# GreyNoise vs VirusTotal (slim)

> VirusTotal scores 67.5 (B) to GreyNoise's 66 (B) for secintel reputation. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/greynoise-vs-virustotal.md (~5,550 tokens) · this version ~3,930 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/greynoise-vs-virustotal.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/greynoise-vs-virustotal
- 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
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

VirusTotal scores 67.5 (B) on agent readiness against GreyNoise's 66 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. GreyNoise leads on reliability, schema & documentation and transparency & trust. Both do secintel reputation.

- GreyNoise: B 66, rank #350 of 1349 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/greynoise.min.md
- VirusTotal: B 67.5, rank #288 of 1349 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/virustotal.min.md
- GreyNoise, good for A triage or investigation agent that needs to know whether an IP is mass-scanning background noise, a known business service or something targeted, with tags and exploited CVEs to explain the verdict. Ahead on Reliability, 78 against 55; Schema & documentation, 83 against 77; Transparency & trust, 76 against 65.
- VirusTotal, good for File, URL, domain and IP reputation with multi-engine evidence, and the one listing here an agent can onboard to by a single POST. Ahead on Agent ergonomics, 83 against 76; Security & auth, 69 against 40; Payments & pricing, 40 against 35; Maintenance & community, 88 against 75. Also Free to start without a card.

| Category | GreyNoise | VirusTotal |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 78 | 55 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 83 | 77 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 76 | 83 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 40 | 69 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 35 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 75 | 88 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 76 | 65 |

| Fact (where they differ) | GreyNoise | VirusTotal |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | GreyNoise Intelligence, Inc. | Google LLC |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.greynoise.io/v3` | `https://ai.virustotal.com/mcp` |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Licence | Proprietary service under the GreyNoise End User License Agreement. The MCP server (greynoise-mcp-server) and the Python SDK (pygreynoise) are MIT | Proprietary service under the Google Cloud Terms of Service (SecOps). The official MCP server vt-mcp, vt-py and vt-go are Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | 48 | 11 |
| MCP registry | not listed | `io.github.VirusTotal/virustotal-mcp` |
| Last release | 2026-10-09 | 2026-10-11 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-05-07 | no date given |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-09-03 | 2025-02-06 |
| Popularity | 99 npm/wk | 26 stars, 53 PyPI/wk |

Why the edge:
- Security & auth, VirusTotal +29: GreyNoise 40 (One API key per workspace with no scopes and no read-only variant, sent in a `key` header, and no page read documents rotation or revocation; the MCP security page says only to rotate on compromise (12 of 30). Most endpoints read, and the MCP server marks its write and destructive tools and has a read-only validation mode, but the API has no read-only key or confirmation step for deleting a blocklist or alert (10 of 20). IP context returns raw HTTP paths, user agents and payloads sent by scanners, and GNQL returns the same at scale; no prompt-injection guidance was found in the docs, the MCP server page or its SECURITY.md (3 of 15). The workspace page shows weekly search usage and the MCP security page says to watch the dashboard for unexpected usage; no per-call log or key activity record was found (5 of 15). SOC 2 Type II announced on 8 June 2023, security@greynoise.io named in the MCP server's SECURITY.md, but security.txt returns 404, the trust centre at greynoise.hypercomply.io renders by script and was not read, and no bug bounty or disclosure policy was found (10 of 20). 12 + 10 + 3 + 5 + 10 = 40.); VirusTotal 69 (A personal v3 key carries every privilege of the account, with no scopes, sent only in an `x-apikey` header. Licensed groups get service accounts with six roles and a daily cap each. VTAI MCP uses OAuth with three scopes, vt:reports:read, vt:submissions:write and vt:network-analysis:write, and REST agent tokens are revocable with one DELETE. No documented query-string option (24 of 30). The read scope and readOnlyHint tools give a read-only mode; submission tools have no per-call confirmation of their own, so consent rests on the client and the `X-VTAI-Consent` header (15 of 20). Reports carry third-party text and `ai_insights`, and the VTAI pages say to treat report text as data, not instructions, and never to read a missing report as safety (12 of 15). Group administrators see consumption by endpoint and by user, VTAI shows OAuth connections at /oauth/connections, and no per-call log for a personal key was found (8 of 15). SECURITY.md in the MCP repository points to the Google Bug Hunters form, and the SecOps SLA and privacy notice are Google Cloud documents, but www.virustotal.com has no security.txt and whether VirusTotal is in scope of Google Cloud's SOC 2 and ISO 27001 reports could not be read (10 of 20). 24 + 15 + 12 + 8 + 10 = 69.)
- Reliability, GreyNoise +23: GreyNoise 78 (Read with the hosted lines for the v3 REST API. Status page at status.greynoise.io on incident.io with 16 components, ten of them GreyNoise's own, including API and API Data Freshness (20). No incident is listed for the 90 days to 3 November 2026. The API component shows 99.94 per cent uptime for August to November and the group 99.83 per cent, downtime the page gives no incident for, so read as clean or trivial with that caveat (25 of 30). Limits with numbers exist only for the free side, 10 lookups a day unauthenticated and 50 searches a week on a free account; paid plans are 'Unlimited' on the plans page and no per-minute figure was found (8 of 15). 429 responses are defined on 29 of 70 operations and a 503 at query engine capacity carries a documented Retry-After header, which the official SDK and MCP client honour with backoff. No idempotency keys for the blocklist, alert and feed writes (10 of 15). The plans page publishes an SLA of 1 business day, 8 hours or 4 hours on paid tiers beside support hours, which reads as a response time, and no availability SLA was found (5 of 10). The v3 API is generally available and v2 was decommissioned on 30 April 2026 (10). 20 + 25 + 8 + 10 + 5 + 10 = 78.); VirusTotal 55 (Read with the hosted lines, on the v3 API and VirusTotal AI together. No status page found. status.virustotal.com does not resolve and neither docs.virustotal.com nor ai.virustotal.com links one (0). No readable incident history (5). Rate limits documented with numbers, 4 requests a minute and 500 a day on a public key, and 60 queries per 60-second window and 1,000 a UTC day plus 20 uploads a minute and 500 a day on VTAI (15). 429 answers QuotaExceededError or TooManyRequestsError on v3, the quota FAQ says wait 30 to 60 seconds, VTAI says honour Retry-After, and VTAI submissions are idempotent by SHA-256 receipt or a caller-chosen request_id (15). The Google Cloud SecOps SLA page lists service level agreements for Google Threat Intelligence and VirusTotal, which cover paid licences (10). The v3 API is generally available; VTAI's OpenAPI document is version 0.10.39 and vt-mcp 0.9.9, neither marked beta, with Codex support marked staging (10). 0 + 5 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 = 55.)
- Maintenance & community, VirusTotal +13: GreyNoise 75 (Read for a closed service with an open-source MCP server and SDK. MCP server v0.5.5 tagged 9 October 2026, 25 days before the check, and product updates on 31 August 2026 (30). In the 90 days to 3 November, dated entries are the Visualizer post of 17 August, the CrowdStrike post of 31 August and the MCP release of 9 October; the Python SDK's last tag is v3.1.0 of 9 July (12 of 20). The MCP repository merged pull request 18 from an outside account on 9 October and has commits from two outside contributors; issues could not be read on github.com; Slack and Discord communities and support@greynoise.io (15 of 25). The official MCP server is not in the official MCP registry, where three third-party servers are; the Python SDK is current (10 of 15). CI runs typecheck, tests, a build, `npm audit` and an MCPB pack, with a live read-only validation against the API, and releases publish from tags with npm provenance; the SDK repository has only a Slack notice workflow (8 of 10). 30 + 12 + 15 + 10 + 8 = 75.); VirusTotal 88 (Read as a closed service with open agent tooling. vt-mcp 0.9.9 on PyPI on 11 October 2026 and the repository's newest tag, antigravity-plugin-v0.1.1, on 2 November 2026 (30). Nine vt-mcp releases between 20 September and 11 October 2026 and 146 commits in 90 days (20). Pull requests merged within a day by the maintainer in October, weekly blog posts, dated release notes per version, but issue replies could not be read because github.com refuses our reader (15 of 25). io.github.VirusTotal/virustotal-mcp in the official registry, latest 0.9.9, and vt-py and vt-go as official clients (15). CI, PyPI, release and registry workflows in the MCP repository and a pinned `mcp==2.1.1`, while vt-py's last release is 28 October 2025 and Google's gti-mcp still requires mcp below 2.0 (8 of 10). 30 + 20 + 15 + 15 + 8 = 88.)
- Transparency & trust, GreyNoise +11: GreyNoise 76 (Closed service under an EULA last modified 7 May 2025 that is clear on scope, with the MCP server and SDK under MIT (15 of 30). Privacy policy of 3 September 2026 with retention periods (threat data indefinitely, backups 14 days, logs about 30 days, account data until deletion is requested), named subprocessors and standard contractual clauses for transfers; no DPA named, and the page as served repeats its sections twice with small differences, such as whether Cloudflare is a subprocessor (20 of 30). The migration matrix dates v2's deprecation (28 July 2025), end of life (1 January 2026) and decommission (30 April 2026) and marks five v3 endpoints deprecated, while the EULA lets GreyNoise discontinue any product at any time with 10 days' notice of EULA changes (15 of 20). Amazon Web Services, Snowflake, Auth0, Stripe, Stigg, Datadog, Webflow, Google, HubSpot and Cloudflare named, with hosting in the United States (15 of 20). 15 + 20 + 15 + 15 = 65.); VirusTotal 65 (Closed service under the Google Cloud Terms of Service, last modified 24 March 2026, with the public API's non-commercial rule stated in the docs, and Apache-2.0 for vt-mcp, vt-py and vt-go (18 of 30). The SecOps Privacy Notice of 6 February 2025 keeps most personal data up to 180 days, names Google Cloud EMEA Ltd as controller for EU users and links a Cloud Data Processing Addendum, and the docs and VTAI pages agree that submissions are shared with partners (24 of 30). No deprecation policy with dates. The overview says v2 "will not be deprecated" for now, and the 0.9.9 release note records removed tool names without a notice period (6 of 20). Data is processed on servers around the world; no subprocessor list specific to VirusTotal was found (8 of 20). 18 + 24 + 6 + 8 = 56.)
- Agent ergonomics, VirusTotal +7: GreyNoise 76 (`quick=true` cuts an IP lookup to `found` and the classification or trust level, `/v3/gnql/metadata` drops raw scan data, and `request_metadata.restricted_fields` names what a plan withholds; no arbitrary field selection (18 of 25). GNQL pages default to 1,000 results with `size` up to 10,000 and a `scroll` token, plus stats, count and export variants and CSV output in the SDK (18 of 20). Error bodies carry a message, 206 marks partial content from plan limits, and the 503 at capacity documents Retry-After, though the 429 example says only that the limit was hit (15 of 20). Nearly every call is a GET or a read POST; the blocklist, alert and feed-consumer writes have no idempotency key. The MCP server sets readOnlyHint true by default, marks 8 write tools and sets destructiveHint on the delete tools (15 of 20). One required parameter on most calls and sensible defaults, but the only official SDK is Python; the TypeScript MCP server is not a client library (10 of 15). 18 + 18 + 15 + 15 + 10 = 76.); VirusTotal 83 (The hosted MCP server lists 11 compact tools, one over the ten-tool line (15), and the vt:reports:read OAuth scope gives a read-only subset (5 added back, so 20). VTAI reports are fixed in shape with `detections` as labels, category counts and `coverage` sized for a model. Pagination and field selection on v3 list endpoints were not read in this run (10 of 20). Error codes an agent can branch on, QuotaExceededError, NotFoundError, `receipt_conflict` on 409, enumerated rejection codes, and Retry-After on VTAI 429s (18 of 20). File submissions are keyed by SHA-256 with recoverable receipts, network submissions by a persisted request_id, `can_resubmit` is set on every result, and all 11 tools carry readOnlyHint and destructiveHint in the source (20). Few required parameters, official clients vt-py and vt-go, and the submit_local_file stdio tool (15). 20 + 10 + 18 + 20 + 15 = 83.)
- Schema & documentation, GreyNoise +6: GreyNoise 83 (OpenAPI 3.0.0 at api.greynoise.io/v3/openapi.yaml, 65 paths and 70 operations, every one with a description, 32 enums, a `key` header security scheme, and 400, 401, 403, 429 and 500 responses on nearly every operation (25). llms.txt at docs.greynoise.io/llms.txt, and every docs page is served as Markdown with a .md suffix (10). Operation descriptions say what each call returns and when to use `quick`, with little on when not to use a call; the MCP tool descriptions in the source are fuller (14 of 20). Typed path and query parameters with enums and required flags, and bulk bodies typed as `{"ips": [...]}` with a 10,000 limit in prose (12 of 15). The guides carry curl and Python examples and the spec defines error bodies with example messages, but the v3 IP reference page itself has no code sample (11 of 15). Versioned paths and a migration matrix with dated deprecation, end-of-life and decommission for v2, plus dated product-update posts naming new endpoints, but no API changelog as such and an empty roadmap page (11 of 15). 25 + 10 + 14 + 12 + 11 + 11 = 83.); VirusTotal 77 (VTAI publishes an OpenAPI 3.1 document at ai.virustotal.com/openapi.json with 17 operations, and the MCP tools take typed JSON Schema inputs with annotations. No OpenAPI document was found for the v3 API, whose reference lists typed parameters page by page (20 of 25). llms.txt on both hosts, 650 links on virustotal.readme.io and an agent manifest plus a Markdown quickstart at /skills/BASIC.md on ai.virustotal.com (10). VTAI descriptions and skills say when to look up, when not to submit, and what a missing report does not prove. v3 endpoint descriptions are one line, such as "Retrieve information about a file" (15 of 20). Enums for indicator_type, analysis status, pending_reason and rejection codes, a consent header fixed to `standard-v1`, required path parameters. The v3 pages read carry no constraints beyond the hash formats (11 of 15). 16 documented v3 error codes with HTTP statuses and a JSON envelope, and VTAI documents 401, 404 and 429 per operation, but the v3 file report page read shows no example request or response body (11 of 15). Version in the path (v3, with v2 still served) and dated release notes for vt-mcp, but no changelog for the API itself (10 of 15). 20 + 10 + 15 + 11 + 11 + 10 = 77.)