CIS-CAT Pro Assessor vs KICS
CIS-CAT Pro Assessor
cisecurity.org
KICS
kics.ioSide by side
| Figure | CIS-CAT Pro Assessor | KICS |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $200/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 12 | 1 |
| Spec score · Infrastructure Testing Tools | 9.3 (#2) | 7.9 (#12) |
| Founded | 2000 | 2006 |
| Headquarters | East Greenbush, New York, United States | Ramat Gan, Israel |
| Purpose | CIS-CAT Pro Assessor scans systems and reports their compliance with CIS Benchmarks. | KICS is an open-source static code analysis solution that finds security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and infrastructure misconfigurations in Infrastructure as Code. |
| Support | CIS SecureSuite membership includes technical product support, and the product page says dedicated Member Success Managers and enhanced technical support are available. | The KICS core team can be contacted at [email protected], and the site points users to GitHub Discussions. |
Plans
CIS-CAT Pro Assessor
- CIS-CAT LiteFree
- CIS SecureSuite End User Membership (up to 99 employees)$2,400 a year
- CIS SecureSuite End User (up to 99 employees)$2,400 a year
- CIS SecureSuite Controls Membership$3,600 a year
- CIS SecureSuite End User (100–499 employees)$5,500 a year
- CIS SecureSuite End User Membership (100–499 employees)$5,500 a year
- CIS SecureSuite End User (500–999 employees)$7,900 a year
- CIS SecureSuite End User Membership (500–999 employees)$7,900 a year
- CIS SecureSuite End User Membership (1,000–4,999 employees)$10,900 a year
- CIS SecureSuite End User Membership (5,000–24,999 employees)$12,800 a year
In their own words
CIS-CAT Pro Assessor
CIS-CAT Pro Assessor has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
KICS
KICS is a free, open-source static analysis solution powered by Checkmarx. It scans Infrastructure as Code for security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and configuration mistakes across Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, Helm, Google Deployment Manager, AWS SAM, Microsoft ARM, Azure Blueprints, OpenAPI, Pulumi, Crossplane, Knative, and Serverless Framework files. Its security queries can be edited, extended, or supplemented with new queries, using OPA Rego policy language. Documented CI and delivery integrations include GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure Pipelines, CircleCI, Bitbucket Pipelines, Terraform Cloud, AWS CodeBuild, pre-commit hooks, and others. A Visual Studio Code extension can scan automatically. KICS runs as a Docker image, from source, or through downloadable Linux, Windows, and macOS releases. Reports can be exported as JSON, SARIF, GitLab SAST, JUnit, HTML, PDF, CycloneDX, ASFF, or CSV. Terraform functions and environment variables are unsupported, and unofficial or custom Terraform modules are not supported.