I priced out eight SOC 2 compliance automation platforms recently, and the useful finding came before any feature comparison: seven of the eight will not tell you what they cost without a sales call. Secureframe is the only one that prints a number on a public page, and that number is "starting at $7,000/year" for its Fundamentals package.
That matters more than it sounds, because this is not a small or settled market. Vanta reported $300 million in ARR in April 2026 and raised at a $4.15 billion valuation in July 2025. Drata spent $250 million acquiring the trust-center startup SafeBase in February 2025. Oneleet raised a $33 million Series A in October 2025 on $9 million of ARR, pitching that the incumbents sell "compliance theater." Consolidating and re-pricing at the same time is a bad moment to walk into a demo without your own numbers.
This is the condensed version. The full comparison on DevToolLab carries the per-vendor plan breakdowns and the screenshots of every pricing page as it stood in September 2026.
What You Are Actually Buying
Strip the marketing away and there are three layers, bundled differently by each vendor.
Evidence collection is the base: integrations that read your AWS, GitHub, Okta and Rippling config and flag a failing control before an auditor does. Everyone sells this. The differences are integration count, how many frameworks the controls map onto, and how much of the paperwork the AI layer drafts.
The audit is the second layer, and it is the one buyers misread. A SOC 2 report has to be issued by a licensed CPA firm, and most of these platforms hand you to a partner network rather than performing it. The third layer is trust: public trust centers, questionnaire automation, vendor risk review. That is where the incumbents spent their acquisition budgets, and where the add-on line items live.
The One Vendor That Anchors the Price
Secureframe publishes Fundamentals at $7,000/year, covering infrastructure monitoring, custom frameworks, controls, tests and evidence collection. Complete layers on third-party risk, advanced risk management and user access reviews. Defense targets CMMC with SPRS score tracking, a System Security Plan and POA&M tooling, which is the differentiator if US Department of Defense contracts are on your roadmap. Vanta, Drata and Sprinto all list CMMC as supported, but none packages the SSP and POA&M work as a tier.
Treat the $7,000 as a floor rather than a quote. "Starting at" assumes a small scope, and every extra framework moves it.
The Two Incumbents
Vanta is the volume leader: 16,000+ customers, 1,000 employees and $504 million raised since 2021. Its ladder runs Essentials, Plus, Professional, Enterprise, every rung quote-based. Essentials covers exactly one framework. Plus adds access management and 25 AI-answered security questionnaires a year; Professional lifts that to 144 and adds risk management and custom monitoring tests. The breadth argument is real, with 400+ integrations against Sprinto's 300+, and at that customer count your auditor has seen a Vanta export before. The cost argument is that each additional framework and questionnaire block is a separately negotiated line item.
Drata has gone further upmarket and no longer publishes a plan ladder at all. Its pricing URL resolves to the homepage, which sorts you into Startup, Growth or Enterprise and ends every path at Contact Sales. The SafeBase acquisition brought the trust center in-house and the site now leads with Enterprise GRC. Its strength is control mapping across frameworks, which is the right pitch once you are running SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and PCI together, and the wrong one if you need a single Type II report.
The Challengers
Sprinto has grown by out-marketing the incumbents, to the point of publishing an "Honest Vanta Review" on its own blog in August 2026. Foundation and Growth are both quote-based, both claiming 25+ frameworks automated out of the box and 300+ integrations. Framework count per dollar is the pitch. Auditors are partners, so ask who your named contact is before the first evidence request stalls.
Thoropass inverts the usual arrangement: it is a licensed audit firm with a platform bolted on, not a platform with a partner list. Its FAQ states plainly that Thoropass delivers the audits, and it holds the highest AICPA peer review rating across SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HITRUST and GDPR. One contract for readiness and attestation is efficient, and it also removes the independence of choosing your own auditor, which some enterprise buyers will probe.
Oneleet bundles penetration testing, code scanning, cloud security and attack surface management into the compliance workflow, on the argument that evidence collection alone leaves you certified on paper and still exploitable. Two-thirds of new Y Combinator companies are customers. If you already pay a pentest vendor, you are buying it twice. Scytale takes the opposite approach and sells human expertise, three startup bundles with in-house compliance experts attached, no prices published.
The Open Source Option
Comp AI is the only self-hostable entry. The trycompai/comp repository is AGPL-3.0 with 1,900 stars, covers SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and GDPR, and runs on an open-core model with enterprise features licensed separately. The hosted tier does not publish a rate card either.
The licensing detail is the one to think about: AGPL is unremarkable for internal use and a genuine constraint the moment you embed it in something you sell.
Side by Side
| Platform | Published price | Who performs the audit | Distinguishing layer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vanta | None | Partner network | Trust Center, AI agent, 144 questionnaires/yr |
| Drata | None | Not stated | Enterprise GRC, SafeBase trust center |
| Secureframe | From $7,000/yr | Partner network | CMMC Defense package |
| Sprinto | None | Partner network | 25+ frameworks, 300+ integrations |
| Thoropass | None | Thoropass itself | Licensed audit firm plus platform |
| Oneleet | None | Not stated | Pentest, scanning and ASM bundled |
| Scytale | None | Not stated | In-house compliance experts |
| Comp AI | Self-host free | Scoped into the quote | Open source, AGPL-3.0 |
Audit Your Own Public Evidence First
Every one of these vendors opens by scanning what an auditor can see from outside: TLS configuration, security headers, whether you publish a disclosure contact. You can run that yourself in Node with no dependencies, and walking into the call already knowing your gaps changes what you are negotiating about.
// soc2-web-evidence.mjs - the public-facing evidence an auditor checks first.
// Usage: node soc2-web-evidence.mjs yourdomain.com
import { connect } from "node:tls"
const host = process.argv[2] ?? "example.com"
const results = []
const check = (name, ok, detail) => results.push({ name, ok, detail })
// 1. TLS certificate: issuer, expiry, days left to rotate
await new Promise((resolve) => {
const socket = connect({ host, port: 443, servername: host }, () => {
const cert = socket.getPeerCertificate()
const days = Math.floor((new Date(cert.valid_to) - Date.now()) / 86_400_000)
check("TLS certificate valid", socket.authorized && days > 0, `${cert.issuer.O ?? cert.issuer.CN}, expires in ${days} days, ${socket.getProtocol()}`)
socket.end(); resolve()
})
socket.on("error", (e) => { check("TLS certificate valid", false, e.message); resolve() })
})
// 2. Security headers on the homepage
const res = await fetch(`https://${host}/`, { redirect: "follow" })
const h = (n) => res.headers.get(n)
check("HSTS header", !!h("strict-transport-security"), h("strict-transport-security") ?? "missing")
check("Content-Security-Policy", !!h("content-security-policy"), h("content-security-policy") ? `${h("content-security-policy").slice(0, 60)}...` : "missing")
check("X-Content-Type-Options", h("x-content-type-options") === "nosniff", h("x-content-type-options") ?? "missing")
check("Referrer-Policy", !!h("referrer-policy"), h("referrer-policy") ?? "missing")
check("Server header hidden", !h("server") || !/\d/.test(h("server")), h("server") ?? "not sent")
// 3. Vulnerability disclosure policy (RFC 9116)
const sec = await fetch(`https://${host}/.well-known/security.txt`)
check("security.txt published", sec.ok && (await sec.text()).includes("Contact:"), `HTTP ${sec.status}`)
for (const r of results) console.log(`${r.ok ? "PASS" : "FAIL"} ${r.name.padEnd(28)} ${r.detail}`)
const failed = results.filter((r) => !r.ok).length
console.log(`\n${results.length - failed}/${results.length} checks passed for ${host}`)
Pointed at stripe.com it returns a clean sheet, which is the baseline a payments company is held to:
PASS TLS certificate valid DigiCert Inc, expires in 68 days, TLSv1.3
PASS HSTS header max-age=63072000; includeSubDomains; preload
PASS Content-Security-Policy base-uri 'none'; child-src 'none'; connect-src https://c.inc...
PASS X-Content-Type-Options nosniff
PASS Referrer-Policy no-referrer-when-downgrade
PASS Server header hidden nginx
PASS security.txt published HTTP 200
7/7 checks passed for stripe.com
The first early-stage domain we ran it against failed five of seven, and none of the five was hard to fix. If you want to close them before the demo, the security.txt Generator writes the RFC 9116 file and the HSTS Header Generator builds the Strict-Transport-Security value with includeSubDomains and preload. The original article walks through what each failing check tells an auditor.
How to Pick
First Type II on a startup budget: get Secureframe's Fundamentals scope in writing as your anchor, then make Vanta Essentials and Sprinto Foundation beat it. Already holding a report and facing ISO 27001, HIPAA and PCI: Drata or Sprinto, whichever remaps your existing controls with less rework. Want readiness and attestation on one contract: Thoropass. Think the report should come with a real pentest: Oneleet. Want to own the evidence store and can live with AGPL: self-hosted Comp AI.
The category has one public price and eight sales teams, but the underlying work is much the same everywhere. Use the $7,000 floor and Vanta's tier definitions as reference points, decide early whether the audit firm sits inside or outside the platform, and run the evidence script before the first call so you are negotiating against your real gaps.
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