SSLBoard as a DigiCert CertCentral alternative
DigiCert CertCentral is what most people picture when they hear “certificate management platform.” It handles issuance, renewal, reissuance, and revocation for DigiCert certificates, with ACME automation, approval workflows, and role-based access for large teams. Over 90% of the Fortune 500 use DigiCert in some form, and CertCentral is the console they manage it from.
But a lot of teams end up looking at CertCentral for a different reason: they want to know what their TLS surface actually looks like. Which hosts exist, what certificates they serve, which protocols and ciphers they accept. For that question, a full certificate lifecycle management platform is the wrong tool. SSLBoard answers it directly.
What is DigiCert CertCentral?
CertCentral is DigiCert’s cloud platform for managing the certificates you buy from DigiCert. It covers more than 20 certificate types, including TLS/SSL, code signing, S/MIME, and document signing, along with EU-specific standards like eIDAS and PSD2. You request certificates, route them through approval workflows, automate renewals via ACME, and track expiration and spend from one dashboard.
The platform is built for enterprise scale. Role-based access control lets different teams request certificates under a shared account, and reporting covers validation status, order history, and upcoming expirations. With public TLS certificate lifetimes shrinking toward 47 days, that renewal automation is the main selling point.
Pricing is subscription-based and quote-driven. There’s no public price list for the platform itself. You talk to sales, negotiate a contract based on certificate volume and features, and commit for a term. Costs scale with the number and type of certificates you manage.
Where CertCentral falls short
None of this is a knock on CertCentral for what it’s built to do. The issues show up when you approach it with the wrong problem.
It’s tied to DigiCert as your CA. CertCentral manages DigiCert certificates. If your infrastructure also uses Let’s Encrypt, AWS-issued certs, or certificates from another CA (and in practice, almost everyone’s does), CertCentral doesn’t see them. Your actual TLS surface is broader than any single CA’s order history.
It manages certificates, not TLS configuration. CertCentral tells you which certificates you’ve ordered and when they expire. It doesn’t perform handshakes against your endpoints to check which protocol versions they accept, which cipher suites they negotiate, whether forward secrecy is in place, or whether your DNS has DNSSEC and CAA records. A perfectly managed certificate can still sit on a server that accepts TLS 1.0.
Enterprise contract required. There’s no way to just check a domain. You need an account, a quote, and in most cases a conversation with sales. If your question is “how does our TLS look right now?”, that’s a lot of process for an answer.
It’s heavy for visibility use cases. Approval workflows, org validation, role management, and spend tracking are useful when you’re issuing hundreds of certificates. They’re overhead when you just want an inventory of your public hosts and a read on their configuration.
How SSLBoard is different
SSLBoard is an on-demand TLS posture report, not a certificate lifecycle platform.
You type a domain and we discover hostnames via Certificate Transparency logs and DNS enumeration, then perform active TLS handshakes against every resolved IP. That means we see every certificate actually deployed on your infrastructure, whatever CA issued it. The report covers certificate health (expiration timelines, issuers, key types and sizes), TLS protocol versions with any endpoint still accepting 1.0 or 1.1 flagged alongside associated CVEs, cipher suites mapped to the hosts that accept them, forward secrecy, HTTP security headers like HSTS, DNSSEC and CAA policy, and post-quantum key exchange support.
The findings roll up into a weighted posture score broken down by category, so you can track improvement over time or compare domains. Every report is shareable via a link, with CSV, Markdown, and JSON exports for audit documentation.
There’s no account, no contract, and no sales call. You pay per scan, and only when you need one.
When to use CertCentral vs. SSLBoard
If you issue and renew a large volume of DigiCert certificates, CertCentral is genuinely the right tool. Lifecycle management, ACME automation, approval workflows, and renewal tracking are its job, and with certificate lifetimes shrinking, automation matters more every year. SSLBoard doesn’t issue or renew anything.
SSLBoard is a better fit when the question is visibility rather than issuance. Before a compliance review, after a migration, when evaluating a vendor, or when someone asks how your TLS looks and you need specifics on protocols, ciphers, and DNS security across every host, regardless of which CA issued the certificates. Plenty of teams use a CLM platform for renewals and SSLBoard to verify what’s actually deployed.
Getting started
Go to sslboard.com, type your domain, and wait a few minutes. Your first scan is always free, with the full report including score, findings, and per-host breakdowns. No account required.