Tracelight vs. Recorded Future

Different markets. Different scope.

Recorded Future is the gold standard for enterprise cyber threat intelligence — Fortune 500 CISOs, government SOCs, six-figure contracts. Tracelight is OSINT for civilian investigators — PIs, M&A diligence, journalists. Both quality platforms. Very rarely the same buyer.

Market positioning

Feature

Tracelight

Recorded Future

Primary buyer

Solo PIs, M&A diligence shops, SIU teams, investigative reporters

Fortune 500 CISOs, government threat-intel teams, large SOCs

Sales model

Self-serve, public pricing, 7-day free trial

Enterprise sales, multi-year contracts, six-figure minimums

Time to first investigation

60 seconds (sign up + run)

Weeks (procurement + onboarding)

Data scope

Feature

Tracelight

Recorded Future

Threat-intel feeds

Sanctions, breach, dark-web, but NOT IOC + APT-attribution datasets

Industry-leading IOC + APT + malware-family datasets

Civilian-OSINT investigation

Primary focus — 32 workers tuned for PI/diligence/journalism

Not a primary use case

Citation-anchored reports

Every claim links to evidence + raw API response

Threat-intel briefings; investigative report layer is your job

Pricing

Feature

Tracelight

Recorded Future

Annual cost

~$588-$5,988/yr (Starter through Agency, public pricing)

~$100k-$1M+/yr (enterprise contracts, not public)

When Recorded Future wins

You're running a Fortune 500 SOC, you need IOC + APT-attribution feeds + a real threat-intel analyst seat license, and your annual security budget has six zeros. Recorded Future is unmatched in that segment and Tracelight does not pretend to compete there.

If you're a civilian investigator…

Tracelight is built for your shape. 7-day free trial, $49/mo starting, 60 seconds to your first cited report.

Start free trial

Comparison based on publicly available Recorded Future product documentation as of May 2026. Recorded Future is a trademark of Recorded Future, Inc.