A Vanta alternative any team under fifty can afford

Below is what is publicly known about Vanta’s price, what that means at ten people, and a plain list of the cases where you should pay for Vanta anyway. Our numbers come near the end, once there is something to hold them against.

For the listing figures in detail, and Vanta’s own audit fee range, see Vanta pricing. Every platform that prints its own number, on its website or on a marketplace listing, is in SOC 2 software that publishes its pricing.

The public record on Vanta

Vanta’s website prints no figure for its plans. So we went to the places a figure does exist: Vanta’s pricing page, the listing Vanta keeps on AWS Marketplace, Vendr (a procurement marketplace that reports what buyers actually paid), and Vanta’s own guide to audit fees.

• Vanta lists four plans on its pricing page and no dollar figure. The call to action is to request personalized pricing. Source, checked 2026-10-02.
• Vanta’s own AWS Marketplace listing prices its Essentials package at a starting cost of $14,000 for a 12-month contract, for 1 to 20 employees. Source, checked 2026-10-02.
• None of the ten lines on the Vanta listing is an audit or an auditor fee, and its overview states that pricing is tiered by company size and program complexity. Source, checked 2026-10-02.
• Vendr, a software buying service, reports that the median buyer pays $20,000 for Vanta, based on data from 373 purchases. Source, checked 2026-10-02.
• Vanta states that a SOC 2 audit fee usually runs between $10,000 and $50,000, and that the all-in cost of a first SOC 2 lands somewhere between $10,000 and $80,000 or more. Source, checked 2026-10-02.

Two things stand out. The listing and the median are subscription numbers only. The audit is billed on top, by a CPA firm. And a median is a middle, which means half of the reported buyers paid more.

What those figures mean at ten people

A median contract is shaped by the buyers who make up the sample. Vanta sells to companies of every size, up to large enterprises with several frameworks and a procurement desk. A seed stage team with one engineer on compliance duty is buying something much smaller: one framework, one report, one cloud account.

That gap matters. At a small company the platform fee can be the largest line in the whole SOC 2 spend, bigger than the audit. Cut it and the project becomes affordable enough to start this quarter.

The work itself does not change much with the vendor. The criteria come from the AICPA either way.² Your auditor tests the same controls against the same evidence. What you are choosing is the tool that gets that evidence into shape, and the price of that tool.

What a small team gets here

The idea is simple. Take the full platform (policies, control tracking, evidence collection, a gap list, the package your auditor reads) and sell it without a sales team in the middle. You sign up, you do the work yourself, and the product tells you what is missing.

• Free to start. The free readiness assessment takes about 15 minutes and gives you a score and a gap list before any card is asked for.
• One entry, then a term. Entry is $2,000 or $4,000 one time, your choice at checkout. Type 2 then runs $600 a month on a 12-month term.
• The audit in the price. The Type 1 entry includes the examination and the auditor fee, and your first SOC 2 Type 2 audit is included in the term.

On the onboarding entry the first year comes to $9,200 all in, or $11,200 with the Type 1 examination, and both carry the first Type 2 audit. The full breakdown is on the SOC 2 cost page.

A later audit is arranged on request: our team negotiates with independent audit firms on your behalf, and it is quoted before it begins.

Side by side

Where Vanta publishes no answer, the cell says so. We did not guess at their numbers, and the sourced figures stay in the list above rather than in a table cell.

Pick Vanta if one of these is you

A fair comparison has to say where the other product is the better buy. These are the cases where we would tell a friend to pay for Vanta.

• You have a lot of people. Access reviews, onboarding trails and scope all grow with headcount. A large team gets more from a product built at that scale.
• You run many frameworks at once. If SOC 2 is one item on a list that also holds several regulatory frameworks, one big platform that maps them together is worth the money.
• Your stack is wide. Vanta has a large integration catalog. Our connector list is short, and the rest is uploads.
• You want someone to sell to you. Some companies need a rep, a procurement process and a negotiated contract. Self-serve is the wrong shape for that.

None of those? Then you are paying for scale you will not use.

Who signs the report

Neither company does. A SOC 2 report is issued by a licensed CPA firm after it examines your controls.¹ The platform only prepares you. That is true of every tool on your shortlist, so no vendor can sell you a better opinion.

Your next step

Start with the part that costs nothing. Take the free readiness assessment and see how far you are from a report. Then compare our pricing with whatever quote you have open. If Drata is also on your list, our Drata comparison runs the same exercise with a different lens, and the best SOC 2 software for startups lines up the whole shortlist.