pro feature gap is significant. Dradis Community lacks several things you'd want for professional client delivery: polished report output, client management, and the kind of template flexibility that makes branded deliverables practical. You can work around it, but you'll spend time on configuration that Pro handles for you.
Self-hosted also means self-maintained. Upgrades, backups, database management, and security patches are your problem. For a team that wants to focus on engagements rather than infrastructure, that overhead is real. The maintenance burden is low compared to running your own Jira instance, but it's not zero.
The UI shows its age compared to PlexTrac. It's functional and logical, but it doesn't feel modern. That may not matter to you, but it matters when you're onboarding someone new or when a client asks to see your internal tooling.
Dradis alternatives
The most common reason teams look for Dradis alternatives is that they want something more turnkey — either a managed cloud option, better AI tooling, or a more modern UI — without giving up the flexibility. PlexTrac fits if budget isn't a constraint. Pentellect fits if you want cloud-based AI-assisted reporting with E2EE and accessible pricing.
AttackForge
What it does well
AttackForge is built around team workflow in a way that the other two aren't quite as explicitly. The platform has a strong emphasis on project management alongside reporting — tracking who's responsible for which findings, managing engagement timelines, and coordinating handoffs between consultants. If your team does a lot of larger engagements where multiple people are working in parallel, AttackForge's structure for that is solid.
The pricing is more transparent than PlexTrac and more accessible for smaller teams. There are published pricing tiers including a solo option, which makes the evaluation process less opaque.
Burp Suite and Nessus integrations are available. The report output is clean and professional.
Where it falls short
AttackForge has less name recognition than PlexTrac or Dradis, which means a smaller ecosystem — fewer community contributions, fewer third-party integrations, and less publicly available information about how people actually use it in practice. That's not a quality judgment, but it affects how much peer knowledge you can draw on when you hit a workflow edge case.
The integration breadth is narrower than PlexTrac. If your workflow depends on pulling from multiple scanner sources or feeding into downstream ticketing systems, verify specific integrations before committing.
AI-assisted features are limited compared to PlexTrac or the current direction Dradis is heading with Echo AI. For teams where AI-assisted finding description drafting would accelerate delivery, AttackForge is less mature in that area.
Head-to-Head: What Actually Matters
Pricing reality
PlexTrac is enterprise pricing. If that's your tier, it's a reasonable option. If it's not, the math won't work regardless of feature quality.
Dradis Community is free. Dradis Pro pricing isn't published — contact them directly. AttackForge publishes tiers. For cost-conscious teams doing their own evaluation, AttackForge gives you the most transparent starting point.
Solo pentester vs. team
Solo or small team (1-3 people): Dradis Community is the most practical no-cost option. If you want managed cloud hosting without self-maintenance, AttackForge's solo tier is worth evaluating.
Mid-size teams (4-15 people): Any of the three commercial options can work. The decision comes down to deployment preference (cloud vs. self-hosted), budget, and how much you value AI-assisted writing.
Enterprise / MSSP: PlexTrac's feature set and integrations are built for this scale.
AI and automation: what actually works
All three tools have some form of AI integration at this point, but the depth varies significantly.
PlexTrac's report assist helps with finding descriptions and remediation recommendations. It's useful when you're working through a long findings list and want to accelerate the prose-writing part without starting from a blank field. The quality depends on how well your raw notes are structured.
Dradis's Echo AI covers similar ground — AI-assisted descriptions and remediation in the Pro product. Given how little Dradis has published about it, practitioners are largely figuring it out themselves.
AttackForge's AI features are less mature as of early 2026.
If AI-assisted reporting is a significant factor in your decision, see our deep dive on using AI to write pentest reports — it covers what the AI actually does well versus where human judgment remains necessary.
Self-hosted vs. cloud
Self-hosted means your data doesn't transit a vendor's infrastructure. For engagements with strict data handling requirements — government clients, healthcare, financial services — that matters. Dradis Pro and AttackForge both offer self-hosted deployment. PlexTrac is cloud-only.
Cloud means the vendor handles infrastructure. Updates, backups, and uptime are their problem. The tradeoff is that your engagement data lives on their servers.
If data residency or client confidentiality requirements drive your decision, that alone may narrow the field to Dradis or AttackForge.
The Open-Source Options
For teams on tight budgets or with strong preferences for self-hosted, open-source tools, three are worth knowing about:
PwnDoc — A self-hosted, open-source report generation tool. Templating is based on docx templates, which gives you full control over output format. Active development, reasonable community. Best fit for teams comfortable with some setup overhead.
Ghostwriter — Built by SpecterOps, Ghostwriter is a full engagement management and reporting platform. More infrastructure to run than PwnDoc, but more complete in scope. If you're doing red team engagements and want a purpose-built platform, it's the most credible open-source option.
SysReptor — Self-hosted pentest reporting with a web-based editor and Django backend. Active development, polished UI for an open-source project. SysReptor also publishes a cloud-hosted commercial version.
All three are legitimate options. If budget is the primary constraint or if vendor lock-in is a genuine concern, evaluating one of these before committing to a commercial tool is reasonable.
Bottom Line: Who Should Use What
| If you're... | Consider... |
|---|---|
| Solo consultant, budget-conscious | Dradis Community (free, self-hosted) or a solo tier from AttackForge |
| Small team, want managed cloud | AttackForge or Pentellect |
| Mid-size team, want self-hosted | Dradis Pro or AttackForge |
| Large team / MSSP, enterprise budget | PlexTrac |
| Strong DevOps culture, OSS preference | Ghostwriter or SysReptor |
| AI-assisted reporting is a priority | Dradis Pro (Echo AI) or Pentellect |
| Data residency / E2EE required | Pentellect (per-record E2EE) or self-hosted option |
The honest answer is that there isn't one clearly superior tool. PlexTrac is the most polished but prices a lot of teams out. Dradis has the most history and a genuine free option. AttackForge is the most transparent on pricing. Which one fits depends on team size, budget, deployment requirements, and how much weight you put on AI features.
One More Option Worth Knowing About
If you're evaluating this space and AI-assisted drafting is important to your workflow, Pentellect is worth adding to the list.
It's a different architecture than the tools above. Every finding is encrypted with per-finding KMS envelope encryption — and before anything reaches the AI, automatic data sanitization strips client PII (IPs, emails, hostnames, file paths) and replaces them with placeholders. The AI never sees your client's sensitive data in plaintext. After generation, the placeholders are restored. No other tool in this comparison does this.
The pricing starts at $15/mo per seat — calibrated for individual consultants and small teams rather than enterprise contracts. For context, that's roughly 1/20th of PlexTrac's entry point. The AI drafting is built into the core workflow — you feed in your raw notes and findings, and the system drafts the prose layer while you focus on accuracy and completeness.
The pentest report template guide covers what a well-structured report looks like, which is useful context regardless of what tool you end up using.
We're launching in April 2026 — which means we'll be newer than every tool on this list. If that matters to your evaluation, it should. But if the combination of E2EE, AI-assisted drafting, and accessible per-seat pricing fits your workflow, it's worth a look.
Last updated: March 2026. Pricing and feature information reflects publicly available data. Contact vendors directly for current quotes and feature availability.