IR-OS vs Cytactic for Cyber Incident Response Management
Cytactic and IR-OS are both pure-play CIRM platforms with AI-assisted coordination across the security, legal, communications, and executive surfaces of a cyber incident. The differences that matter to a buyer are not category-level. They are about pricing transparency, time to first incident, the architecture of the AI agents, and the substrate underneath every decision the room makes. This page walks them through, organized by who is doing the evaluating.
At a glance
Nine capability rows. Honest. The bold cells are where IR-OS provides something Cytactic does not visibly offer on its public surface or charges to scope through enterprise sales.
| Capability | IR-OS | Cytactic |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Pure-play CIRM | Pure-play CIRM |
| Pricing | Public. $199 / $499 / $799 per month. | Not published. Enterprise sales required. |
| Time to first incident | ~5 minutes self-serve signup; default IR plan auto-generated | Sales call, scoping, deployment |
| Defensible record | Cryptographic hash chain on every decision. Independently verifiable. | Audit log. Not externally verifiable on the public product surface. |
| Regulatory clock orchestration | Built-in. SEC Item 1.05 (4 business days), GDPR Article 33 (72 hours), NIS2, DORA, HIPAA, state laws. Auto-tracked from materiality. | Workflow templates. Manual tracking. |
| AI agent architecture | Seven named agents with bounded scope and per-decision traceability: Containment, Comms, Compliance, Insurance, Forensics, Recovery, Lessons. | "Agentic" coordination. Architecture not public. |
| Crisis communications | Top-nav pillar. Stakeholder map, holding statement library, privilege chain, outbound log. | Workflow module. |
| Tabletop to live continuity | Yes. Same plan and chain run drills and live. | Yes. |
| Try before you buy | 7-day free trial. 30-day money-back guarantee. | Sales-led. |
How the buying committee sees this
CIRM purchases are signed off by a committee, not a single buyer. The four roles below are the four signatures on the typical mid-market or upper-mid-market PO. Each tab below answers, for that role: what you need to prove, what Cytactic gives you, what IR-OS gives you that they do not, and the artifact you can show your auditor, regulator, board, or insurer tomorrow.
What you need to prove
That the room responded faster than last time, contained the blast radius, and you can show your work to a regulator, an insurer, and the board with the same artifact.
What Cytactic gives you
A coordination platform with AI assists for cross-functional alignment. Strong on the "what just happened" reconstruction across the security, legal, and executive surfaces.
What IR-OS gives you that they do not
A named, bounded seven-agent operator architecture. Each agent has a documented scope (Containment, Comms, Compliance, Insurance, Forensics, Recovery, Lessons) and every action it takes or recommends lands on the same hash-chained ledger. You can answer "why did we do X at 03:47?" with a signed, verifiable record rather than a screenshot. The Readiness Score trends the program over time so the next board review is a chart, not an anecdote.
What you can show your auditor tomorrow
The chain-of-decisions export, PDF plus JSON, hash-anchored, with per-decision counsel review attestations.
What you need to prove
That privilege survived the incident, the regulator clock was tracked from minute zero, and no off-system Slack thread can be subpoenaed to contradict the official timeline.
What Cytactic gives you
Coordination on the legal and communications axis. Workflow templates for breach response.
What IR-OS gives you that they do not
Structural privilege. Counsel-led channels with scoped capture and no responder-asserted privilege (that is what plaintiffs argue around). Built-in regulatory clock orchestration for SEC Item 1.05, GDPR Article 33, NY DFS 500, NIS2, DORA, HIPAA, and state breach laws. Clocks start when materiality is asserted, not when someone remembers. The privilege chain and the regulatory chain are the same chain, hash-anchored, append-only, third-party verifiable.
What you can show the regulator tomorrow
The 72-hour timeline reconstruction with cryptographic anchors, per-decision attribution, and the privilege assertion for each scoped artifact.
What you need to prove
The program is defensible to the insurer, the board, and (if it comes to it) plaintiffs' counsel. And that the cyber-readiness line on the budget is producing measurable return, not vendor theater.
What Cytactic gives you
Enterprise crisis coordination. Pricing requires a conversation, scoping, and procurement.
What IR-OS gives you that they do not
Published pricing ($199, $499, or $799 per month, no procurement cycle, no implementation services line item). A Readiness Score trended over time so the board sees the program improve, not just react. An insurance-defensibility export that maps every incident decision to your cyber-liability policy's notification, cooperation, and mitigation clauses. The CFO line that does not require a footnote.
What you can put in the board deck
The Readiness trend chart, the last four tabletop after-action reports, the regulatory-clock compliance summary, and the cost line that the CFO can read out loud.
What you need at 3am
To know what to do, in what order, with which document. To not be inventing the playbook while ransomware is encrypting.
What Cytactic gives you
An agentic coordination workflow. Designed for crisis programs that have already been built.
What IR-OS gives you that they do not
A single screen for the room. The next valid action is the primary button. The decision log is the timeline. Handoffs are explicit. The holding-statement library is one click. You are not learning the tool while the incident escalates.
What you do tomorrow
Open IR-OS, declare the incident, take the next action. No training program required. The default IR plan is already there from the five-minute setup; you tune it from inside the live incident as the room learns.
When Cytactic is the better choice
Three scenarios where Cytactic is a better fit than IR-OS. We mean these.
- You are Fortune-100 scale with a 24x7 fusion center already staffed. What you want is a higher-ceiling crisis-simulation program with white-glove deployment and a named customer-success team that flies to you. That is Cytactic's home turf and IR-OS is not trying to be that.
- Your procurement committee resists vendors who publish pricing. Some Fortune-500 procurement orgs treat public pricing as a signal of immaturity (a real and persistent bias). If the only way you can get a CIRM purchase across the finish line is through an enterprise sales motion with a custom MSA, Cytactic fits the procurement shape better.
- You require on-premise or sovereign-cloud deployment for regulatory reasons IR-OS does not yet meet. IR-OS is cloud-hosted on Cloudflare, US-region by default. If your data residency or air-gap requirements are non-negotiable, Cytactic's deployment options may fit and ours do not.
If none of those describes you, the value math tilts hard toward IR-OS. You get most of what Cytactic's platform offers, the differentiators above that it does not, and a price you can see, for less than the cost of a single Fortune-500 procurement cycle.
Frequently asked
Is IR-OS cheaper because it does less?
No. Smaller team, lower overhead, transparent pricing. The operational scope is comparable. Cytactic has been at it longer and has more white-glove services around the product. IR-OS ships the platform with self-serve onboarding so the price reflects the product, not the field organization wrapped around it.
What happens if Cytactic adds hash-chain records?
The chain is not a feature, it is the substrate every action writes to. Bolting a chain onto an existing record store after the fact does not produce the same defensibility property. IR-OS made that architectural decision on day one.
Can I import data from Cytactic into IR-OS?
Yes. Cytactic exports incident records and playbook content as structured data. IR-OS accepts those formats and maps them into incidents, IR plans, and tabletop libraries. The IR-OS team will help on the call if you want a hand.
Who is on the IR-OS Advisory Board?
The IR-OS Advisory Board includes Mark Lynd, who has facilitated 150+ C-suite tabletops across his career in prior CEO, CIO, and CISO roles.
What if I outgrow IR-OS?
Export everything. The hash chain is portable, the JSON is yours, the IR plan is your document. IR-OS is the operating system, not the lock-in.
What is the catch with the published pricing?
No catch. Annual billing saves 17%. No setup fees, no implementation services line item, no procurement cycle. 30-day money-back guarantee. Pricing lives at ir-os.com/#pricing and updates publicly when it changes.
Run an incident in IR-OS today
Five-minute setup. No sales call. The default IR plan is generated automatically; you tune it inside the first live drill.
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