The top CTEM platforms you should know in 2025

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a cybersecurity strategy originally coined by Gartner analysts, which focuses on identifying, prioritizing, validating, and mobilizing teams to reduce threat exposure across an organization’s full attack surface. It’s in a category of cybersecurity tools often considered as, “offensive security,” as the tools and processes related to CTEM deal with stopping attacks before they happen.

Unlike traditional vulnerability management or threat detection, CTEM emphasizes continuous insight into how an attacker could exploit weaknesses, so defenders can get ahead of breaches.

As defined by Gartner analysts, CTEM unfolds across five core stages:

1. Scoping: Determining what needs protection across infrastructure, apps, cloud, SaaS, and third parties
2. Discovery: Uncovering known and unknown assets, misconfigurations, and vulnerabilities
3. Prioritization: Assessing which exposures pose actual risk based on context and exploitability
4. Validation: Confirming which exposures are genuinely exploitable via testing or simulation
5. Mobilization: Driving remediation with practical, contextual guidance and integration with workflows

Unlike traditional security “categories,” CTEM is a framework for solving cybersecurity challenges and comprises teams, tools and processes. The first step in a CTEM program is to identify the scope of a cyber challenge, and then to find tools that address that specific scope.

Does my organization need a CTEM solution?

Concerned because your organization had a breach from a third-party asset? Look at External Exposure Management. Fighting alert fatigue? Look at Vulnerability Prioritization Tools. The key is to first scope your biggest cyber challenges and then look at the vendors addressing those issues.

Based on online reviews and customer testimonials, here are some of the top CTEM vendors. Each one covers a different CTEM scope:

Cymulate

Scope / Best for: Validation – Breach and attack simulation (BAS) across the kill chain.

• Scoping: Allows users to simulate threats across the full attack surface – cloud, endpoints, network, and email
• Discovery: Surfaces coverage gaps in detection and prevention based on simulation results
• Prioritization: Maps simulation results to MITRE ATT&CK to show high-impact techniques your stack doesn’t detect well
• Validation: Continuously executes safe, controlled attack simulations to test defenses and incident response capabilities
• Mobilization: Tracks security posture over time and highlights specific control gaps to fix

Cymulate enables organizations to validate whether their defenses can withstand real-world adversarial behavior.

Why is Cymulate a top CTEM vendor? 4.9 out of 5 on G2.

IONIX

Scope / Best for: Discovery, Prioritization, Validation – External and third-party exposure management.

• Scoping & Discovery: IONIX maps your entire external attack surface, even unknown or orphaned assets, across domains, clouds, suppliers, and subsidiaries
• Prioritization: Its contextual engine filters out noise and flags the exposures that matter most based on attacker behavior, asset sensitivity, and real-world exploitability
• Validation: Detects whether threats are actively being weaponized or scanned in the wild
• Mobilization: Offers clear, targeted remediation guidance, supported by integrations with ticketing and security orchestration platforms

IONIX is especially effective for security teams that need to reduce external risk blind spots and third-party exposure.

Why is IONIX a top CTEM vendor? 5.0 out of 5 on Gartner Peer Insights and 5 star customer reviews.

Nagomi

Scope / Best for: Mobilization – Operationalizing prioritization and response.

• Scoping: Integrates with SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and vulnerability tools to understand your detection and response surface
• Discovery: Correlates alerts, vulnerabilities, and threat intel to expose weak spots in incident coverage
• Prioritization: Applies a “threat-centric” lens to sort exposures by actual attack scenarios and coverage gaps
• Validation: Highlights where threats can bypass existing defenses due to control blind spots or misconfigurations
• Mobilization: Offers clear playbooks for closing gaps across people, processes, and technology

Why is Nagomi a top CTEM vendor? Customer case studies of Nagomi.

XM Cyber

Scope / Best for: Validation – Attack path modeling in hybrid environments.

• Scoping: Helps define risk across on-prem and cloud environments, including user entitlements and access relationships
• Discovery: Aggregates asset, credential, and configuration data from integrated tools to build a risk graph
• Prioritization: Identifies exploitable attack paths that chain together vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and excessive privileges
• Validation: Continuously simulates attacker movement and privilege escalation scenarios
• Mobilization: Recommends the smallest set of changes needed to break attack paths and protect critical assets

XM Cyber is ideal for organizations that need visibility into how an attacker would move laterally inside their environment.

Why is XM Cyber a top CTEM vendor? XM Cyber customer reviews.

Veriti

Scope / Best for: Mobilization – Risk-aware policy management and enforcement.

• Scoping: Focuses on the policy and control layer, helping organizations understand what’s enforced across firewalls, EDRs, and more
• Discovery: Aggregates configuration and security policy data from multiple tools to expose gaps and conflicts
• Prioritization: Uses business context and control coverage to rank which policy exposures are most urgent
• Validation: Simulates potential access and attack routes based on control settings and user behavior
• Mobilization: Enables one-click policy optimization across tools—ensuring fast, non-disruptive remediation

Veriti is particularly strong in helping security leaders close exposure gaps caused by misaligned or outdated policies.

Why is Veriti a top CTEM vendor? Read the case studies.

Final thoughts

CTEM is transforming security programs from reactive to proactive. These platforms don’t just report exposures, they help organizations understand, test, and fix them before adversaries can exploit them. Whether you’re focused on external risk, internal access paths, or security control optimization, there’s a CTEM solution to match your operational challenge.