01 · Product name
Recorded Future
Paid intelligence platform that reads open sources at team scale.
Published by Recorded Future.
In short
Recorded Future is an enterprise threat-intelligence platform. It uses machine learning and natural language processing over open, technical, and dark-web sources, then puts the result in an analyst workbench and an API. It is a paid product sold to teams, not a free CLI. Osint Daily lists it because “what does the expensive tool actually replace?” is a fair directory question.
Product pricing strategy
02
Premium
Recorded Future is a premium product. Budget for a subscription or a quote. If the vendor does not publish a simple price, the number is sales-led. This listing does not invent one.
No. Recorded Future is a paid enterprise platform. Pricing is sales-led. There is not a community edition comparable to Maltego CE or Shodan’s free account.
Utility and features
03
Recorded Future is not a weekend install. It is a subscription platform for organizations that need collection, scoring, and alerting as a program: finished intelligence, technical indicators, and a search across sources most people cannot license one by one. The AI piece is real and specific — models help read and cluster source text — and it is not a chatbot you paste a person’s name into for sport.
- What you are buying. A staffed data platform: collection, models that rank and cluster, analyst modules, and integrations. Not a single binary.
- Where AI shows up. Language models and classifiers over source text, used to surface risk and summarize. An analyst still decides what is reportable.
- Who it is for. Security and intelligence teams with a budget and a reason to look at the same entities every week. Individuals are not the customer.
If your work is a single lookup, VirusTotal, Shodan, or Have I Been Pwned will answer faster and cheaper. If your work is a queue of indicators, a daily brief, and an API into a SIEM, this is the category of tool people buy instead of hiring an extra collector. Pricing is quote-based. There is no honest free tier to document. Maltego still shows up in the same teams as the place a human draws the graph.
- 1
Write the question your team cannot answer with free lookups. Take that, not a feature grid, to a sales conversation.
- 2
Ask which sources and which modules are in the quote. The platform is not one SKU in practice.
- 3
Pilot on indicators you already track so you can see what it adds beyond VirusTotal and Shodan.
- 4
Keep a human on the export. Model-written risk lines still need a citation.
Caveats
04
Recorded Future is a paid intelligence platform. There is no meaningful free tier to ‘try the same thing.’ Pricing is sales-led. Do not invent a number from this page.
The product is ongoing collection and a workbench. A hit is the vendor’s data plus their analysis. Open the underlying evidence the UI lets you open. API access follows the contract, not a blog post. One artifact still belongs in VirusTotal or urlscan.
Screenshots
05
Potential use cases
06
- Your team already tracks a set of entities and wants alerts when the vendor’s collection mentions them or their infrastructure. That is a licensed workflow: the output is alerts and analyst context inside the product, under the contract. Pivot a single hash or URL out to VirusTotal or urlscan when you need a public second view. The platform is not a substitute for those lookups, and it is not evidence by itself.
- You are comparing a renewal against the free tools in this directory. List the questions the team actually asks in a month. Mark which ones VirusTotal, urlscan, Shodan, and an internal tip already answer. The remainder is the case for Recorded Future, and the price is a quote. This listing does not invent it.
- An integration is the job: a SIEM or a TIP should receive indicators through the API the contract includes. The output is those fields in your system, with the vendor as the source. Do not paste a client’s sensitive incident into a module you have not read. Flashpoint is the comparison when the requirement is illicit-community collection rather than this vendor’s breadth.
Hard cases
The case where the first result is easy to over-read.
The alert is the vendor’s correlation
An entity alert fires and the graph looks decisive. Before it becomes a customer report, open the notes and the technical indicators and see which are the vendor’s inference. Re-check a hash or domain in VirusTotal or urlscan. If you cannot explain the edge without saying ‘Recorded Future said so,’ the edge is not ready. Quote the contract’s use terms if the output will be shared outside the team.
Questions
Is Recorded Future free?
No. Recorded Future is a paid enterprise platform. Pricing is sales-led. There is not a community edition comparable to Maltego CE or Shodan’s free account.
Is Recorded Future an OSINT tool?
It consumes open sources along with technical and closed collections, and it is used by OSINT and threat-intel teams. It is a platform, not a single open-source utility.
Citations
07
Titled sources. These public pages are what the quotes on this listing come from.
Product
Recorded Future
https://www.recordedfuture.com/Product
Recorded Future platform
https://www.recordedfuture.com/platform/