StartComply
vs Vanta
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 Vanta?
If a US customer is waiting on a SOC 2 report, buy Vanta. 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.
Vanta maps NIS2 and DORA onto its SOC 2 engine. That alignment is genuinely useful. It is not the same object your supervisor asks you to produce.
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 Vanta, vendor risk is a paid add-on, and there is no external scanning engine at any tier.
The price is on our website
€4,500 a year for each framework you are regulated against, plus €1,500 for the third-party risk and external scanning module. That is the list price on our own website, implementation included. It follows the frameworks you actually need, not your entity count or your vendor count. Extra user packs are the only add-on.
Vanta publishes nothing. Public estimates put a realistic multi-framework scope at USD 20,000 to 40,000, with renewals reported 30 to 50 percent higher once the first-year discount expires.
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.
The same bench sells vCISO time if you want it, quoted separately, never bundled into the licence to inflate it.
The features StartComply has that Vanta doesn’t
Twenty-nine capabilities, checked against both products in July 2026. Six 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 |
 Vanta |
|---|---|---|
| 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, FedRAMP | ||
| Third-party risk management | ||
| TPRM included in the base subscription | Paid add-on | |
| Vendor registry and risk tiering | ||
| Risk-tiered questionnaires with automated distribution | ||
| Questionnaire automation without usage quotas | Quota plus overage | |
| Continuous vendor monitoring in the base price | In the add-on | |
| 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 | Add-ons priced separately | |
| Operational in hours to days | Weeks | |
| Sovereignty and language | ||
| EU-only data residency by default | Frankfurt opt-in | |
| EU-owned, outside US CLOUD Act reach | ||
| Seven live EU language interfaces | 4 reported | |
| Platform and ecosystem | ||
| 400+ integrations and a public API | ||
| Agentic AI for policy drafting and questionnaire answering | 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 and Gartner Peer Insights, Forrester’s GRC Platforms Wave, and third-party contract price data. Vanta publishes no official price list, so every Vanta 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 Vanta offers, and who takes the point. Nothing hidden, including the six Vanta wins.
| # | Criterion | StartComply |
Vanta |
Point to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | TPRM in the base product | Built into every subscription: registry, four level tiering, questionnaires, Article 30 clause tracking, continuous monitoring, fourth party visibility and offboarding. | A paid add-on sold separately, publicly estimated at USD 5,000 to 15,000 a year on top of the base platform. | StartComply |
| 02 | Independent analyst and peer ratings | No independent review footprint yet. We launched in 2026 and review bases take years to build. | Around 2,450 G2 reviews averaging 4.6, a Leader placement in the Forrester GRC Wave Q2 2026, and roughly 4.4 on Gartner Peer Insights. | Vanta |
| 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 delivered as framework mappings on the SOC 2 and ISO engine. No incident clocks or register of information 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 35 frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP and the EU AI Act. | Vanta |
| 05 | Questionnaire automation | Risk tiered questionnaires mapped to NIS2, DORA, GDPR and ISO 27001:2022, with automated distribution and reminders. No usage caps reported. | An AI agent answers inbound and outbound questionnaires. Plan quotas are reported, around 144 a year on some tiers, with overage fees beyond the cap. | Draw |
| 06 | Continuous vendor monitoring in the base price | Continuous cyber, compliance and financial signals with live risk score updates and threshold alerts, included at every tier. | The TPRM Agent monitors vendors around the clock, but only inside the paid add-on. | StartComply |
| 07 | External vendor domain scanning | Active external vulnerability scanning of your own domain and of every vendor domain in your register, included as standard. | No native scanning engine at any tier. Outside-in vendor telemetry arrives only through integrations you procure separately. | StartComply |
| 08 | AI and automation engine | An AI engine for gap analysis, remediation suggestions and policy work. Narrower in scope, and its technical depth is not yet publicly documented. | The Agentic Trust Platform drafts policies, answers questionnaires from your evidence library, reviews vendor documents and auto-scores vendors. The deepest AI layer in the category. | Vanta |
| 09 | Integrations and public API | No public integration catalogue or API documentation at the time of research. A genuine gap if you run a large heterogeneous cloud estate. | More than 400 integrations and a public API, the widest connector library in the category. | Vanta |
| 10 | Pricing transparency | Published on our pricing page: €4,500 a year per framework and €1,500 for the third-party risk module, implementation included. | Quote only, with no public price list. Customers report renewal increases of 30 to 50 percent once the first year discount expires. | StartComply |
| 11 | Total cost at SMB scale | €10,500 a year for two frameworks plus third-party risk, implementation included. | A realistic USD 20,000 to 40,000 a year once vendor risk management and a second framework are added. All figures are public estimates. | 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 hosting by default, with Frankfurt available as an opt-in. Because Vanta Inc. is US-incorporated, the CLOUD Act reaches the company wherever the data sits. | StartComply |
| 13 | Platform polish and UX maturity | A modern interface on a young product, less battle tested at scale. | Mature and widely praised, refined across more than 16,000 customers. | Vanta |
| 14 | Security practitioners behind the product | Built and operated by TicTac, a working MSSP and incident response firm running since 1999. The people who answer your call wrote the control mappings. | An excellent software company. Regulatory content is maintained by a content team and services are delivered through a partner ecosystem. | StartComply |
| 15 | Implementation and onboarding | Configuration done by us, included in the subscription, with no implementation fees. | Self serve plus partner delivered. Evidence format and sync friction are reported at scale, and renewal negotiation is a noted friction point. | StartComply |
| 16 | Support model | Direct support from the product team, included. Optional vCISO and advisory time from the same bench, quoted separately and never mandatory. | Scaled global support, widely praised in reviews, on a tiered SaaS model. | Draw |
| 17 | Localisation | Seven live EU language interfaces: English, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, Polish, Czech and German, with more announced. | English, with German, French and Spanish reported. | StartComply |
| 18 | Scale and customer proof | More than 100 European organisations, plus Cyber Security Awards 2026 recognition in the GRC category. | More than 16,000 customers and roughly USD 300M in annual recurring revenue as of April 2026. | Vanta |
| 19 | Deployment speed | Hours to days, with same day configuration possible. | Weeks for a startup SOC 2 scope, and longer as compliance needs mature. | StartComply |
| 20 | Fit for EU SMBs | Purpose built for European organisations of roughly 20 to 1,000 people whose obligations are NIS2, DORA, ISO 27001:2022 or GDPR. | Built US first around SOC 2 driven sales, and increasingly aimed at mid-market and enterprise accounts. | StartComply |
Final tally: 12 StartComply, 2 draws, 6 Vanta. Vanta wins the criteria that reward scale, ecosystem and track record. We win the criteria that decide whether a European SMB can actually buy, deploy and afford the thing.
How to read the two draws. On questionnaire automation their AI answers inbound questionnaires better than ours, while ours arrive control-mapped and without usage quotas. On support theirs is scaled and well rated, 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 the all-in, year-two number for your real scope. Ours is published, theirs is a public estimate, and over three years the gap is not marginal.
Three-year total for a 120-employee EU manufacturer
NIS2 important entity, 30 vendors, needs NIS2 plus ISO 27001. Ours is the list price for exactly that scope, so it is a single figure. Vanta’s solid bar is the lower estimate and the lighter extension the upper.
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 for this scope: two frameworks at €4,500 each plus the €1,500 third-party risk module, €10,500 a year, implementation included and no renewal uplift. Be aware that our price rises in steps of €4,500 for every additional framework, so a four framework scope narrows this gap considerably. Vanta’s are public third-party estimates: entry at an estimated USD 10,000 to 12,000, plus the vendor risk add-on and a second framework, giving a realistic USD 20,000 to 40,000 a year. 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 Vanta. 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 Vanta’s buyer, and paying enterprise prices for a SOC 2 engine with your regulation 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 an enterprise above 1,000 people and SOC 2 is the goal
Go with the big platform. That is the obvious call and we are not going to argue you out of it. Vanta gives you SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS and FedRAMP, more than 400 integrations, the deepest AI layer in the category and roughly 2,450 independent reviews behind the signature.
If a US customer is holding up a contract until your SOC 2 report lands, none of our advantages help you. Buy the thing that solves your actual problem.
And if you sit in both worlds, a European software vendor selling into US enterprises, or a fintech that needs SOC 2 commercially and DORA legally, then run both. Keep Vanta for SOC 2 and let us carry the EU layer. At €4,500 a year for the one framework you are regulated against, it costs a fraction of a Vanta contract, and it stops you answering a European supervisor from a platform that does not model the regulation.
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. Vanta 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.
Vanta is a trademark of Vanta 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 August 2026.