“Free internal audit software” is one of the highest-intent phrases this program tracks, and one of the most misleading to search, because the honest answer sits between “no” and “not quite the way you are picturing it.” No internal audit platform on the market publishes a free edition built to run a real function end to end: no free audit universe, no free workpaper sign-off chain, no free issue log with aging and escalation, sustained at no cost with a vendor standing behind it. What does exist is real, but narrower: time-boxed trials on two analytics tools, free tiers buried inside otherwise paid ecosystems, two open-source projects built for a different job than internal audit, and a set of purpose-built free tools this site publishes itself.
This guide separates the two honestly: what is genuinely free and worth using, and what only looks free until a trial ends or a seat count grows. It covers the two real trials, ACL Analytics and Alteryx; the free tiers inside Power BI, KNIME, Python, R and LogicGate; two open-source GRC projects and where each falls short of an audit engagement workflow; this site’s own free tools and templates; a genuinely free stack for a one-person shop; what free actually costs in support, audit trail and security review; and the signals that mean it is time to pay. The site’s audit software for small teams guide picks up exactly where this one stops being enough, and the types of internal audit software guide maps the categories referenced throughout.
How to read this guide
What this guide is for. A straight answer to “is there free internal audit software,” covering the real trials, the free tiers, two open-source projects and this site’s own free tools, each with its actual limits attached, so nothing here gets mistaken for a paid product given away.
Evidence. Research-based: vendor pricing and documentation, the open-source projects’ own project pages, public procurement records, third-party pricing data, and the scorecards and fit-by-situation ratings from this site’s own product reviews, which are themselves research-based. We have not used these products hands-on.
Last verified. 27 September 2026.
In this guide
- Why there is no free audit management platform
- Trials that last 30 days, not free software
- Free tiers inside paid tools
- Open-source GRC projects, and where they fall short
- This site’s own free tools
- Free templates worth downloading
- A genuinely free stack for a one-person shop
- What free actually costs
- When to stop using free and pay for a platform
- Worked example: MidState Beverage’s first free year
- Questions about free internal audit software
- Sources and verification
- Related guides
Why there is no free audit management platform
Every internal audit platform this site reviews, Optro (formerly AuditBoard), TeamMate, Diligent One Platform, Workiva and the rest, sells access rather than giving it away, and none publishes a self-serve free tier. That is not an oversight. A real audit platform is not one feature; it is hosting, uptime, encryption, a support desk and its own security certifications, kept current under a vendor’s name, wrapped around a workflow that has to stay coherent from audit universe through issue follow-up through board reporting, across dozens of engagements and several years of records. None of that is free to build or free to run, and no vendor in this market has chosen to give it away regardless of how the search results for “free internal audit software” sometimes read.
Some of what turns up in that search is not internal audit software at all. Compliance automation tools, built to get a company certified against SOC 2 or ISO 27001 rather than to run an audit function, sometimes offer a free trial or a limited free tier of their own, and get swept into the same results because the category boundary genuinely confuses buyers; the internal audit software vs compliance automation comparison draws that line in full, and the types of internal audit software guide maps every category this page touches. What follows here sorts the rest, the parts that are genuinely relevant to an audit function, into what is real and what only looks free.
The demand behind this page is real, and it clusters with other segment searches this site tracks: “small business,” “banks” and “credit unions” sit alongside “free” and “open source” in the same autocomplete data, which is a reasonable proxy for who is actually asking. A function shopping on a tight budget is the normal reader here, not an edge case, and the rest of this guide is written for that reader specifically.
Trials that last 30 days, not free software
Two audit-relevant analytics tools publish a genuine free trial rather than a permanently free tier, and the distinction matters because a 30-day window rarely covers a full engagement.
| Product | What you get | Length | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACL Analytics (Diligent) | Full analytics software: scripted tests, connectors and exception tracking | 30 days | Diligent has not published an ongoing price; access ends when the trial does |
| Alteryx (all tiers) | Full platform access at whichever tier is trialed | 30 days | The cheapest tier afterward, Alteryx One Starter, is $250 a user a month, cloud-only, and excludes Ask Alteryx, Auto Insights and Orchestrator |
| Arbutus Analyzer | A “no cost trial license” | Not published | Arbutus promises contact within one business day, but publishes no trial length and no ongoing price anywhere on its site |
All three trials grant real product access, not a crippled demo, which makes them useful for a single time-boxed task, testing a script library before a renewal decision, or running one analytics-heavy engagement while a purchase is being approved. None converts into an ongoing free product afterward. Alteryx’s cheapest published tier still runs $250 a user a month billed annually, restricted to 1 to 10 users and excluding several features present in the higher tiers, and Diligent has published no ongoing price for ACL Analytics at all, so a function that wants to keep using it past day 30 is negotiating from a blank page, not a list price. Arbutus’s evaluation page is the least transparent of the three: it promises a response within one business day but does not say how long the trial itself runs or what the product costs afterward, which is common enough in this market to be worth asking about directly before a function relies on a demo license for real engagement work.
Free tiers inside paid tools
A handful of tools are genuinely free to use for real work, not just to trial, but each one is free for only part of what a function eventually needs, and one entry below is easy to misread as a free platform when it is nothing of the kind.
| Tool | What is free | What is not | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Power BI Desktop | Full desktop report-building and modeling, no subscription, no time limit | Publishing, scheduled refresh and sharing through the Power BI service | Microsoft |
| KNIME Analytics Platform | The full desktop workflow tool, free and open source | Centralized scheduling, sharing and monitoring across a team, sold separately as KNIME Business Hub | KNIME |
| Python and R | The languages, and most audit-relevant libraries, cost nothing to license, ever | A coding-skill investment, and a version-control and audit-trail habit the function has to build itself | — |
| LogicGate Standard and External users | No per-seat cost once the platform itself is purchased | The platform itself; Vendr’s reported median contract is $53,784 a year | LogicGate; Vendr |
Power BI Desktop and KNIME Analytics Platform are the two closest things on this page to real free software: both do useful analytics work with no subscription, no trial clock and no seat count, as long as the work stays on one machine. The moment either needs to be shared, scheduled or run by more than one person, the free part ends. Power BI’s sharing and scheduled refresh live in Power BI Pro, at $14 a user a month, or Premium Per User, at $24 a user a month, and KNIME’s collaborative layer is a separate paid product, KNIME Business Hub, aimed at teams that need to schedule and monitor workflows centrally rather than run them on one analyst’s laptop. For a solo auditor building a duplicate-payment test or a journal-entry risk score, neither limit matters until a second person needs to see the result on a schedule.
Python and R cost nothing to license, in perpetuity, and cover most of what an audit-analytics engagement actually needs: reading a general-ledger export, joining it against a vendor master, and scoring exceptions. The price shows up as time and skill instead of a subscription: a function has to write and maintain its own scripts, its own version control and its own record of what a given script does and why, none of which a vendor supplies, and none of which a reviewer can check without reading the code itself. LogicGate’s free Standard and External users are the entry on this table most worth reading twice, because they do not make LogicGate free. A function still has to buy the underlying Internal Audit Management application and at least one paid Power User seat first, and Vendr’s reported median LogicGate contract is $53,784 a year. What the free user types buy is the ability to add reviewers, approvers and read-only stakeholders afterward without paying per seat, a real cost saving at scale, not a way around the purchase itself.
Open-source GRC projects, and where they fall short
Two open-source governance, risk and compliance projects publish a genuinely free, self-hosted edition with no license fee and no artificial user limit. Neither is built for internal audit engagement work, and both make that trade-off explicit on their own pages rather than hiding it.
| Project | Deployment | What is free | What you are on your own for |
|---|---|---|---|
| eramba Community | Self-hosted, Docker or a VMware image | General GRC functionality: a risk register and compliance-framework mapping across standards including ISO 27001, GDPR and SOC 2, with no license fee, user limit or time limit | Hosting, patching and your own security review; no audit universe, engagement planning memo or workpaper sign-off chain found on its public pages |
| SimpleRisk Core | Self-hosted, PHP and MySQL on Unix, Linux or Windows | A risk register, asset management and pre-built self-assessments for frameworks including CIS Controls, HIPAA, NIST 800-171 and PCI DSS, with unlimited users | Support, which the vendor states is email only with no service-level agreement; paid extras and hosting are reserved for its On-Premise and SaaS editions |
eramba’s Community edition describes itself plainly: “Full GRC functionality, no licence fee, no user limits, no time limit.” What it delivers is a general risk register and compliance-framework mapping, self-hosted through Docker or a VMware image; nothing on its public pages describes an audit universe, an engagement planning memo or a workpaper sign-off chain, the specific mechanics an internal audit function runs on every engagement. SimpleRisk’s open-source Core edition is similar in shape: free, unlimited users, a real risk register and pre-built self-assessments for frameworks including CIS Controls, HIPAA, NIST 800-171 and PCI DSS, self-hosted on a PHP and MySQL stack. Its own site does not soften the support trade-off: “Open-source support is email only, with no SLA.”
Both projects are worth a look for a function that wants a lightweight, self-hosted risk or issue register and has the in-house skill to run a server, patch it and own the security review that comes with hosting it. Data residency follows the same logic: whatever server either project runs on, in whatever country, is the function’s own choice and the function’s own responsibility, not a term negotiated into a vendor’s data-processing agreement. Neither project replaces the audit-specific workflow a purpose-built platform sells, and a function that later wants full consolidation across risk, compliance and audit, rather than a self-hosted point tool, should read the GRC suite vs standalone audit management software guide instead.
This site’s own free tools
internalauditguide.com publishes free tools of its own, built so that nothing typed into them is uploaded anywhere: no account, no seat count and no vendor relationship to negotiate.
| Tool | What it does | Pairs with |
|---|---|---|
| mySampler | Random, systematic and monetary-unit sample selection, exact-binomial sample sizes, and a selection memo that documents itself | Any stack; sampling is often the weakest link in a small shop’s methodology |
| RCM Workbench | Builds and runs the risk and control matrix across engagements, with PBC requests, suggested test steps, evidence registers, review notes, sign-off and an exportable report | The site’s RCM template if a static starting point is preferred |
| myDayLog | Logs fieldwork time in about five seconds and rolls entries up by engagement into a timesheet-ready file | A one-person shop’s record of where the year went, for the board or a business case |
| Self-Assessment Hub | 16 self-assessments, including a Standards Readiness check across the Global Internal Audit Standards | Stands in for a peer QAIP reviewer the function does not have |
| CIA Practice Questions | An interactive bank of 156 original questions across all three CIA exam parts, with a study mode and a timed exam mode | A candidate preparing for the exam while also running a small function’s day-to-day work |
The first four cover a meaningful slice of a small function’s workflow at no cost, and the fifth is aimed at a different reader entirely: a candidate studying for the CIA exam, frequently the same person running a one- or two-auditor shop during the day. None of the five is a system of record, and none logs a formal audit trail across users, because there are no user accounts to log; each stores what a visitor enters only in that visitor’s own browser. The full set, including tools this guide has not named individually, sits at IA QuickTools.
Free templates worth downloading
Alongside the interactive tools, the site publishes five annotated templates that cover documents a function drafts on nearly every engagement, each one a real file to copy rather than a tool to log into.
| Template | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| RCM template | Every column of a risk and control matrix explained, with six worked rows and one real rebuild |
| Work program template | Two full worked programs and a filled-in change log |
| Issue log template | The fields that make follow-up actually work, annotated field by field |
| Planning memo template | Eight sections mapped to the Global Internal Audit Standards’ engagement-planning requirements |
| Report template set | Full, short-form and memo report shells, annotated |
Templates solve a narrower problem than the tools above: they standardize a document’s structure so a new hire or a reviewer knows where to look, but they carry no workflow, no sign-off chain and no reminder when a due date passes. Pair a template with RCM Workbench or myDayLog for the pieces of the work that need to move rather than sit still on a page. Every one of the five already follows the same field-level structure used across this program’s reviews and guides, so a function that later buys a platform is not translating between two different vocabularies for what a planning memo or an issue log is supposed to contain.
A genuinely free stack for a one-person shop
Put every free piece above together and a one- or two-person function can cover most of the twelve-area scorecard this site uses for full platform reviews, at an annual cost of zero, provided the organization already licenses Excel or Google Workspace, which nearly all do.
| Need | Covered by | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|
| Audit universe and annual plan | Excel or Google Workspace, already licensed | $0 |
| Risk and control matrix | RCM Workbench, or the RCM template as a static starting point | $0 |
| Sample selection | mySampler | $0 |
| Workpapers and evidence | Excel or SharePoint, with version history turned on | $0 |
| Issues and follow-up | The issue log template | $0 |
| Fieldwork time | myDayLog | $0 |
| Reporting | The report template set | $0 |
| Quality self-check | Self-Assessment Hub | $0 |
| Repeatable analytics | Power BI Desktop, or Python and R for a function with the skill | $0 |
| Total | — | $0 a year |
This is the same starting point priced in the site’s audit software for small teams guide, which adds one Power BI Pro seat, at $14 a month, for about $168 a year, once a repeatable analytics task such as a duplicate-payment check earns its keep. The stack above is the genuinely free version of that same starting point, before that first paid seat gets added, and it holds up for longer than most functions expect. The audit software vs Excel and SharePoint guide covers the signals that mean it has stopped being enough.
What free actually costs
Nothing above is free in every sense. Three costs show up consistently across the trials, the open-source projects and even a well-run spreadsheet, and they are worth pricing in before a function builds its methodology around free tools.
- Support. A 30-day trial’s support disappears with the trial; SimpleRisk says so about its own open-source edition in as many words, and eramba’s Community pages do not describe a support channel at all. This site’s own free tools have no support line by design, since there is no account to attach one to.
- Audit trail. A self-hosted open-source tool puts the work of building and preserving version history and an access log on the function, not a vendor. Excel and SharePoint need version control turned on deliberately, not assumed, and a trial that expires can leave a workpaper file in a format nobody in the function can reopen once access ends.
- Security review. Self-hosting eramba or SimpleRisk means the function, not a vendor, owns patching, encryption and access control, and neither project’s public pages publish a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report to hand an examiner or an external auditor. That gap is closer to disqualifying for a bank or a public company’s SOX program than for a small private company’s advisory work; the audit software due diligence guide covers the fuller list of questions to ask before trusting any vendor, paid or free, with audit evidence.
None of these three costs is a reason to avoid free tools; they are a reason to be deliberate about which piece of the workflow carries the most risk if it goes wrong. A sampling memo built in mySampler, with no vendor behind it, is a low-risk place to save money, since the math is checkable and the output is a document, not a running service. A control library for a public company’s SOX program, built on a self-hosted open-source project with no SOC 2 report and no vendor support line, is a much higher-risk place to save the same money, and worth pricing against a paid platform before committing a full audit cycle to it.
When to stop using free and pay for a platform
A handful of signals reliably mean the free stack has reached its limit, usually well before headcount does.
- SOX or ICFR scope arrives. A control library and a testing cycle are one area this site’s small-team guide treats as binary, not gradual: either the entity is in scope this year or it is not.
- A second reviewer joins. Shared review and sign-off across more than one person is where a folder structure and an inbox start losing the thread that a platform’s workflow is built to hold.
- The board or a regulator asks for a named system of record. “We keep it in Excel” satisfies almost nobody asking that question a second time.
- Evidence has to link to workpapers at scale, not occasionally. That is an evidence add-in’s or an analytics platform’s job, not a free tool’s.
- An examiner or an external auditor wants to see the system, not just its output. A screen share of a spreadsheet reads differently than a screen share of a platform built for the purpose.
- The free tools themselves start feeling like the bottleneck. A sampling memo that still has to be reformatted into a report by hand, every time, is a signal on its own.
What a real platform costs once one of those signals appears is itself public, in places. The City of Norman, Oklahoma’s council agenda for 28 February 2025 puts TeamMate+ Audit Essentials, for two named users, at $6,150.88 a year before implementation, and Vendr’s lowest recorded Onspring deal sits at $9,972 a year. Neither is a guaranteed quote, but both are real evidence that the jump from free to paid, at this size, is closer to the cost of a single conference registration than an enterprise contract. The business case for audit software guide covers turning that number into an approved budget, the audit software demo script guide covers what to ask for once vendors are in the room, and the implementing audit management software guide covers the first 120 days once a purchase is approved.
Worked example: MidState Beverage’s first free year
MidState Beverage, the three-state drinks distributor used elsewhere on this site as a six-person audit function’s home base, started smaller: one audit manager, inherited from a general-ledger reorganization, with an audit universe already built in Excel and no software budget approved. This example is illustrative, not a real company. For the first month the entire stack was Excel and SharePoint, already licensed through the wider company. mySampler went in almost immediately, because reperforming a reviewer’s sample-size math by hand was the single most tedious part of the job, and myDayLog followed soon after to keep an honest record of where the year went.
That configuration, total cost zero, held for seven months, until accounts payable asked for a recurring duplicate-payment check the manager did not want to rebuild in Excel every quarter, and one Power BI Pro seat, at $14 a month, went in to cover it. Free, in other words, was not a placeholder for MidState; it was the entire budget for more than half of the first year, and it covered real, defensible audit work the whole time. The site’s audit software for small teams guide picks up MidState’s story from month seven through the board’s request, in month sixteen, for a named system of record.
Questions about free internal audit software
Is there a genuinely free internal audit management platform?
No. Every internal audit platform this site reviews, including Optro, TeamMate, Diligent One and Workiva, sells its core product, and none publishes a self-serve free edition built to run a function end to end. What is free is narrower: two or three 30-day trials, a handful of free tiers inside otherwise paid tools, two open-source GRC projects built for a different job, and this site’s own free tools and templates, all covered above. None of them is a full substitute for a system of record once a function has outgrown a single reviewer and a shared drive.
Do Optro, TeamMate or Diligent One have a free version?
Not a published one. None of the major internal audit platforms covered on this site offers a self-serve free trial or a free tier from its own pricing page; evaluation access, where it exists, is arranged through a sales conversation rather than a download button.
Is LogicGate actually free?
No, though it is easy to read it that way. LogicGate’s Standard and External user types cost nothing once a function already owns the Internal Audit Management application, but the application itself is a paid purchase, with a Vendr-reported median contract of $53,784 a year. Treat the free seats as a way to add reviewers cheaply, not a way to skip the purchase.
Can ACL Analytics or Alteryx be used for free long-term?
Only for the length of the trial. Both publish a 30-day free trial, and neither offers an ongoing free tier afterward. Alteryx’s cheapest paid edition, Alteryx One Starter, runs $250 a user a month billed annually, and Diligent has not published an ongoing price for ACL Analytics at all.
Are eramba or SimpleRisk safe to run a real internal audit function on?
They are safe to try, with real caveats. Both are self-hosted, so the function, not a vendor, is responsible for patching, encryption and access control, and neither publishes an audit-specific engagement workflow or a SOC 2 report. They fit a lightweight, general risk or compliance register better than they fit an internal audit function’s workpapers and sign-off chain, and neither is a place to keep the only copy of evidence a regulator or an external auditor may later ask to see.
Are internalauditguide.com’s own free tools really free, with no catch?
Yes. There is no account, no seat count and nothing uploaded anywhere; that is also their limit, since none of them is a system of record once a function is SOX-scoped or has outgrown a single spreadsheet. The best internal audit software guide picks up the comparison once that point arrives.
internalauditguide.com has no commercial relationship with any vendor named on this page. We take no vendor money, run no affiliate links and accept no sponsored placements, and no vendor saw this page before publication. Product and company names are the trademarks of their owners. Corrections: desk@internalauditguide.com.
Sources and verification
- Diligent: ACL Analytics product page — the 30-day free trial and the absence of a published ongoing price (accessed 27 September 2026).
- Alteryx: pricing page — the Alteryx One Starter price, tier limits and 30-day trial length (accessed 27 September 2026).
- Alteryx: platform pricing comparison — what the Starter tier excludes (accessed 27 September 2026).
- Arbutus Software: Evaluation — the no-cost trial license and one-business-day contact promise (accessed 27 September 2026).
- Microsoft: Power BI pricing — Power BI Desktop’s free-download status and the Pro and Premium Per User prices (accessed 27 September 2026).
- KNIME: KNIME Analytics Platform — the free, open-source desktop platform and the separate KNIME Business Hub (accessed 27 September 2026).
- LogicGate: platform pricing page — the applications-plus-Power-User model and free Standard and External users (accessed 27 September 2026).
- Vendr: LogicGate marketplace page — the $53,784 median contract value (accessed 27 September 2026).
- eramba: Get Community — the Community edition’s license terms and self-hosted deployment (accessed 27 September 2026).
- SimpleRisk: open-source deployment — the Core edition’s features, deployment stack and support terms (accessed 27 September 2026).
- City of Norman, Oklahoma: council agenda attachment, TeamMate+ quote of 28 February 2025 — the $6,150.88 subscription figure (accessed 27 September 2026).
- Vendr: Onspring marketplace page — the $9,972 lowest recorded deal (accessed 27 September 2026).
Related guides
- Internal audit software: the independent buyer’s guide — every review, comparison and buying guide in one place.
- How we review audit software — the evidence levels, the scorecard and the fit-by-situation method.
- The audit software shortlist finder — eight questions, a shortlist with the reasons from each review.
- The requirements matrix — 156 weighted requirements and vendor scoring in a free Excel workbook.
- Best internal audit software — 25 platforms and tools, compared by use case, for when free stops being enough.
- Internal audit software pricing — real numbers, pricing models and how to negotiate.
- Types of internal audit software — audit management, GRC, SOX, compliance and analytics, mapped.
- GRC suite vs standalone audit management software — how to make the call in 2026.
- Internal audit software vs compliance automation — why a SOC 2 tool is not a substitute for an audit platform.
- Evaluating AI in audit software — what is real and what is agent-washing.
- The business case for audit software — getting budget approved by the CFO and the board.
- The audit software demo script — 25 scenarios that make vendors show, not tell.
- Audit software due diligence — security, data residency, AI data use and vendor stability.
- Audit software vs Excel and SharePoint — when to switch, and how big you need to be.
- Implementing audit management software — the first 120 days and migrating off Excel.
- 15 mistakes internal audit teams make when buying software — and how to avoid each.
- Selecting an audit management system — a vendor-neutral RFP method.
- Audit software for small internal audit teams — real prices for one to five auditors, once the free stack is not enough.
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