episki vs Thoropass
Bring your own auditor, or buy the audit in the box
Thoropass bundles the platform with its own audit practice — one vendor, one invoice. episki keeps the platform and the auditor separate, runs the program with agents, and publishes what it costs.
Why teams evaluate Thoropass alternatives
Thoropass made a specific bet: put the compliance platform and the audit practice under one roof so a first-time buyer coordinates one vendor instead of two. For a team that has never been through SOC 2, that removes a genuinely painful piece of project management.
The bet has a cost. Bundling couples two decisions that have different lifespans — you might keep a platform for five years and change auditors twice, or the reverse. Quote-only pricing makes the total hard to model, and the reported all-in range is wide. And the platform's roadmap is shaped by the audit practice it serves rather than by how far the software itself can go.
- Auditor independence — bring the firm you trust, change it without re-platforming, and give them scoped access per assessment at no extra cost
- A published price — model three years of platform cost without a sales call
- Work that runs itself — agents draft the policies, narratives, and questionnaire answers, and the program advances between audits
Where episki is different
episki is a platform decision, not a bundled engagement. What it invests in is what happens between audits: agents that draft, checks that evaluate, and evidence that carries its own provenance.
Every integration operation decodes its response, runs its assertions, and writes an explicit verdict against the control. Empty evidence returns inconclusive rather than passing. An unreadable response fails its region. An incomplete sync cannot attest a control. A failing check raises a finding with the offending records attached — and an approved exception, with a recorded approver and an expiry date, can satisfy that check for named records without pretending the underlying condition changed.
For the auditor, the important property is reproducibility: the AI authors deterministic recipes that then run without a model in the loop, so how an artifact was gathered is inspectable rather than asserted.
When Thoropass might still be the better fit
If you want the audit and the software from the same vendor — one contract, one timeline, one point of contact — Thoropass is built precisely for that and does it well. That is especially compelling for a first SOC 2 at a small company with no compliance function and no existing auditor relationship. episki assumes you have, or want, your own auditor.
episki vs Thoropass: feature comparison
See how the platforms compare across the capabilities that matter most to security and compliance teams.
| Feature | episki | Thoropass |
|---|---|---|
| Approach | Autonomous GRC — agents run the program; humans approve the work that matters | Compliance platform bundled with an in-house audit practice |
| Auditor relationship | Auditor-agnostic — bring the firm you already trust, with scoped guest access per assessment and an auditor portal with Q&A threads | Audit delivered by Thoropass's own practice, which is the core of the value proposition |
| Pricing model | Published — platform $750/mo (or $7,500/yr) + optional modules; unlimited users and frameworks, with AI tokens the only metered resource | Quote-only and bundled; commonly reported at $20,000–$30,000 all-in for a sub-50-employee SaaS pursuing SOC 2, and $35,000–$50,000 for mid-market multi-framework |
| What the price includes | Platform only — you pay your auditor separately and can change firms without changing platforms | Platform and audit together, which simplifies procurement but couples the two decisions |
| AI capabilities | Agents draft policies, answer questionnaires, map controls, and recommend tasks — and the AI authors deterministic recipes that then run without a model in the loop, so output is reproducible | Automation focused on audit readiness and evidence workflows |
| Controls & evidence | Continuous controls that produce a verdict — every check evaluates the evidence it collected and writes pass, fail, or inconclusive, and a failing check raises a finding. Empty or undecodable evidence attests nothing | Automated evidence collection feeding the bundled audit process |
| AI governance | AI Governance module — agent and use-case registry with allowlists and safety floors, AI risk treatments wired to controls and evidence, and ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF, and the EU AI Act mapped | Framework coverage focused on the audited standards it delivers |
| Framework coverage | 34+ pre-built frameworks plus custom, all unlimited, with crosswalk derivation through the SCF hub | Core audited frameworks — SOC 1 and 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and more — priced by how many you adopt |
| Integrations | AWS (multi-account, multi-region, and Organizations), GitHub, Google, Microsoft, Slack, Teams, Jira, Linear, Supabase, Vercel, and Netlify — each writing evaluated control coverage, not just collected files | Integrations for automated evidence collection |
| Exception handling | An approved exception can satisfy a specific check for named records — it requires a recorded approver and justification, and it expires, so the control returns to failing on its own when the acceptance lapses | Findings resolved through the audit workflow |
| Scope & boundaries | Programs report against individual boundaries, with scope rules on cloud account, region, resource, and tag | Scope defined per audit engagement |
| Remediation workflow | Bi-directional Jira, Linear, and GitHub sync — remediation lives in the tracker your engineers already use, and status flows back | In-platform task tracking tied to audit readiness |
| API & agent access | REST API, a published entity-ontology catalog with a drift checksum, and a hosted MCP server whose writes route through the same API as the UI | REST API |
Why teams switch from Thoropass to episki
Real differences that affect how fast your team ships audits and proves trust.
Keep the auditor decision separate from the software decision
Bundling the audit is convenient right up until you want to change one without the other. episki is auditor-agnostic — your firm gets scoped guest access per assessment, and switching firms does not mean migrating platforms.
- Auditor and assessor guest access scoped per assessment, included in the platform price
- An auditor portal with Q&A threads, so requests and responses stay attached to the evidence
- Change audit firms, or run different firms for different frameworks, without re-platforming
A verdict you can defend, not just a green check
Most platforms tell you evidence was collected. episki tells you what it proved. Every check evaluates its own evidence and writes pass, fail, or inconclusive — and the ways a check can quietly pass without proving anything are closed by design.
- Empty, undecodable, or partially collected evidence returns inconclusive and attests nothing
- A failing check raises a finding with the offending records attached, not a dashboard tile
- An approved exception can satisfy a check for named records — but it needs an approver and it expires
A published price you can model
Thoropass is quote-only, and the reported all-in range spans a wide band depending on frameworks and headcount. episki publishes the platform price, module prices, token allowances, and partner discounts.
- $750/mo (or $7,500/yr) for the platform, with unlimited users and frameworks
- No onboarding fee, no implementation fee, no per-seat or per-framework charge
- Annual prepay gives two months free; Operator Partner discounts for vCISO and MSP firms
episki vs Thoropass — frequently asked questions
It depends on whether you want the audit bundled. Thoropass's core proposition is that the software and the auditor come from the same vendor. episki deliberately separates them — you bring your own audit firm, get scoped guest access and an auditor portal included, and pay a published platform price. If you already have an auditor you trust, the bundle is a cost you do not need.
Thoropass is quote-only and bundles the audit, so the numbers are not directly comparable. Reported all-in figures land around $20,000–$30,000 for a sub-50-employee SaaS doing SOC 2, and $35,000–$50,000 for mid-market multi-framework programs. episki's platform is $7,500/yr with unlimited users and frameworks, and you pay your auditor separately — so the honest comparison is episki plus your audit quote against Thoropass's bundled quote.
Yes, and it is designed for it. Auditors and assessors get guest access scoped per assessment, included in the platform price rather than billed per seat. The auditor portal carries Q&A threads so requests and responses stay attached to the evidence they concern, and every artifact carries provenance showing how it was gathered.
Reproducibility. The AI authors deterministic recipes — plain, inspectable procedures — that then run without a model in the loop, so an auditor can read exactly how each artifact was gathered rather than trusting a one-off generation. Every check writes an explicit pass, fail, or inconclusive verdict, and an approved exception records its approver, its justification, and its expiry.
When you want one vendor, one invoice, and one project plan covering both the software and the audit — especially for a first SOC 2 where coordinating a separate audit firm is real overhead you would rather not carry. That bundle is a genuine simplification, and it is what Thoropass is built to deliver.
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