Picking compliance software feels like picking a health insurance plan.
Everything sounds great. Nothing has prices. You need a PhD to understand the difference between tiers. And somehow you still end up on the phone with Chad from sales.
We thought we'd make it easier.
Below are four honest comparisons: what each tool does well, what it doesn't, and where Loxe fits in. We're not going to trash anyone. The compliance space is small and everyone's building something real.
But if you're an AWS-native startup doing your first SOC 2 and you want your engineer hours back, your policies written, your auditor handed something they can actually verify, and a co-pilot that knows your stack and your situation? Read on.
Prowler
Open-source cloud security scanner.
Battle-tested, beloved by security engineers.
Comp AI
A modern, open-source-first Vanta alternative.
Great product. Broad by design.
Oneleet
Security-first, pentesting bundled.
Auditor-included. Opinionated and premium.
Vanta / Drata / Sprinto
The incumbents. Used by thousands.
Priced for thousands (of dollars).
Your data. Here's what happens to it.
Most compliance tools give you a privacy policy. We'd rather just show you.
Where it lives
Your scan data lives in an isolated, org-scoped Postgres workspace. Nobody else's data is in it. Your reports are stored in S3 with private, authenticated access only. There is no shared bucket, no multi-tenant evidence store, nothing that touches another customer's workspace. Retention is configurable per org.
Delete anytime
Every scan has a delete button. One click wipes all evidence, reports, findings, and logs for that scan immediately. Nothing sits in a queue. Request deletion and everything is gone within 24 hours.
What Gideon actually sees
When you ask Gideon something, it receives an anonymized findings summary for that session: control results, pass/fail status, gap categories. It does not receive your account IDs, your ARNs, or your raw evidence payloads. When the session ends, that context is discarded. Gideon can help you because it knows your compliance posture. It cannot help itself to your infrastructure details because it never had them.
Your access log
Every time your scan data is accessed, by you, a teammate, or anyone with your credentials, it is recorded and visible to you. Open your scan page and look under Access Log. You will see every report download, every Gideon query, every results view, with timestamps.
Your permissions
Org owners invite teammates with specific roles: Admin, Engineer, Auditor, Viewer. An Auditor can read reports and evidence but cannot run scans or touch settings. You set it, you change it, you revoke it.
Full export
Your data is yours to take. Every scan produces a full JSON export: raw evidence, API traces, SHA-256 hashes, control results. You are not locked into our UI.
What we cannot see
We see your compliance posture. We do not see what is inside those resources. Not your S3 object contents, not your database rows, not your application data, not your users.
The IAM role you deploy explicitly denies reading secret values. That is not a policy statement. It is in the CloudFormation template you deploy. Most compliance tools ask you to trust them. We would rather give you something to verify.
- Effect: DenyAction: - secretsmanager:GetSecretValue - kms:Decrypt - ssm:GetParameterResource: '*'