StartComply
vs Drata
Why do European SMBs choose StartComply?
- Go live in a day. We scope the platform on a call and configure it for you. That work is inside the price, and most customers are running before the week is out.
- Keep the whole programme inside Europe. EU-only hosting under Greek and EU ownership, no US parent and no CLOUD Act. Your team and your suppliers work in seven European languages.
- Pay for nothing you will never use. We cover NIS2, DORA, ISO 27001:2022, GDPR and IMO. There is no SOC 2 engine underneath that you fund, configure and work around.
100+ European organisations · No credit card, no sales maze
Should you choose StartComply or Drata?
If a US customer is waiting on a SOC 2 report, buy Drata. We mean that. If your deadline says NIS2, DORA or ISO 27001:2022, four things decide it.
NIS2 and DORA are the product, not a mapping
Open an incident and the clocks start counting: 24 hours, 72 hours, one month. Your DORA register of information sits on the vendor record, with the Article 30 clauses tracked contract by contract.
Drata delivers NIS2 and DORA as cross-mapped overlays on its ISO and SOC 2 engine. Our research found no incident clocks, no register of information and no Article 30 tracking in the product.
Vendor risk is included, and so is the scan
Registry, tiering, questionnaires, continuous monitoring and offboarding come with every plan. So does active external vulnerability scanning of your own domain and of every vendor domain you track, run on our own engine.
At Drata, the deeper vendor risk and Trust Center functionality sits in higher tiers or add-on modules, and there is no external scanning engine at any tier. Vendor risk runs on questionnaires and collected evidence, not outside-in telemetry.
Your evidence never leaves the EU
We host exclusively in EU data centres, under Greek and EU ownership with no US parent, so no US CLOUD Act pathway exists, and we put the EU-only guarantee in the contract. When your auditor asks where the evidence physically lives, the answer is one sentence.
At research time Drata published no EU data residency at all. Hosting is US-based, the SafeBase Trust Center included, on a US-incorporated company. An EU organisation can run controls in Drata; its data does not stay in Europe.
You get a security team, not a support queue
StartComply is built and run by TicTac, an Athens security firm doing incident response, forensics and audits since 1999. The people who answer your call are the people who wrote the control mappings.
Drata’s support is highly rated and its partner ecosystem is broad. It is a software company: services come from partners and the regulatory content from a content team, a different model from a working security bench.
The features StartComply has that Drata doesn’t
Twenty-nine capabilities, checked against both products in July 2026. 7 of them go the other way, and they are in the list too. Use the toggle to strip out everything we both do and leave only the lines where the choice is actually made.
| Capability |  StartComply |
 Drata |
|---|---|---|
| European regulatory mechanics | ||
| NIS2 24h, 72h and one month incident clocks | ||
| DORA register of information | ||
| DORA Article 30 contract clause tracking | ||
| ISO 27001:2022 | ||
| GDPR | ||
| IMO maritime cyber | ||
| SOC 2 | ||
| HIPAA, PCI DSS, CMMC | ||
| Third-party risk management | ||
| TPRM included in the base subscription | Higher tiers, add-ons | |
| Vendor registry and risk tiering | ||
| Risk-tiered questionnaires with automated distribution | ||
| Vendor evidence via an own Trust Center network | ||
| Continuous vendor monitoring in the base price | Assessment driven | |
| External vulnerability scanning of vendor domains | ||
| External scanning of your own domain | ||
| Fourth party and subcontractor visibility | Lighter | |
| Structured vendor offboarding | Lighter | |
| Commercials | ||
| Pricing published on the website | ||
| Implementation included in the price | ||
| Price does not scale with entity or vendor count | Scope based | |
| Operational in hours to days | 6 to 12 weeks | |
| Sovereignty and language | ||
| EU-only data residency by default | ||
| EU-owned, outside US CLOUD Act reach | ||
| Seven live EU language interfaces | Four languages | |
| Platform and ecosystem | ||
| 300+ integrations and a public API | ||
| Agentic AI for vendor assessments | Narrower | |
| Public Trust Center for your buyers | ||
| Independent review base on G2 and Gartner Peer Insights | ||
| In-house MSSP and incident response team behind the product | ||
Compiled July 2026 from both vendors’ public documentation and pricing pages, G2, Gartner Peer Insights and third-party procurement data. Drata publishes no official price list, so every Drata cost figure on this page is a public estimate and labelled as one. Where a capability could not be evidenced in a vendor’s own documentation we recorded it as absent rather than assuming it exists. Corrections are welcome and we will publish them.
Both sides of all 20 criteria on one screen
The same 20 criteria we apply to every vendor in our 68-platform market study, side by side. What we offer, what Drata offers, and who takes the point. Nothing hidden, including the 7 Drata wins.
| # | Criterion |  StartComply |
Drata |
Point to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | TPRM in the base product | Built into every subscription: registry, four level tiering, questionnaires, Article 30 clause tracking, continuous monitoring and offboarding. | One of four Trust Management product lines; the deeper vendor risk and Trust Center functionality typically sits in higher tiers or add-ons. | StartComply |
| 02 | Independent analyst and peer ratings | No independent review footprint yet. We launched in 2026 and review bases take years to build. | Around 4.7 to 4.8 across more than 1,150 G2 reviews and thirteen consecutive quarters as a G2 Leader; about 3.8 on Gartner Peer Insights, where cost complaints concentrate. | Drata |
| 03 | Native EU regulatory mechanics | NIS2 24 hour, 72 hour and one month incident clocks, a DORA ICT register of information, Article 30 clause tracking, GDPR and IMO, all as working product. | NIS2 and DORA are cross-mapped overlays on the ISO and SOC 2 engine; no register, no clocks and no national transpositions evidenced at research time. | StartComply |
| 04 | Framework breadth | A deliberately focused set: NIS2, DORA, ISO 27001:2022, GDPR and IMO. Nothing outside Europe. | More than 30 frameworks with a framework builder: SOC 2, ISO 27001 and 27701, HIPAA, PCI DSS 4.0, CMMC 2.0 and ISO 42001. | Drata |
| 05 | Questionnaire automation | Risk tiered questionnaires mapped to our frameworks, with automated distribution and reminders. | Agentic assessments with human-in-the-loop scoring, plus SafeBase auto-response for inbound reviews from a 1,000-plus organisation network. | Drata |
| 06 | Continuous vendor monitoring in the base price | Continuous cyber, compliance and financial signals with live risk score updates, included at every tier. | Assessment and evidence driven, inside the vendor risk product line; no external technical monitoring of vendor domains. | StartComply |
| 07 | External vendor domain scanning | Active external vulnerability scanning of your own domain and every vendor domain, included as standard, first party. | No external attack-surface or vendor-domain scanning engine of its own. | StartComply |
| 08 | AI and automation engine | An AI engine for gap analysis, remediation suggestions and policy work. Narrower in scope. | The Agentic Trust Management Platform: a VRM agent that reviews documents, scores risk and drafts reports, with a human in the loop by design. | Drata |
| 09 | Integrations and public API | No public integration catalogue or API documentation at the time of research. | More than 300 integrations, a public REST API and webhooks; only Vanta’s catalogue is reported larger. | Drata |
| 10 | Pricing transparency | Published: €4,500 a year per framework and €1,500 for the third-party risk module, implementation included. | Quote only, banded by headcount and framework count, with vendor risk, Trust Center and Modern GRC priced as separate modules on top. | StartComply |
| 11 | Total cost at SMB scale | €10,500 a year for two frameworks plus third-party risk, implementation included. | Estimates: entry USD 7,500 to 15,000, typical mid-market programmes USD 20,000 to 45,000 a year, modules extra. | StartComply |
| 12 | EU data residency and jurisdiction | EU-only hosting under Greek and EU ownership, with no US parent and therefore no CLOUD Act pathway. | US-hosted on AWS with no EU data residency published at research time; SafeBase is also US-hosted. | StartComply |
| 13 | Platform polish and UX maturity | A modern interface on a young product, less battle tested at scale. | Mature and consistently praised for ease of use. | Drata |
| 14 | Security practitioners behind the product | Built and operated by TicTac, a working MSSP and incident response firm running since 1999. | A software company with an auditor and partner ecosystem; regulatory content is content-team driven. | StartComply |
| 15 | Implementation and onboarding | Configuration done by us, included in the subscription, with no implementation fees. | Six to twelve weeks commonly reported for mid-market scopes that include vendor risk. | StartComply |
| 16 | Support model | Direct support from the product team, included. Optional vCISO from the same bench, never mandatory. | Highly rated support, with customer success managers on higher tiers. | Draw |
| 17 | Localisation | Seven live EU language interfaces, with localised policies and questionnaires. | English, Spanish, French and German; nothing east of German documented. | StartComply |
| 18 | Scale and customer proof | More than 100 European organisations, plus Cyber Security Awards 2026 recognition. | More than 7,000 customers in 60 countries, USD 100M ARR crossed in 2025, and a SafeBase network of over 1,000 organisations. | Drata |
| 19 | Deployment speed | Hours to days, with same day configuration possible. | Weeks, with six to twelve weeks reported when vendor risk is in scope. | StartComply |
| 20 | Fit for EU SMBs | Purpose built for European organisations of roughly 20 to 1,000 people under NIS2, DORA, ISO 27001:2022 or GDPR. | Built for cloud-native SaaS proving SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA or PCI to enterprise buyers. | StartComply |
Final tally: 12 StartComply, 1 draws, 7 Drata. Drata wins the criteria that reward its own centre of gravity. We win the criteria that decide whether a European SMB can actually buy, deploy and afford the thing.
How to read the draw. On support, theirs is highly rated and scaled with customer success managers on higher tiers; ours is smaller and closer to the people who built the product. Neither is a clear win.
What each one actually costs you
The honest comparison is what a documented vendor risk programme costs on each platform. Ours is published and self-contained. Theirs is quote-only and sold as a premium module on top of a platform licence.
Three-year total for a third-party risk programme, 30 vendors
No framework certification work in this scope. Ours is the published price of the module that does exactly this. Drata does not publish prices, so its bar is the lowest public third-party estimate for the platform alone, before the vendor risk module is added on top.
Reading notes: each bar uses the currency that vendor quotes in, euro and US dollar, plotted on one numeric axis for illustration only. No conversion is applied. Our figure is our published list price: the third-party risk and external vulnerability assessment module at €1,500 a year, with no implementation fee and no per-seat charge. Drata’s pricing is quote-only. Public third-party estimates start at roughly USD 7,500 a year for the platform, which is the bar shown, and vendor risk and the trust centre are both sold as premium modules on top of it, so the real figure for this scope is higher than the bar. Two things the Drata price does not buy: external scanning of your vendors’ domains, which its vendor risk module does not perform, and European data residency, which had no publicly verifiable statement at the time of research. External audit and certification fees sit outside both numbers. Validate both against written quotes for your own scope, including year two.
What our customers say
Finally, a compliance tool that understands European regulations. StartComply got us audit-ready in weeks, not months.Maria Papadopoulos, CISO, financial services
The AI policy engine alone saved us hundreds of hours. And the third-party risk management is exactly what DORA requires.Thomas Müller, Compliance Manager, insurance
We evaluated enterprise platforms costing 10x more. StartComply does what we need at a price that makes sense.Elena Kowalski, Data Protection Officer, technology
We consider joining Drata. Why should we choose StartComply?
There is a straight answer, and it depends on two things: how big you are, and which regulation is actually binding you.
If you are one of the thousands of European SMBs facing NIS2 and DORA
Then you are not Drata’s buyer, and paying for a platform whose EU regulation is mapped on top is the expensive way to fail an inspection.
You need the 24 and 72 hour incident clocks, the DORA register of information, Article 30 clause tracking, vendor risk and external scanning in the price, evidence that stays in the EU, and artefacts in the language your auditor reads. That is the entire product. €4,500 a year per framework, published, live in a day.
If you are a US-facing technology company and SOC 2, ISO or PCI is the gate
Buy Drata. It is the number two of US compliance automation: more than 7,000 customers, a 4.7 to 4.8 G2 record across 1,150-plus reviews, 300-plus integrations, the most mature human-in-the-loop agentic assessment engine we reviewed, and the SafeBase Trust Center network that absorbs inbound security reviews at a scale we do not attempt.
If inbound reviews from enterprise buyers are your heaviest workload, none of our advantages help you. Buy the thing that solves your actual problem.
And if you sit in both worlds, a European software exporter under NIS2 at home and SOC 2 abroad, run both. Keep Drata for the certification machine and the Trust Center, and let us carry the EU layer: the clocks, the register, Article 30 tracking, supplier scanning and local-language artifacts, with the evidence held on EU soil where no Drata region can currently put it. At €4,500 a year for the framework you are regulated against, the EU layer stays well below the reported Drata mid-market band.
Compare us with the rest
Same 20 criteria, same honesty, one competitor at a time.
How we compiled this. Both platforms were assessed against the same 20 criteria we apply to every vendor in the TPRM Platform Landscape 2026, using vendor documentation and pricing pages, company announcements, G2 and Gartner Peer Insights review data, Forrester’s GRC Platforms Wave, and third-party contract price data, gathered in July 2026. Drata figures marked as estimates are public third-party figures published in the absence of an official price list. Where a capability could not be evidenced in a vendor’s own documentation we recorded it as absent rather than assuming it exists. If we got something wrong, write to us and we will correct it publicly.
Drata is a trademark of Drata Inc. All product names, logos and brands are the property of their respective owners. Their use here is for identification only and implies no affiliation or endorsement. Last updated July 2026.