Secureframe vs Vanta (2026): pricing, features and verdict

Short answer: Pick Secureframe if you want a number on the page before the quote ($7,500 a year to start on Fundamentals), a Knowledge Base with an owner and a review schedule on each answer, and, if you are a defense contractor, a Defense package aimed at CMMC. Pick Vanta if the audit evidence already lives in Vanta and questionnaire drafts should use it, you need hosting in the US, in Frankfurt, or in Australia, and you can match your year to 25, 144 or 288 questionnaires. Secureframe is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2020. Vanta was founded in 2018. The Vanta pages in this record do not name a headquarters.

These are neighboring GRC platforms. The questionnaire module is a reason they show up in the same search, and it is not the whole product. Secureframe’s best-fit line is companies running SOC 2, ISO 27001 or CMMC in Secureframe that want answers from the same data. Vanta’s best-fit line is companies already running SOC 2 or ISO 27001 in Vanta that want answers from the same evidence. If you have not picked the audit platform, do that first. The questionnaire caps only make sense after you know which evidence library you will feed.

Checked October 2026 on each vendor’s pricing, questionnaire, trust and help pages.

Key takeaways

• Meters differ: Secureframe counts AI-answered questions (100 a year on Fundamentals, 15,000 on Complete). Vanta counts questionnaires (25 a year on Plus, 144 on Professional, 288 on Advanced). A 400-question SIG is one Vanta questionnaire and could be hundreds of Secureframe questions.
• Starting price: Secureframe Fundamentals is listed as starting at $7,500 a year. Complete and Defense are quote-only. Vanta’s Essentials, Plus, Professional and Enterprise tiers have no public prices.
• When the model declines: Secureframe’s help center says automation leaves a question blank when it finds no confident match, so early coverage depends on approved policies and verified answers already in the Knowledge Base. Vanta says it answers 80% or more of questions automatically, with results varying by knowledge base. That 80% is Vanta’s claim.
• Sources: Trust AI answers in Secureframe have a See sources control. Vanta calls generated answers well-cited. Neither record describes a numeric confidence score on the Vanta side. Secureframe does not describe one either, beyond the confident-match rule that withholds an answer.
• Regions: Secureframe’s trust center lists AWS with data location “United States / London.” London is in the UK, not the EU, and no EU region is named. Vanta documents a US region, an EU region on AWS in Frankfurt, and an Australian region, and warns that a regional tenant does not keep every subprocessor in-region.
• Limitations: SSO, SCIM and custom integrations start on Secureframe Complete. Fundamentals does not include them. Vanta’s approval workflows and custom tagging sit in Advanced Questionnaire Automation. Capterra quotes on Vanta include “I do think Vanta is very expensive” (May 2025) and “The pricing was too high” (October 2025). A July 2025 Capterra review of Secureframe said “the integrations can be wonky and sometimes feel superfluous.”

Two audit platforms that also answer security reviews

Secureframe’s about page says the company has raised $79 million, from investors including Kleiner Perkins and Gradient Ventures. Customers named on the site, and repeated on the vendor record, are Coda, Kinectify and PerkUp. That is a short public list next to Vanta’s. Vanta’s site names GitHub, Duolingo, Intercom, Samsara, Atlassian, Ramp, Snowflake and Icelandair, plus Restaurant365 and SonarSource on the questionnaire page. Named customers are not a quality score. They are who has agreed to be listed. Vanta’s list is the longer one, and that is a genuine commercial strength: more public proof that large software companies have put the platform through a security review of its own.

Secureframe’s genuine strength on content governance is concrete and worth granting up front. The Knowledge Base lets you set an owner on each question and answer pair and schedule content reviews on a set frequency. A Chrome extension reuses that base on web portal questionnaires. Reviewers can be assigned and are notified by email. Answers move through Verify to Complete before export. For a team whose pain is stale security answers, an owner and a schedule is a clearer control than a generic “AI keeps it fresh” line.

Vanta’s genuine strength is the evidence graph. The knowledge base is previous questionnaires plus documents and policies in Vanta, with synced policies and custom tags for product, region and industry. If the control you showed an auditor last month is the control a customer asks about this month, you want one source. Custom tagging is packaged with Advanced Questionnaire Automation, so confirm the tier before you promise product-specific and region-specific answers.

Secureframe says teams can upload and answer RFPs as well as security questionnaires. It does not sell a dedicated RFP workflow, and it does not market DDQ response. Vanta’s questionnaire page is described for security questionnaires and security reviews and makes no RFP response claim. A proposal team looking for a dedicated response-management workflow will not find one on these pages. Both accept an uploaded questionnaire. That import sits on a compliance platform.

The meter: questions versus questionnaires

This is the comparison that changes the invoice, and it is easy to miss because both vendors say “automation.”

Secureframe Fundamentals, starting at $7,500 a year, includes 100 AI-answered questionnaire questions a year and a Trust Center with 15 document requests a year. Complete, quote only, moves that to 15,000 AI-answered questions a year and adds advanced questionnaire automation, an advanced Trust Center, SSO, SCIM and custom integrations. Defense, quote only, includes everything in Complete plus CMMC tooling: SPRS score tracker, system security plan, POA&M, and a managed CUI enclave. The help center says questions you answer manually do not count toward a purchased limit. That distinction matters. A human-typed answer is not the same meter event as a Trust AI suggestion. Ask Secureframe to confirm that reading in the order form, not only in the help article.

One hundred AI answers a year is the Fundamentals cap. A single workbook with more than 100 questions can use that entire allowance if automation attempts every row. Fifteen thousand on Complete is a different product economically. Do the arithmetic on last year’s question volume before you treat $7,500 as the cost of the year. It is the published start of Fundamentals. It is not a promise that Fundamentals covers your volume.

Vanta’s ladder, from the pricing page and the questionnaire product page: Essentials includes one compliance framework, the Vanta AI Agent, automated evidence collection and a Trust Center, with questionnaire automation as an optional add-on. Plus adds AI-powered Questionnaire Automation at 25 questionnaires a year, with an optional upgrade toward 144. Professional, marked most popular, includes 144 questionnaires a year, an Advanced Trust Center, risk management and advanced reporting. Enterprise is a custom GRC package. Sold standalone, Questionnaire Automation is 144 a year. Advanced Questionnaire Automation is 288 a year and adds custom tagging, approval workflows and SCIM.

A company that receives 40 customer questionnaires a year is over Plus and under Professional. A company that receives 10 long workbooks might fit Plus and still explode a Secureframe Fundamentals question cap. Bring both counts to the call: number of files, and number of questions inside them. The vendors chose different units. Your spreadsheet should show both.

Vanta’s 80% claim belongs in the same paragraph as the varying-by-knowledge-base clause, because that is how Vanta wrote it. It is not a measured benchmark in this record. Secureframe’s corresponding mechanism is the blank: no confident match, no generated answer, a person fills it. Coverage on day one is a function of what you have already approved. That is a limitation and a control. Quote the help article in the security review of the AI feature. Do not paraphrase it into a guarantee that wrong answers never appear. The article is about questions with no confident match. It does not publish an error rate for the answers that are filled.

Files, portals, Slack and review steps

Secureframe Questionnaire Automation takes Excel, CSV, Word and PDF, and can export in the original format or as a zip with evidence. Generative Trust AI suggestions include See sources for answers the model created. The Chrome extension covers web portal questionnaires. OpenAI provides the AI platform and large language model capability, location United States, per the trust center. Questionnaire answer generation and rephrasing run through OpenAI. Secureframe lets you switch these features off. Decide that setting before you upload a customer’s questionnaire. If a buyer forbids third-party model processing, the off switch is the sentence to test, not a footnote.

Vanta imports from third-party portals, spreadsheets, DOCX and PDF, and exports the finished questionnaire in the original format. Assignments can be a question or a whole questionnaire. Comments and Slack replies are part of the flow. Owners and approvers for each review stage are in Advanced. Slack is the collaboration surface named for assignments, comments and answering. Secureframe’s Slack article is about personnel sync and compliance tasks. Microsoft Teams is a listed Secureframe integration. Teams is not in Vanta’s collaboration record used here. If the reviewers live in Teams, Secureframe’s integration list is the one that names it. Confirm what the Teams connection actually does. “Listed integration” is not the same sentence as “answer the questionnaire inside the chat.”

Secureframe notifies assigned reviewers by email and uses Verify, then Complete, before export. Vanta’s richer approval chain is a paid step up. Match the workflow you have written down. A single reviewer and an email is a different purchase from stage-by-stage approvers.

Trust centers and certificates

Both ship a trust center. Secureframe’s includes custom domains and an automated NDA workflow, with 15 document requests a year on Fundamentals and an advanced Trust Center on Complete. Vanta’s includes gated documents, NDA collection and an optional AI chatbot for buyers. Essentials includes a Trust Center. Professional lists an Advanced Trust Center. Salesforce, HubSpot, DocuSign and Ironclad show up on Vanta’s trust-center notes.

Certificates for the vendor you are about to buy:

Secureframe’s trust center lists SOC 2 Type II (report period August 1, 2025 to July 31, 2026, available on request), ISO 27001:2022, CMMC Level 2 and TX-RAMP Level 1. CMMC Level 2 on Secureframe itself is part of the Defense story, next to the SPRS, SSP, POA&M and CUI enclave features. If you sell to the US Department of Defense supply chain, that package is the reason Secureframe is on the shortlist even when the questionnaire math favors someone else.

Vanta’s security page points at an ISO 27001 certificate and a SOC 2 Type II report on its Trust Center. The record also lists ISO 42001, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS and CCPA. There is no CMMC package in the Vanta facts used here. Do not infer one from “compliance automation.”

Hosting and subprocessors

Secureframe: AWS, data location stated as United States / London. Ask which region your tenant would use. London is not an EU region. OpenAI is in the United States and can be disabled for generation and rephrasing. Other named subprocessors, all with US data locations in the published note, include Datadog (monitoring), OneSchema (data import structuring), Intercom Fin (communications), plus LaunchDarkly, Sentry, Twilio and Cloudflare.

Vanta: app.vanta.com for the US, app.eu.vanta.com on AWS in Frankfurt for the EU, and an Australian region. The help article is explicit that choosing a region does not pin every supporting service or subprocessor to that region. AWS is named for infrastructure, key management and the Frankfurt centre. The fuller subprocessor list is linked from the security page and renders client-side (trust.vanta.com/subprocessors). Read it during the review, or take it from the DPA. A client-rendered page is a poor artifact to freeze in a security packet unless you save a copy that day.

Integration breadth, as each vendor states it: Secureframe lists 300+ integrations across cloud, identity, HR, ticketing (Jira, Linear, Asana), communication (Slack, Teams) and CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot). Named examples in the vendor file also include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Workspace and Okta. Vanta says 400+ tools. Named examples include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, GitHub, Jira, Okta, Slack, Salesforce and HubSpot. Both numbers are vendor claims. The useful check is your list: the IdP, the cloud account, the ticketing tool, the HRIS. A July 2025 Capterra review, from someone in IT support, says of Secureframe that “the integrations can be wonky and sometimes feel superfluous.” That is one reviewer’s sentence, on Capterra, checked October 2026. It is a reason to connect your real stack in a proof, not a verdict on all 300 names.

What the review sites show

Secureframe: 4.7 out of 5 on G2 from 805 reviews (July 2026) and 4.8 out of 5 on Capterra from 58 reviews (October 2026). Vanta: 4.5 out of 5 on G2 from 2,721 reviews (October 2026), 4.4 out of 5 on Gartner from 71 reviews (July 2026), and 4.2 out of 5 on Capterra from 33 reviews (October 2026). Secureframe’s G2 score is higher. Vanta’s G2 sample is more than three times larger. Report both. G2’s May 2026 summary of Vanta says reviewers found the user interface disorganized, the AI features overly relied upon, and customer support slow or lacking in some areas. On price, Capterra carries “I do think Vanta is very expensive” (May 2025) and “The pricing was too high” (October 2025). Secureframe at least publishes $7,500 a year as a start, which removes one mystery and does not remove the quote for Complete, where 15,000 questions and SSO live.

Side-by-side packaging

	Secureframe	Vanta
Entry public price	Fundamentals, starting at $7,500/year	None
AI allowance at entry	100 questions a year	Questionnaire automation is an add-on on Essentials
Middle allowance	15,000 questions a year on Complete (quote)	25 questionnaires a year on Plus; 144 on Professional
Top questionnaire tier	Included in how Complete is described	288 a year on Advanced, with tagging, approval workflows, SCIM
SSO and SCIM	From Complete	SCIM called out on Advanced Questionnaire Automation
Trust center allowance	15 document requests a year on Fundamentals	Trust Center on Essentials; Advanced Trust Center on Professional
CMMC	Defense package, and CMMC Level 2 on Secureframe’s trust center	Not described in this record
Free trial	None listed	None listed
Model switch	OpenAI generation can be turned off	Not described as an off switch in this record
Manual answers	Help center: manual answers do not count toward the purchased AI limit	Not given the same sentence in this record

Known issues and limitations

Secureframe

• The entry meter is 100 AI questions: pricing (checked October 2026). 15,000 questions, SSO, SCIM and custom integrations require quote-only Complete.
• No EU region named: the trust center lists AWS data location as United States / London (checked October 2026). Confirm the tenant region.
• Blanks when confidence is missing: the help article says automation leaves a question blank when it finds no confident match (checked October 2026).
• OpenAI on the answer path: generation and rephrasing run through OpenAI unless you switch the features off, per the same trust center.
• One reviewer’s line on integrations: “the integrations can be wonky and sometimes feel superfluous,” IT support, July 2025, on Capterra (checked October 2026).

Vanta

• No public price, plan or trial: pricing (checked October 2026) sends you to a demo.
• Questionnaire caps and a workflow gate: 25, 144 and 288 a year, with approval workflows and custom tagging on Advanced, per the questionnaire page (checked October 2026).
• Quoted complaints about cost: “I do think Vanta is very expensive” (May 2025) and “The pricing was too high” (October 2025), on Capterra (checked October 2026).
• G2, May 2026: the review summary says reviewers found the user interface disorganized, the AI features overly relied upon, and customer support slow or lacking in some areas (G2, checked October 2026).
• Residency caveat: help center (checked October 2026) says a regional tenant does not guarantee all supporting services stay in that region.
• No RFP claim on the questionnaire product. Do not scope proposal projects into this module.

Choose Secureframe when

• You want “starting at $7,500/year” in the first email, and you have counted AI-answered questions against 100 on Fundamentals or 15,000 on Complete.
• Each answer in the Knowledge Base should have an owner and a scheduled review.
• You need See sources on generative answers, and you accept that a question with no confident match stays blank for a person.
• You can turn OpenAI-backed generation off if a customer questionnaire must not be processed that way, and you have tested that switch.
• CMMC is in scope: SPRS, SSP, POA&M, a managed CUI enclave, and Secureframe’s own CMMC Level 2 listing.
• US or London hosting is acceptable, and you have asked which one your tenant gets. SSO can wait until Complete, or you already know you will buy Complete.

Choose Vanta when

• Evidence collection for SOC 2 or ISO 27001 is the main purchase, and questionnaires are a module on top.
• Your count is questionnaires per year, and 25, 144 or 288 covers it, including the Advanced tier if you need stage-by-stage approvers and custom tags.
• You need an EU region on AWS in Frankfurt or an Australian region, and you will review subprocessors that may sit outside it.
• The larger public review set matters to the buying committee: 2,721 G2 reviews as of October 2026, plus Gartner.
• Slack is where assignees comment and answer, and the 400+ integration claim includes the cloud and identity tools you will actually connect.
• You have read the 2025 Capterra lines on price and you still want the quote, because the alternative is not cheaper in a way you can see yet.

Verdict

Secureframe and Vanta automate compliance and then meter a questionnaire assistant on top. Secureframe’s genuine strengths are the published Fundamentals price, per-answer ownership and review schedules, See sources, an off switch for OpenAI generation, and a Defense package for CMMC with its own CMMC Level 2 certification. Vanta’s genuine strengths are drafting from the same policies used in audits, original-format portal and file handling, a US plus Frankfurt plus Australia hosting story, a very large G2 sample, and a stated integration catalog on the order of 400 tools.

The unit in the contract decides the fit as much as the logo does. Count questions if you are pricing Secureframe. Count questionnaires if you are pricing Vanta. Then upload one real workbook, see what is filled, what is blank, and which source a reviewer can open, before you treat either marketing percentage as your coverage.

Read the full Secureframe review or Vanta review, or browse all RFP & DDQ software.

Sources checked

• Secureframe pricing (checked October 2026)
• Secureframe about (checked October 2026)
• Secureframe questionnaires (checked October 2026)
• Secureframe integrations (checked October 2026)
• Secureframe trust center (checked October 2026)
• Secureframe help: getting started with questionnaires (checked October 2026)
• Secureframe help: questions left blank (checked October 2026)
• Secureframe help: Slack (checked October 2026)
• Secureframe reviews on G2 (checked July 2026)
• Secureframe reviews on Capterra (checked October 2026)
• Vanta pricing (checked October 2026)
• Vanta questionnaire automation (checked October 2026)
• Vanta trust center (checked October 2026)
• Vanta about (checked October 2026)
• Vanta security (checked October 2026)
• Vanta EU data centre announcement (checked October 2026)
• Vanta help: EU and Australia regions (checked October 2026)
• Vanta homepage (checked October 2026)
• Vanta on G2 (checked October 2026)
• Vanta reviews on Gartner (checked July 2026)
• Vanta reviews on Capterra (checked October 2026)