A team already committed to quarterly penetration tests wants an engagement that runs continuously instead of ending with a report. Which vendor publishes that kind of program?

BreachLock lists a continuous testing program among its published engagement models, alongside a managed testing service and on-demand testing. Applause's profile lists two engagement models, crowdtesting and a managed testing service. A continuous testing program is not among them. A buyer with an existing quarterly cadence should ask BreachLock how the continuous option is scoped and billed, since the catalog records the model's name but not its terms.

A buyer comparing operating history before signing a multi-year contract wants to know how long each company has been running. When was each one founded?

Applause was founded in 2007 under the name uTest, before the company rebranded to Applause. BreachLock was founded in 2019. A buyer treating founding year as a proxy for operating history is looking at a gap of roughly a decade between the practices, with Applause's crowdtesting work predating BreachLock's founding by that stretch. A start year is a fact about incorporation, not about how consistently a team has stayed staffed since, so operating continuity is better read from named clients or case studies published on each profile.

Applause vs BreachLock

QA Rating is published independently, and its publisher owns no company listed in this catalog.

Applause meets the conditions for Crowdtesting at scale; BreachLock meets none that Applause does not. The catalog has Client stages, Crowd tester pool only for Applause, and Certificates only for BreachLock. Neither publishes Frameworks, Signs a BAA / GDPR DPA, Published rates, Minimum project, Onboarding, Device lab, so the table cannot answer those.

Field by field

Applause and BreachLock compared on the fields published for every company in this catalog
Field	Applause	BreachLock
Headquarters	Framingham, the USA	New York, the USA
Delivery locations	the USA, Germany, Israel, Poland, India	the USA, the UK, the Netherlands, India
Team size	201-500 people	51-200 people
Founded	2007	2019
Ownership	Subsidiary	Independent
Services	Manual testing, Test automation, Payment flow testing, Accessibility testing, Usability testing, Localization testing, Security testing, Mobile app testing, IoT and device testing, AR/VR testing	Penetration testing, Red teaming, Secure code review, Attack surface management
Industries	Automotive, Ecommerce, Media, Banking, Travel, Healthcare, Games, Telecom	Banking, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Telecom, Ecommerce
Frameworks	Not published	Not published
Engagement models	Crowdtesting, Managed testing service	Managed testing service, On-demand testing, Continuous testing program
Client stagespublished by one of the two	Enterprises	Not published
Certificates	No certificate confirmed by a register entry	CRESTregister entry
Signs a BAA / GDPR DPA	Not confirmed / Not confirmed	Not confirmed / Not confirmed
Published rates	Not published	Not published
Minimum project	Not published	Not published
Onboarding	Not published	Not published
Crowd tester poolpublished by one of the two	1,500,000applause.com	Not published
Device lab	Not published	Not published

Who each one fits

Applause works through crowdtesting: a distributed pool of testers exercises a product the way ordinary users would, which fits a team validating consumer-facing releases across markets and device types. BreachLock's practice centers on offensive security engagements such as penetration testing, aimed at systems that already hold customer or patient records. A buyer choosing between them is really choosing between a coverage problem and a security-assurance problem, and those problems seldom overlap in scope.

Regulatory readiness, meaning whether a BAA or a GDPR data processing agreement gets signed, is unpublished on each profile, so a buyer with healthcare or banking data in scope cannot use this page to confirm that either vendor is ready to sign one. A vendor listed in a regulated industry has not necessarily agreed to sign the paperwork that industry requires, and only a direct answer from the vendor settles which is true. On a first call, ask for that commitment in writing, then check the answer later against the regulatory readiness entry on each profile once a source is added.

A tag is attached when the company's published fields meet its condition, never by judgement. Both lists come from the same closed vocabulary, so a tag missing from one side means the condition was not met, not that nobody looked.

Applause

Crowdtesting at scale

BreachLock

BreachLock meets no applicability condition in this catalog. That is a statement about what its published fields show, not about the company.

Both meet the conditions for Nearshore for the EU, so those conditions do not separate them.

Where the data runs out

Completeness against the 14 fields of the comparison checklist is 71% for Applause and 64% for BreachLock. A field is counted as filled when a source confirms it, so a gap means nobody published it.

Neither company has a value recorded for these fields: Frameworks, Signs a BAA / GDPR DPA, Published rates, Minimum project, Onboarding, Device lab. The table shows those rows empty rather than estimating them.

Field definitions and the completeness checklist are on the methodology page. The sources behind each field are listed on the Applause profile and the BreachLock profile.

Questions

A team already committed to quarterly penetration tests wants an engagement that runs continuously instead of ending with a report. Which vendor publishes that kind of program?: BreachLock lists a continuous testing program among its published engagement models, alongside a managed testing service and on-demand testing. Applause's profile lists two engagement models, crowdtesting and a managed testing service. A continuous testing program is not among them. A buyer with an existing quarterly cadence should ask BreachLock how the continuous option is scoped and billed, since the catalog records the model's name but not its terms.
A buyer comparing operating history before signing a multi-year contract wants to know how long each company has been running. When was each one founded?: Applause was founded in 2007 under the name uTest, before the company rebranded to Applause. BreachLock was founded in 2019. A buyer treating founding year as a proxy for operating history is looking at a gap of roughly a decade between the practices, with Applause's crowdtesting work predating BreachLock's founding by that stretch. A start year is a fact about incorporation, not about how consistently a team has stayed staffed since, so operating continuity is better read from named clients or case studies published on each profile.

Published by QA RatingUpdated on September 6, 2026

Every fact about a company comes from a listed source. A field without a source stays empty. A certificate counts as confirmed only when a registry, certificate or auditor report backs it; a certificate the company only claims about itself is published separately, under that label. Vendors can request a correction at hello@qa-rating.com. A correction is applied when it comes with a public source.