# Censys vs Pulsedive (slim)

> Censys scores 64.1 (B) to Pulsedive's 47.9 (D) for secintel indicators. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/censys-vs-pulsedive.md (~4,600 tokens) · this version ~3,030 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/censys-vs-pulsedive.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/censys-vs-pulsedive
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-03
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Censys scores 64.1 (B) on agent readiness against Pulsedive's 47.9 (D), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Pulsedive leads on payments & pricing. Both do secintel indicators.

- Censys: B 64.1, rank #420 of 1349 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/censys.min.md
- Pulsedive: D 47.9, rank #1079 of 1349 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/pulsedive.min.md
- Censys, good for An agent that needs to know what a host, web property or certificate exposes right now and how that changed, with DNS resolution and enrichment on paid plans. Ahead on Reliability, 55 against 31; Schema & documentation, 82 against 77; Agent ergonomics, 79 against 64; Security & auth, 55 against 23; Maintenance & community, 84 against 40; Transparency & trust, 64 against 57. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install.
- Pulsedive, good for An agent that needs a quick risk verdict and linked threats for a domain, IP or URL with no signup, or a passive scan of a new indicator. Ahead on Payments & pricing, 50 against 35. Also Free to start without a card.

| Category | Censys | Pulsedive |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 55 | 31 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 82 | 77 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 79 | 64 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 55 | 23 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 35 | 50 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 84 | 40 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 64 | 57 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Censys | Pulsedive |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Censys, Inc. | Pulsedive LLC |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.platform.censys.io/v3/` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |  |
| Auth | OAuth or key | API key |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Censys's Terms of Service. The Platform SDKs are MIT and the cencli command line tool is Apache-2.0 | none |
| Tools exposed | 12 | 0 |
| Last release | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-27 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | 2022-05-02 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | 2024-08-28 |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 11 stars | none |

Why the edge:
- Maintenance & community, Censys +44: Censys 84 (Newest changelog entry 2 November 2026 and censys-platform 0.16.7 on 29 October (30). Ten dated changelog entries between 8 September and 2 November and eight PyPI releases since 4 August (20). A closed service with a weekly changelog, a Gainsight community forum with Platform Q and A sections, an in-app feedback portal and support@censys.com. GitHub issue replies weren't read (12 of 15). Official SDKs in three languages regenerated from the spec, the Go and TypeScript repositories pushed on 3 November and PyPI on 29 October (15). The SDKs are 0.x and generated, with a stated grace period for dropping Python versions. CI wasn't read (7 of 10). 30 + 20 + 12 + 15 + 7 = 84.); Pulsedive 40 (Read as a closed service. The site footer shows version 6.3.18 dated 27 October, seven days before the check, and the newest blog post is 29 September 2026 (30). No changelog lists releases, so three dated changes in 90 days could not be shown (0 of 20). A Discord, support@pulsedive.com, a contact form and a docs troubleshooting section; the GitHub feedback repository is archived since 2020 (10 of 15). No entry in the official MCP registry (the docs MCP server is not listed and the registry's pulsedive entries are third-party) and no official SDK (0 of 15). No official packages to assess (0 of 10). 30 + 0 + 10 + 0 + 0 = 40.)
- Security & auth, Censys +32: Censys 55 (Personal access tokens as a Bearer header, several per user, named, shown once and deletable, with no scopes or expiry stated. Service accounts on Search and Core plans use OAuth 2 client credentials with module roles and a rotatable secret, and the MCP server takes OAuth with a consent page. Only the organisation id, not a secret, may travel in the query string (26 of 30). Module roles (Analyst, Manager), an API Access role and the advice to grant service accounts only the roles they need, but no read-only token and no confirmation step for deleting a collection (12 of 20). Results carry banners, HTML titles and certificate subjects from scanned hosts, and no guidance on treating them as untrusted was found in the API, MCP or skills docs (3 of 15). A platform audit log for admins that records service account activity, credit usage per member through the API and `X-Request-ID` on every response, with no documented per-call log for token holders (10 of 15). security@censys.com on the contact page. security.txt 404, no bug bounty, and the compliance page says Censys helps customers with SOC 2, ISO 27001 and FedRAMP without claiming any for itself (4 of 20). 26 + 12 + 3 + 10 + 4 = 55.); Pulsedive 23 (One key per account sent only as a query parameter, with no scopes, header option or rotation documented (10 for one all-powerful key less 10 for the query string, so 0). Lookups read, submit=1 writes to the public dataset and keyless use is read-only in practice, but there is no read-only key (10 of 20). Responses include community comments, banners and DOM snippets from scans with no guidance on treating them as untrusted (3 of 15). The privacy policy says web and API logs are available from the account page (10 of 15). security.txt returns 404 and no disclosure policy, bug bounty or certification was found (0 of 20). 0 + 10 + 3 + 10 + 0 = 23.)
- Reliability, Censys +24: Censys 55 (Graded as a hosted service on the Platform API. Atlassian Statuspage at status.censys.com with Platform API, Authentication, Credit Management and three MCP server components (20). Its feed lists 12 entries from 24 August to 2 November 2026. Two were maintenance on ASM. The rest include intermittent 500s on the Platform from 13:52 on 24 August to 09:52 the next day, periodic query failures from 20 to 22 September, historical data calls timing out for about an hour on 18 September, an internal networking outage of the Platform and ASM from 00:35 to 13:46 EDT on 30 September, and failing searches from 14:26 EST on 2 November still in monitoring at 19:08. One full outage of about 13 hours and two multi-hour periods of failing core queries, read as more than one major (5). Limits are published with numbers, concurrency 1 or 25 per organisation and 25 requests a second per IP with a burst of 125 (15). Overruns return 429 or 503, but no Retry-After, backoff guidance or idempotency keys were found, and the SDKs say only that they follow the API's default retry strategy (5 of 15). No SLA found. The terms disclaim any warranty that the service will meet requirements, and the pricing page names none (0). The v3 API is generally available (10). 20 + 5 + 15 + 5 + 0 + 10 = 55.); Pulsedive 31 (Read with the hosted lines. No status page was found on the site, the docs, the support page or in search (0). No readable history (5). The limits page names Free, Pro, Commercial and Enterprise tiers and three remaining-request headers but gives no numbers, pointing to the account page; the vendor's plan post of 11 March 2024 gives 50 a day on Free and 250 on Pro (8 of 15). A 429 returns a JSON error naming the limit and the headers show what remains, with no Retry-After or backoff guidance; scans are safe to repeat and polling is free (8 of 15). No SLA; the terms supply the services as is and as available (0). The API is generally available (10). 0 + 5 + 8 + 8 + 0 + 10 = 31.)
- Agent ergonomics, Censys +15: Censys 79 (`fields` limits a search response to named fields and `page_size` caps it at 100, with raw and full variants of lookups chosen by endpoint (22 of 25). `page_token` with `next_page_token` and `previous_page_token`, `total_hits`, aggregate endpoints and a bulk lookup (20). A status code table that separates 401, 403, 422, 429 and 503, problem+json bodies and `X-Request-ID` on responses, but no catalogue of error codes beyond status (14 of 20). Lookups and search are safe to retry, but collections, tags, comments and member endpoints write with no idempotency key, and no tool annotations are documented for the MCP server (8 of 20). One required field on search, SDKs in Python, Go and TypeScript, a CLI and Claude Code skills, though every paid-tier call also needs the organisation id (15). 22 + 20 + 14 + 8 + 15 = 79.); Pulsedive 64 (limit on explore, pretty, get=links or properties, historical and schema flags, and submit=0 keeps a scan out of the dataset, but an indicator record carries every property group with no field selection (16 of 25). Linked indicators page with page_current and page_next, 1 to 10 pages per request by plan, explore rows capped by tier, and CSV or STIX output (14 of 20). Errors are a single string with a status code; the 429 body names the limit (12 of 20). Every lookup is a GET, scanning an existing indicator updates it, and polling by qid is free (14 of 20). One required parameter per call and keyless defaults, but no official SDK (8 of 15). 16 + 14 + 12 + 14 + 8 = 64.)
- Payments & pricing, Pulsedive +15: Censys 35 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Starter at $79 a month for 500 credits and Starter Pro at $599 for 4,000 are public in the docs with one credit an action, which gives a per-call price, while Core and higher plans and credit top-ups are priced by sales (15 of 20). A free account gets 100 credits a month and five free actions a day with no card named (20). Signup, token creation and Starter purchase all happen in a browser, and no key API was found (0). 0 + 15 + 20 + 0 = 35.); Pulsedive 50 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Pro $29 a month is on the site menu and the Team and Business API prices are in the vendor's plan post of 11 March 2024, sold as monthly quotas rather than per call (10). A free account needs no card (20). Requests without a key are accepted, so an agent can look up an indicator with no signup at about 10 a day (20). 0 + 10 + 20 + 20 = 50.)
- Transparency & trust, Censys +7: Censys 64 (A closed service under terms effective 1 October 2018 that are clear on who may use the data for what, with MIT SDKs and an Apache-2.0 CLI (15 of 30). Privacy policy of 1 April 2025 keeps data 'for as long as necessary' with no periods, while the retention policy revised 11 July 2023 gives seven days for queries before anonymisation and up to three years for ASM seed data after an account expires, and still names the retired Censys Search. Two GDPR representatives are named. No public DPA found, and the privacy page's mailto points to censys.io while its text says censys.com (16 of 30). The transition guide gives the Legacy Search API no sunset date, the Accept header allows schema versions but no lifecycle is published, and credit packs were discontinued on 2 November with no notice period stated (5 of 20). Hosted in the United States, Stripe and Google named, unnamed analytics, advertising and session replay vendors, no subprocessor list (8 of 20). 15 + 16 + 5 + 8 = 44.); Pulsedive 57 (A closed service with terms naming Pulsedive LLC and New Jersey law, with the OpenAPI files under Apache 2.0 (15 of 30). The privacy policy of 28 August 2024 lists processors and what is logged, keeps deleted-account data for compliance with no periods, and names no DPA; an enterprise privacy page exists and was not read (14 of 30). The recent field is marked deprecated in the spec with no date and there is no policy (5 of 20). DigitalOcean, Plausible, Stripe, SendGrid, Google Workspace, Monday, QuickBooks and Typeform named, storage in the United States (16 of 20). 15 + 14 + 5 + 16 = 50.)