We made the switch about six months ago, and I have to say, our team's sentiment around compliance and audit prep has completely changed. Hyperproof felt like driving a tank to the grocery store—powerful, but over-engineered for our actual needs.
Our core issue was the sheer complexity for a mid-sized SaaS company. We needed to manage SOC 2, ISO 27001, and a handful of customer security questionnaires. Hyperproof's structure was rigid, and the cost per control owner added up fast. The automation was nice, but we spent more time managing the tool—fighting its UI, explaining its logic to non-technical team members—than actually improving our posture.
The move to a manually managed Confluence space, structured with page trees and a strict tagging system, was a revelation. We created a master "Control Library" page, then child pages for each framework. We use simple tables to map controls across frameworks, and Jira integration via macros for evidence collection and task tracking. It’s not automated, but that’s the point—it forces a human to think and review.
The biggest win? Clarity and buy-in. Engineers and support leads can actually find what they need without training. The search works. The cost is just Confluence. We miss some automated reminders, but a monthly calendar review works fine. Sometimes the simplest, most transparent system is the one people will actually use.
Curious if anyone else has taken a step back from a dedicated GRC platform for a more "manual" approach? Especially interested in how you handle evidence retention and auditor access in a wiki setup.
I'm a data engineer at a ~100 person fintech, and we handle audit evidence collection for SOC 2 and ISO 27001. We actually tested Hyperproof for a quarter before we settled on a simpler, custom-built tool using Python and Airtable, which is what we run in production now.
* **Realistic pricing and team scaling:** Hyperproof quotes start around $15-20 per control owner per month. For a mid-sized team where 20-30 people might be control owners, that's a real $4-5k annual commitment before you add frameworks. The hidden cost is the time for every new hire to climb the learning curve.
* **Deployment and change management effort:** We spent 6 weeks just getting our controls imported and mapped in Hyperproof. For Confluence, a motivated person with template pages can have a working library live in an afternoon. The ongoing effort shifts from tool administration to actual control review.
* **Where it clearly wins:** Hyperproof's automated evidence collection from AWS, Jira, and GitHub is its killer feature. If you have hundreds of controls and need weekly automated pulls, it's worth the complexity. For us, that was overkill for maybe 50 controls we manually verify anyway.
* **Where it breaks or feels rigid:** The moment you need a custom field or a view the UI doesn't support, you're stuck. We hit a wall trying to create a simple, unified dashboard for all framework statuses without paying for a higher tier. Confluence tables might be manual, but you can make them look any way you need.
I'd recommend sticking with your Confluence setup unless you're growing past ~75 control owners or need automated evidence pulls from more than 2-3 systems. If you could share roughly how many controls you're tracking and whether automated evidence gathering is a pain point, I could make that call cleaner.
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Interesting to hear your team landed on a custom Python/Airtable setup. That automated evidence collection from AWS and GitHub is definitely Hyperproof's big draw, but you're right - if you're manually verifying most controls anyway, that feature goes unused.
We looked at a similar hybrid approach but got stuck on audit time. Doesn't manually linking evidence in Airtable and then having to export/show lineage to auditors become its own chore? How do you handle that review trail?
Still looking for the perfect one
Your "win" around clarity and buy-in is interesting, but I'm skeptical you can measure it. You say engineers can find what they need without training. How many fewer hours are you spending on audit prep now versus when you used Hyperproof? What's the actual time delta per control review?
Forcing a human to think and review sounds noble until you're scaling. That manual process becomes a bottleneck. What happens when you add a third framework or double your team size? The Confluence method relies on perfect discipline, which tends to decay. Hyperproof's rigidity, which you hated, is what enforces that discipline at scale.
martech_auditor