Grip vs. Obsidian

Grip inventories OAuth grants. Obsidian shows which grants were used, when, by whom, and whether the activity is consistent with the workflow. The inventory tells you what's possible. The activity tells you what's happening. In a head-to-head at a major North American insurer, Grip reported 9,792 accounts on a single app; the customer's security leader said the number “is not true.” Inferred usage doesn't survive contact with a UAR or an audit.

When a third-party integration is compromised, your team needs to know which records were accessed, which identities were affected, and how far the access spread. Grip inventories the integration. Obsidian traces the full blast radius across the SaaS stack with identity-tied activity, ties it to the user or agent who triggered the access, and shows downstream impact. Those aren't the same answers.

Grip's detection logic is anchored in identity and login anomalies, with ITDR 2.0 extending to OAuth grants and browser extensions. That's a narrower signal than the full SaaS attack surface requires. Obsidian protects 2 of the 5 biggest US banks, the world's largest energy company, and the world's largest hospitality provider. Every real attack across that network sharpens the detections running in your environment. You're not just buying a tool. You're buying intelligence earned from the hardest targets in the world.

Grip's architecture creates fidelity gaps that compound under operational pressure: discovery noise that's difficult to filter without an identity integration, account counts that can't be relied on for user access reviews, and apps that aren't always distinguished by tenant. These aren't tuning problems. They're structural to a discovery model anchored in inferred identity, not real activity. One major North American insurer, evaluating Grip against Obsidian, concluded the platform couldn't operationalize their access review program and asked to replace Grip with Obsidian.

Grip's reporting tends to anchor in tabular inventory views. For teams reporting across tenants, ownership models, and executive audiences, that can be difficult to translate into audit evidence or executive risk briefings. Security teams reporting on multi-tenant integration health often find themselves rebuilding the narrative outside the platform.

Grip's model pushes governance design and ongoing tuning onto the customer. A Grip discovery in a large enterprise can surface 2,700+ applications. The customer builds the workflows, ownership model, and policy to operationalize them. Small security teams without a dedicated architect often can't absorb that overhead. Obsidian's deployment model and detection tuning are built for faster time to value, with low-tuning out of the box.

A global insurance brokerage that runs Obsidian for SaaS posture and ITDR evaluated Grip in 2025 and chose to stay with Obsidian. One Grip capability stood out from that evaluation worth flagging directly: Grip's visual workflow can push configuration fixes (like automatically re-enabling MFA or conditional access settings), which Obsidian's action policies currently surface but don't yet auto-execute. Aside from that one workflow capability, their Security Integration Engineer didn't find any other Grip feature compelling and described the broader experience as “a little clunky” with reporting that was “a little rough.” Their conclusion: Obsidian is “running laps around them.”

99.99% uptime over the last 12 months. Regional hosting across the US, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. Granular RBAC scoped per app. Production-safe connectors with bulk-API support. Obsidian connects to your most critical SaaS apps and collects activity data without disrupting them. Learn more about our certifications and attestations.

99.99% uptime over the last 12 months. Regional hosting across the US, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. Granular RBAC scoped per app. Production-safe connectors with bulk-API support. Obsidian connects to your most critical SaaS apps and collects activity data without disrupting them. Learn more about our certifications and attestations.