Comp AI review: open-source compliance automation that moves fast

Last updated October 2026

Compliance automation has quietly become table stakes. If you sell software to other businesses, the question is no longer whether you need SOC 2 or ISO 27001, but how quickly and cheaply you can get there. Comp AI is one of the newer entrants in this space, and it has moved remarkably fast since launching in early 2025. With a $34 million Series A closed in September 2026, more than 1,000 reported customers, and an open-source core that anyone can inspect on GitHub, the platform has carved out a position that sits somewhere between scrappy startup tool and serious compliance infrastructure.

The pitch is straightforward. Comp AI uses AI agents to automate the parts of compliance that typically consume weeks of engineering and operations time: writing policies, collecting evidence, monitoring controls, managing vendor risk, and preparing for auditor review. It covers SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR, with FedRAMP support listed for enterprise customers. The company claims teams can reach audit readiness in days rather than quarters, which is ambitious but not unreasonable for organisations with relatively standard cloud stacks.

What makes it interesting, beyond the AI angle, is the open-source model. Roughly 99% of the codebase is published under AGPLv3, which means you can read every integration, every agent, and every control check before you commit. That level of transparency is unusual in the compliance software market, where most platforms are fully proprietary. Whether you care about self-hosting or simply want to verify what the tool is doing on your behalf, the open core gives you that option.

What Comp AI is

The basics

Comp AI is a compliance automation platform built by Bubba AI, Inc., a Miami-based company founded in January 2025 by Lewis Carhart (CEO), Claudio Fuentes (COO), and Mariano Fuentes (CTO). The founding team previously built LeapAI, a workflow automation platform, and that background shows in the product's emphasis on agentic AI and process orchestration. The company raised a $2.6 million pre-seed in July 2025, followed by the $34 million Series A in September 2026 led by Roo Capital and Grand Ventures. Total funding stands at $37.5 million, which gives it a runway that many compliance startups at this stage do not have.

The platform covers the full compliance lifecycle. You connect your infrastructure and business systems, and Comp AI maps your technical stack against the controls required by your chosen framework. AI agents generate policies, collect evidence, run checks, flag gaps, and prepare materials for your auditor. The auditor themselves remains an independent CPA firm; Comp AI does not issue SOC 2 reports or ISO 27001 certificates. What it does is handle the operational work that sits between "we need to be compliant" and "the auditor has everything they need."

Who it's for

The platform is built for software companies and cloud-native organisations. Its integrations lean heavily toward the tools that engineering teams use: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, HR platforms like BambooHR, Rippling, and Deel, and the standard SaaS stack of a modern technology company. The 580-plus integrations listed on the website are impressive in number, though the depth of evidence collection varies by connector. If your stack is conventional, cloud-hosted, and composed of well-known services, Comp AI will likely cover it well. If you run unusual or legacy infrastructure, expect some manual evidence gathering.

The sweet spot appears to be startups and mid-market companies with 20 to 500 employees, particularly those facing their first SOC 2 audit or expanding into ISO 27001. Engineering-led teams that want to inspect what the tool is doing, rather than treating compliance as a black box, will appreciate the open-source core. Larger enterprises with complex regulatory environments and established GRC programmes may find the platform lighter than what they need, though the enterprise tier and recent funding suggest Comp AI is working to move upmarket.

Features

AI-powered policy generation

Writing security policies from scratch is one of the most tedious parts of compliance. Comp AI addresses this with an AI policy editor that generates policies based on your organisation's context: your tech stack, your processes, your risk tolerance, and the framework requirements you need to meet. You describe what you want in plain language, and the editor produces a full policy document. Changes are shown in a diff viewer, and nothing is applied until you review and approve. The output is a starting point that will need customisation, particularly for organisations with specific regulatory requirements or unusual operational models, but it removes the worst of the blank-page problem.

Automated evidence collection

Evidence collection is where compliance platforms earn their keep. Comp AI connects to your infrastructure and business tools to pull evidence automatically: access reviews, configuration checks, policy acknowledgement records, and system screenshots. Connected checks run daily, and the platform stores evidence with timestamps that your auditor can verify. You can also describe a check in plain language, and the system generates a recurring automation that runs daily to verify a particular control and capture the result. This natural-language approach to defining custom checks is one of the more distinctive features in the current market. For controls that cannot be verified through an integration, you still need to upload manual evidence, which is true of every platform in the category.

Continuous monitoring and cloud security

Compliance is not a one-time event, and neither is the monitoring. Comp AI runs daily scans of your cloud infrastructure on AWS, GCP, and Azure, checking configurations against the controls required by your chosen frameworks. When something drifts from the expected state, the platform flags it and, in many cases, drafts a remediation plan. Risk scoring helps you prioritise what to fix first. Vendor risk management is built in, so you can track the security posture of your third-party providers alongside your own controls. This continuous monitoring matters most after your first audit, when the goal shifts from "get certified" to "stay certified."

Device agent and endpoint checks

Employee devices are a common audit stumbling block. Comp AI offers an open-source device agent, a system tray application that runs on macOS 14 and later, Windows 10 and later, and Ubuntu 20.04 and later. It checks four things every hour: disk encryption, antivirus status, password policy compliance, and screen lock timeout. Results report back to the portal automatically. The agent is designed with privacy in mind; according to the documentation, it does not collect personal data, browsing history, or file contents. For organisations that cannot or prefer not to install the agent, Comp AI provides manual evidence guidance covering the same four control areas across all three operating systems.

AI-powered penetration testing

Penetration testing is an unusual inclusion in a compliance platform. Comp AI's AI agents probe your codebase, APIs, and infrastructure for vulnerabilities, then generate reports automatically. This is not a replacement for a thorough, human-led penetration test on a complex application, but it provides a baseline level of security testing that many early-stage companies would otherwise skip entirely. For SOC 2 and ISO 27001 purposes, having automated pentest results on file strengthens your security posture and gives your auditor additional evidence to work with. The company bundles this into the platform fee rather than charging separately, which is a meaningful cost saving if you would otherwise hire an external firm.

Trust centre and auditor workflow

The trust centre is a public-facing page that shows your published policies and verified controls to prospects and customers who want to evaluate your security posture. It updates automatically as your compliance status changes, which means you are not manually maintaining a separate security page. On the auditor side, Comp AI provides a dedicated auditor role with finding and revision workflows, plus a bulk evidence export designed to give your CPA firm everything they need in one package. You can bring your own auditor, which is worth noting because some compliance platforms steer you toward specific audit firms.

Slack-based support and guided workflow

Comp AI pairs its software with human compliance expertise. Each customer gets a dedicated compliance expert available through a 1:1 Slack channel, with a claimed response time of under three minutes. The platform itself provides a guided task list that shows what is complete, what is missing, and what to do next. For teams going through their first audit, this combination of structured guidance and responsive human support is valuable. It bridges the gap between "the software tells you what to do" and "someone who understands compliance helps you do it."

Pricing

How Comp AI structures its plans

Comp AI's pricing has shifted over the course of 2026. Earlier in the year, the company listed public tiers on its website. As of late 2026, some sources report that earlier published tiers have been retired in favour of quote-based pricing for managed plans, while other sources still reference self-serve tiers. The pricing picture is not entirely settled, which is common for a fast-growing company adjusting its go-to-market strategy. What follows reflects the best available information from multiple sources.

Free tier

Comp AI offers a free plan that is permanent, not a time-limited trial. It lets you explore the platform, map your tech stack against SOC 2 controls, and understand the scope of work ahead of you. Automated evidence collection and active compliance management require a paid plan. The free tier is useful for evaluation and for understanding what compliance will involve before you commit money.

Starter and Growth plans

Self-serve pricing, where available, starts at roughly $149 per month for the Starter plan, which covers active work on a single framework, typically SOC 2. The Growth plan, at roughly $299 per month ($3,588 per year), adds multi-framework support for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR, with cross-framework control mapping that lets you satisfy overlapping requirements once rather than separately for each standard. Growth is positioned as the plan most companies choose, and the multi-framework mapping is a genuine time saver for organisations pursuing more than one certification.

Enterprise and managed plans

For larger organisations or those wanting a fully managed experience, Comp AI offers custom-priced enterprise plans. Third-party estimates place scaled enterprise use in the range of $20,000 to $80,000 per year, depending on the number of frameworks, headcount, audit timeline, and scope. Some managed plans reportedly bundle audit and penetration testing costs into the platform fee, which simplifies budgeting but makes it harder to compare prices directly with competitors that charge for software and audit separately. Comp AI advertises a 100% money-back guarantee on audit outcomes, though the exact terms are worth clarifying during the sales process.

Self-hosting

The open-source core can be self-hosted at no licence cost. You need to provide your own PostgreSQL database, email service, background job processing, TLS certificates, and monitoring. Self-hosting removes the subscription fee but introduces operational costs that scale with your team's DevOps capacity. This path suits organisations with strong infrastructure teams and data-sovereignty requirements. It is a poor fit for early-stage teams without dedicated operations staff or for anyone on a tight audit timeline who needs the managed support.

Pros and cons

What works well

The guided workflow and Slack support stand out. For teams going through their first compliance audit, the combination of a structured task list and a responsive human expert reduces the confusion and false starts that plague the process. Having someone available in Slack who understands both the platform and the compliance requirements is more useful than a help centre or ticketing system, particularly when you are working against a deadline.

The open-source core is a genuine differentiator. In a market where most platforms are proprietary and opaque, being able to inspect every integration and every control check on GitHub is meaningful. It builds trust with technical buyers, enables self-hosting for organisations that need it, and provides a level of auditability that closed-source competitors cannot match. The AGPLv3 licence ensures the core remains open even as the company grows.

Speed to readiness is competitive. The company claims teams can reach audit readiness in days, and while that depends heavily on your starting position, the AI-driven policy generation and automated evidence collection do compress timelines significantly. For SOC 2 Type I, where no observation window is required, a well-prepared team with a standard stack can plausibly move from zero to audit-ready in a couple of weeks. Type II still requires a minimum observation period, typically three to twelve months, that no software can shorten.

The pricing is accessible for startups. Starting at $149 per month for a single framework, Comp AI undercuts several established competitors. The free tier provides a genuine evaluation environment rather than a time-pressured trial. For early-stage companies where every dollar matters, the combination of low entry cost and included features makes compliance less financially daunting.

Bundled penetration testing adds value. Most compliance platforms treat pentesting as an external cost. Including AI-powered pentesting in the platform fee means one fewer vendor to manage and one fewer line item in the budget. The results feed directly into your compliance evidence, which simplifies the auditor handoff.

Where it falls short

Pricing transparency is inconsistent. The combination of self-serve tiers, quote-based managed plans, and shifting price structures makes it difficult to budget confidently before speaking to sales. Competitors like Vanta and Drata also have quote-based elements, but Comp AI's pricing has changed enough over its short history that published figures may not reflect current rates. Requesting a detailed quote early in your evaluation is essential.

The integration library, while large, is newer. The 580-plus integrations are impressive in number, but the depth of evidence collection varies. Organisations with non-standard stacks, legacy systems, or uncommon SaaS tools may find that some connectors are shallow or that manual evidence is needed more often than expected. Established competitors with longer histories tend to have deeper integrations for a wider range of tools.

The track record is short. Comp AI launched in 2025 and has been commercially available for less than two years. The G2 review base of roughly 70 reviews is small compared to Vanta's or Drata's hundreds. Early adopters have generally reported positive experiences, but the sample size makes it harder to predict how the platform handles edge cases, complex environments, or scale. The $37.5 million in funding and 1,000 reported customers suggest momentum, but momentum is not the same as a proven long-term track record.

The enterprise edition boundary is not entirely clear. While 99% of the codebase is open source, a commercially licensed enterprise edition exists in a separate directory. Which features sit behind the commercial licence, and how that boundary might shift over time, is not always obvious from the public documentation. If you are evaluating the self-hosted version, clarify exactly which capabilities require the enterprise licence before committing.

Manual evidence is still necessary in places. No compliance platform eliminates manual evidence collection entirely, and Comp AI is no exception. Access reviews, certain HR processes, and controls involving systems without API integrations still require someone to gather and upload evidence by hand. The platform handles this better than a spreadsheet, but the promise of full automation has limits.

SCIM provisioning is not confirmed. For organisations with strict identity lifecycle requirements, the absence of confirmed SCIM support in public materials is a gap worth investigating during evaluation. If automated user provisioning and deprovisioning are critical to your compliance programme, verify this capability before purchasing.

Who Comp AI is best for

Comp AI fits well for engineering-led startups and mid-market software companies that need SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification and want to move quickly without hiring a full-time compliance team. If you run a conventional cloud stack on AWS, GCP, or Azure, use standard HR and business tools, and want a platform that combines AI automation with hands-on human support, Comp AI is worth a serious look. The open-source core appeals to technical buyers who want transparency, and the pricing is competitive enough to work for companies that are still watching their burn rate. Teams facing their first audit will benefit most from the guided workflow and Slack support, and the multi-framework mapping saves real time if you need SOC 2 and ISO 27001 simultaneously.

Who should look elsewhere

Larger enterprises with established GRC programmes may find Comp AI lighter than their needs require. If you have complex regulatory obligations beyond the four supported frameworks, need deep integration with existing enterprise security tools, or require features like advanced identity lifecycle management that are not yet confirmed in the platform, a more established vendor may be safer. Organisations with non-standard or legacy infrastructure should also evaluate carefully, as the integration depth may not cover their stack adequately. If consistent, public pricing is important to your procurement process, the quote-based model for managed plans may be frustrating. And if you are already happy with Vanta, Drata, or another established platform, switching to Comp AI for the sake of novelty is probably not worth the migration effort.

Related comparisons

• Comp AI vs Vanta

• Comp AI vs Drata

• Comp AI vs Secureframe

Frequently asked questions

What frameworks does Comp AI support?

Comp AI supports SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR, with FedRAMP support available for enterprise customers. The Growth plan and above include cross-framework control mapping, so overlapping requirements between frameworks are satisfied once rather than separately.

Is Comp AI open source?

Yes. Roughly 99% of the codebase is published on GitHub under the AGPLv3 licence. A small enterprise edition with commercially licensed features exists alongside the open core. You can inspect, modify, and self-host the AGPLv3 portion without a licence fee.

Can I self-host Comp AI?

You can. The open-source core includes a documented Docker self-hosting route. You will need to provide your own PostgreSQL database, email service, background jobs, TLS certificates, and monitoring. Self-hosting removes the subscription cost but requires a team capable of managing the infrastructure.

How much does Comp AI cost?

Self-serve plans start at approximately $149 per month for a single framework, with the multi-framework Growth plan at roughly $299 per month. Enterprise and managed plans are quote-based, with third-party estimates ranging from $20,000 to $80,000 per year depending on scope. A permanent free tier is available for evaluation.

How quickly can I get audit-ready with Comp AI?

The company claims teams can reach audit readiness in days. Realistically, a well-prepared team with a standard cloud stack can get to a SOC 2 Type I readiness checkpoint in one to three weeks. SOC 2 Type II requires an observation window of three to twelve months, which no software can shorten.

Does Comp AI replace my auditor?

No. Comp AI prepares you for the audit and provides evidence to your auditor, but the SOC 2 report or ISO 27001 certificate is issued by an independent CPA firm or certification body. You can bring your own auditor or work with one of Comp AI's partners.

What integrations does Comp AI support?

Comp AI lists more than 580 integrations, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, BambooHR, Rippling, and Deel. The integration catalogue is publicly available, and the depth of evidence collection varies by connector. If your stack includes uncommon tools, check whether the relevant integrations meet your evidence requirements.

Does Comp AI include penetration testing?

Yes. The platform includes AI-powered penetration testing that examines your codebase, APIs, and infrastructure for vulnerabilities and generates reports automatically. This is bundled into the platform fee rather than charged separately. It provides a useful baseline, though it may not replace a thorough human-led pentest for complex applications.

What does the device agent check?

The device agent checks four things on employee machines: disk encryption, antivirus status, password policy compliance, and screen lock timeout. It runs every hour and reports results to the portal. It is available for macOS 14 and later, Windows 10 and later, and Ubuntu 20.04 and later. It does not collect personal data, browsing history, or file contents.

How does Comp AI compare to Vanta?

Both platforms automate SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance. Comp AI's main structural difference is its open-source core, which allows inspection and self-hosting. Vanta is more established, with a larger integration library and review base. Comp AI tends to be less expensive at the entry level, while Vanta offers a broader feature set for complex enterprise environments.

Is there a free trial?

Comp AI offers a permanent free tier rather than a time-limited trial. The free plan lets you explore the platform and map your stack against SOC 2 controls. Active compliance management and automated evidence collection require a paid plan. For the managed enterprise offering, the buying path starts with a demo rather than a self-serve trial.

What kind of support does Comp AI provide?

Each customer gets a dedicated compliance expert accessible through a 1:1 Slack channel, with a claimed response time of under three minutes. The platform also provides a guided task list that walks you through each step of the compliance process. This combination of software guidance and human expertise is designed for teams that do not have in-house compliance specialists.

How is Comp AI funded?

Comp AI has raised $37.5 million in total: a $2.6 million pre-seed in July 2025 and a $34 million Series A in September 2026, led by Roo Capital and Grand Ventures. The company reports more than 1,000 customers and 15x year-over-year revenue growth. Its headquarters are in Miami, with an office in New York.

Can Comp AI handle multiple frameworks at once?

Yes. The Growth plan ($299 per month) and above support multiple frameworks with cross-framework control mapping. This means a single control that satisfies both SOC 2 and ISO 27001, for example, only needs to be implemented and evidenced once. This saves considerable time for organisations pursuing more than one certification.