Autonomous vs. Manual Pentesting Benchmark

Informed by a real-world head-to-head benchmark across four production web applications.

Traditional pentesting is slow, time-boxed, and constrained by limited access. As applications grow more complex, critical logic flaws slip through standard Greybox engagements.

This report explains how autonomous AI pentesting changes the security baseline, covering:

Speed at production pace

Why autonomous pentests complete in hours instead of weeks, allowing teams to find and fix issues while code is still fresh.

Depth of real vulnerabilities

How AI testing consistently uncovered critical logic flaws such as IDORs, authentication bypasses, e-signature forgery, and broken access control that manual testers missed under time pressure.

The access asymmetry

Why instant source code access lets AI operate in a Whitebox model by default, while human testers remain constrained by cost, time, and logistics.

Where humans historically focused

How manual pentests prioritized configuration hardening and compliance checks, and why this created a trade-off between breadth and depth.

Includes clear case studies, side-by-side metrics, and a practical verdict on when autonomous testing outperforms traditional pentests, plus how recent improvements have closed the remaining hardening gap.

Built by Aikido Security.