Vanta vs. Drata: which SOC 2 automation platform should you buy? Whichever one has native connectors for the most of your exact stack, works with the auditor you want, and costs less at year-two renewal — because on everything else the two are close enough that the brand is not the decision. Both connect to your cloud, code, identity, and HR systems, auto-collect evidence, map it to the Trust Services Criteria, and monitor continuously. The differences are marginal and shift release to release. This guide compares them across the dimensions that actually differ, adds the DIY column most vendor bake-offs omit, and settles the one fact the sales process is built to blur: a platform automates the evidence, not the controls.
This is the tool-selection companion to two deeper pieces. If you are still deciding whether to buy any platform at all, start with do you need a compliance platform; for the whole SOC 2 path — Type I vs. Type II, the five criteria, the timeline, and the cost — the SOC 2 for startups complete guide is the hub this article sits under.
What do Vanta and Drata actually do?
The same thing, competently. Both are evidence-automation platforms: read-only connectors reach into your identity provider, your cloud accounts, your source host, your MDM, and your HR system, and pull compliance evidence automatically and continuously — MFA status per user, encryption settings per bucket, branch protection per repo, offboarding timestamps per departure. That evidence gets mapped to the SOC 2 Common Criteria (and to ISO 27001, HIPAA, or other frameworks if you scope them), tracked against control owners with deadlines, and surfaced on an auditor-facing dashboard so your CPA firm reads evidence in the tool instead of over email attachments.
That is the product, and it is genuinely valuable. Manual evidence collection for a SOC 2 cycle runs 50 to 100-plus hours of mostly senior engineer time, all of it miserable, and it has to be redone every cycle because auditors need evidence from the current period. A platform does that collection on a schedule, forever. Continuous monitoring is the second real benefit: a control that silently degrades in March surfaces in March, not during next January’s fieldwork.
Vanta and Drata are the two market leaders, but they are not the only credible options — Secureframe, Thoropass, and Sprinto do the same job and are worth a quote, especially if one of them has better coverage for your particular stack. The category matters more than the logo.
Vanta vs. Drata vs. DIY: how do they compare?
Close on capability, different on the details that touch your specific environment. The table is the comparison in one view. Treat every cell as directionally true and verify current specifics — feature parity and pricing in this category move quarter to quarter, and the vendors leapfrog each other on connectors constantly.
| Dimension | Vanta | Drata | DIY / no platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| Framework coverage (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR) | Broad multi-framework; SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, and more, with cross-framework control mapping | Broad multi-framework; the same major frameworks with cross-mapping | Whatever you build mappings for by hand; one framework is realistic, several is a project |
| Integration / evidence-automation breadth | Large native connector catalog across cloud, IdP, MDM, HR, code | Large native connector catalog, comparable in scope | Only what you wire yourself (CloudTrail, AWS Config, IdP + HR logs); anything unbuilt is a manual upload |
| Continuous control monitoring | Continuous; alerts on drift and failing controls | Continuous; alerts on drift and failing controls | Only if you build alerting on top of your pipeline |
| Auditor network | Marketplace of partner firms familiar with the evidence format | Marketplace of partner firms familiar with the evidence format | Bring your own auditor; they read your artifacts cold |
| Pricing model | Annual subscription, quoted per company; steps up by employee tier + framework count | Annual subscription, quoted per company; steps up by employee tier + framework count | No subscription; cash cost near zero, engineering time is the price |
| UX / onboarding | Guided onboarding, polished dashboard, policy template library | Guided onboarding, polished dashboard, policy template library | You own the whole experience; no guardrails, no templates |
| What it does NOT do | Implement any control | Implement any control | Implement any control |
The last row is the one that matters most, and it is identical across all three columns. Hold that thought.
What does a compliance platform NOT do?
It does not implement a single control — and that distinction is the entire buying decision. A platform observes and reports; it does not fix. Connect Vanta or Drata to your AWS account and it will tell you, accurately and continuously, that three S3 buckets are public, that four IAM users have no MFA, and that CloudTrail is off in two regions. It will not turn on MFA. It will not separate your prod and dev accounts. It cannot. Those are engineering projects, and they were engineering projects before you started paying five figures a year for a dashboard that describes them.
This is the fact the sales funnel is structured to blur, so it is worth stating flatly: the red items on a compliance dashboard are your engineering backlog, priced in sprints, not a compliance to-do list a subscription clears. The controls underneath SOC 2 are ordinary good platform engineering — SSO everywhere and universal MFA, killing long-lived credentials in favor of federated short-lived access, reviewed PRs through a gated pipeline, centralized tamper-resistant logging, encryption at rest and in transit, and a maintained subprocessor list. You build those. The platform watches whether they operate. If you buy the platform before the controls exist, the first year of the subscription is pure rent on a wall of red.
None of that is a knock on the products. It is their design: they are observation and workflow tools, and observation does not close gaps. Which is exactly why the platform-vs-platform question is less important than teams treat it — you are choosing between two competent cameras pointed at work only you can do.
How much do Vanta and Drata cost?
Both land in roughly the low-to-mid five figures per year for SOC 2 at typical SMB headcount — but treat that as a directional, verify-current figure, because neither publishes firm public pricing and both quote per company. The number you see in year one is a land grab; year two is where the business model lives. Two step-up axes drive the renewal: employee tiers and framework count. Crossing 50 or 100 employees mid-contract, or adding ISO 27001 or HIPAA at list price, routinely turns a modest first year into a materially larger second one.
The defense is boring and effective: get the multi-framework add-on price and the employee-tier boundaries written into the order form before you sign, not left in the sales thread. Teams that negotiate the HIPAA or ISO add-on at initial signature routinely pay far less than teams that add it at renewal — by then your evidence history lives in the tool and the vendor knows what migration would cost you. And remember the subscription is never the whole bill: the auditor’s fee and the engineering time to build the controls are separate line items on every path, platform or not.
When is doing it yourself the right call?
When you already have the engineering discipline to run an evidence pipeline — and almost never otherwise. Structurally, Vanta and Drata are commercial evidence pipelines: connectors in, durable queryable evidence out, mapped to controls. The self-hosted version is the same idea for less cash and more engineering time. A team already comfortable wiring CloudTrail, AWS Config, and IdP logs into S3 with Object Lock and a query layer can absolutely produce audit evidence an auditor will accept, on their own terms, with no subscription.
But be honest about the two cases where DIY actually wins. The first is a single, first Type I at tiny scope — one product, a couple of AWS accounts, a handful of people — where you accept 100-plus hours of manual screenshot collection because the budget is genuinely near zero. The second is the disciplined-pipeline team above. Outside those, DIY manual collection decays badly past about 20 controls, and a Type II observation window means re-collecting quarterly forever. If nobody owns that pipeline as a real, staffed responsibility, “we’ll do it ourselves” becomes “we reconstruct evidence under deadline every cycle,” which is the exact failure the platforms exist to kill. The 90-day SOC 2 readiness sprint assumes a platform precisely because the evidence lift is where unstaffed DIY quietly collapses.
Which should you pick?
Pick by integration coverage, auditor, and price — in that order — and stop treating the brand as the decision. Walk it in three steps:
- Integration coverage for your exact stack. Put both Vanta and Drata (and Secureframe, if you like) in a read-only trial for a week against your real systems. Count how many of your controls each evidences automatically versus how many become manual uploads. An unsupported IdP, a self-hosted GitLab, or a niche MDM turns “automated” back into the spreadsheet you were trying to escape — now with a subscription fee. This step usually produces a clear winner on its own.
- The auditor relationship. If you already have a CPA firm you trust, confirm it works on the platform. If you do not, both marketplaces are fine starting points — check which partner firms completed audits recently and at what fee range.
- Price at renewal, not signature. Get the year-two list price, the employee-tier boundaries, and the multi-framework add-on cost in writing before you commit.
The good-enough bar: you have made the right call when the tool you chose evidences the majority of your controls automatically, sits on the marketplace of an auditor you can work with, and stays affordable at year-two renewal. Both Vanta and Drata clear that bar for most regulated SMBs at 10 to 80 engineers — which is precisely why the agonizing between them is misspent energy. The failure mode is not picking the “wrong” platform; the two are close enough that either is defensible. The failure mode is buying either one before the controls exist, or buying it to avoid building them at all. Choose DIY only if a named engineer owns the evidence pipeline as real work; choose a platform — Vanta or Drata, it barely matters which — if you want the 50-to-100-hour-per-cycle collection burden handled and the controls are (or are about to be) real.
The Template
Score each item honestly before you sign anything. This is a selection scorecard, not a checklist to complete — it tells you which column you are in.
Step 1 — Are the controls actually in?
- SSO fronts every SaaS tool that supports it; MFA enforced on 100% of accounts
- Prod and dev are separated (accounts or hard boundaries), not sharing one blast radius
- Change management is real: reviewed PRs through a gated pipeline with traceable history
- Logging is centralized and tamper-resistant
- Offboarding is a single revocation action
If most of these are no, no platform helps yet — the subscription would rent you a view of the backlog. Build the controls first (or run a readiness sprint), then come back to this template.
Step 2 — Coverage: trial both read-only for a week
- Listed every system that must produce evidence: IdP, cloud accounts, code host, MDM, HR, ticketing
- Confirmed each platform has a native connector for each — no gaps handled by manual upload
- Recorded, per platform, the percentage of controls evidenced automatically vs. manually for YOUR stack
- Verified framework coverage for what you need in the next 24 months (SOC 2, and ISO 27001 / HIPAA / GDPR if on the roadmap)
Step 3 — Auditor
- Confirmed your preferred audit firm works on the platform, or picked one from its marketplace
- Got a fee range from firms that completed audits on the platform in the last 12 months
- Confirmed you can bring your own auditor if you want to
Step 4 — Price the future, not the present
- Year-two list price in the order form, not the sales thread
- Employee-tier boundaries documented (what happens if you cross 50 / 100 mid-contract)
- Multi-framework add-on price locked in writing at initial signature
- At-churn export terms confirmed: evidence history, format, retention
Step 5 — The DIY sanity check
- A named engineer would own the evidence pipeline as real, staffed work (not “the team”)
- Scope is either a tiny first Type I or a team already running durable, queryable log storage
- You have accepted that manual collection decays past ~20 controls and re-runs every Type II quarter
If Step 5 is mostly true, DIY is viable and you can skip the subscription. Otherwise, whichever platform won Step 2 for your stack is the answer — and the margin between Vanta and Drata is small enough that either is a defensible call. Buy on coverage, auditor, and renewal price; then go build the controls, because that is the part no tool does for you.