Comparison
Cybiq vs free guides vs consultants vs compliance platforms
Reviewed August 2026 against Regulation (EU) 2024/2847, OJ L, 12.12.2024.
There is no single best option here, and which one fits depends on what you need. Free guides are the cheapest way to get oriented. Consultants and law firms are the only option that can take responsibility for a judgment call on an unusual product. Compliance platforms suit organisations tracking many regulations across many teams. Cybiq gives a fast, source-anchored first read on the Cyber Resilience Act specifically: a classification, an obligations list, a timeline and starter documents, built deterministically so every legal claim is checkable against the Official Journal. Cybiq gives orientation and documents, not legal advice, and it does not replace a lawyer when your situation calls for one.
Four options, compared
Every cell below is a factual, neutral description. Where a number is not publicly verifiable without naming a specific provider, it is given as a range with "typically" or left out rather than guessed.
| Criterion | Free guides & blog posts | Consultants & law firms | Compliance platforms | Cybiq |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | General explanations of the Regulation, written for a broad audience, usually without your product's specifics. | A professional judgment tailored to your product, including edge cases a generic tool cannot reason about, and someone who can represent you if a regulator makes contact. | Software that tracks obligations across multiple regulations, typically with workflows, dashboards and integrations aimed at ongoing GRC management rather than a single product's applicability. | A deterministic classification against the Cyber Resilience Act only: verdict, obligations list, regulatory timeline, and a downloadable determination memo. |
| What it costs you (money) | Usually free to read. | Billed hourly or per engagement; typically the largest direct cost of the four, and the one that scales with how unusual your product is. | Typically a recurring subscription rather than a one-time purchase. No specific figure is given here: we could not verify a public price list without naming a provider, and guessing would be worse than saying nothing. | Free applicability check. One-time document packs, see pricing below. No subscription. |
| What it costs you (time) | High: you have to find reliable sources, cross-check them yourself against the primary text, and adapt general advice to your specific product. | Briefing a professional on your product and waiting for their analysis; turnaround is commonly days to weeks depending on the firm and its capacity. | Setup and configuration before first use, then ongoing maintenance to keep the tracked obligations current. | Minutes: six questions, an immediate verdict. |
| How current it stays | Varies a lot. A guide can be written once and never revisited even as dates or guidance change. | Current as of when the advice was given; law changes are not tracked automatically unless you have an ongoing retainer. | Depends on the vendor's update cadence, which varies by platform and is not always visible to the buyer. | The corpus is re-verified weekly against the live Official Journal text (see methodology). |
| Is the reasoning checkable | Depends entirely on whether the author cites the actual legal text; many do not. | Depends on the individual. A good adviser explains their reasoning and cites the law, but you generally cannot audit their internal reasoning process the way you can audit a deterministic tool. | Usually not: the underlying rule set is typically proprietary and not shown to the buyer. | Yes. Every legal claim is anchored to a verbatim Official Journal quote you can read yourself. |
| What it does NOT do | Tell you whether the CRA applies to your specific product, assess your specific documents, or take responsibility for being wrong. | Scale cheaply to many products at once; quality and cost vary by individual and firm. | Reliably explain why a specific answer was given for your product, or replace professional advice for edge cases. | Does not give legal advice, does not represent you before an authority, does not perform a bespoke analysis of an unusual or borderline product, and does not cover anything beyond the Cyber Resilience Act. See CRA vs GDPR, CRA vs NIS2, CRA vs DORA and CRA vs AI Act for the other regimes it does not assess. |
When to use each
Free guides and blog posts
Good for getting oriented: building vocabulary, seeing whether the topic is even relevant to you, and forming questions before you spend money or a professional's time. Not enough on their own to make a compliance decision, because you cannot tell from a guide alone whether it was written carefully or checked against the actual text.
Consultants and law firms
Hire one when the situation is not a routine read of the Regulation. Concrete triggers:
- Your product is unusual or sits in a borderline category that general guidance does not clearly cover.
- Your product looks likely to need a notified body, meaning an Annex III Class II or Annex IV critical route rather than self-assessment.
- You are already facing an enforcement action or contact from a market surveillance authority.
- You need contractual liability allocated between you and a customer or supplier over CRA obligations.
- Anything where being wrong is expensive: the stakes here are real, not theoretical.
“administrative fines of up to EUR 15 000 000 or, if the offender is an undertaking, up to 2,5 % of the its total worldwide annual turnover”
A notified body itself is a separate, designated body, not a law firm, but working out whether you need one is exactly the kind of judgment call a professional is suited for:
“a conformity assessment body designated in accordance with Article 43 and other relevant Union harmonisation legislation”
“Where the product is an important product with digital elements that falls under class II as set out in Annex III, the manufacturer shall demonstrate conformity with the essential cybersecurity requirements set out in Annex I by using any of the following procedures”
Compliance platforms
Good for organisations that already manage many regulations across many products and teams, and need workflow tracking, task assignment and an audit trail at that scale. Overkill if you have one product and one question: is the CRA in scope, and what do I do about it.
Cybiq
Good for a fast, evidence-anchored first read: whether the CRA is even in play, which conformity route looks likely, what the obligations and dates are, and a starting document you can build on. Best used together with a professional once one of the triggers above applies, not instead of one.
What Cybiq is, precisely
Cybiq runs your answers through one deterministic engine: identical inputs always produce identical outputs, with no language model in the legal reasoning path. Every legal claim it shows carries a verbatim quote from the Official Journal, and the whole corpus is re-verified weekly against the live text fetched from the Publications Office CELLAR endpoint. Every document you download is sealed with a SHA-256 hash, so you can prove months later exactly which wording you relied on. The full method, including how the citation audit and verification schedule work, is documented on the methodology page rather than repeated here.
What Cybiq actually covers is the definition the Regulation itself uses:
“a software or hardware product and its remote data processing solutions, including software or hardware components being placed on the market separately”
“This Regulation applies to products with digital elements made available on the market, the intended purpose or reasonably foreseeable use of which includes a direct or indirect logical or physical data connection to a device or network.”
Cybiq is orientation, not legal advice: it does not represent you before an authority, it does not perform a bespoke analysis of an unusual product, and it covers the Cyber Resilience Act only, not the GDPR, NIS2, DORA or the AI Act. No lawyer has reviewed its documents, and nobody certifies them; the engine's honesty comes from anchoring, not from a credential.
Pricing
Cybiq's own pricing, for reference against the cost rows above:
- Verification checklist pack, €49: role-specific verification checklist for importers and distributors, plus their vulnerability-notification duties under Articles 19–20.
- CRA compliance pack, €199: classification memo, vulnerability-handling procedure, SBOM policy, secure-by-default checklist, support-period statement and Annex V documentation index.
- Notified-body readiness pack, €299: everything in the compliance pack plus a conformity-assessment preparation guide and regulatory-watch updates until December 2027.
One-time price, no subscription. Every item cites verbatim Official Journal text, and the SHA-256 hash on each document lets you prove exactly which version you relied on.
Orientation, not legal advice. Cybiq does not represent you before an authority and does not substitute for a lawyer when your situation calls for one; see "when to use each" above. Quoted spans come from Regulation (EU) 2024/2847 as published in the Official Journal and are re-verified against the live text by automated tests.