MISP vs. Recorded Future: What Are The Differences?

Open Source vs. Commercial Closed Source

One of the biggest differences between MISP and Recorded Future is that MISP is an open source threat intelligence platform, whereas Recorded Future is a company offering paid threat intelligence feeds for which the source code is not publicly available.

• MISP is an open source threat intelligence sharing platform.
• Recorded Future offers paid threat intelligence feeds and a threat intelligence portal.

When comparing the threat intelligence functionality offered by MISP and Recorded Future, one strength of MISP is that its platform is open source.

The MISP codebase is constantly being reviewed, hardened and improved by the security community. Public scrutiny means that any vulnerabilities present in MISP are likely to be quickly found and patched before they make it into a public release.

Threat Intel Feeds vs. Threat Intel Platform

Another key difference between MISP and Recorded Future is that MISP is solely a platform for consuming, sharing and organising threat intelligence. MISP does offer some default feeds, but they are public OSINT feeds not produced by the MISP team directly.

In contrast, Recorded Future offers paid threat intelligence feeds produced by the company’s in-house security researchers. These feeds can be ingested using Recorded Future’s MISP integration.

Self-hosted vs. Cloud hosted

MISP can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure, whereas Recorded Future’s threat intelligence portal is hosted SaaS.

However, services like CloudMISP allow you to host MISP in the cloud as a managed service and skip the operational challenges of self-hosting, maintenance and upgrades.

The benefit of self-hosting is control and lower cost. You have full control over your installation and configuration, and won’t pay a premium for someone else to host and maintain your threat intelligence platform for you.

The benefit of cloud-hosting is fast setup, ease of use, and access to ongoing support. If something goes wrong with your self-hosted MISP instance, it’s up to you and your team to fix it. If something goes wrong with a managed service like CloudMISP or Recorded Future’s portal, their teams will fix it for you, giving your team more time to focus on their primary tasks.

Free vs. Paid

One simple difference between MISP and Recorded Future is that MISP is free and open source, whereas Recorded Future’s threat intelligence feeds are paid products.

While MISP being free is a potential cost saving for your SOC, the downside is that you aren’t entitled to support when something goes wrong.

If you’re interested in using MISP but would also like ongoing support, you can use a managed MISP service like CloudMISP.

Support is included with Recorded Future.

The Bottom Line

The main difference between MISP and Recorded Future is that MISP is a Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) whereas Recorded Future is mainly a provider of threat intelligence feeds.

Although both names operate in the cybersecurity space, they do different things, and can even be viewed as complimentary: MISP can be used to ingest threat intelligence feeds provided by Recorded Future.