Alternatives to Astra at Mid-market companies

This tool is a self-service API security scanner designed to surface security risks early in development and deployment. Submit a URL and receive a risk score from A to F along with prioritized findings. It operates as a black-box scanner, requiring no agents, code access, or SDK integration, and works with any language, framework, or cloud. Read-only methods (GET and HEAD) plus text-only POST for LLM probes are used, and scan completion typically occurs in under one minute.

The scanner covers 12 categories aligned to the OWASP API Top 10 (2023). It detects authentication bypasses and JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none, weak algorithms, expired tokens, missing claims, and sensitive data in claims. It identifies Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) and Insecure Direct Object References (IDOR) via sequential ID enumeration and active adjacent-ID probing. It flags Broken Function Level Authorization (BFLA) and privilege escalation by probing admin endpoints and exposing role or permission fields. Other categories include Property Authorization over-exposure, Input Validation issues like CORS wildcards and dangerous HTTP methods, Rate Limiting and Resource Consumption weaknesses, and Data Exposure risks such as PII patterns, API key formats, and error or stack-trace leakage. It also checks Encryption posture via HTTPS redirects, HSTS, and cookie flags, identifies SSRF indicators, highlights missing API versioning and legacy paths, maps unsafe consumption surfaces, and runs LLM / AI Security probes across multiple scan tiers.

The scanner parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 with recursive $ref resolution, cross-referencing spec definitions against runtime findings to highlight undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. For authenticated scans at the Starter tier and above, support includes Bearer, API key, Basic auth, and Cookie methods. Domain verification is enforced through DNS TXT records or an HTTP well-known file to ensure only the domain owner can scan with credentials. A strict header allowlist is applied, forwarding only Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* headers.

The Web Dashboard centralizes scan management, report viewing, score trend tracking, and branded compliance PDF downloads. The CLI, published as an npm package, enables commands such as middlebrick scan <url> with JSON or text output. A GitHub Action is available to act as a CI/CD gate, failing the build when the score drops below a defined threshold. The MCP Server allows scans from AI coding assistants including Claude and Cursor.

Pro tier adds continuous monitoring with configurable rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly. It provides diff detection across scans to highlight new findings, resolved findings, and score drift. Email alerts are rate-limited to one per hour per API, and HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks are supported with auto-disable after five consecutive failures.

Four pricing tiers are offered. The Free tier provides 3 scans per month and CLI access. Starter at 99 USD per month supports 15 APIs, monthly scans, dashboard access, email alerts, and the MCP Server. Pro at 499 USD per month includes 100 APIs with incremental pricing, continuous monitoring, GitHub Action gates, CI/CD integration, Slack and Teams alerts, compliance reports, and signed webhooks. Enterprise at 2000 USD per month adds unlimited APIs, custom rules, SSO, audit logs, SLA, and dedicated support.

Safety measures include read-only scanning without destructive payloads, blocking of private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints at multiple layers, and strict data handling. Customer scan data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation. Data is never sold and is not used for model training.