Vanta vs. OneTrust vs. Drata: Which Tool to Choose

Compliance automation is necessary for companies operating in regulated industries. Regulatory requirements are too complex, and the penalties are too high to rely on manual processes or trust unverified compliance partners. From data privacy to risk management to compliance with necessary frameworks or regulations, you need a partner that does it all.

We’re here to make your job easier and compare three leading governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) tools in the market (Vanta, OneTrust, and Drata) so you can see how each one meets (or falls short of) your needs. 

Meet the Platforms

OneTrust, Vanta, and Drata all have capabilities centered around compliance and trust management. However, each of the three has its own focus and intended audience. Here’s a bit about each platform.

OneTrust

OneTrust is primarily a data privacy and governance tool, but it can also help users comply with over 50 security frameworks. Its automations are largely focused on data privacy concerns like those you might handle when dealing with GDPR, CCPA, and similar regulations. OneTrust offers various “solution packages” with pricing based on user numbers or feature usage.

OneTrust has a rating of 4.5 stars* on G2 and 4.3 stars on Capterra. 

* OneTrust offers five products, and the two most relevant to this article (Tech Risk & Compliance and Third-Party Management) share this rating, the highest of all OneTrust products.

Vanta

Vanta is a platform designed to help users automate compliance efforts and risk management. It covers over 35 security frameworks and offers automations that give users ongoing visibility into their compliance and security posture. Vanta offers two packages aimed at startups and three aimed at larger companies with GRC teams. Users can also add on packages for vendor risk management and customer trust management. 

Vanta has a rating of 4.6 stars on G2 and 4.3 stars on Capterra.

Drata

Drata is a GRC solution that focuses on trust management. The platform supports over 25 of the most common compliance frameworks. You’ll get access to a compliance accelerator program, an Audit Hub to help you breeze through your audits, and automations for governance and compliance issues. Drata has offerings for startups, mid-market, and enterprise companies, so you don’t have to worry about switching GRC tools as you scale. 

Drata has a rating of 4.8 stars on G2 and 5.0 stars on Capterra.

Now that you know who we’re evaluating, let’s dig in!

Control Monitoring

Stringent controls that prevent unauthorized individuals from accessing PII or other sensitive information are a large part of privacy and security. It’s not enough to have a tool that guides you through setting the right controls; monitoring tools help your team test controls and catch any potential issues before they balloon into serious threats. 

OneTrust

OneTrust includes control monitoring as part of its Control Workflow, which leads users through the implementation process. The controls available in OneTrust’s Control Workflow map to the compliance frameworks the tool supports.

Control monitoring is built in: As soon as you mark a control as “implemented,” it will automatically shift to being monitored. Teams can set multiple owners for each control to make sure everyone is kept in the loop. OneTrust can also map the same control to multiple frameworks if necessary to avoid redundancies. However, control monitoring is not a main focus of OneTrust (evidenced by the lack of reviewers who mentioned this functionality), so its feature set may lag behind tools geared more toward risk management and compliance.

Vanta

Vanta has a much heavier focus on control monitoring than OneTrust and heavily automates the process with an understanding of what it takes to follow the stringent requirements many security frameworks require. Once a control is set, Vanta tests it every hour. When a control doesn’t pass a test, Vanta alerts you and provides guidance on how to fix the situation.

You can set up any of Vanta’s pre-built controls, mapped to the security and compliance frameworks the tool supports, or build or import custom controls. Vanta supports bi-directional integration to help you manage controls across systems. Users speak highly of the platform’s control mapping capabilities, calling them “a standout feature” and saying they’re a boon in “stay[ing] consistently audit ready.” 

However, others caution that the inbuilt control descriptions “were too generic. We have to modify them intensely” for audits. Another warned, “I can't count how many times the integrations broke and caused us to have to restart in the middle of an audit,” causing them to ultimately switch to Drata. 

Drata

Control monitoring is heavily featured in compliance-focused Drata. Every control you set is constantly monitored and tested. The Trust Center includes a Continuous Monitoring section that shows six control categories and their corresponding controls. While Drata pre-maps relevant controls to categories, you can also add any of your controls to a category if it’s not included. When you view your controls, you’ll be able to see if there are any that have not passed a test within a certain time frame (the last three days, by default). 

Users credit Drata’s control monitoring process for “[giving] us back hours each week” and ensuring “we’re not scrambling last minute or relying on guesswork” during audit prep. They appreciate the ease of the automations, including the fact that they require little configuration for most purposes: One user cites being able to “use almost every [monitoring] test provided by Drata out of the box.” However, “Its built-in control templates aren’t always flexible enough for fully bespoke workflows,” so companies with truly unique needs will need to devote some time to setup. 

Framework Support

It’s not enough for your GRC solution to cover the framework you’re currently working toward compliance with. You want a tool with an expansive framework support structure, so you can add additional frameworks as you grow and expand to new market segments. Here are the frameworks that these three solutions support:

Audit Experience

Audits can be time-consuming, stressful, and costly. A good GRC solution addresses each of these issues. Along with providing the clarity to help you come into compliance with your chosen framework(s) or standard(s), a standout tool in this category simplifies the audit process itself. Let’s look at how these three competitors score on audit friendliness. 

OneTrust

OneTrust has an Audit Management module that uses data and settings from its IT Risk Management module. To use the former, you’ll first need to make sure the latter is set up with the relevant controls. Then, you can use the Audit Management module to set up an audit—choose your standard or framework, define the controls that need to be audited, and then assign auditors and approvers. Once an audit has been created, you can add attachments, create related tasks, and see progress updates.

Auditors working within OneTrust use workpapers to evaluate each control; you can review the findings once an individual workpaper has been completed. You can also use the Audit Management Dashboard for an overview of statistics related to all of your organization’s audits. One customer notes the platform “certainly allowed us to wrap up our audit in half of the required time.” However, others think “the audit module can do with a little bit of improvement,” likely because “the other tools in the market have more tools for risk and compliance and audit tasks.”

Vanta

Vanta’s audit experience is designed to give auditors and customers maximum visibility. All necessary information lives in Vanta, so once your auditor is given access, they have everything they need to do their work. You can see the same view your auditor does and track the progress of the audit. Two-way messaging capabilities allow auditors to leave their comments and questions within Vanta, so you can reply with any necessary information to hasten the process. 

Vanta has built out an auditor network to help you easily find a service provider, or you can use the auditor you’re already working with. Users appreciate Vanta’s audit-friendly approach for “significantly reduc[ing] the time required to implement audit processes and manage audit schedules” and “reducing manual effort and audit time.” There’s some slight room for improvement, as one customer mentions, “the collaboration between Vanta and third-party auditors could be more integrated. There’s still a good amount of back and forth outside the platform,” despite the built-in messaging system.

Drata

Drata’s Audit Hub centralizes everything you and your auditor need to simplify and streamline the experience. The tool automatically pulls all the evidence required for your audit—plus your audit history—into one secure portal that you can add your auditor to. Like Vanta, it offers in-platform communication, so auditors can send messages, create tasks, and request evidence as they work. You’ll be able to see the status of your evidence and receive notifications of necessary to-dos or completed tasks. 

Drata has created a pre-vetted network of auditors and will even match your company with an audit partner through its Auditor Network if you don’t have one lined up. With all these features, happy customers report that “Drata paid for itself within the first year by significantly lowering our SOC 2 audit expenses” and “eliminated the need for back-and-forth emails with our SOC 2 auditors.” 

Others share how the “consolidation of controls aligned to various frameworks make audits easy and efficient.” One customer remarks, “The audit hub is very basic at this point and doesn't give much visibility into the progress of an audit,” so if you’re looking for more granular updates, you may need to communicate directly with your auditor. 

Risk Management

Enabling your team to perform proactive risk management is a key function of GRC tools. Leaders in this space walk your team through applying various risk assessment methodologies and risk management frameworks for both internal and external (third-party) risks. Here’s how the platforms measure up on risk management.

OneTrust

Risk management is one area where OneTrust shines. It has two modules (IT Risk Management and Third-Party Risk Management) to help customers secure their systems and assess and monitor ongoing risk from vendor relationships. 

Its IT Risk Management capabilities map your entire system and help you discover and assess potential risks by impact and probability. OneTrust provides your team with the backing of a risk assessment methodology and leaves room for you to note important context information alongside each entry in your risk register. These capabilities help you standardize how risks are rated and make sure you’re prioritizing the mitigations that matter most. Plus, your stakeholders can easily see your risks when you use OneTrust’s pre-built risk analysis dashboards or create your own to track the risk information that’s most important to you. 

When it comes to vendor risk management, OneTrust automates much of the work. Choose a control framework, and the tool will build a risk assessment for you—or you can build a custom survey flow that raises questions based on the vendor’s previous answers. Then, you can create risk profiles for each vendor to view all the important information in one place. Stay secure in the knowledge that you’re protected with OneTrust’s risk mitigation workflows and rule-based triggers. It’s also easy to share your risk management progress thanks to custom dashboards and exportable PDF reports.

Customers are largely happy with OneTrust’s Risk Management modules, calling it “a very complete platform for managing risk” that is “fundamental in allowing us to proactively identify, evaluate, and mitigate IT and cybersecurity risks.” Another notes, “the flexibility of the risk assessment templates and frequent monitoring tools have enabled us to have updated information about risks inherent and have a concrete way of dealing with them before they happen.” There are a few minor complaints around usability, with one customer sharing, “some modules, especially around risk scoring and third-party assessments, take a fair bit of trial and error to get right.”

Vanta

Vanta’s goal is to centralize and automate the risk management process as much as possible. Like OneTrust, it offers tools to help you monitor your systems and third-party risks. Its solutions work both for companies building out their risk management programs and those who have already created a risk register. The platform’s built-in templates are easy to modify to reflect your company’s risk management processes. Continuous monitoring, mitigation planning, and reporting are all available to help your company keep up with the many risks it faces.

The Vendor Risk Management solution automates vendor questionnaires and pulls evidence from external documentation or sources like SOC 2 reports, DPAs, and other official records. Let Vanta’s built-in templates walk you through risk evaluation, or build your own with custom fields that reflect how your company thinks about risk. Vanta’s continuous monitoring uncovers potential shadow IT usage and tracks your vendors and their vendors to alert you when potential issues arise. 

Users are mixed on how Vanta’s risk management tools work in practice. One notes the Vendor Risk Management module is a “paid product ‘add-[on],’” rather than a feature included in the base price. Another is a fan of “the platform's comprehensive feature set, from risk assessments to policy management,” while others have found gaps in Vanta’s risk management capabilities: “We started the new approach to risk assessment and can’t use internal risk management instrument so we made it in excel,” another customer writes. They’re not the only one who misses the promised flexibility; one notes the tool “assumes that your vendors are mainly SaaS and so there is some awkwardness [...] when they are not (e.g. an MSP)” while another says, “Some fields in the risk register or vendor security reviews are a bit rigid”

Drata

Drata simplifies end-to-end risk management by providing templates and automations to make the process easy. From a pre-mapped library to automatically populated risk scores and treatment plans, it stays on top of internal and external risks for you. The custom risk scoring feature allows you to define how your company evaluates and responds to risks. Plus, Drata’s Risk Drawer gives you one centralized location to add risk data and context and create risk management tasks in Jira. 

Thanks to its pre-loaded risk library, building a risk register is easy. Drata automatically maps controls to your chosen security framework(s). Once a control has been mapped, Drata continuously monitors it for you and alerts risk owners of potential threats. For visibility into your cybersecurity and IT risk management processes, Drata offers a centralized dashboard and a comprehensive Risk Report. 

Drata also offers Vendor Risk Management capabilities to protect you against third-party risks. Its vendor directory centralizes vendor risk information so you can assess potential risks and create treatment plans. It gives you everything you need to proactively address vendor risk management, from pre-built security reviews to custom questionnaires and a Vendor Risk Management agent that collects official documentation and compares it to your policies and trust criteria. 

Drata’s risk management tools have saved its customers time and given them peace of mind. One states, “We don't have an easy way to do vendor inventory or risk management. We solved this by using these features in Drata and now have a central place to not only track vendors/risk, but assign tasks to executives/employees who need to review them.” Another cheers how ”we have been able to get uplifted functionality for the risk register and risk measurement process.” However, other reviewers appreciate that risk management is a wide field with complex needs, noting ”the risk management module still has some way to go to reach the level of maturity required for large enterprise.”

Access Reviews 

Unauthorized access to sensitive information will disqualify you from any privacy or security certification; even if you’re not required to pass any audits, it’s an unnecessary security risk. GRC platforms that centralize and automate user access reviews take a heavy administrative burden off your employees’ plates. Here’s how our contenders handle access reviews.

OneTrust

Curiously, the OneTrust site doesn’t mention access reviews, though reviewers mention that the capability is present. Presumably, the access reviews are a part of its Privacy Automation toolkit, which promises to “streamline compliance by operationalizing all privacy use cases in one platform.” In plain language, it’s a home for your company’s privacy initiatives. OneTrust was founded in response to GDPR, which requires access reviews, so it’s a good bet they live here.

Similar to the company’s lack of focus on this feature, most reviewers don’t call it out either. One mentions “data portability and access controls” among their pros for the platform, but they don’t tell us why they’re a fan. If access reviews are a heavy part of your team’s work, you may want a platform that gives this issue more attention.

Vanta

Vanta’s access review automation helps your company manage system access continuously without requiring heavy time investments from employees. Whether you’re introducing access reviews for the first time or looking to integrate them into your GRC program, Vanta provides workflows to help you get set up. The platform integrates with over 375 tools, allowing you to oversee all your systems from one dashboard.

Vanta offers remediation management to help you adjust user access and create reports. Customers are happy with the efficiency the tool’s Access Review package brings. One reviewer says, “As a lean startup, we don’t have a dedicated security team, so having a central dashboard to manage access reviews, monitor integrations, and track policy compliance has been a huge timesaver.” Another adds, “The vast number of integrations makes access reviews much smoother.” The one downside noted by customers is that this functionality isn’t included in the base Vanta configuration; “Vanta packages different parts of the platform, like access reviews, separately,” a reviewer warns. 

Drata

Access reviews are one of Drata’s core features, and are easy to automate. The platform allows you to use an SSO provider or individual integrations to access data from thousands of systems and put it into a centralized management dashboard. Its User Access Reviews feature then automates everything—and notifies you when manual approval is needed. To make sure audits go smoothly, Drata links evidence from your access reviews to controls. 

Drata’s centralized dashboard provides a holistic view of your company’s access practices so you can spot gaps and identify risks. Users appreciate Drata’s “out-of-the-box compliant policy drafts, security controls and support for required practices like […] user access reviews,” stating “increased tooling for user access reviews and risk assessments […] will further simplify our compliance processes and policies.” 

And unlike Vanta, this feature isn’t an add-on: A happy purchaser shares, “Everything from personnel management, risk management, policy maintenance, framework compliance and access review is a standard feature within the application.” 

Support and Expertise

GRC solutions are complex, and implementation rarely goes perfectly. Having a responsive and knowledgeable support team is therefore one of the biggest differentiators for service providers in this space. Let’s see what customers have to say about each tool’s support experience.

OneTrust

Users’ experiences with OneTrust’s documentation and support team vary, with the general consensus being that things are okay…but not great. One customer says, ”I really liked how OneTrust is providing expert training for their modules. However I would recommend they can take one step forward and provide some expert plus/pro training.” Another mentions that, when encountering challenges during the implementation process, ”We would have appreciated more proactive guidance […] We realized that we lacked 360 knowledge to fully understand how it should be implemented in our systems […] to avoid data issues after deployment.” 

Customers’ support experiences seem to rely on the type of contract they have: One states, “In the course of the 5 years - I've had good and not so good support since we did not purchase the Enterprise Support. However, I have been very happy with [...] the additional features available for support (access to support calls, support calendars).” Another outright says, “Their support structure seems designed for large enterprises, and they don’t care when smaller clients are stuck. A critical tool like this should come with reliable, accountable support. Unfortunately, this has not been my experience.” Therefore, make sure you temper your expectations according to the scope of services you intend to purchase. 

Vanta

Customer response to Vanta’s support is mostly positive, though a few reviewers mention having subpar experiences. One reviewer gushes, “their customer support is top-notch—responsive, knowledgeable, and genuinely helpful.” Another concurs: “Our team has made use of customer support frequently, who have been helpful, knowledgeable, and able to answer nearly all of our questions right away. For those which they don't immediately know, they usually take less than a week to answer.” 

The biggest complaint naysayers have is the response time, with one saying, “Customer support is great most of the time, however with more complicated issues this can take a little bit longer than anticipated.” Another’s “dislikes” section of the review includes “Support Response Time – slow customer support.” Though slowness isn’t the worst trait a support team can have, it’s something to keep in mind if you expect answers right away. 

Drata

Drata has almost uniformly impressed customers with the support and responsiveness its customer success team offers. One reviewer mentions, “The support is very responsive and fast, one of the best support teams we have dealt with.” The level of expertise available to customers has been a differentiator, with a happy customer praising how, ”Customer support has also been able to go the extra mile to diagnose in depth issues with how their platform was interpreting our cloud setup and provide pointers on how to adjust our Azure settings to make them more secure.” 

Another concurs: “The team's readiness to assist, combined with their deep understanding of compliance challenges, has made a significant difference in our ability to maintain and improve our governance frameworks. This level of support is what sets Drata apart in the crowded field of GRC platforms.”

The one mention of a support shortfall was, once again, responsiveness; a customer mentions that during their implementation process, “We had a few technical issues along the way and their support wasn't always as responsive as we hoped.” However, given the tenor of the reviews section, this experience was an outlier.

OneTrust vs. Vanta vs. Drata Head-to-Head

Now that you know the details, let’s compare OneTrust vs. Vanta vs. Drata in a head-to-head format.

Why Teams Switch to Drata

Drata has your company covered from your first GRC efforts through each step of building and scaling your program. It was developed by asking what teams need when they’re trying to formalize and scale compliance initiatives, and that focus has remained our driving force. At Drata, we pride ourselves on having a customer success team that’s well-versed in the technical and regulatory requirements your company is dealing with. 

We’re constantly thinking about where GRC is headed and building the tools tomorrow’s workforces will need to oversee governance, manage risk, ensure compliance, and maintain trust. If you’re working in a regulated industry, you need Drata to manage your compliance efforts while saving your team time.

Discover the Drata difference. Schedule a demo today.