StrongDM Comply vs JupiterOne security-policy-templates vs Policyseed

Three open-source projects will give you a SOC 2 policy set without paying for a compliance platform. They make different trade-offs on licence, toolchain, output format and how much of the work is automated. This page lays those out side by side, with links to both upstream repositories, so you can pick the one that fits how your team already works.

The three projects in one paragraph each

StrongDM Comply (Apache-2.0) is a Go CLI that scaffolds a compliance repository, renders Markdown policies to PDF with pandoc, and can open Jira, GitHub or GitLab tickets when scheduled procedures come due. The SOC 2 theme includes 27 policies, 5 narratives and 4 procedures.

JupiterOne security-policy-templates (CC BY-SA 4.0) is a large library of 25 policies and about 129 procedure templates for cloud-native organisations, built with the jupiter-policy-builder npm CLI from a JSON configuration and designed to publish into the JupiterOne platform.

Policyseed (Apache-2.0) is a deterministic generator of 22 policies from a structured intake, with conditional content by stack, a browser version that stores nothing, a CLI with a review-date check, and an optional paid Audit Kit that tailors the policy statements and procedures to your named tools and produces Word and spreadsheet files.

Feature comparison

Licence

Comply and Policyseed are Apache-2.0: use, modify, redistribute and sell derivatives with attribution and the licence notice. JupiterOne’s templates are Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. For internal use the difference is academic. It matters if you are a consultancy building a policy product on top of the templates, or if you publish your policies (some companies do, as part of a trust page): derivatives of CC BY-SA content must carry the same licence.

Format and toolchain

Comply’s output is PDF, which is what many auditors expect, but it needs pandoc, and pandoc’s LaTeX dependency is the reason the project recommends Docker on most systems. JupiterOne outputs Markdown and is happiest when the destination is its own platform. Policyseed outputs Markdown from the free tools and DOCX, XLSX and ICS from the Audit Kit; the ZIP is assembled in the browser, so the server never sees the finished documents.

If your team already keeps documentation as Markdown in Git, all three fit. If your auditor wants Word files with tracked changes, Policyseed’s Audit Kit is the only one of the three that produces DOCX directly.

Customisation depth

All three replace a company name. The difference is what happens when your environment differs from the template author’s. Comply and JupiterOne expect you to edit prose. Policyseed’s templates carry conditional blocks keyed to the intake: a company with no identity provider gets different Access Control language from one on Okta; a company with PHI in scope gets additional handling statements in the Data Classification policy; a fully remote company gets a different Physical and Remote Work policy. The Audit Kit goes further and rewrites sections 4 and 5 around the tools you named. You still read every line; the tailoring is a draft for the policy owner, not a substitute for one.

Maintenance

Comply’s last commit was in July 2022. It works, and Apache-2.0 means you can fork it, but expect to own it. JupiterOne’s repository still receives commits. Policyseed’s templates are versioned on GitHub and the CLI’s check command reads the revision history table of each rendered policy and exits non-zero when the last review is older than your stated cadence, which turns policy review into a failing CI job rather than a forgotten calendar entry (example in the docs).

Which one to pick

• Choose Comply if you want procedures to open tickets automatically, you are comfortable with Go and pandoc, and you want PDFs as the primary artifact.
• Choose JupiterOne if you want the widest procedure library, you are a JupiterOne customer or plan to be, and the CC BY-SA terms suit you.
• Choose Policyseed if you want a complete, internally consistent set of 22 policies from a structured intake in minutes, DOCX output for the examination, and a CI check for review dates, with the option of AI tailoring later.

For a broader comparison that includes the vendor lead-magnet templates, see free SOC 2 policy templates compared. For the list of policies and who should own each, see SOC 2 policies for startups. The full Policyseed set is at the template index; pricing for the Audit Kit and the Agency licence is on the pricing page.

Policyseed provides governance policy templates and AI tailoring. It is not legal advice and not a compliance guarantee. Management adopts the policies; the CPA firm performs the SOC 2 examination.