SSLBoard as a crt.sh alternative

SSLBoard as a crt.sh alternative

Certificate-transparency Crt.sh Monitoring Alternative

If you’ve been using crt.sh to search Certificate Transparency logs, you know it’s a valuable tool for discovering SSL/TLS certificates. But when it comes to managing certificates at scale, crt.sh has significant limitations. That’s where SSLBoard comes in: a comprehensive Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform that goes far beyond what crt.sh can offer.

What is crt.sh?

crt.sh is a free, web-based tool developed by Sectigo (formerly Comodo CA) that allows users to search Certificate Transparency logs. It’s great for quick certificate lookups by domain name, subdomain enumeration, finding certificates by organization or other identifiers, and ad-hoc certificate discovery.

However, crt.sh is essentially a search engine—it doesn’t help you manage your certificates, only find them.

The Limitations of crt.sh

While crt.sh is useful for occasional searches, it falls short for organizations that need to manage certificates proactively.

crt.sh requires manual searches, meaning you have to remember to check regularly with no way to get notified when new certificates are issued to your domains. It shows you what certificates exist in CT logs, but it can’t tell you which certificates are actually deployed on your servers—a critical gap since a certificate might be issued but never installed, or an old certificate might still be in use. With certificates expiring every 3 months (or even more frequently), you need proactive alerts, but crt.sh doesn’t provide any notification system. For organizations with hundreds or thousands of certificates across multiple domains and CAs, crt.sh offers no way to organize, tag, filter, or manage certificates in one place. While crt.sh works well for individual searches, it’s not designed to handle enterprise-scale certificate management—there’s no API for automation, no bulk operations, and no way to export data for compliance or reporting. Finally, crt.sh doesn’t analyze certificate quality, cipher strength, TLS versions, or identify misconfigurations; it just shows you what exists in the logs.

SSLBoard: The Complete crt.sh Alternative

SSLBoard is a modern, agentless Certificate Lifecycle Management platform that addresses all of crt.sh’s limitations and more.

SSLBoard continuously scans all Certificate Transparency logs, processing approximately 10 million new certificates daily, so you don’t need to remember to search: SSLBoard automatically discovers and indexes certificates for your domains. Unlike crt.sh, SSLBoard doesn’t just show you what’s in CT logs; it also actively scans your servers to verify which certificates are actually deployed and in use, giving you complete visibility into your certificate landscape. SSLBoard sends email, webhook, and calendar notifications when certificates are approaching expiration, so you’ll never be caught off guard by an expired certificate again. You can manage all your certificates in one dashboard, regardless of which CA issued them, with the ability to filter, sort, tag, comment, and organize certificates across all your domains and subdomains. SSLBoard is designed to handle organizations with tens of thousands of certificates, providing fast performance, bulk operations, and comprehensive APIs for automation. It analyzes certificate quality, identifies weak ciphers, checks TLS versions, and flags misconfigurations, while also allowing you to export data to Excel for compliance audits and generate comprehensive reports. SSLBoard identifies when certificates are renewed but not deployed, when different certificates are used on IPv4 vs IPv6, or when old certificates remain on some load balancer nodes. Finally, you can visualize upcoming certificate expirations in a calendar view, with optional ICS calendar integration, and SSLBoard only shows certificates that are actually in use, reducing noise.

When to Use crt.sh vs SSLBoard

Use crt.sh when:

  • You need a quick, one-time certificate lookup
  • You’re researching certificates for a specific domain
  • You have a very small number of certificates and don’t need ongoing management

Use SSLBoard when:

  • You manage multiple domains and subdomains
  • You need continuous monitoring and alerts
  • You want to track which certificates are actually deployed
  • You need to ensure compliance and pass audits
  • You have certificates from multiple CAs
  • You want to prevent outages from expired certificates
  • You need to scale certificate management across your organization

Making the Switch

If you’ve been relying on crt.sh for certificate discovery, SSLBoard offers a natural upgrade path. SSLBoard adds the management, monitoring, and automation features you need to maintain SSL/TLS hygiene at scale.

Ready to move beyond manual certificate searches? Try SSLBoard free for 14 days and see how much easier certificate management can be.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash