Vanta vs Drata: How to Choose, and Where We Fit

We sell a competing product, so treat everything here accordingly. What follows is written to be useful to someone comparing options rather than to win the comparison — including the parts where the honest answer is that one of the others is the better buy.

They are more alike than the marketing suggests

Vanta and Drata are the two best-known compliance automation platforms. Both connect to your cloud, identity provider and endpoint tooling, collect evidence continuously, map it to frameworks, and get you through a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audit with far less manual work than a spreadsheet.

Teams spend weeks agonising over the choice and then report, a year later, that either would have been fine. The differentiators people actually cite are auditor relationships, the quality of a specific integration they depend on, and how the pricing conversation went — not a capability gap.

So the better question is not “Vanta or Drata”. It is “is a compliance automation platform the right category for us at all?”

Three categories get sold under one name

The questions that actually separate vendors

Ask all of these, of all three of us, in writing. The answers move total cost far more than the headline figure.

• Is pricing per framework? Model what you need now PLUS the framework a customer will ask for next year. This is where the money is, and where first-year quotes mislead most.
• Is the price published? A vendor who will not put a number on their website is telling you the number depends on what they think you will pay.
• What counts as a seat? Some platforms charge full price for auditors and read-only reviewers who will never edit anything.
• Are integrations included or an add-on? Automated evidence collection is most of the value; priced separately, the maths changes entirely.
• What is the renewal uplift, capped at what? Get it in writing. An uncapped renewal after a discounted first year is a standard play in this category.
• What are you NOT certified for? Ask every vendor. Several compliance platforms are less certified than the customers they sell to.

Where Cyber Horizon genuinely differs

Three things, all checkable without talking to us:

The price is on the website. £600, £1,500 and £3,000 a month for 5, 15 and 50 seats; annual is twelve months for the price of ten. Neither Vanta nor Drata publishes pricing. You can disagree about whether our number is right, but you can see it.

All 71 frameworks are on every plan. No per-framework charge. Add a framework in month six and the invoice does not change. Plans differ by seats, service level and single sign-on — nothing else.

Risk, vendor risk, incident response and threat intelligence share one evidence trail with compliance, rather than being separate products. That matters if your job is “understand our cyber risk” rather than “pass the audit”.

A proof-of-concept that tells you something

A guided demo proves the product exists. If you want to know whether it works for you, run the same exercise with each shortlisted vendor, in the same order, and score it. Two hours each.

1. Connect your own identity provider yourself. Note how long it takes and whether it needs a support ticket.
2. Open the access-review workflow. Does it show real users and real entitlements, or a summary count?
3. Complete one review and export the evidence. Would an auditor accept the artefact? Does it record who reviewed, when, and what they decided?
4. Add a framework you do not yet hold. Does existing evidence map across, or does the control set start empty?
5. Break something deliberately — remove MFA from a test account. Does the platform notice, when, and does it raise something actionable?
6. Ask for your data back. Format, completeness, and how long it took.

Step five is the one that separates products. A platform that tells you a control has drifted, promptly and with enough context to act, is doing the job. One that renders a red tile you notice next quarter is a dashboard.

The honest summary

If you need one certification, your buyers are American, and you want the safest, most established choice: Vanta or Drata, and the decision between them matters less than the sales teams will suggest.

If you need several frameworks, you are selling into the UK and EU, you want risk expressed in money rather than colour, and you would rather read a price than book a call: that is the case we are built for.

And if you are under fifteen people with one customer asking a question, you may not need any of us yet. A completed questionnaire, a pen test and a published sub-processor list has closed more deals than people expect.