Most free trial users sign up, check their security score, and close the tab. While this is a core part of SecurityScorecard, there are many other ways to make the most out of our platform and get visibility into your cyber risk.
Your free trial comes with more than a letter grade. Used correctly, it gives you an outside-in view of your own attack surface, a live look at up to five of your vendors’ security postures, 20 searches of a global internet-exposure database, and a running log of every issue your team has and hasn’t addressed. This guide walks through each of those features and how to get something useful out of them before your 14-day Premium trial window closes.
Start With Your Score — Then Read What’s Behind It
Your Security Rating is an A through F grade built from external signals across ten risk factors: network security, DNS health, application security, endpoint security, IP reputation, patching cadence, and more. It reflects what an attacker or risk team can observe about your organization without touching your systems.
The grade is the starting point, not the destination. The findings underneath it — specific, observable issues driving your score down — are where the value lives. Each factor score breaks down into actual findings with enough detail for your team to understand what was detected, where it is, and what to do next. Spend time here rather than staring at the letter.
One thing most users miss: SecurityScorecard evaluates your organization from the outside, the same way a vendor security team, a prospective customer, or an attacker would. If you have end-of-life systems on your network, outdated browsers pushing requests from your IP space, or misconfigured DNS records, that information is visible externally and it’s already in your score. Our proprietary scanning infrastructure identifies gaps in your security posture that you might not know about.
Use the Score Planner to Build a Remediation Roadmap
The Score Planner is available to every free account. It lets you model what your score would look like if you addressed specific issues before you actually address them.
Run it before your next internal security review. It shows you which findings, if remediated, would move your score the most. That answer matters because not all vulnerabilities carry equal weight in the scoring model. A team working through a remediation backlog should know whether closing five open ports moves the needle more than updating browser versions across endpoints. The Score Planner answers that question with data rather than guesswork.
It also gives you something concrete to bring to leadership: a specific list of improvements tied directly to a measurable score outcome. That framing resonates with stakeholders who don’t read raw vulnerability reports.
Monitor Up to 5 Vendors During Your 14-Day Premium Trial
During the 14-day Premium trial window, you can monitor up to five companies in addition to your own organization. Use this immediately as it’s the clearest demonstration of what continuous vendor monitoring looks like in practice. This gives you some visibility into your supply chain risk.
Add your most critical vendors first: your cloud infrastructure provider, your payment processor, your largest SaaS tools. Pull their scores. Look at the same ten risk factors across their external posture that you reviewed for your own organization. If their endpoint security factor is degraded, that’s observable evidence of something you won’t find in a questionnaire.
35.5% of all breaches analyzed in SecurityScorecard’s 2025 Global Third-Party Breach Report involved a third-party nexus, up from 29% the year before. Vendor risk doesn’t stay in your vendors’ systems. It reaches yours through every trusted connection between you. Checking five of those connections during your trial gives you a defensible starting point — and shows you directly why five isn’t enough for a mature program.
When the trial ends, continuous monitoring beyond your own organization requires a paid plan. That transition point is worth planning for before the 14 days run out.
Respond to Questionnaires and See What Your Vendors Are Asking
Free accounts can receive and respond to security questionnaires sent through the SecurityScorecard platform. If a customer, partner, or auditor sends you a questionnaire via SecurityScorecard, you can complete and return it directly in the platform without a paid subscription.
This feature is useful in two directions. First, it shows you what a questionnaire workflow looks like when it’s running through the platform rather than through email and spreadsheets. Second, it gives you hands-on experience with what your own vendors go through when you send them questionnaires, which is worth understanding before you decide how to structure your own assessment program.
Creating and sending questionnaires to your vendors requires a Premium plan or above. If that workflow is relevant to your program, the trial period is a good time to evaluate what that process looks like end to end.
Use the Help Center to Get Up to Speed Quickly
The SecurityScorecard Help Center is available to all free users and is worth treating as a companion to the platform rather than a last resort. It covers every feature with documentation, walkthroughs, and context on how our scoring methodology works.
The scoring methodology documentation is particularly valuable for free trial users. Understanding why a specific risk factor is weighted the way it is and what signals feed into it helps you prioritize remediation more effectively than the findings list alone. It also prepares you for conversations with vendors who dispute findings, since you can explain the methodology and evidence behind each issue.
The Help Center also houses the SecurityScorecard Community, where security practitioners share use cases, ask questions, and discuss common implementation challenges. Free accounts have full access.
What the Free Trial Shows You About Your Program
A free trial, when used fully, answers three questions that most security teams don’t have solid answers to: What does my external attack surface actually look like? What are my most critical vendors’ security postures right now? And which issues should I fix first to move the most risk?
The honest answer to all three requires more than a one-time score check. Annual point-in-time assessments create unseen risk 364 days a year. The free trial doesn’t solve that gap on its own, but it shows you the gap exists — and what continuous visibility into it would look like.
Organizations that treat the trial as a starting point for ongoing monitoring, rather than a one-time check, are the ones that carry the most useful data into their upgrade decision. By the time your 14-day Premium trial closes, you should know what five of your vendors look like from the outside, which issues in your own organization matter most, and whether the program you’re building fits inside five vendor slots or needs to scale further.
Start using Threat Intelligence — run your first search directly from your free trial account.
