A red team engagement can tell you that your detection failed. It rarely tells you why, or which specific rule needed to fire and did not. That gap is expensive to close after the fact, because the attacking team has usually left by the time the debrief happens, and reconstructing exactly what should have been caught turns into guesswork.
Purple teaming solves that problem by removing the separation. The people attacking and the people defending work the same session, in real time, testing one technique at a time and checking whether the detection actually fired. When it does not, the fix happens on the spot instead of three weeks later in a report nobody reads closely enough to act on.
of cybersecurity teams experienced at least one significant security consequence caused directly by a skills gap in 2025, with 69% reporting multiple incidents, a gap that shows up first and most clearly in detection engineering
ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study, 2025.
Average data breach cost in the United States
IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, 2025.
Tactic categories defined in the MITRE ATT&CK framework, the reference model most purple team exercises use to select and sequence which techniques to test in a given session.
MITRE ATT&CK Framework, current version.
Read together, those figures describe why purple teaming has grown so quickly as its own category rather than staying a footnote to red teaming. Detection failures are expensive, the people needed to fix them are scarce, and the framework needed to organize the work already exists and is widely adopted.
This guide explains what purple teaming actually includes, compares leading U.S. providers, and gives you the questions that separate a real detection engineering practice from a red team firm offering a purple team session as an afterthought.
Three services get compared constantly in this space, and the difference determines what you actually learn from the engagement.
A red teaming engagement pursues a defined objective against a live environment, usually without the defending team knowing in advance, to test whether a realistic attacker would be caught. Surprise is part of the design. The output tells you whether detection worked, but not always which specific control should have caught which specific step.
A purple teaming engagement removes the secrecy on purpose. The attacking side and the defending side work together in the same session, executing one technique at a time, often mapped directly to MITRE ATT&CK, and checking in real time whether the expected detection fired. When it does not, the session pivots immediately into tuning the rule, the log source, or the alert logic, so the fix happens inside the engagement rather than as a follow up project.
Breach and attack simulation (BAS) automates a narrower version of the same idea using software rather than human operators, running a library of known techniques continuously and reporting which ones your controls caught. BAS platforms are a strong complement to human led purple teaming because they can run constantly between engagements, but they generally test known, catalogued techniques rather than the creative technique chaining a skilled human red teamer brings to a live session.
One question separates the three quickly: is the defending team told what is happening as it happens, or only afterward? Purple teaming is disclosed and collaborative throughout. Red teaming is disclosed only at the debrief, if at all during the engagement itself. BAS is not a human engagement at all, it is a continuously running check.
Providers in this space generally take one of four approaches. Matching the approach to what you actually need to improve matters more than comparing methodology language, since most firms cite the same framework.
Framework driven purple team engagement: Structured sessions that work through a defined set of MITRE ATT&CK techniques relevant to the client, testing and tuning detection for each one in sequence. Best suited to organizations that want systematic, prioritized coverage of known technique gaps.
Threat informed purple teaming: Sessions built around the specific tactics of a named threat actor or group known to target the client’s sector, rather than a generic technique list. Best suited to organizations that already know which adversaries are most relevant to them.
Continuous breach and attack simulation platform: Automated, ongoing testing of known techniques against existing controls, usually delivered as software with a dashboard. Best suited to organizations that want constant validation between full purple team sessions, not a replacement for them.
Detection engineering as a service: A managed, ongoing relationship focused specifically on writing, testing, and maintaining detection content over time, often incorporating periodic purple team sessions as one input among several. Best suited to organizations without an internal detection engineering function of their own.
Category: Framework driven and threat informed purple teaming, delivered through Offensive Security + Adversary Simulation alongside detection tuning and program ownership.
Best for: Mid market and regulated organizations that want to systematically close detection gaps and connect the results to a broader security program, including healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, technology, government and defense.
Strengths: Purple team sessions mapped directly to MITRE ATT&CK, sequenced by which techniques matter most for the client’s actual threat profile rather than a generic checklist. Detection tuning happens inside the session itself, with the same team available afterward through managed security operations to keep the new detection content maintained over time. Purple team findings connected to defensive hardening and risk advisory and GRC, so a detection gap becomes a remediation project inside one accountable team rather than a report that sits unread. Operators with backgrounds spanning military, law enforcement and regulated industry, applying real world adversary behavior rather than a purely academic technique list. Available as a standalone engagement or as a structured follow on to an objective based red team exercise, closing gaps a red team engagement surfaced. vCISO leadership available to translate detection findings into a board level roadmap and budget conversation.
Considerations: Delivery is consultative and scoped, which takes longer to start than signing up for a continuous automated platform. Delivery is U.S. centric. Organizations needing purple team coverage embedded across many international security operations centers simultaneously should confirm coverage early. Not a continuous automated breach and attack simulation platform. Organizations wanting ongoing, always on technique validation between full sessions will want a platform provider alongside Echelon’s human led engagements.
Category: Continuous breach and attack simulation platform with purple team workflow built around MITRE ATT&CK.
Best for: Organizations wanting ongoing, automated validation of detection coverage between full scale purple team engagements.
Strengths: Strong, long standing platform for continuous, automated technique testing mapped explicitly to MITRE ATT&CK. Well established in the market with broad integration coverage across common security tools. Useful for tracking detection coverage trends over time, not just at a single point in time. Supports collaborative workflow between offensive and defensive teams inside the platform itself.
Considerations: Automated technique testing trades some depth for scale relative to fully human led purple team sessions. Does not replace human creativity in chaining novel techniques the way a live adversarial operator would. Program ownership and broader remediation support sit outside the platform itself.
Category: Breach and attack simulation platform with a large library of attack techniques and continuous validation.
Best for: Organizations wanting broad, continuous coverage across a large technique library, particularly at enterprise scale.
Strengths: Extensive technique library, frequently updated as new adversary behavior is published. Strong at surfacing control drift over time, catching cases where a previously effective detection silently stops working. Well suited to organizations validating detection across a large, distributed environment. Established enterprise customer base with mature platform tooling.
Considerations: As a platform, does not provide the collaborative, real time human tuning session a live purple team engagement delivers. Best used alongside, not instead of, periodic human led purple team engagements for genuinely novel technique coverage. Governance and compliance documentation is not the platform’s primary focus.
Category: Breach and attack simulation and exposure validation platform with purple team scenario capability.
Best for: Organizations wanting a platform that combines continuous simulation with structured, scenario based purple team exercises.
Strengths: Combines automated breach and attack simulation with more structured, scenario driven purple team exercises inside one platform. Broad coverage across endpoint, email, web and network vectors within simulated scenarios. Reporting designed to support both technical remediation and executive communication. Reasonably fast to deploy relative to standing up a fully custom human led program.
Considerations: Depth on any single vector is generally less than a specialist consultancy would deliver in a focused human led engagement. Value depends on internal capacity to act on the volume of findings a continuous platform can generate. Program level remediation support and governance advisory sit outside the platform.
Category: Adversary simulation specialist with deep focus on identity and Active Directory attack paths, including purple team delivery.
Best for: Organizations with complex Windows and Active Directory environments wanting purple team sessions built around identity based attack paths specifically.
Strengths: Widely recognized specialization in identity attack paths and Active Directory compromise, an area many generalist purple team providers cover only superficially. Strong research output that has shaped how the broader industry understands identity based detection. Purple team sessions built around genuinely difficult, realistic identity attack chains rather than simple, easily detected techniques. Well suited to testing whether a mature SOC actually catches identity based lateral movement specifically.
Considerations: Specialization in identity means less emphasis on other technique categories relative to a full spectrum purple team practice. Governance and compliance advisory is not part of the core offering. Best suited to organizations that already know identity is a priority risk area, rather than those seeking broad first coverage.
Category: Continuous, automated adversary emulation platform built around modern detection engineering workflows.
Best for: Engineering led security teams that want lightweight, continuously running technique validation integrated into existing detection workflows.
Strengths: Modern, engineering friendly platform designed to run continuously with lower operational overhead than legacy breach and attack simulation tools. Strong fit for teams that want technique validation integrated directly into their existing detection engineering process. Faster iteration cycles for adding and testing new techniques relative to older platform architectures. Well suited to security teams comfortable operating tooling themselves rather than relying on a fully managed service.
Considerations: Newer entrant relative to established platforms, with a shorter public track record. Best suited to teams with in house detection engineering capacity to act on the output. Human led, objective based red team and social engineering vectors are outside the platform’s scope.
Based on publicly available service descriptions and market positioning. It reflects how each firm structures its purple team offering, not measured engagement quality, which depends heavily on the specific operators or platform configuration involved.
| Provider | Primary Focus | Human Led Sessions | Continuous Automated Testing | MITRE ATT&CK Mapping | Detection Tuning Support | Program Ownership | Mid Market Fit |
| Echelon Risk + Cyber | Human led + program | Strong | No | Yes | Included | High | 5 stars |
| AttackIQ | BAS platform | Workflow only | Strong | Yes | Limited | Medium | 4 stars |
| SafeBreach | BAS platform | No | Strong | Yes | Limited | Medium | 4 stars |
| Cymulate | BAS + scenarios | Scenario led | Yes | Yes | Limited | Medium | 4 stars |
| SpecterOps | Identity + AD | Strong | No | Yes | Available | Low to medium | 3 stars |
| Prelude Security | Engineering led platform | No | Yes | Yes | Limited | Low to medium | 3 stars |
Organizations are encouraged to conduct their own due diligence and request references before engaging any provider.
These seven questions separate a genuine purple team practice from a platform or a red team firm offering purple teaming as an afterthought.
Is this a live, collaborative session or an automated report?
Ask directly whether your defending team will work alongside the attacking side in real time, or whether the engagement is software running technique checks with a report generated afterward. Both have value, but they answer different questions, and a proposal that blurs the two is worth pressing on specifically.
How are techniques selected and prioritized?
A strong purple team engagement selects techniques based on your actual environment and threat profile, mapped to a framework like MITRE ATT&CK, rather than working through a generic list top to bottom. Ask how the session plan is built and whether it reflects intelligence specific to your sector.
What happens the moment a technique goes undetected?
This is the core value of purple teaming and the question that separates it from red teaming. The session should pivot immediately into diagnosing why the detection did not fire and tuning it on the spot, not simply logging the miss for a report delivered weeks later.
Who owns the detection content afterward?
A purple team session produces new or improved detection rules. Ask explicitly who is responsible for maintaining that content once the engagement ends, since detection quality decays as your environment changes, and a rule tuned once during a session can go stale within months without an owner.
Does this complement or replace our existing controls?
If you already run a breach and attack simulation platform, ask how a human led purple team engagement fits alongside it rather than duplicating it. The two are genuinely complementary when scoped correctly and a waste of budget when they overlap without coordination.
What is the operator or engineer background on this specific engagement?
Purple team quality depends heavily on the people assigned, both the attacking operator and the detection engineer working alongside them. Ask who specifically will run your session and whether their background matches your environment, particularly if your risk concentrates in a specialized area like identity or cloud.
Purple teaming services exists because finding a detection gap and closing it are two different skills, and most organizations only have people for the first one. A red team engagement finds the gap. A purple teaming services closes it, in the same session, with the people who own the detection actually watching it happen.
The firms in this guide are all capable, and several will be a better fit than us for a specific need. A continuous platform will validate detection every day rather than periodically. A firm specializing in identity will test Active Directory detection more rigorously than a generalist. Those are genuine strengths and we have marked them where they apply.
What we see go wrong most often is not a bad purple team session. It is a good one whose tuning never gets maintained. A rule fixed in March is untested again in September, the environment has changed, and the same technique that was caught in the session slips through six months later because nobody owned keeping it current.
Whichever firm or platform you choose, decide before the engagement starts who owns detection content afterward. A purple team session without a maintenance owner produces a temporary improvement rather than a durable one. Learn more about our Purple Teaming Services.