Strix and CyberOrbit are not the same purchase.
One finds problems in your pipeline. The other produces evidence from outside your company, for the people who ask for exactly that. Most teams that care about both should run both.
The short version
Strix publishes an open-source AI penetration testing agent. You point it at your own application, it runs in your environment, and it finds things. It is genuinely good at that, and if your question is “what is broken in this codebase” it is a reasonable answer.
That is not the question a security questionnaire asks. It asks whether you have had a third-party penetration test in the last twelve months. A test your own team configured and ran does not answer it, however good the findings are, because the words third party are doing the work.
Side by side
This page compares the open-source Strix agent (github.com/usestrix/strix, Apache-2.0) with a CyberOrbit signed engagement. Strix also publishes a hosted platform and a commercial enterprise tier, which are not compared here.
| Strix (open-source agent) | CyberOrbit (signed engagement) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs the test | You do. The open-source agent runs in your environment, on infrastructure you control. | We do. We scope the engagement and execute it against the scope you declare. |
| Who signs the output | Output you generate yourself. Any sign-off would come from your own team. | A named certified security professional reviews the findings and signs the report. |
| What the artefact is | Findings your own team produced, with a proof-of-concept for each one. | Evidence produced by a party outside your organisation. |
| Where it fits | In the pipeline, on every build. Strix's commercial tiers also produce compliance-oriented reporting. | In the audit file, answering the third-party-test question a security questionnaire asks. |
| Source code | The agent is open source under Apache-2.0. Inspect, modify and self-host it. | Closed. You get the evidence bundle, not the engine. |
Strix details taken from the public github.com/usestrix/strix repository and its documentation, checked August 2026, with sources retained. Products change. If anything here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
The difference that decides it
It is not coverage, and it is not how clever the agents are. It is who is accountable for the result.
When we sign a report, a named certified security professional puts their credential against findings they reviewed. In our experience that signature is what an auditor, a QSA or a procurement team asks for, and it is why the report travels outside your company at all. Self-generated output cannot carry it, no matter which tool produced it, because the person attesting would be the same person being assessed.
Standards are more relaxed here than vendors usually admit. PCI DSS v4.0.1 requirement 11.4.1, for one, expressly permits a qualified internal resource to perform the testing, provided that resource is organisationally independent of the systems being tested. So this is not a claim that self-run testing is worthless. It is narrower and more useful: when the person asking is outside your organisation, they generally want evidence from outside it too.
Which one you actually want
Reach for Strix
- You want findings inside CI, on every pull request.
- You want to read and modify the tooling rather than trust a black box.
- Nobody outside your company has asked you for evidence yet.
- You have engineering time to run it in your pipeline.
Reach for CyberOrbit
- An auditor, customer or investor has asked for a third-party test.
- You need control cross-references and an evidence bundle, not a findings list.
- You need it signed, and you need the signature to mean something.
- You would rather not run the engagement yourself at all.
These are not mutually exclusive, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Running an open-source agent in your pipeline and commissioning an independent signed test are different controls answering different people. A team doing both is in better shape than a team doing either.
See what our report actually contains
Every finding carries the real request, the real response, timings and steps to reproduce, with control cross-references for ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA and GDPR.