What it is
Vanta is a trust-management platform. It connects to your cloud accounts, identity provider, HR system, code repositories, and laptops, runs continuous tests against the controls of a framework such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001, and collects the evidence an auditor asks for. Around that core it sells the pieces a buyer’s security review touches: a public Trust Center, security-questionnaire automation, vendor risk management, and a risk register. It supports more than 35 frameworks, including HIPAA, GDPR, NIST 800-53, CMMC, and FedRAMP, across about 400 integrations and 1,400+ automated tests.
Vanta does not issue your SOC 2 report. An independent CPA firm does that, and its fee is separate from the Vanta contract.
The platform has shifted from dashboards to agents. On 2026-03-19 Vanta launched three: a Compliance Agent that collects evidence and flags policy inconsistencies, a Third-Party Risk Management Agent that drafts vendor risk analyses, and a Customer Trust Agent that answers inbound security questionnaires from a knowledge base built on past answers. In June 2026 it added the Vanta Agent for Risk, which merges internal and third-party risk into one continuously updated view. A hosted MCP server, in beta for all customers and limited to Vanta admins, lets Claude Code, Cursor, and other MCP clients read failing tests, manage controls, and open remediation pull requests.
The company announced $300M in ARR and 16,000+ customers on 2026-04-29, three times its 2024 figure. Its last priced round was a $150M Series D at a $4.15B valuation in July 2025, the same month it bought the vendor-monitoring startup Riskey. It received FedRAMP 20x Moderate authorization for its government cloud in April 2026.
Why it shows up in ops stacks
- Security reviews gate revenue. For B2B companies selling into mid-market and enterprise accounts, a missing SOC 2 report or a 300-question security questionnaire can hold a signed deal for weeks. RevOps and deal desk teams feel this before the security team does. The Trust Center and questionnaire automation exist to take that work off the sales cycle.
- Legal ops owns the paper that follows. DPAs, vendor assessments, and records of processing sit with legal. Vanta’s March 2026 privacy module adds records of processing activities (RoPA), a data inventory, and data protection impact assessments (DPIAs) next to the security controls.
- Shadow AI made it a procurement question. Vanta’s own April 2026 data says 70% of companies run AI tools that skipped security review. Each new AI vendor your team adopts is a vendor assessment someone has to run.
Pricing
Vanta publishes plan names — Essentials, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise — but no prices. Its AWS Marketplace listings show the floor: for 1–20 employees on a 12-month term, Essentials is $14,000, Plus $21,500, and Professional $23,000. Plus adds 25 AI-answered questionnaires a year and access management; Professional raises that to 144 questionnaires and adds risk management and an advanced Trust Center.
Across 373 contracts tracked by Vendr, annual spend ranged from $7,500 to $57,221, with a median of $20,000. Add-ons are where totals climb. Marketplace list prices include Trust Center at $6,000, Questionnaire Automation at $10,000, and Third Party Risk Management at $13,600 a year. Stacking those list prices, a 150-person SaaS company running SOC 2 plus ISO 27001, with questionnaire automation and vendor risk, should budget $35,000–$60,000 a year — before the CPA firm’s audit fee, which is billed separately.
Best for
Security, RevOps, or legal ops leads at B2B SaaS companies of 20 to 1,000 employees who need a first SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report to unblock enterprise deals, and then need to keep answering questionnaires without pulling engineers off product work. It is also a fit when you add HIPAA, GDPR, or FedRAMP on top of SOC 2 and want one set of controls mapped to all of them.
Watch-outs
- Renewals jump. G2 and Reddit reviewers report year-two increases of 40% or more, often tied to headcount growth or add-ons bundled at renewal. The guard: write a renewal cap in the single digits into the first order form, fix the employee band, and ask for multi-year pricing only after you have seen one audit cycle through.
- A green dashboard is not a secure company. Reviewers note that some automated tests check that a setting exists, not that the control works. The Delve affair in March 2026, where a competitor was accused of fabricating SOC 2 evidence, shows how much weight buyers now put on auditor independence. The guard: choose your CPA firm yourself rather than defaulting to the partner list, and have the auditor sample evidence outside what the integrations collected.
- AI answers ship under your name. The Customer Trust Agent drafts questionnaire answers from past responses, which can repeat an answer that was true last year. The guard: require a named owner to approve every answer on controls that changed in the last 12 months, and review the knowledge base every quarter.
Alternatives, and when to pick them instead
Drata is the other large player: $100M+ ARR and 7,000+ customers as of February 2025, with a Trust Center built from SafeBase, which it bought for about $250M. Its observed median contract is about $24,900. Pick Drata when your engineers want to write custom tests as code, or when you are evaluating SafeBase’s Trust Center as the main purchase.
Secureframe starts around $7,500 a year, and its median contract lands near $20,000. Pick it when you want more hands-on onboarding support from the vendor during the first audit.
Sprinto targets cost-conscious SaaS teams, often outside the US. Pick it for a first SOC 2 at under 100 employees when price outweighs brand recognition in the buyer’s review.
The fastest-growing entrant is Comp AI, an AGPLv3 open-source platform that raised a $34M Series A on 2026-09-17 and reports 1,000+ customers and 15x year-over-year ARR growth. Pick it when you want to self-host the compliance system or cannot justify a five-figure license for a first SOC 2.
If you already run OneTrust for privacy or ServiceNow for IT risk, price their GRC modules before adding Vanta; a second system of record for controls is a cost you pay at every audit. For governing which AI agents and MCP tools your teams run, pair Vanta with a dedicated layer such as Zenity or WitnessAI — Vanta records the vendor risk, it does not enforce agent policy.