If your company needs to prove to customers or auditors that it takes security seriously — a SOC 2 report, ISO 27001, GDPR compliance — the old way was painful: someone on the team spent weeks before every audit manually screenshotting settings and chasing down evidence. Compliance automation tools fixed that by connecting directly to your actual systems and pulling that evidence continuously instead. Vanta and Drata are the two biggest names doing this, and they overlap so heavily that most buyers end up comparing them directly. Here's what actually differs.
Vanta
Vanta automatically checks whether your company's real systems meet the requirements of a given certification — SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA and similar — instead of someone manually proving it once a year. It's the more established of the two, with over 16,000 customers including technically sophisticated buyers like Cursor, Snowflake and GitHub.
Pricing: no public pricing. Four tiers (Essentials, Plus, Professional, Enterprise), all custom-quoted based on company size and which frameworks you need.
Strengths: named a Leader in Forrester's GRC Platforms Wave (Q2 2026), 400+ integrations for continuous monitoring, and a genuinely useful Trust Center that doubles as a sales-enablement tool for B2B SaaS companies talking to security-conscious buyers.
Limits: you'll need a sales call to get a price, several of the efficiency claims (hours saved, faster deal cycles) are vendor-reported rather than independently audited, and the value you get scales with how many frameworks and integrations you actually need.
Drata
Drata does fundamentally the same job — continuous, automated evidence collection so you're not scrambling before an audit — with a couple of features aimed more specifically at 2026-era engineering teams. It serves 8,500+ customers including Brex and Okta.
Pricing: also no public pricing; contact sales required for a quote.
Strengths: continuous evidence collection across multiple frameworks, an "agent governance" feature that extends compliance monitoring to AI agents specifically (useful if your product ships autonomous agents), and autonomous third-party vendor risk assessment built in.
Limits: no public pricing here either, a reported customer base smaller than Vanta's, and — the honest core issue — its value proposition overlaps significantly with Vanta's, so the choice often comes down to specific fit rather than a fundamental feature gap.
Side-by-side
| Vanta | Drata | |
|---|---|---|
| Reported customers | 16,000+ | 8,500+ |
| Pricing | Custom quote, 4 tiers | Custom quote |
| Integrations | 400+ | Not disclosed at the same granularity |
| Standout feature | Trust Center as a sales tool | AI agent governance monitoring |
| Independent validation | Forrester Wave Leader, Q2 2026 | Not independently ranked at this level |
Verdict
Pick Vanta if: you want the largest, most analyst-validated ecosystem of integrations and frameworks, and you sell to enterprise or security-conscious buyers who will actually check your Trust Center as part of their own vendor review.
Pick Drata if: your product already runs AI agents in production and you want compliance monitoring that extends to agent behavior specifically, or you want autonomous third-party vendor risk assessment bundled in without adding another tool.
Neither company publishes pricing, so in practice the decision usually comes down to a sales demo and a quote — get both, and weigh them against which specific frameworks and integrations your company actually needs rather than headline customer counts alone.