cybersoftware vs Vanta, Drata, and Delve: an honest comparison

The GRC platform market (Vanta, Drata, Delve, Secureframe, Sprinto, and a handful of regional players) is real, well-funded, and excellent at what it does. We use their public pricing, public documentation, and our own conversations with their former customers to write this comparison. None of this is bait. If you're at a 150-person Series B with a dedicated security hire, you should go use one of them.

This article is for the company that isn't there yet, and for whom that math doesn't pencil out.

What the big GRC platforms actually sell

The category is sometimes called "compliance automation." The core product is an integration platform plus a control catalog: you connect your AWS, GitHub, Okta, and HR system to the platform, the platform reads evidence from each, and a dashboard tells you which controls are covered. You also get policy templates, a vendor management module, a security questionnaire repository, and trust center hosting.

What the platforms don't include is the audit. SOC 2 reports can only be issued by an independent licensed CPA firm. The big GRC tools introduce you to an auditor in their network; you sign a separate engagement and pay separately. Industry-typical pricing as of 2026:

First-audit engagement fees from the auditors in those networks run $8,000-$15,000 for Type 1, $12,000-$25,000 for the first Type 2. So the all-in first year typically lands between $20,000 and $50,000.

What cybersoftware sells

Starting is free: readiness assessment, score, gap list and one AI sample policy. The software is $199 a month, cancel any time, or $2,189 a year (pay for eleven months, get twelve), with SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 both included. Audits, Type 1 and Type 2, come with access to our preferred pricing program.

Audits go through our preferred pricing program, and we negotiate the fee on your behalf, and the price is shown inside the app before you book. A Type 2 examination starts once the observation window closes. Audits unlock after four paid months on monthly, or right away on yearly.

We do not sell a control catalog or a vendor management module or a trust center. We sell the shortest credible path from "the deal needs SOC 2" to a CPA-signed report.

Side by side, with the parts that actually matter

When you should NOT use cybersoftware

We tell people this on sales calls and we'll tell you here. You should use a big GRC platform if any of these are true:

• You're past 100 employees, with a full security/GRC function.
• You need ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP, or other frameworks beyond SOC 2. Multi-framework is where the big platforms shine.
• You sell to enterprise buyers who require a hosted trust center with continuous monitoring dashboards (Vanta and Drata both do this very well).
• You have a dedicated security team that lives in the GRC dashboard day-to-day, with workflows for vendor reviews, risk assessments, and quarterly access certifications.

What we mean by "the on-ramp"

cybersoftware is built for the bottom of the ladder: companies handling customer data, two to fifty people, no dedicated compliance hire, with a real deal on the line. We do one framework very well. When you outgrow us, you graduate to a bigger platform with your audit history intact. No lock-in, no penalty, no "platform-locked evidence" trap. The audit history travels with you, because the CPA report is yours, not ours.

That's it. There's no catch and there's no fine print. We took the one job, getting a startup their SOC 2, and stripped everything that wasn't that job out of the price.

Further reading

• SOC 2 Type 1 vs Type 2: which to start with, and when
• What SOC 2 Type 1 actually requires for a sub-20-person SaaS