CIS-CAT Pro Assessor vs Test Kitchen
CIS-CAT Pro Assessor
cisecurity.orgTest Kitchen
kitchen.ciSide by side
| Figure | CIS-CAT Pro Assessor | Test Kitchen |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $200/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 12 | 1 |
| Spec score · Infrastructure Testing Tools | 9.3 (#2) | 8.2 (#7) |
| Company headquarters | CIS lists its headquarters in East Greenbush, New York. | LinkedIn identifies Burlington, Massachusetts as Progress Software headquarters. |
| Company size | LinkedIn lists CIS in the 501–1,000 employee range. | LinkedIn lists Progress Software as a public software-development company with 1,001–5,000 employees and 4,302 discoverable employees. |
| Purpose | CIS-CAT Pro Assessor scans systems and reports their compliance with CIS Benchmarks. | Test Kitchen is a test harness for executing infrastructure code on one or more platforms in isolation. |
| Support | CIS SecureSuite membership includes technical product support, and the product page says dedicated Member Success Managers and enhanced technical support are available. | The documentation directs users to the #test-kitchen channel on Chef Community Slack for assistance from community members. |
| System requirements | The installation guide lists a multicore processor, at least 2 GB RAM, 5 GB free disk space and administrator privileges for local assessments. | The installation guide requires a 64-bit operating system, hardware virtualization enabled, and a processor supporting Intel VT-x or AMD-V. |
| What it does | CIS-CAT Pro Assessor scans local and remote systems against CIS Benchmark configuration recommendations and reports compliance. | Test Kitchen runs infrastructure code against one or more isolated target platforms. |
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.
Test Kitchen
Test Kitchen is a free test harness for running infrastructure code in isolation on one or more platforms. Its workflow uses create, converge, setup, verify, and destroy commands to provision environments and test infrastructure code. Documented drivers cover Amazon EC2, Apache CloudStack, DigitalOcean, Docker through Dokken, Google Cloud Platform, Hetzner Cloud, Vagrant, Azure, Hyper-V, OpenStack, and VMware products. Which drivers are available depends on the driver gems installed in the Ruby environment. Provisioning options include Chef Infra, Cinc Client, Habitat, PowerShell DSC, and shell scripts; listed verification integrations include Cinc Auditor, Chef InSpec, and Serverspec. Community plugins add Ansible, Puppet, and Salt provisioners. Installation is available through RubyGems, system packages, or Cinc Workstation, but Test Kitchen itself does not bundle Cinc or Chef tooling. Requirements include a 64-bit operating system and enabled CPU virtualization. The project uses Apache License 2.0 and points users to Chef Community Slack for community assistance. The documentation notes known issues and no current maintainer for kitchen-docker, recommending kitchen-dokken instead.