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Vanta vs. Drata for the Trust Services Criteria: An API & Automation Deep Dive
For a technical founder or CTO, choosing a SOC 2 automation platform is more than a compliance decision—it's an engineering one. You're not just buying a GRC tool; you're integrating a system into your tech stack. While our Ultimate Guide to SOC 2 Automation provides the high-level strategy, this deep dive is for the leaders who need to know how the tech actually works.
This article goes beyond marketing claims to analyze how Vanta and Drata automate evidence collection for the five SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria (TSCs). We'll examine their monitoring engines and, most critically, dissect their API capabilities to determine which platform offers the most power for your engineering team.
Core Philosophies: Speed and Simplicity vs. Depth and Precision
Before diving into the technical specifics, it's crucial to understand the fundamental approach each platform takes.
- Vanta: The Startup Accelerator: Vanta is renowned for its speed and ease of use. It's the go-to choice for early-stage startups that need to achieve their first SOC 2 report quickly to unblock enterprise sales. Its core promise is accelerating time-to-value.
- Drata: The Engineer's System of Record: Drata is positioned as a trust management platform built for engineering-heavy teams that demand deep visibility and real-time control monitoring. Its philosophy is "automation-first," designed to create a scalable and auditable system of record.
Automating the Trust Services Criteria: A Head-to-Head Comparison
How do these philosophies translate into automating evidence collection for each of the five TSCs? The answer lies in the depth and focus of their integrations.
Security (The Common Criteria)
The Security TSC is the mandatory foundation of any SOC 2 audit, covering logical access controls, system operations, and change management.
How They Automate: Both platforms use read-only API integrations to connect to your tech stack—cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure), identity providers (Okta), version control (GitHub), and more—to continuously monitor configurations.
Drata's Approach:
Drata emphasizes the depth of its monitoring. Its integrations perform "comprehensive checks" that go beyond simple user provisioning, allowing an engineering team to get a granular, real-time view of control health and quickly diagnose failures. Drata also allows you to build your own adaptive, logic-based tests for custom controls.
Vanta's Approach:
Vanta focuses on breadth, with an extensive library of integrations that provide a complete, automated view of compliance, covering essential controls like credential management and user access.
Availability
This criterion focuses on ensuring your systems are available for operation and use as committed, involving monitoring for high availability and disaster recovery. For a more technical look at this, see our guide to automating SOC 2 on AWS.
How They Automate: Both platforms monitor your cloud environment to verify that availability-related controls are in place.
- Drata's Approach: Drata’s infrastructure tests directly map to availability controls, such as verifying that resources are deployed across multiple availability zones.
- Vanta's Approach: Vanta’s continuous monitoring achieves the same goal by checking for things like backup settings for cloud databases and other high-availability configurations.
Confidentiality & Privacy
These criteria concern the protection of sensitive information, including data encryption, access restrictions, and proper data disposal.
How They Automate: Both platforms scan your environment to ensure that data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and their integrated Policy Centers help manage, distribute, and track employee acceptance of critical confidentiality and privacy policies.
Processing Integrity
This criterion ensures that system processing is complete, valid, accurate, and timely. It is supported by monitoring change management and system operations controls.
How They Automate: Both platforms integrate with version control systems to monitor software development lifecycle (SDLC) controls, such as the enforcement of code review processes before merging, providing a clear audit trail for change management.
The Extensibility Factor: A Deep Dive into the APIs
For a technical leader, out-of-box automation is only half the story. The real power lies in a platform's ability to be extended and integrated into your unique engineering workflows. This is where the APIs come in.
Vanta API: Built for Automation and Extensibility
Vanta’s API is consistently described as more comprehensive and built for performing a wider range of automation tasks. It is a full RESTful service designed to let you programmatically manage your Vanta account and build custom integrations.
Key Vanta API Capabilities:
- Manage Workflows: You can automate critical processes like offboarding users and querying test results to find failing resources.
- Build Custom Integrations: This is a major differentiator. The API allows you to push data into Vanta from systems it doesn't natively support, such as custom internal tools.
- Manage Resources: You can programmatically manage resource ownership and upload file-based evidence.
The Verdict: The Vanta API is a powerful tool for engineering teams that want to deeply embed compliance into their existing ecosystem.
Drata API: Built for Reporting and Evidence Upload
Drata’s API is powerful but has historically been more focused on querying data for reporting purposes and pushing specific types of evidence into the platform.
Key Drata API Capabilities:
- Push Evidence: The API provides clear endpoints for uploading evidence for specific controls, such as completed security training or background checks.
- Query Data: You can pull data from Drata to power custom dashboards or reporting.
- Integrate Custom Workflows: The API allows for the integration of custom workflows and data from third-party solutions.
The Verdict: The Drata API is excellent for extracting compliance data for external use and for programmatically uploading specific types of manual evidence.
Conclusion: Which Platform is Right for Your Team?
Both Vanta and Drata are top-tier platforms that will save your team hundreds of hours. The right choice depends on your company's stage, technical maturity, and strategic priorities.
Choose Vanta if:
- You are an early-stage startup where speed to compliance is the top priority.
- Your team values a simple, intuitive user interface and a quick onboarding process.
- You need mature, built-in modules for risk and vendor management.
- Your engineering team wants a highly flexible API to build custom integrations.
Choose Drata if:
- You are a more mature, engineering-led company that prioritizes deep, real-time automation.
- You want a best-in-class, collaborative audit experience via features like the Audit Hub.
- Your primary focus is on technical control monitoring.
- Your main API use case is extracting compliance data for reporting.
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