Picus Security Platform vs Stratus Red Team

Picus Security Platform helps security teams validate attack surfaces, exposures, and security controls to prioritize risks and remediation. It simulates attacks against controls such as EDR, SIEM, firewalls, WAFs, and email gateways, then supports remediation and retesting. The platform combines automated penetration testing, breach and attack simulation, and exposure validation. Its threat library contains more than 30,000 TTPs and thousands of scenarios; critical new simulations are added under a 24-hour SLA. AI Threat Builder converts inputs such as a blog URL, PDF, CVE ID, or threat actor name into an ATT&CK-mapped simulation. Picus says it integrates with more than 75 security technologies. Deployment options include SaaS, on-premises, and fully air-gapped environments, with yearly subscriptions and unlimited simulations. Pricing is available on request, and a 14-day free trial is listed. The trial includes one simulation agent, a ransomware-only library, and recommendations for one technology. After the trial, recurring simulations stop and simulation results are no longer accessible.

Stratus Red Team is a free, open-source Go binary for running specific offensive attack techniques against a live cloud environment and checking detections. Its techniques map to MITRE ATT&CK, with coverage for AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, and Entra ID. For each technique, it can prepare prerequisites, detonate the activity, reverse side effects, and remove prerequisites. Terraform creates and removes required infrastructure, and Stratus downloads its own Terraform binary. Installation options include Go, Homebrew, pre-built Linux, Windows, and macOS binaries, and Docker. The tool can also operate as a Go library for automation and custom techniques. It supports Linux, macOS, Windows, API use, and self-hosting. Documentation recommends an administrator role in a sandbox account or test cluster, not production infrastructure. Kubernetes clusters must already exist, AWS customer-provided detonation infrastructure is unsupported, and Azure resources are fixed to West US.