HIRO vs. LATACORA

The retained humans vs. the autonomous team.

Latacora pioneered the fractional-CISO model almost a decade ago and built strong reputation with infrastructure-heavy tech companies. Their pitch is long-term partnership: security engineers who embed with you and eventually help you build the function in-house. Hiro runs a different shape — agents backed by on-call engineers, priced as SaaS. Here’s the honest comparison.

 
Hiro
Latacora
Founded
2023
2015
Engagement model
SaaS, published pricing
Long-term retainer, build-and-transition
Monthly cost
$2–6k, month-to-month
Not published; typically $15k+ retainer
Core primitive
Agents do the work, engineer on-call reviews risky changes
Human security engineers embedded with your team
Response time
30 min (Scale tier) / 4h worst case
Hours to days (scheduled touchpoints)
Questionnaires
Answered from live infra in 4h
Human-written; timeline varies
Code review in your IDE
Built-in MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot
Not typically included
Proof layer
YC S23; early-stage
Decade of tenure with infra-heavy tech companies

Choose Hiro if...

  • →You want pricing transparency and month-to-month terms.
  • →You want minutes-to-response, not days.
  • →You’re buying now, not planning a 12-month implementation.
  • →Your team is shipping code in Claude Code / Cursor and wants security in the loop.
  • →You’re building for scale and want the SRE model applied to security.

Choose Latacora if...

  • →You want a decade-old vendor with infrastructure-heavy tech pedigree.
  • →You prefer a long-term embedded-team model over SaaS.
  • →Your goal is explicitly "build a security function in-house over 2–3 years."
  • →You operate in a regulated vertical (financial services, medical devices) where established reputation is a procurement requirement.

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Latacora is a trademark of its respective owner. Comparison reflects our understanding of publicly-available service descriptions as of publication.