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Pricing · verified 8 Sept 2026

Vanta pricing: the published rate card, what Vanta costs a year, and the alternatives

Almost every article about Vanta pricing opens by saying Vanta does not publish a price. That is only half true, and the half that is wrong is the useful half. Vanta publishes a full ten-line rate card on its AWS Marketplace listing: starting prices for Essentials, Plus and Professional, and a separate price for every add-on module. Below is that rate card as read on 8 September 2026, the median contract buyers actually sign, the gap between the two, and an honest comparison against the platforms Vanta competes with.

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Short answer

Vanta costs about $20,000 a year at the median, based on 169 recorded purchases in Vendr's contract database read on 8 September 2026, with deals running from roughly $7,500 to $57,221. Vanta's own published AWS Marketplace rate card starts at $14,000 for the Essentials package on a 12-month contract for a company of 1 to 20 employees, $21,500 for Plus and $23,000 for Professional. Add-on modules are priced separately and are expensive relative to the platform: third-party risk management is $13,600 and the Customer Trust Management bundle is $22,250. Buyers negotiate an average of 29.83 percent off the first quote, the widest discount recorded at any major compliance platform.

Vanta's published rate card, read from AWS Marketplace on 8 September 2026

Software vendors who sell through AWS Marketplace have to list contract dimensions with prices, because a buyer is transacting against an AWS bill rather than a sales order. That obligation is why Vanta's numbers are public here and nowhere else. These are list prices for a 12-month contract, before any negotiation, and the package rows are explicitly labelled as starting costs for a company of 1 to 20 employees.

Line item What the listing says it covers 12-month list price
Essentials Package Starting cost for 1 to 20 employees $14,000
Plus Package Starting cost for 1 to 20 employees $21,500
Professional Package Starting cost for 1 to 20 employees $23,000
Customer Trust Management Bundle of Trust Center Advanced and Questionnaire Automation Advanced $22,250
Questionnaire Automation Advanced 288 security questionnaires a year $16,000
Third Party Risk Management Up to 50 vendors managed per year $13,600
Questionnaire Automation 144 security questionnaires a year $10,000
Trust Center Advanced Trust Center Advanced module for 1 to 20 employees $10,000
AWS FTR Module AWS Foundational Technical Review module $7,500
Trust Center Trust Center module for 1 to 20 employees $6,000

Source: Vanta's AWS Marketplace product listing, contract dimensions section, read 8 September 2026. List prices, not quotes. Re-check before you rely on them.

Three things the rate card tells you that the vendor blogs get wrong

The entry price is higher than the internet says

A lot of published guides put Vanta's entry point at $7,500 to $12,000 for a company under 50 people. The listed starting price for Essentials at 1 to 20 employees is $14,000. If you are budgeting off a blog number, you are budgeting low, and the first quote will not feel like a negotiation, it will feel like a surprise.

The cheapest recorded contract is probably not a platform deal

The low end of Vendr's recorded Vanta range is $7,500. The AWS FTR module lists at exactly $7,500. That is a strong hint the cheapest contracts in the dataset are single modules rather than the compliance platform, so quoting $7,500 as what Vanta costs a small company is misleading. Treat the low end of any range as scope, not as a discount you can ask for.

Modules cost about as much as the platform

Third-party risk management lists at $13,600 against $14,000 for the entire Essentials package. Customer Trust Management lists at $22,250 against $23,000 for Professional. Add two modules to a mid-tier package and you have roughly doubled the contract. This is where a Vanta quote grows between the demo and the order form.

What buyers actually pay, and how far the quote moves

List price and signed price are different numbers. The table below is recorded contract data from Vendr's marketplace, read on 8 September 2026, for the four platforms that genuinely compete for the same SOC 2 and ISO 27001 work. The column that matters most is the last one: it tells you how much room the vendor has, and Vanta has the most room in the category.

Platform Median contract a year Recorded range Average saving off first quote
Vanta $20,000 $7,500 to $57,221 29.83%
Drata $25,000 $9,494 to $67,350 23.22%
Secureframe $20,000 $7,733 to $32,575 Not reported
Sprinto $15,000 $13,167 to $16,000 Not reported
Hyperproof $41,400 $22,215 to $70,000 21%

Vendr marketplace contract data, read 8 September 2026. Vanta 169 recorded purchases, Drata 127. Recorded purchase counts drift between visits, so treat the median, the range and the discount as the durable figures.

Sprinto's range is the tell in that table. Every other platform records a spread of four to eight times between its cheapest and most expensive deal, and Sprinto's runs from $13,167 to $16,000. A narrow band like that usually means a simpler product sold to a narrower set of company sizes, which is worth knowing before you put it on a shortlist next to Vanta and expect the same scope.

What actually moves your Vanta number

1. Employee headcount, in bands

The dominant driver, and the one you cannot argue with, because the contract is written against a band rather than a seat count. Hiring through a boundary raises the renewal on its own. Ask for the exact band boundaries in writing and model the headcount you expect at renewal, not the one you have at signature.

2. How many frameworks you run

The package tiers differ largely in framework coverage, so SOC 2 alone and SOC 2 plus ISO 27001 plus HIPAA are different products commercially. If you know a second framework is coming within eighteen months, price it now and get it into this contract rather than paying to add it mid-term.

3. Modules, which are the real variable

Trust Center, questionnaire automation and vendor risk are separately priced and, as the rate card shows, individually comparable to a whole package. Decide which ones you will genuinely use in year one and refuse the rest. A module you turn on because it was in the bundle still sits in your renewal baseline forever.

4. What is not in the number at all

The audit. Vanta gets you ready and packages evidence; a licensed CPA firm issues the SOC 2 report and an accredited body issues the ISO 27001 certificate, both as separate paid engagements. Any penetration test your framework expects is separate too. Build the full-year compliance budget, not the software line.

The job Vanta's price does not cover

Everything above buys you continuous testing of controls you have already written down, against frameworks you have already chosen. That is genuinely valuable and Vanta does it well. It is also a closed loop: the platform watches your systems, not the regulators. When the rule behind a control changes, nothing in an evidence-collection tool tells you, because the control still passes its test. It is testing the old requirement faithfully.

That gap is the reason regulatory change monitoring is priced and bought separately from framework automation, and it is the job we built Complianceofficer to do: watch the rulebooks that sit behind your controls, across SOX and PCAOB guidance, BSA and AML, sanctions, privacy and the security frameworks, and say in plain language when one of them moves and which of your policies it touches. If you are already committed to a SOC 2 platform, the two sit side by side rather than competing. Our pricing is published on the pricing page at $149 a month or $894 a year, with no quote process, and the compliance scan above is the part you can check today.

If you are still choosing between platforms rather than budgeting for one, the Vanta alternatives comparison sets out what each competitor is genuinely better at, and the SOC 2 compliance software page covers what the framework itself requires before any tool is involved.

Questions buyers ask before signing

How much does Vanta cost per year?

About $20,000 a year at the median, across 169 recorded purchases in Vendr's contract data read on 8 September 2026, with deals from roughly $7,500 to $57,221. Vanta's published AWS Marketplace list prices for a 1 to 20 employee company on a 12-month contract are $14,000 for Essentials, $21,500 for Plus and $23,000 for Professional, before modules and before any discount.

Does Vanta publish its pricing?

Not on its own site. Checked on 8 September 2026, vanta.com/pricing lists four tiers, Essentials, Plus, Professional and Enterprise, with no dollar figure anywhere and a demo request on every one. It does publish a ten-line rate card on its AWS Marketplace listing, which is where the numbers on this page come from.

Does Vanta charge per employee or per user?

Per employee headcount band, not per named user of the software. Each package on the rate card is priced as a starting cost for a 1 to 20 employee company and steps up from there. The practical consequence is that three people use the product and the whole company is billed, so headcount growth is a pricing event even when your compliance program has not changed.

How much can you negotiate off Vanta?

More than at any comparable platform. Vendr records an average saving of 29.83 percent off the first quote at Vanta, against 23.22 percent at Drata, about 21 percent at Hyperproof and about 11 percent at Workiva. Thin discounts signal pricing power and wide ones signal substitutes, and Vanta has three credible ones. Run a real parallel evaluation and say so.

Is Vanta cheaper than Drata?

On the recorded medians, yes, by about $5,000 a year: roughly $20,000 against $25,000, read on 8 September 2026. Secureframe matches Vanta at about $20,000 and Sprinto comes in lower at about $15,000. The spread is narrow enough that framework count, module list and headcount band will decide your number, so get quotes from two of them scoped identically before reading anything into the medians.

Does the Vanta price include the audit?

No. The subscription buys readiness, continuous control testing and evidence packaging. The SOC 2 report itself must be issued by a licensed CPA firm and an ISO 27001 certificate by an accredited certification body, each a separate paid engagement. Penetration testing, where your framework or a customer requires it, is separate again.

Why did my Vanta renewal go up?

Usually because you hired through a headcount band boundary, which raises the price without anything about your compliance work changing. The other common cause is modules added mid-term, which are separately priced and stay in the renewal baseline. Both are avoidable at signature by getting the band boundaries and a renewal cap into the order form.

What should I ask for in writing?

Four things, and none of them are the rate. The headcount band boundaries and what happens when you cross one. A renewal uplift cap as a fixed percentage. The module list with each price broken out rather than a bundle total. And the cost of adding your likely second framework, quoted now. Those four decide what you pay in year two, which is where the money is.

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