Ciso Assistant Community

Ciso Assistant Community

Open-source GRC platform for risk, audit, compliance and TPRM — self-host free with no user cap.

64/100MonitorFree · from €39 per contributor/mo (billed annually)Freemium

If you have a DevOps-capable team and a compliance mandate to stop renting software, CISO Assistant Community is the most credible free GRC platform on the market — roughly 200 frameworks, automatic OLIR mapping, and a 2026 release cadence (v4.0.2 through v4.0.9 in under a month) that would embarrass paid vendors. You are buying effort instead of a license: you run a server, you patch it, you own the methodology decisions. Teams that would rather not operate infrastructure can move to Pro SaaS at €39 per contributor per month billed annually, which also buys cloud hosting, priority support and 10 GB of dedicated storage. Pick the Community edition if your constraint is budget or data

Verified 4d ago · liveness 64/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/ciso-assistant-community

Best for
  • Security teams consolidating risk, audit and compliance into one self-hosted platform
  • CISOs running multiple frameworks who need automatic mapping and crosswalks
  • Organizations with data-sovereignty or on-premises requirements and DevOps capacity
  • Small and mid-size companies that want GRC without per-seat license costs
Not ideal for
  • Teams with no one to run, upgrade and back up a self-hosted instance
  • Buyers expecting a finished built-in AI Engine today — it is listed as WIP (Q4/2026)
  • Companies wanting white-glove onboarding or 24/7 phone support on the free edition
Visit Website

IntermediateA DevOps-capable team can have CISO Assistant Community running on a server and a first framework imported in an afternoon, with the bulk of the time going to evidence collection rather than installation. Non-technical GRC analysts should plan on days, not hours, and should pair with an engineer. Moving to Pro SaaS or Pro On-premises removes the hosting work but adds procurement andWeb · API · CLIAPI availableVerified 4d ago
Pricing
Free · from €39 per contributor/mo (billed annually)
FreemiumFree tier6 plans6 hidden costs
Learning curve
Intermediate
A DevOps-capable team can have CISO Assistant Community running on a server and a first framework imported in an afternoon, with the bulk of the time going to evidence collection rather than installation. Non-technical GRC analysts should plan on days, not hours, and should pair with an engineer. Moving to Pro SaaS or Pro On-premises removes the hosting work but adds procurement and
Runs on
WebAPICLI
API available · 3 integrations
Who it's for
CISO at a 300-person company holding ISO 27001 and chasing SOC 2Security engineer responsible for automation and reportingGRC analyst running third-party risk and incident work
Live sentiment
Is Ciso Assistant Community actually worth it?

We scan live Reddit threads, YouTube comments, X posts, G2 reviews and other communities — and hand you an honest verdict in under a minute.

  • Honest verdict, not marketing
  • Real pros & cons from real users
  • Attributed quotes with receipts
Run a free scan

3 free scans · no card needed

Skip it if

Skip CISO Assistant Community if nobody on your team can own a self-hosted server — patching, backups and upgrade steps land on you, and the vendor will not run it for you on the free plan.

The 30-second take
Biggest gripe

Going past the 100 readers included in Pro SaaS means paying for additional readers on top of your contributor seats, so a readership-heavy program costs more than the headline seat count suggests.

Price reality

Community is €0 forever, self-hosted with unlimited users — nothing in commercial GRC matches that for a DevOps-capable team. Pro SaaS at €39 per contributor per month billed annually undercuts per-seat managed platforms such as Vanta or Drata for small teams that only pay for the people who write, with 100 readers included free. Pro On-premises at €2,400 per instance per year (1–5 seats, billed annually) is priced for a single-instance mid-size team, and the jump to €8,500 per year for

In short

Ciso Assistant Community — Open-source GRC platform for risk, audit, compliance and TPRM — self-host free with no user cap. Best for Security teams consolidating risk, audit and compliance into one self-hosted platform, CISOs running multiple frameworks who need automatic mapping and crosswalks, Organizations with data-sovereignty or on-premises requirements and DevOps capacity. Free to start; paid plans from €39/mo.

What's new in Ciso Assistant Community

Checked 4 days ago

Across the latest 5 updates: 4 changelog entries and 1 news mention.

ChangelogBlog·7 days agoNewest

CISO Assistant v4.0.8 – v4.0.9: custom score scale, SCF 2026.3, ASD Essential Eight model

v4.0.8 and v4.0.9 add a custom score scale on audits without cloning the framework, the SCF 2026.3 library and an ASD Essential Eight (Nov 2023) model, batched autocomplete loading, and fix a seat-count regression that counted readers.

ChangelogBlog·11 days ago

CISO Assistant v4.0.7: notification centre, risk trajectory view, X-rays

v4.0.7 adds an in-app notification centre, a risk trajectory view that projects a risk assessment forward in time, X-rays across governance and operations that flag active controls with no evidence, and per-user module visibility.

NewsBlog·12 days ago

Engineering: the bug that only lives between 64 and 128 KB

An engineering write-up on a frontend crash triggered only by responses in a 64–128 KB window, tracing an undici assertion and a gunicorn setting that hid the issue during local testing.

ChangelogBlog·17 days ago

CISO Assistant v4.0.5 – v4.0.6: mapping table, command palette, Power BI connector

v4.0.5 adds a mapping table beside the graph, relation graphs on detail pages, a command palette with search and create, workflow steps recording measurements and file scan results, and a Power BI connector upgrade path.

ChangelogBlog·22 days ago

CISO Assistant v4.0.4: dynamic framework behaviour change and container hardening

Patch release with a behaviour change for dynamic frameworks, honest loading states on list views, and a container-hardening step operators must read before upgrading.

What people actually say about Ciso Assistant Community — is it worth it?

We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.

1 mentions across 1 source (Hacker News) · researched Jul 3, 2026.

80% positive20% critical

Average across the 1 source that answered — each source counts once, not each post.

Recurring strengths
  • +Open-source (AGPLv3) with no vendor lock-in.
  • +150+ compliance frameworks with automatic control mapping.
  • +Free community edition with unlimited users.
  • +Active development with regular releases and CRQ addition.
  • +REST API for deep integration and automation.
Recurring frustrations
  • −Self-hosting setup is complex and time-consuming.
  • −Community edition lacks premium features and support.
  • −Limited documentation can slow onboarding for new users.
  • −Framework library may not cover niche or regional regulations.
  • −UI/UX is functional but not as polished as commercial tools.
Patterns worth knowing
Positive reception of open-source, free GRC alternative
Seen on Hacker News
Appreciation for broad framework support and control mapping
Seen on Hacker News
Concerns about self-hosting difficulty and required DevOps skills
Seen on Hacker News
Learning curve
intermediateProductive in ~A few hours to days for initial setup
Hidden costs people mention
  • • Hardware and maintenance costs for self-hosting
  • • Time investment for setup and training

Viability Score

64/100
Monitor

How well maintained and how widely used is Ciso Assistant Community? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this

Recent activity
90
Traction
20
Site health
95
User sentiment
80
What the vendor publishes
60

Last calculated: October 2026

How we score →

Key Features

  • Risk assessment with a methodology-agnostic workflow and UI
  • Audit management with evidence centralization and reuse across campaigns
  • Compliance libraries covering roughly 200 frameworks including ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOC 2, NIS2, DORA, GDPR, CMMC and EBIOS RM
  • SCF 2026.3 library and ASD Essential Eight (Nov 2023) model (v4.0.8–4.0.9)
  • Automatic control mapping and crosswalks based on the NIST OLIR standard
  • Custom score scale on audits without cloning the framework (v4.0.8)
  • In-app notification centre (v4.0.7)
  • Risk trajectory view projecting a risk assessment forward in time (v4.0.7)
  • X-rays across governance and operations flagging active controls with no evidence (v4.0.7)
  • Third-party risk management (TPRM) using audit capabilities on provider compliance
  • Business impact analysis (BIA) linked to assets and action plans
  • GDPR processing capture through the Privacy module
  • Incident tracking with full timeline and evidence capture
  • Threat modeling with TTP catalogs and MITRE ATLAS support
  • Workflow engine with a visual builder, including AI workflow steps (v4.0.2–4.0.3)

About Ciso Assistant Community

FreemiumIntermediateAPI availableWeb · API · CLI

CISO Assistant Community is the free, AGPLv3-licensed edition of intuitem's open-source GRC platform. You deploy it yourself on a local machine or a server — on-premises or cloud — and can migrate between the two later. There is no user cap on the Community plan, which is why both small security teams and large public-sector programs end up here. The pitch is methodology-agnostic breadth: the library ships around 200 frameworks (ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOC 2, PCI DSS, NIS2, DORA, GDPR, HIPAA, CMMC, EBIOS RM, plus an SCF 2026.3 library and an ASD Essential Eight model added in v4.0.8/4.0.9). Automatic control mapping relies on the NIST OLIR standard, so moving between frameworks does not mean rebuilding your control set by hand. Around that core sit the modules practitioners ask for: risk assessment, audit management with evidence centralization and reuse, third-party risk management, business impact analysis, GDPR processing capture through the Privacy module, incident tracking, threat modeling with TTP catalogs and MITRE ATLAS, and a workflow engine with a visual builder that can now include AI steps and steps recording measurements and file scan results. The v4.0.7 release added an in-app notification centre, a risk trajectory view that projects an assessment forward in time, and X-rays that flag active controls with no evidence. The v4.0.5–4.0.6 releases added a mapping table, a command palette with search and create, and a Power BI connector. Community is self-hosted and community-supported; cloud hosting, priority support, storage bundles and premium features sit on the paid Pro tiers. It suits security teams with DevOps capacity who are tired of tracking risk and compliance across scattered spreadsheets.

Behind the Verdict

CISO Assistant Community earns its place in a stack the same way Postgres or Metabase does: it does a large job competently, costs nothing to start, and asks you to run it. The breadth is real — the framework library covers ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOC 2, PCI DSS, NIS2, DORA, GDPR, HIPAA, CMMC and EBIOS RM, and automatic mapping runs on the NIST OLIR standard so crosswalks between them are maintained rather than hand-built. For a CISO juggling three or four frameworks, that is the single feature that saves the most hours. The modules are the other half of the story. Audit management centralizes evidence and reuses it across campaigns; TPRM reuses the same audit machinery on provider compliance; the Privacy module captures GDPR processings and links them to your action plan; business impact analysis ties to assets and actions. Recent releases pushed further: v4.0.7 added X-rays that surface active controls with no evidence and a risk trajectory view that projects a risk assessment forward, v4.0.5–4.0.6 added a command palette and a mapping table, and v4.0.8–4.0.9 added a custom score scale on audits without cloning the framework plus an ASD Essential Eight model. Risk quantification combines scenarios and treatment hypotheses with preset distributions, so you get numbers without a statistics degree. Where it asks for patience: you self-host and self-patch. The v4.0.4 release notes flagged a container-hardening step operators must read before upgrading, and the seed data references a v3.21.2 SCIM account-takeover patch — read security releases before you upgrade, because nobody is doing that for you on the free edition. Integrations documented on the vendor site are Jira, ServiceNow and Power BI; if your stack lives elsewhere, budget for work against the REST API, CLI and toolbox scripts. The AI Engine is still listed as WIP (Q4/2026) at the time of writing, though AI steps have already appeared inside workflows. Compare against Vanta and Drata if you want a managed service and do not mind per-seat pricing; compare against a plain spreadsheet only if your compliance obligation is one framework and one person. For everyone in between, this is the best value in GRC.

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Real-world workflow fit

Concrete scenarios for the personas Ciso Assistant Community actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.

CISO at a 300-person company holding ISO 27001 and chasing SOC 2

Self-hosts CISO Assistant Community on an internal VM, imports the ISO 27001 and SOC 2 libraries, and lets automatic OLIR mapping carry existing controls across so the SOC 2 gap list appears without rebuilding the control set.

Outcome: One control set covering both frameworks, evidence stored once and reused in both audit campaigns, and a gap list the team can work through in the existing Jira queue.

Security engineer responsible for automation and reporting

Uses the REST API, CLI and toolbox scripts to pull compliance results into the company data warehouse, then builds a Power BI connector view so the audit committee sees control status next to ticketing metrics.

Outcome: Compliance reporting runs on a schedule instead of a manual export, and the built-in X-rays flag active controls with no evidence before the auditor does.

GRC analyst running third-party risk and incident work

Runs provider compliance through the TPRM audit capabilities, links business impact analysis results to the affected assets, and captures an incident timeline with evidence in the same platform.

Outcome: Third-party risk, BIA and incident records live in one place, so a regulator question or a board question is answered from a single source rather than three spreadsheets.

Use Cases

Models Under the Hood

Offline-ready local AI models (exact names not specified in sources)

as of 2026-09-25

Limitations

  • The Community edition is self-hosted and managed by you, with community support only — no vendor on call.
  • Cloud hosting, priority support, premium features and storage bundles require the paid Pro SaaS (€39 per contributor per month, billed annually) or Pro On-premises (€2,400 per instance per year, 1–5 seats, billed annually) plans.
  • Documented out-of-the-box integrations are Jira, ServiceNow and Power BI; anything else is work against the REST API.
  • The AI Engine is listed as WIP with a Q4/2026 target, though AI steps already appear inside workflows.
  • Upgrades occasionally require operator action — v4.0.4 flagged a container-hardening step to read before upgrading.
  • The scraped sources do not name the underlying models behind the AI features.

as of 2026-10-04

Verification history

We have re-verified Ciso Assistant Community 8 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.

  1. — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
  2. — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
  3. — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
  4. — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
  5. — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
  6. — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it

Showing the 6 most recent of 8 verification passes.

Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.

12-month cost

Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.

Annual total
—
Contact sales for a quote
Effective monthly
—
—

Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.

Plans compared

For each published Ciso Assistant Community tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.

Community

€0 forever

Ideal for

A single security team or a budget-constrained public-sector program with an engineer who can run a server and does not need vendor support.

What this tier adds

Starting tier: self-hosted on your own machine or server, all essential features, unlimited users, community support, AGPLv3.

Pro SaaS

€39 per contributor/mo (billed annually)

Ideal for

A small security team of roughly 6 or fewer contributors that wants cloud hosting, priority support and a CSM without running infrastructure.

What this tier adds

Adds cloud hosting with updates and backups, priority support, premium features and 10 GB dedicated storage; you pay per contributor with 100 readers included.

Pro On-premises

€2,400 per instance/yr (1–5 seats, billed annually)

Ideal for

A mid-size team with data-sovereignty constraints that must keep the instance in its own environment but wants vendor support and deployment help.

What this tier adds

Keeps your own infrastructure while adding priority support, premium features and deployment assistance, priced per instance for 1–5 seats.

Unlimited Seats SaaS

€8,500/yr

Ideal for

A growing security program that keeps hitting seat math and wants predictable cost with no per-contributor accounting.

What this tier adds

Removes per-seat limits entirely on SaaS with standard compute, and storage can be added via the +100 GB bundle.

SecNumCloud Instance – Unlimited

€14,500/yr

Ideal for

Organizations that need a high level of data sovereignty and SecNumCloud-certified hosting, typically regulated or public-sector buyers.

What this tier adds

Unlimited users on a dedicated node for increased isolation, on SecNumCloud-certified hosting.

Custom

Custom quote

Ideal for

Enterprises with proprietary framework integrations, restructuring needs, or partners wanting GRC coaching and professional services.

What this tier adds

Custom deployment, special customization, proprietary and custom framework integration, GRC coaching and an onboarding partnership program.

Hidden costs & gotchas

What the public pricing page doesn't put in bold. Captured from pricing-page footnotes, contract terms, and recurring complaints.

  • Going past the 100 readers included in Pro SaaS means paying for additional readers on top of your contributor seats, so a readership-heavy program costs more than the headline seat count suggests.
  • The Pro SaaS cloud tier includes 10 GB of dedicated storage; extension packages are priced separately and a +100 GB SaaS storage bundle runs €960 per year when you outgrow it.
  • Pro On-premises covers only 1–5 contributors per instance at €2,400 per year, so a mid-size team that grows past five seats must either step up to the Unlimited Seats SaaS tier at €8,500 per year or pay per instance.
  • Unlimited Seats SaaS at €8,500 per year ships with standard compute resources only — dedicated isolation means moving to the SecNumCloud Unlimited instance at €14,500 per year.
  • Custom framework work, GRC coaching and onboarding are billed as professional services rather than included, even for large accounts.
  • Community support means Discord and docs; anything resembling an SLA or monthly CSM follow-up starts on a paid tier.

Where the pricing makes sense

The company stage and team size where Ciso Assistant Community's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.

Community is €0 forever, self-hosted with unlimited users — nothing in commercial GRC matches that for a DevOps-capable team. Pro SaaS at €39 per contributor per month billed annually undercuts per-seat managed platforms such as Vanta or Drata for small teams that only pay for the people who write, with 100 readers included free. Pro On-premises at €2,400 per instance per year (1–5 seats, billed annually) is priced for a single-instance mid-size team, and the jump to €8,500 per year for

Setup time & first value

How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Ciso Assistant Community — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.

A DevOps-capable team can have CISO Assistant Community running on a server and a first framework imported in an afternoon, with the bulk of the time going to evidence collection rather than installation. Non-technical GRC analysts should plan on days, not hours, and should pair with an engineer. Moving to Pro SaaS or Pro On-premises removes the hosting work but adds procurement and

Switching to or from Ciso Assistant Community

How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.

Migrating in
  • →From spreadsheets: import your existing libraries of threats and security functions plus previous analyses, then map them onto shipped frameworks.
  • →From a per-seat GRC tool: export controls and evidence into the shipped framework libraries and rebuild crosswalks on the NIST OLIR standard instead of hand-maintaining them.
  • →From an on-premises GRC system: deploy Community or Pro On-premises on your own infrastructure and migrate data via the API and CLI.
  • →From a single-framework audit file: load the matching library, then use automatic mapping to extend coverage to NIST CSF, SOC 2 or NIS2 without duplicating controls.
Migrating out
  • ↗To Pro SaaS: keep the same data model and move the instance to intuitem's cloud hosting, which adds updates, backups and 10 GB of dedicated storage.
  • ↗To Pro On-premises: stay on your infrastructure but add priority support, premium features and deployment assistance.
  • ↗To Unlimited Seats SaaS: for programs that outgrow per-seat accounting, at €8,500 per year.
  • ↗To a managed GRC platform (Vanta, Drata and similar): export controls, evidence and results through the REST API or PDF engine and re-map them into the new vendor's framework model.

Integrations

JiraServiceNowPower BI

Resources & Guides

Tutorials & Learning

YouTube returned 6 videos for “Ciso Assistant Community”, and we withheld 6: 6 did not mention Ciso Assistant Community. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about Ciso Assistant Community.

Tools that pair well with Ciso Assistant Community

Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Ciso Assistant Community, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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