Best vCISO Platforms in 2026: A Practitioner’s Comparison Guide for MSPs and MSSPs
The vCISO market has undergone a structural shift over the past two years. What was once a cottage industry — individual consultants selling time against spreadsheets and Word templates — has matured into a defined software category with a growing number of purpose-built platforms competing for a rapidly expanding market. Cybersecurity talent shortages are forcing SMBs to look outside for security leadership. Regulatory requirements are multiplying faster than most in-house teams can track. And AI is beginning to reshape what “GRC delivery” even means operationally.
For MSPs and MSSPs that have added vCISO services — or are evaluating whether to do so — the platform choice is one of the most consequential infrastructure decisions you will make. Choose wrong, and you are locked into a delivery model that does not scale: single-client architectures that require manual duplication of effort across your portfolio, seat-based pricing that penalises you every time you grow, and no white-label capability that means your clients see a third-party brand, not yours.
This guide cuts through the vendor marketing to evaluate the six platforms that practitioners are actually evaluating in 2026: GetCybr, Cynomi, Vanta, Drata, RealCISO, and Risk Cognizance. The evaluation is conducted through a single lens — what works for an MSP or MSSP managing multiple client organisations — because that is the use case most of the existing comparison content ignores.
What follows is not a feature checklist. It is a practitioner-grade comparison covering the architectural decisions, pricing models, and operational realities that determine whether a platform can actually support a scalable vCISO practice.
How We Evaluated These Platforms
Every platform in this guide was evaluated against eight criteria. These were not chosen arbitrarily — they reflect the questions that come up repeatedly when MSPs try to operationalise vCISO delivery at scale.
1. Multi-client architecture. Is the platform designed to manage multiple client organisations from a single pane of glass, with tenant isolation, portfolio-level dashboards, and client-specific configurations? Or was it built for a single company’s internal compliance team and retrofitted for service providers?
2. Pricing model. Does the pricing align with how MSPs generate revenue? Per-client models allow you to price predictably and margin consistently. Seat-based models create misaligned incentives — you pay more simply because your clients have more employees, regardless of how much work you are actually doing.
3. Framework coverage. How many compliance frameworks are supported out of the box? Can you build custom frameworks for clients with bespoke requirements? The breadth here directly affects your addressable client base.
4. White-label capabilities. Can MSPs deliver the platform and its outputs — reports, dashboards, client portals — under their own brand? White-label is not a luxury feature; it is the difference between building your brand equity and building the software vendor’s.
5. Self-hosted option. Can the platform be deployed on your own infrastructure? This matters increasingly for clients with data residency requirements, government contractors with regulatory restrictions, and MSPs that have made infrastructure independence a selling point.
6. Risk quantification. Does the platform go beyond checkbox compliance to quantify risk in financial terms? FAIR-based quantification connects security posture to business impact in language that boards and executives actually understand.
7. TPRM. Is third-party risk management built into the platform, or is it a separate product at additional cost? As supply chain risk becomes a standard part of vCISO engagements, platforms that bolt this on as an add-on are creating hidden cost surprises for service providers.
8. AI capabilities. How is AI integrated into the platform’s core workflows — and does it add genuine operational leverage, or is it a surface-level feature?
GetCybr — The MSP-Native Disruptor
GetCybr is the platform most likely to be unfamiliar to practitioners who have been evaluating the market for more than a year. It launched into a crowded field with a specific and deliberate architectural bet: that the dominant players were all built for single-company use, and that the MSP and MSSP market was systematically underserved.
That bet looks increasingly well-placed.
Architecture. GetCybr is multi-tenant from day one. Every client organisation is a fully isolated tenant — separate data, separate configurations, separate compliance postures — managed through a unified portfolio dashboard. There is no concept of “one account per client” requiring you to log in and out to switch context. The entire portfolio is visible from a single interface: risk scores, compliance status, framework progress, and open action items across every client simultaneously. This is not a feature added to a single-company tool. It is the architectural foundation the platform was built on.
Pricing. vCISO pricing at GetCybr is per-client, per-year. The operational implication is significant: your platform costs scale with the number of clients you onboard, which is exactly how your revenue scales. There is no seat-counting, no per-user overhead calculation, no pricing that punishes you for working with larger organisations. If you are running a 20-client vCISO practice and you add a 21st client, your costs and your revenue increase proportionally.
Frameworks. GetCybr ships with 50+ pre-built compliance frameworks, covering the standards that come up most frequently in MSP client engagements: SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST CSF, NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, CMMC, CIS Controls, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, and a substantial number of sector-specific and regional standards. Enterprise and Self-Hosted tiers add unlimited custom framework creation — relevant for MSPs serving clients with bespoke regulatory requirements or clients operating in jurisdictions with frameworks not yet in the pre-built library.
White-label. Report-level white-labelling is available on all tiers. Full platform white-labelling — custom domain, custom branding throughout the client-facing portal — is available on the Enterprise tier. For MSPs that have invested in brand building, delivering a compliance portal that displays your brand rather than GetCybr’s is the difference between building client loyalty and building someone else’s brand awareness.
Self-hosted. GetCybr is currently the only vCISO platform in this market offering a self-hosted deployment tier with Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) LLM support. MSPs can deploy on their own cloud infrastructure — AWS, Azure, GCP, or private cloud — and connect to the LLM provider of their choice: OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, or locally hosted models. This addresses a genuine and growing market need: government contractors, healthcare-adjacent clients, and clients in jurisdictions with strict data residency requirements cannot send compliance data to a multi-tenant SaaS platform. Self-hosted changes the conversation entirely for those client types.
Risk quantification. GetCybr uses FAIR-based financial-impact quantification, translating security posture assessments and control gaps into projected financial exposure ranges. This is the output that boards and CFOs actually engage with — not a maturity score, not a traffic light RAG status, but a dollar-denominated range of expected loss that contextualises why a remediation investment makes financial sense.
TPRM. Third-party risk management is included on all tiers without additional cost. For MSPs positioning TPRM as a service line, the ability to deliver vendor assessments and supply chain risk monitoring through the same platform — on the same per-client pricing — is a meaningful commercial advantage over platforms that charge separately.
AI. GetCybr’s AI is integrated into core assessment workflows rather than applied as a reporting layer. Gap analysis, compliance mapping, and risk scoring are automated through the native AI engine. On the Self-Hosted tier, MSPs connect their own LLM — meaning sensitive compliance data stays within their infrastructure boundary.
Best for. MSPs and MSSPs managing five to fifty-plus client organisations who need a scalable delivery platform. If you are billing vCISO services and you want a platform that was designed for the way you actually work, GetCybr is the most architecturally coherent choice in the market.
Explore the MSSP vCISO platform or review the full GRC platform capabilities.
Cynomi — AI-Driven Security Plans for Individual Clients
Cynomi has built genuine momentum in the market with a clear value proposition: AI-generated security plans and assessment reports that reduce the time a consultant spends producing deliverables for each client engagement. If you are running assessments manually — questionnaires, gap analysis, report writing — Cynomi can meaningfully compress that cycle.
The challenge for MSPs comes when you try to manage a portfolio of clients through the platform rather than a single engagement at a time.
Cynomi’s architecture is session-centric rather than portfolio-centric. Working with one client means entering a single-client context; switching to the next client means a fresh session. There is no portfolio-level dashboard that shows compliance status, risk scores, and open items across all of your clients simultaneously. For a consultant managing three to five clients, this is workable. For an MSP with fifteen, twenty-five, or fifty clients, it creates a daily operational burden: you are essentially doing account management by logging in and out rather than by monitoring a live portfolio view.
The pricing model is seat-based, which creates a cost structure that does not map naturally onto the per-client billing model most MSPs use. As your consultancy team grows, your Cynomi costs grow — independently of how many clients you are serving or what revenue those seats are generating.
Framework coverage is more limited than GetCybr’s 50+ library, which constrains the client types you can serve through the platform. White-label capabilities are present but limited relative to what full-platform white-labelling on Enterprise tiers offers. There is no self-hosted tier.
Best for. Individual security consultants or small practices managing a handful of clients, particularly where rapid assessment and report generation is the primary use case. See how GetCybr compares in our detailed Cynomi comparison.
Vanta — Single-Company Compliance Automation
Vanta occupies a well-defined position in the compliance automation market and executes it well. If your goal is automating evidence collection for a single company’s SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, Vanta delivers a polished experience with strong integrations into the tooling that most SaaS companies already use — AWS, GitHub, Google Workspace, Okta, and others.
The limitation for MSPs is architectural rather than a matter of feature depth.
Vanta was built for a company’s internal compliance team. The product assumes a single organisation, a single set of controls, and a single audit scope. There is no multi-tenant portfolio dashboard. Managing fifteen clients through Vanta means maintaining fifteen separate accounts, logging in and out, reconciling status manually, and billing for fifteen separate seat subscriptions. This is not a workaround — it is a consequence of the platform’s design intent.
The seat-based pricing model amplifies this challenge. Because Vanta prices per user, your costs are determined by how many people across your clients have access to the platform, not by how many clients you are managing or what revenue those clients generate. For an MSP with a small team managing several large-employee-count clients, this creates a pricing structure that is actively punitive.
White-label is limited. There is no self-hosted tier. TPRM is available but as an add-on at additional cost.
Vanta has invested in its integration ecosystem and evidence automation depth. For a company managing its own compliance programme, that investment is well-placed. For a service provider delivering compliance to others, the architectural fit is fundamentally misaligned.
Best for. Companies managing their own internal SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA compliance programme — not service providers. For a detailed breakdown of the differences, see our GetCybr vs Vanta comparison.
Drata — Evidence Automation with Seat-Based Pricing
Drata and Vanta occupy similar market territory and are frequently evaluated side by side. Drata has built a strong reputation for continuous monitoring — rather than a point-in-time evidence collection process, it maintains ongoing visibility into control status across integrated systems and alerts when controls fall out of compliance.
The integration ecosystem is broad, and the continuous monitoring approach resonates with engineering-led compliance teams that want real-time feedback on their control posture rather than quarterly assessments.
For MSPs, the evaluation quickly hits the same structural barriers as Vanta. Drata is a single-company tool. Multi-tenant management across a client portfolio is not a supported workflow — it requires separate accounts, manual aggregation, and a workflow that does not scale beyond a small number of clients before it becomes operationally burdensome.
The seat-based pricing model creates the same misalignment described above. Each client’s account is priced on the number of users — a metric that has no direct relationship with the MSP’s revenue per client. As you grow your practice, your Drata costs grow in a way that does not correlate with the value you are delivering.
White-label is limited. No self-hosted tier is available. TPRM is partially available but not included as a standard feature on all plans.
Drata’s continuous monitoring and evidence automation depth make it a genuinely strong product for the use case it was designed for. That use case is an internal compliance team, not a service provider.
Best for. Mid-market companies automating their own compliance evidence collection, particularly engineering-led teams that want continuous monitoring rather than periodic audits. Review our GetCybr vs Drata comparison for a full breakdown.
RealCISO — Per-Engagement vCISO Workflow
RealCISO approaches the vCISO software market from a workflow management perspective. The platform is structured around discrete vCISO engagements — defining scope, running assessments, producing deliverables, and managing a project lifecycle from initiation to close.
For individual vCISO consultants who run structured, defined-scope engagements with each client, RealCISO provides a reasonable framework for managing those deliverables. The compliance-focused approach means clients receive structured outputs that map to recognised frameworks.
The limitations appear at the portfolio layer. RealCISO is engagement-centric rather than portfolio-centric: managing multiple active client engagements simultaneously does not surface through a unified dashboard showing current status across all clients. Portfolio management — the ability to monitor risk posture, compliance progress, and open actions across ten or twenty clients from a single view — is not the platform’s design focus.
AI automation is more limited than in platforms that have invested more heavily in AI-driven assessment and gap analysis workflows. Self-hosted deployment is not available. White-label capabilities are limited in scope compared to platforms that offer full client-portal branding.
Best for. Individual vCISO consultants managing a small number of structured engagements where the engagement lifecycle management and deliverable templates are the primary value. Our GetCybr vs RealCISO comparison covers the differences in depth.
Risk Cognizance — Enterprise GRC Platform
Risk Cognizance brings a different profile to this comparison. It is an enterprise GRC platform with genuine breadth: AI-powered risk and compliance analysis, attack surface monitoring, vulnerability management integration, and broad GRC capabilities that span multiple domains. For an enterprise organisation trying to consolidate its internal GRC programme onto a single platform, Risk Cognizance offers meaningful capabilities.
The challenge for MSPs is that the platform is designed for enterprises managing their own risk — not service providers delivering GRC as a service to others.
The architecture reflects enterprise assumptions: a single organisational boundary, a compliance programme scoped to one entity, and reporting oriented toward internal stakeholders and audit committees. Multi-client portfolio management for service providers is not the platform’s design intent. The licensing model is enterprise-tier, meaning the cost structure aligns with large organisations rather than the per-client economics of an MSP practice.
White-label for service providers is not available. The deployment model is cloud-based, without a self-hosted tier for MSPs that require infrastructure independence.
Risk Cognizance has invested meaningfully in AI integration across its GRC workflows — attack surface analysis, risk scoring, and compliance gap detection all have AI components. For an enterprise use case, that investment is relevant. For an MSP evaluating whether to build a vCISO practice on the platform, the architectural and commercial misalignment outweighs the feature depth.
Best for. Enterprise organisations managing their own internal GRC programme at scale, particularly those wanting an integrated platform that spans risk, compliance, and attack surface monitoring. See our GetCybr vs Risk Cognizance comparison.
Comparison Summary Table
| Platform | Multi-Client Architecture | Pricing Model | Frameworks | White-Label | Self-Hosted | Risk Quantification | TPRM Included |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GetCybr | Multi-tenant (all tiers) | Per-client/year | 50+ (unlimited custom on Enterprise) | Full white-label on Enterprise | Yes (BYOM) | FAIR-based financial impact | Yes, all tiers |
| Cynomi | Single-client sessions | Seat-based | Limited library | Limited | No | Basic scoring | Limited |
| Vanta | Single-company | Seat-based | SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI and others | Limited | No | Limited | Add-on |
| Drata | Single-company | Seat-based | Wide coverage (SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA, PCI and others) | Limited | No | Limited | Partial |
| RealCISO | Per-engagement | Per-engagement | Core frameworks | Limited | No | Basic | Limited |
| Risk Cognizance | Enterprise single-org | Enterprise license | Multiple domains | No | Cloud-based | AI-powered scoring | Available |
How to Choose the Right vCISO Platform for Your MSP
The decision criteria simplify considerably once you are clear about the use case.
If you are managing five or more client organisations, multi-tenant architecture is not a preference — it is a requirement. A platform that requires separate accounts per client means your operational overhead scales linearly with your client count. At fifteen or twenty clients, that overhead becomes your competitive disadvantage against MSPs that have automated it away.
If you bill clients per engagement or per client, seat-based pricing creates a cost structure that actively works against you. You want a pricing model where your costs and your revenue grow in the same direction, for the same reasons.
If data residency or regulatory restriction matters to any of your clients, the self-hosted option is not optional. Government contractors, healthcare-adjacent clients, and clients in jurisdictions with strict data localisation requirements cannot operate on a standard multi-tenant SaaS deployment. Only one platform in this comparison offers a self-hosted tier with BYOM LLM support.
If TPRM is a service line you offer or are building, verify before you sign whether it is included or charged separately. Hidden add-on costs on a per-client basis compound quickly across a portfolio.
If your brand matters, white-label is not cosmetic. Every report, every client portal, and every assessment output that carries a third-party brand is an opportunity you are giving away.
The verdict for MSPs and MSSPs is reasonably clear: for service providers managing multiple client organisations, GetCybr is the only platform in this comparison that was designed from the ground up for multi-client vCISO delivery — with the architecture, pricing model, and deployment flexibility the market has been missing. The other platforms in this guide are strong products for the use cases they were built for. They were not built for yours.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best vCISO platform for MSPs in 2026?
GetCybr is the leading vCISO platform for MSPs in 2026. It is the only platform in the category designed with multi-tenant architecture from day one — meaning every client is a fully isolated tenant managed through a unified portfolio dashboard, without requiring separate accounts or manual context-switching. Per-client pricing aligns directly with how MSPs bill clients, 50+ compliance frameworks cover the breadth of standards that come up in typical MSP engagements, and the self-hosted tier with BYOM LLM support is unique in the market. For service providers managing five or more client organisations, it is the most architecturally coherent platform available.
Which vCISO platform supports self-hosted deployment?
GetCybr is currently the only vCISO platform offering a self-hosted tier with Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) LLM support. MSPs can deploy on their own cloud infrastructure — AWS, Azure, GCP, or private cloud — and connect the LLM provider of their choice: OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, or locally hosted models. This is specifically valuable for MSPs serving government contractors, healthcare-adjacent clients, or clients operating in jurisdictions with strict data residency or data localisation requirements, where sending compliance data to a standard multi-tenant SaaS platform is either prohibited or commercially unacceptable.
What is the difference between a vCISO platform and a GRC tool?
A GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) tool is typically designed to manage a single organisation’s compliance programme — one company, one set of controls, one audit scope. The user is an internal compliance team working on their own organisation’s posture. A vCISO platform like GetCybr is designed for service providers — MSPs and MSSPs — who deliver GRC and security leadership services to multiple client organisations simultaneously. The architectural difference is fundamental: multi-tenant data isolation, portfolio-level dashboards, per-client reporting, white-label capabilities, and a pricing model that aligns with service delivery economics rather than internal headcount. Retrofitting a single-company GRC tool for multi-client service delivery is possible but operationally expensive as client count grows.
Is GetCybr a good alternative to Cynomi for MSPs?
For MSPs managing multiple clients, GetCybr offers significant structural advantages over Cynomi. The architecture is multi-tenant rather than session-centric, meaning you manage your entire client portfolio from a single dashboard rather than switching between individual client contexts. Pricing is per-client rather than seat-based, aligning costs with revenue. Framework coverage is broader at 50+ pre-built frameworks versus Cynomi’s more limited library. Full platform white-label is available on Enterprise tier. And the self-hosted option with BYOM LLM support has no equivalent in Cynomi. Cynomi’s strongest use case is individual consultants or very small practices where rapid AI-generated assessment reports are the primary value driver and portfolio management complexity is low. For practices with five or more clients, GetCybr’s architectural advantages become increasingly material. See our full GetCybr vs Cynomi comparison for a detailed breakdown.
Comparison based on publicly available information as of February 2026. Platform features, pricing, and capabilities may have changed since publication. We recommend verifying current details directly with each vendor before making a purchasing decision.
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