Discover vanta review: A Closer Look at Features and Pricing

Quick Answer: Vanta is highly recommended for early-stage startups (Series A-B) with standard cloud stacks who need SOC 2 certification fast to close enterprise deals. It’s less ideal for mid-market companies with complex, custom environments or tight budgets under $30K (total platform + audit).

Best Alternatives: Drata (better UX) or Secureframe (more customizable).

You’re about to drop $30,000-$50,000 on your first SOC 2 audit. Will Vanta’s $10K-15K automation platform be worth it, or is it just expensive shelfware?

The short answer: For early-stage SaaS startups, Vanta is a massive accelerator—cutting your audit timeline by 50% and unblocking enterprise deals overnight. But for bootstrapped companies or complex environments, that price tag can be a deal-breaker.

Here’s the real breakdown of features, pricing, and alternatives.

Is Vanta the Right Tool for Your SOC 2 Journey?

Think of Vanta, a SOC 2 compliance automation platform founded in 2018, as a personal trainer for your company’s security. It gives you a structured workout plan (the control frameworks and policy templates) and watches your form 24/7 (monitoring your security settings). But at the end of the day, your team still has to lift the weights—doing the actual remediation and keeping things in shape.

This review will dig into Vanta’s core promise: automating the painful process of evidence collection to make audits smoother. That’s its main selling point.

We’ll break down who really benefits from Vanta’s approach and where you might hit some roadblocks. Let’s set the stage by looking at how it performs for different types of companies before diving deeper into features and costs.

Vanta’s Core Strengths

Founded back in 2018, Vanta quickly became a major player in the compliance world, now helping over 7,500 customers. Its big claim is automating up to 90% of the manual grunt work that goes into a security audit.

This is a huge deal. Some audit firms have seen clients using Vanta cut their audit times by 50%, shrinking a months-long marathon into just a few weeks.

The platform really shines in a few key areas, especially for teams stretched thin on resources:

• Speed to Compliance: Vanta’s pre-built policy templates and automated tests drastically cut down the time it takes to get ready for an audit.
• Continuous Monitoring: It hooks directly into your cloud stack (like AWS, GCP, Azure), identity providers, and code repos, giving you a real-time dashboard of your security controls.
• Auditor Trust: Let’s be honest, auditors have seen it all. Many are familiar with Vanta’s evidence exports, which can make the whole process a lot less painful.

“Vanta is an indispensable tool for startups facing their first SOC 2. It translates abstract compliance requirements into actionable technical tasks, effectively bridging the gap between engineering and security.”

To help you figure out if Vanta is a good match and assist in choosing the right auditor, here’s a quick scorecard.

Vanta Suitability Scorecard

This table gives you a snapshot of how well Vanta might fit based on your company’s profile.

Company Profile	Vanta Suitability Score (1-5)	Key Consideration
Early-Stage Startup (Seed-Series A)	5/5	Excellent for getting audit-ready fast to unblock sales.
Growth-Stage Company (Series B-C)	4/5	Strong value, but may need more customization than templates offer.
Mid-Market / Enterprise	3/5	Good for centralized visibility, but may struggle with complex, custom controls.
Heavily Regulated (FinTech, HealthTech)	3/5	A solid starting point, but requires significant internal expertise to manage overlapping compliance needs (e.g., HIPAA, PCI).
Bootstrapped / Low Budget	2/5	The cost can be a significant hurdle; manual processes or lighter tools might be more feasible initially.

This scorecard isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but it should give you a general idea of where Vanta’s strengths and weaknesses lie.

Vanta Pros and Cons: The Honest Breakdown

Before diving deeper, let’s look at the high-level trade-offs.

✅ Vanta Pros

• Deep AWS/GCP Integrations: 200+ pre-built connections that actually work.
• Time Savings: Can cut audit prep from 6 months → 6 weeks.
• Auditor Trust: Most Big 4 firms are familiar with their evidence format.
• Continuous Monitoring: 24/7 automated control checks.

❌ Vanta Cons

• Price Creep: Starts at $10K, but can hit $80K+ with add-ons and renewals.
• Doesn’t Include Audit: You still pay $10K-70K for an external CPA firm.
• Automation Gap: Custom controls still need manual evidence (~30-40% of work).
• Limited Support: Self-service model; white-glove support usually costs extra.

Key Considerations Before Committing

Here’s the reality check: Vanta is not a magic “set it and forget it” button.

While it’s fantastic at flagging issues, it doesn’t actually fix anything. Your team is still on the hook for correcting misconfigurations, running employee security training, and knocking out those tedious periodic access reviews.

And even though Vanta streamlines a ton, you still need to understand the nuances of the audit itself. For example, knowing what’s covered in a complete guide to SOC 2 penetration testing is critical for a successful certification. The tool is your guide, but the ultimate responsibility for being compliant rests squarely on your shoulders. It’s a vital distinction to make if you want to set realistic expectations.

How Vanta Automates Compliance Workflows

To really get what Vanta does, you have to look under the hood at its automation engine. Think of Vanta as a tireless, 24/7 security analyst for your entire tech stack. It’s designed to kill the soul-crushing, manual, and error-prone tasks that used to bog down engineering teams for months before an audit. It pulls this off by focusing on four key automation areas.

The platform’s bread and butter is continuous monitoring. By plugging directly into your most critical systems—cloud providers like AWS and Azure, HR platforms like Gusto, and code repos like GitHub—Vanta is constantly scanning your environment. It’s on the lookout for security slip-ups, like a public S3 bucket or an employee who still hasn’t turned on multi-factor authentication, and flags them the moment they happen.

This proactive approach completely changes the game. Compliance shifts from a once-a-year fire drill to a steady, manageable process. Instead of discovering security gaps during a high-stakes audit, your team gets instant alerts, letting them fix issues long before an auditor ever sees them.

Automated Evidence Collection

The second pillar of Vanta’s automation is its knack for gathering audit evidence for you. Auditors need hard proof that your security controls are actually working, which used to mean taking hundreds of screenshots and digging through endless logs. It was awful.

Vanta makes that whole process obsolete. It connects to your systems via APIs and pulls the required data directly. It grabs configuration settings, user access lists, security training records, and everything else, then neatly organizes it into an audit-ready format, similar to a SOC 2 audit checklist.

This automated collection is a massive weight off your shoulders. It doesn’t just save hundreds of hours of mind-numbing work; it gives auditors trusted, timestamped evidence straight from the source. This alone can seriously speed up the fieldwork phase of an audit.

This is part of a bigger shift happening everywhere. As Vanta automates compliance, you can see similar principles in other intelligent automation use cases that are transforming how businesses operate. The goal is the same: swap out repetitive manual work for reliable, system-driven processes.

Pre-Built Policy Templates

Writing security policies from scratch is a brutal task, especially if you don’t have a dedicated compliance expert on staff. Vanta tackles this head-on with a library of policy templates built for frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001.

These aren’t just generic Word docs. They come pre-mapped to the specific controls each framework requires, giving you a huge head start on essential policies like:

• Information Security Policy: The core document that lays out your company’s security promises.
• Acceptable Use Policy: The rules of the road for employees using company systems and data.
• Incident Response Plan: Your step-by-step playbook for when a security breach happens.
• Vendor Management Policy: The process for checking and monitoring your third-party service providers.

Your team can grab these templates, tweak them to fit your business, and get them approved right inside the Vanta platform. It’s a structured way to make sure you have all the necessary paperwork locked down—a critical part of compliance that teams often stumble on. You can dive deeper into how tools are changing the audit game in our guide to SOC 2 automation.

Vendor Risk Management

Finally, Vanta helps automate the headache of managing third-party risk. Your security is only as strong as your vendors’, and auditors will demand proof that you’re keeping an eye on the partners who touch your data.

Vanta’s vendor risk module gives you a central place to inventory all your vendors, fire off security questionnaires, and track their compliance status. It helps you quickly see which vendors pose the highest risk so you can do the proper due diligence. This feature is crucial for showing you have a mature security program that thinks beyond your own company walls.

What to Expect from Vanta Onboarding and Maintenance

Getting started with Vanta is impressively quick, but what does the day-to-day commitment really look like? It’s a classic sprint vs. marathon situation. The initial setup feels like a mad dash to the finish line, but true compliance is a long-term endurance sport.

To really succeed with Vanta, you have to understand both parts of the journey. We’ll walk through what that initial setup sprint actually involves, from connecting your tech stack to watching the automated tests light up. More importantly, we’ll be honest about the long-haul maintenance required to keep everything green.

The Initial Onboarding Sprint

Vanta’s onboarding is built for speed, designed to get you from zero to audit-ready in weeks, not months. The best analogy is assembling a complex piece of IKEA furniture with a really great set of instructions. All the parts and tools are there, but you’re the one who has to put it all together correctly.

The process breaks down into a few clear phases:

1. Integration with Your Tech Stack: This is ground zero. You’ll start by connecting Vanta to all the core platforms that run your business. Think cloud providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure; identity providers like Okta or Google Workspace; code repos like GitHub; and HR systems like Gusto or Rippling. Every connection you make turns on another firehose of automated evidence collection.

2. Policy Customization and Adoption: Vanta gives you a head start with a solid library of pre-built policy templates. Your job is to take these templates and mold them to reflect how your company actually operates. This isn’t just a find-and-replace task; auditors can spot generic policies from a mile away and will expect them to be customized for your business.

3. Mapping Controls and Tests: As soon as your systems are integrated, Vanta gets to work, automatically running hundreds of tests against specific SOC 2 criteria. This is where the magic happens. Your team will review these tests, see what they’re checking for, and start knocking out any failures. It’s the moment the platform’s value clicks, turning abstract compliance language into a concrete to-do list for your engineers.

The onboarding phase is where Vanta absolutely shines. It’s a guided, checklist-driven experience that demystifies a confusing process. But be warned: you need to dedicate real, focused engineering time here to get the integrations right and fix the initial red flags quickly.

The Long-Term Maintenance Marathon

Once you’ve survived the setup and passed your first audit, the real work begins. Let’s be crystal clear: Vanta is not a “set it and forget it” tool. It’s a continuous monitoring platform that requires ongoing attention from your team. This is the single biggest misconception people have when reading any vanta review online.

The platform will keep surfacing new issues 24/7, but it’s on your team to investigate, delegate, and remediate them. This is where many companies drop the ball, underestimating the true resource commitment.

Common Ongoing Maintenance Tasks

To get the most out of your Vanta subscription long-term, you need to build new routines. These tasks are critical for making sure your security controls stay effective and that you’re always ready for the next audit cycle.

Here are the recurring jobs you’ll need to assign:

• Remediating Failing Tests: Vanta’s dashboard becomes your security command center. When a test fails—maybe a new engineer forgets to turn on MFA or an S3 bucket is accidentally made public—you need a rock-solid process for assigning an owner and getting it fixed fast.
• Managing Employee Security Training: Vanta keeps tabs on who has completed security awareness training and who has accepted company policies. Someone on your team (usually in HR or IT) needs to own this, ensuring new hires get trained and everyone completes their annual refreshers.
• Conducting Periodic Access Reviews: Auditors demand that you regularly review who has access to critical systems. Vanta automates the painful part by generating the lists of who has access to what, but a human still has to go through that list, approve or revoke permissions, and document the decisions.

Ultimately, Vanta is your guide and your automation engine, but it’s not a replacement for internal ownership. It handles the mind-numbing work of evidence gathering and continuous checks, but the critical human tasks of fixing things, making strategic calls, and providing oversight? That’s still on you.

Decoding Vanta Pricing and Total Cost of Ownership

Let’s talk about what Vanta actually costs, a topic that pops up in every honest vanta review. Getting a handle on the platform’s pricing model is key to budgeting accurately and avoiding the sticker shock that catches so many people off guard. It’s not just a single subscription fee—it’s a living number that grows with your company. You can read our detailed breakdown of SOC 2 audit costs for industry benchmarks.

Think of Vanta’s pricing like buying a new car. You see the base model price, but then come the add-ons: the better engine, the tech package, the sunroof. Each one bumps up the final number. Vanta works the same way.

Most companies start with a base platform fee, which for a small business often lands somewhere between $10,000 to $15,000 a year. That initial price usually gets you one compliance framework, like SOC 2, for a set number of employees. But that’s just the starting line.

Key Drivers That Influence Your Final Bill

A few key factors will take that initial quote and stretch it into a much bigger number as your needs grow. If you want to calculate the true total cost of ownership (TCO), you need to know what they are.

• Employee Count: This is the most direct cost multiplier. As your team expands, you’ll get bumped into higher pricing tiers. Vanta is built to scale with you, so a 50-person startup pays a lot less than a 500-person company.
• Compliance Frameworks: Need to add ISO 27001, HIPAA, or GDPR on top of SOC 2? Each one will increase your annual bill. Every framework has its own unique set of monitoring requirements, policy templates, and tests, and the price reflects that extra work.
• Number of Integrations: Vanta connects to a ton of different systems, which is great, but the number and complexity of those connections can influence your package. The more systems you link up, the more data Vanta has to monitor, and that can push you into a higher pricing tier.

User reviews consistently praise Vanta’s user-friendly dashboard but also reveal key pain points. Pricing often emerges as a top complaint—starting at $10K/year but escalating with add-ons and renewals, sometimes hitting $80K+ for complex setups, which can squeeze budgets for FinTech and HealthTech firms. Explore more insights on this in the 2023 State of Trust Report.

Uncovering the Hidden Costs

Beyond those primary drivers, a few “hidden” costs can sneak up on you, especially when it’s time to renew your contract. This is where the initial quote and the real long-term investment part ways. One of the most common surprises is a major price hike at renewal, often triggered because your team grew or you now need features that weren’t in your first plan.

You’ll also find that some of Vanta’s most useful features are actually add-on modules with their own price tags. This includes tools for things like advanced vendor risk management or automating security questionnaires. What looks like a core part of the platform in a demo might turn out to be a premium add-on.

Finally, to get the complete financial picture, you have to remember that Vanta’s fee doesn’t include the audit itself. You can learn more by reading our guide on how much a SOC 2 audit costs. When you add up the platform cost and the auditor fees, you get the true cost of getting compliant.

How Vanta Serves Startups vs Mid-Market Companies

Vanta’s value isn’t one-size-fits-all. The platform that feels like a rocket ship for an early-stage startup can feel like a straitjacket for a more established mid-market company. Understanding this difference is probably the most critical part of deciding if it’s the right tool for you.

For a fast-growing startup, Vanta is often the key that unlocks its first big enterprise deals. The minute a Fortune 500 prospect asks for a SOC 2 report, the entire sales cycle grinds to a halt. Speed is everything.

This is where Vanta shines. It translates abstract compliance requirements into a clear, actionable checklist that engineers can actually follow. Its pre-built policy templates and automated tests create a straight line to a Type 1 report, slashing the time it takes to get audit-ready. For a team without a single compliance person on staff, Vanta basically acts as their guide, turning a terrifying process into a manageable project.

The Startup Accelerator Model

For startups, the number one benefit is speed to compliance. Vanta helps them quickly stand up a security baseline and generate the proof needed to get early enterprise customers over the line.

• Unblocking Sales: Getting that first soc 2 report is often a non-negotiable blocker for closing six-figure deals. You can check our list of best SOC 2 auditors to find a partner who works well with Vanta.
• Resource Efficiency: Startups can’t afford a full-time security analyst. Vanta automates a huge chunk of the evidence collection, freeing up engineers to build the product instead of taking screenshots.
• Structured Foundation: The platform provides a solid—if somewhat generic—foundation for security policies and controls. For a company’s first audit, that’s often more than enough.

“For an early-stage company, Vanta is less of a compliance tool and more of a sales enablement tool. It directly addresses the security objections that kill enterprise deals, allowing the company to compete on a level playing field with more established players.”

This combination of speed and structure is exactly what a startup needs. But as a company grows up, its needs change, and Vanta’s limitations can start to show.

The Mid-Market Automation Gap

For mid-market companies, especially those in regulated spaces like FinTech or HealthTech, the story gets more complicated. These organizations usually have mature, custom-built security controls that don’t map cleanly to Vanta’s standardized tests. This mismatch creates what’s known as the “automation gap.”

The automation gap is that frustrating space between what Vanta automates and the specific, custom evidence your auditor actually needs for more complex controls. A mid-market company might have a sophisticated incident response workflow in Jira or a unique access review process that Vanta’s out-of-the-box integrations can’t fully capture.

This forces teams into a ton of manual work just to bridge that gap—endless screenshots, lengthy written explanations, and manually uploading evidence files. It’s a huge source of frustration for teams who bought the tool expecting a near-total automation solution.

The key to closing this gap isn’t just about the tool; it’s about the auditor.

Choosing an audit firm that knows Vanta inside and out is essential. These auditors understand how to work with Vanta’s evidence exports and are more flexible in accepting the platform’s data, even for customized controls. They know how to interpret the automation and where to ask for supplemental proof, ensuring a smoother audit without the endless back-and-forth that can derail timelines and burn out your team. Without this alignment, you risk paying for automation that your auditor won’t even accept.

Vanta Feature Fit by Company Size

The value of Vanta’s core features really depends on where you are in your growth journey. What’s a lifesaver for a startup can become a point of friction for a larger organization.

Vanta Feature	Value for Startups	Challenge for Mid-Market
Pre-Built Policy Templates	Huge time-saver; provides an instant, “good enough” baseline for a first audit without needing legal or compliance experts.	Often too generic; requires significant customization to reflect mature, existing policies, creating extra work.
Automated Evidence Collection	A game-changer. Automates ~70-80% of evidence collection, freeing up engineers from manual, repetitive tasks.	Hits the “automation gap.” May only cover ~50-60% of evidence for custom controls, leaving a large manual workload.
Standardized Control Tests	Provides a clear, prescriptive path to compliance. Tells a small team exactly what to build and how to prove it.	Can be rigid and inflexible. Custom controls that are perfectly valid may fail Vanta’s tests, creating false negatives.
Centralized Dashboard	Offers a single source of truth for compliance posture, giving founders and investors confidence and visibility.	May lack the granularity needed for complex environments with multiple teams, products, or regulatory frameworks.

Ultimately, for startups, Vanta’s streamlined, prescriptive approach is its greatest strength. For mid-market companies, that same approach can become its biggest weakness if not paired with the right audit partner and internal processes.

How Vanta Compares: Side-by-Side Analysis

Feature	Vanta	Drata	Secureframe	Manual Process
Annual Cost	$10K-15K	$12K-18K	$8K-12K	$0 (labor ~$50K)
Integrations	200+	150+	100+	Manual
Best For	Tech startups, AWS-heavy	First-timers, ease of use	Custom builds	Large budgets
Setup Time	2-4 weeks	1-2 weeks	3-5 weeks	3-6 months
Automation %	~70%	~75%	~65%	0%
Audit Support	Good	Excellent	Good	None

A Simple Framework for Making Your Decision

Video: A breakdown of key factors when choosing a compliance platform.

So, how do you decide if a compliance automation tool like Vanta is the right call? It really comes down to a balancing act between speed, your team’s expertise, and your budget. To cut through the noise, you need to ask three honest questions. Your answers will give you a clear path forward.

First, how fast do you need this done? If your sales team is getting blocked on big enterprise deals because you don’t have a SOC 2 report, then speed is everything. This is where Vanta shines—its templates and automated checks are built to get you audit-ready in weeks, not the months it can take doing it manually.

Second, what’s your team’s real-world compliance knowledge? If you don’t have someone who lives and breathes this stuff, the idea of writing dozens of security policies from scratch is probably terrifying. Vanta’s structured framework acts as a critical set of guardrails, guiding you through your first audit without getting lost.

Finally, you have to look at the total cost. And I don’t just mean the platform subscription—you need to add in the separate fees for the audit firm. A clear-eyed view of that all-in number will tell you if Vanta’s premium price tag is a smart investment or if you need a more budget-friendly approach.

Key Questions to Guide Your Choice

Get your key stakeholders in a room and walk through these points. The more honest you are about your internal capabilities, the better your decision will be.

1. How quickly do we really need our SOC 2 report? If the answer is “yesterday” because a seven-figure deal is on the line, Vanta’s ability to accelerate the process is a massive advantage. If you have a longer runway, you’ve got more time to weigh your options, including a more manual approach.

2. What is our team’s existing compliance expertise? For teams who are new to formal security audits, Vanta provides a much-needed roadmap. But if you have a seasoned CISO who can build custom controls in their sleep, the platform’s standardized approach might feel a bit restrictive.

3. What’s our total budget for the tool AND the audit? Vanta’s subscription can easily start at $15,000 and go up from there. Once you tack on auditor fees, your total first-year investment could hit $30,000–$50,000 without breaking a sweat. Make sure this number aligns with your financial reality. For a deeper dive, check out our guide on Vanta’s role in the SOC 2 process.

This decision tree helps visualize how a startup and a mid-market company might weigh these factors differently.

As you can see, for startups, the priority is almost always unblocking sales as fast as possible. Mid-market companies, on the other hand, have to weigh automation against their existing, often more complex, security controls.

Making the Final Call

After working through these questions, a clear pattern should start to form.

If your company’s top priorities are speed, ease of use, and a guided path for a team that’s green when it comes to compliance, Vanta is almost certainly a top contender. Its power to slash your audit timeline and get that “yes” from enterprise buyers is hard to ignore.

However, if your organization has highly customized security controls, deep in-house expertise, and a tighter budget, you’ll likely find better value somewhere else. In that case, your focus should shift to finding an audit firm that offers more hands-on guidance, which you can pair with a less expensive tool.

No matter which path you take, the end goal is the same: a successful audit that proves to your customers that you take their data seriously.

Vanta FAQ: Your Questions Answered

When you’re digging into a compliance platform like Vanta, questions are going to pop up. Good ones, too. Before you commit, you need straight answers. Here are the most common things people ask during a Vanta review.

Is Vanta a Full GRC Platform or Just for Compliance?

Vanta is a laser-focused compliance automation platform. Its main job is to make getting and staying compliant with frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA as painless as possible. It’s fantastic at continuous control monitoring, pulling evidence automatically, managing policies, and running access reviews.

While it has some elements you’d find in a Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) tool, it’s not an enterprise GRC suite built for managing complex risk registers or tracking regulatory changes. Many startups use Vanta for what it does best—automation—and handle their broader governance and risk tracking in tools they already use, like Jira or Notion.

Does the Vanta Subscription Include the Audit Cost?

Nope. This is a big one to remember for budgeting. The price you pay for your Vanta subscription does not include the external audit or penetration testing fees.

You’ll need to hire and pay an audit firm or a security testing company separately. When you’re calculating the total cost of your compliance program, be sure to add the Vanta platform fee to the actual cost of the audit. The final number will be quite a bit higher than just the software subscription.

What Is the Difference Between a Vanta Trust Page and a Trust Report?

Both of these are sales tools, but they serve different people at different stages of a deal.

• Vanta Trust Page: Think of this as your public-facing security billboard. It’s a portal where you can show off your security certifications, system uptime, and some key policies. It’s built for prospects in the early stages who just need a quick way to verify your security posture.
• Vanta Trust Report: This is the deep-dive document, usually shared under an NDA with serious prospects. It maps your specific controls to the evidence, shows how fresh that data is, and gives the kind of detailed assurance a CISO needs to see before signing off on a deal.

A Trust Page builds that initial flicker of confidence. A Trust Report answers the final, tough security questions that get a contract signed. Both are incredibly useful for moving sales conversations forward.

Can Vanta Reliably Automate Access Reviews?

Yes, Vanta is excellent at automating the evidence gathering for access reviews. It connects to your core systems—think Okta, Google Workspace, AWS, and GitHub—and pulls all the user lists and permissions into one central dashboard. From there, managers can easily attest to who needs access and who doesn’t.

But—and this is important—the process still needs a human driver. The automation shows you what the access levels are, but your team still has to handle the who and the why. Someone needs to own the review cycles, make the final call on approvals, and make sure that when access is revoked, it actually gets shut off.

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