A Vanta alternative with a published price

Vanta pricing works through the listing figures and Vanta’s own audit fee range, with each source named. Every platform that prints its own number, on its website or on such a listing, is in SOC 2 software that publishes its pricing.

You are probably reading this with a quote open in another tab, or waiting on one. A prospect asked for a SOC 2 report, a compliance platform came back with a number, and the number was larger than the deal it was supposed to unblock. So the real question is narrower than the search term. What is the cheapest honest route to a SOC 2 Type 1 that this buyer will accept, and how much of that can you work out before you sit through four sales calls? If you are still deciding which report you need, Type 1 versus Type 2 sorts that out first.

The price gate is the category, not one company

Three more names off a typical shortlist, each pricing page read from the vendor’s own site. One of them now prints a starting figure for its entry plan. The other two print none.

• Secureframe lists its Fundamentals plan as starting at $7,500 a year and shows no dollar figure for its other two plans, Complete and Defense. Every plan links to a quote request. Source.
• Drata lists its compliance plans, Foundation, Advanced and Enterprise, on a plans page with no dollar figure, and each plan button leads to a demo request. Source.
• Suralink publishes no price, stating that every company and team has different needs and inviting prospects to reach out. Source.

None of that is a scandal. A pricing page that asks for a call is an ordinary enterprise motion. What makes it worth pausing on is the other half of the same domain, where the same vendors publish confident ranges for what a SOC 2 costs in general.

• Drata estimates the audit fee for a SOC 2 Type 1 at $7,500 to $15,000 and for a Type 2 at $12,000 to $20,000 for small to midsize companies, and puts the total first-year cost at $25,000 for a small startup. Source.
• 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.

Read those next to the four above. One of them puts a five-fold spread on a stranger’s audit. The same domain puts no figure at all on its own product.

What a gated price costs you in calendar time

A withheld price is not free to the person shopping. It converts a two minute question into a scheduled one. To learn what four vendors charge you book four calls, sit through four discovery conversations, and then wait on four follow-ups with a proposal attached. Two weeks is an optimistic version of that. None of it is hostile, and it is simply how enterprise software has always been sold, to buyers who have a procurement function to absorb it.

The cost lands in two places. Your calendar is the obvious one. The second is the shape of the decision itself: the first real number reaches you at the end of a sales conversation rather than at the start of your research, which is the wrong end for comparing anything.

What you can compare before anyone quotes you

Four questions have answers that do not depend on a quote. Ask them of every name on the list, in writing, and you can rank the list before you take a single call. The answers are the comparison.

1. Is the price published at all? Open the sources above and read them. Vendor pricing pages change without notice, so check them yourself rather than trusting a comparison table, this one included.
2. Is the examination inside the price, or a second invoice? A quote for software alone cannot be compared to one that includes the audit. Only a licensed CPA firm may perform the examination.¹
3. What does year two cost? Renewal is where compliance pricing moves, and the second invoice decides what the first one really was.
4. What can you export if you leave? Work locked inside a platform is work you pay for twice. Ask for the answer as a list of file formats, not as a reassurance.

Where Vanta is the better buy

In each of these, the money is better spent there than here.

• You are past fifty people. Polara Labs is built around a first report at a small company. Above that headcount the access reviews, the onboarding trail and the scope itself grow into work a launchpad is not shaped for.
• You need a framework we do not sell. We sell SOC 2 through to the audit by an independent licensed U.S. CPA firm, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 readiness for certification, and HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS and NIST CSF 2.0 readiness. If SOC 1 or FedRAMP has to run beside them in one control set, buying two tools to avoid one is a bad trade.
• Your evidence lives in tools we do not connect to. Our nine direct integrations are Amazon Web Services, GitHub, Google Cloud, Google Workspace, Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Linear, Jira and Slack. If your controls are evidenced elsewhere, a large catalog is worth paying for.
• Your buyer already knows the name. Recognition on a security questionnaire carries real weight in a deal. We cannot supply it, and claiming otherwise would be the kind of thing this page exists to avoid.

Launchpad is the honest word for what this is. It is built to be outgrown rather than defended, and the four cases above are what outgrowing looks like. The head to head write-up covers the same ground across the rest of the category, and the best SOC 2 software for startups lines up the whole shortlist.

Do you need a compliance platform at all?

No. A SOC 2 report is issued by a licensed CPA firm,¹ and nothing in the AICPA attestation standards requires software sitting in between.² Companies do this with a spreadsheet, a shared drive and one patient engineer.

The cost is time, and it lands in three places. You write the policies and adapt them until they describe what your company does. You map every control to the criteria the auditor will test.³ Then you answer evidence requests one at a time while the engagement runs. None of that is difficult. All of it is slow, and the slowness is what a platform is selling you.

Nobody can quote you an honest hour count for the manual route, ourselves included. Our side of it we can state: audit-ready starting at about a week, with the gap engine and the policy drafts (thirteen for Security, plus one for each extra category you add, except Availability) doing the first pass. SOC 2 without a compliance platform covers the manual route in full.

What we charge

Polara Labs publishes its SOC 2 price: Orbit is $7,800 a year, and your SOC 2 Type 2 audit by an independent licensed U.S. CPA firm is included in every contract year.

Now the detail, with something to judge it against. Star is $2,000 one time for onboarding. A SOC 2 Type 1 report adds $2,000, the auditor engagement fee sitting inside that figure so no second invoice arrives from the CPA firm later. If a customer needs Type 2, Orbit is $7,800 a year, and your SOC 2 Type 2 audit is included in every contract year. How much SOC 2 costs compares the published figures across the market, and the SOC 2 cost calculator totals two years.

Polara Labs puts that on the pricing page, next to the plan it belongs to. That is the only structural difference this page is claiming. You can check it in the same click you already used on theirs.

Which turns the four questions above into a table. Our column comes from a public price list. Theirs comes from Vanta’s pricing page and its AWS Marketplace listing, and says Not published wherever neither one answers, or Not compared here where we did not read a source.

Not published is not an accusation. It means we will not invent a figure on their behalf, and neither should any page you read on this subject. Get a quote, drop it into the same rows, and the comparison becomes real.

Any vendor that answers those four questions in writing has earned its place on the shortlist. That includes this one. If the answers here are not the right fit, you found that out several sections ago rather than on a sales call.