The honest take. Vanta is a compliance automation platform — built to get you SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HITRUST audit-ready by monitoring your security and infrastructure controls. Privacy Automated is a privacy operations platform — built to do the active privacy work: drafting DPIAs, routing DSARs, answering privacy questions, maintaining vendor inventories and records of processing. They overlap on the word "GDPR" and very little else. The right question isn't usually "which one?" — it's "do I need both?"
What Vanta does brilliantly
- SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HITRUST audit prep. Vanta monitors your cloud infrastructure, code repositories, HR systems, and endpoints against the controls those standards require. It produces the evidence package an auditor needs.
- Continuous control monitoring. If an MFA setting gets turned off, an unencrypted S3 bucket appears, an employee's laptop drifts out of policy — Vanta flags it. That's hard to replicate without an audit-tech platform.
- Vendor security review automation. Their Trust Center + Vendor Risk products handle the "send the questionnaire, chase the response, store the SOC 2" workflow well.
- Auditor relationships. Vanta has pre-built relationships with most SOC 2 auditors, which compresses your audit time.
What Vanta doesn't do
- Active privacy operations. Vanta does not draft DPIAs for new processing activities. It does not classify inbound DSARs from your privacy inbox. It does not route deletion requests to your sales / engineering / HR / finance teams. It does not maintain Records of Processing under GDPR Article 30. It does not answer privacy questions from your internal teams.
- GDPR / CCPA depth. Vanta has GDPR and CCPA checklists, but they're audit-style "do you have the policies?" checks — not the workflow of doing privacy compliance. You still need a place to actually run the privacy programme.
- Non-security regulatory scope. PIPEDA, Quebec Law 25, Article 35 DPIAs, the European Data Protection Board's recent guidance — not the surface area Vanta is designed to cover.
The pattern we see most often. A growing SaaS company gets to ~50 employees, signs Vanta for SOC 2, gets the badge. A year later their first EU customer asks for a DPA, then a DPIA, then routes a deletion request. Their Vanta dashboard has nothing to do with any of that. They sign Privacy Automated alongside. The two run in parallel: Vanta for the security-audit programme, Privacy Automated for the privacy-operations programme. They overlap in vendor inventory and that's about it.
Feature-by-feature
| Vanta | Privacy Automated | |
|---|---|---|
| SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HITRUST audit prep | Yes (core product) | No |
| Continuous infrastructure control monitoring | Yes | No |
| DPIA drafting | No | Yes — AI-assisted, human reviews |
| DSAR / DSR routing + fulfillment | No | Yes — department fan-out |
| Policy-grounded Q&A | No | Yes — cites your own docs |
| Records of Processing (Art. 30) | No | Yes |
| Privacy policy & ToS templates | Boilerplate | We don't ship these — use a lawyer |
| Vendor risk / DPA tracking | Yes (security focus) | Yes (privacy focus) |
| Cookie / consent banner | No | No |
| Annual pricing | ~$7K–$30K+ depending on modules | $0 (Free) / $1,188/yr (Starter) / $3,588/yr (Growth) |
When to pick which
Pick Vanta if: your immediate pain is getting SOC 2 or ISO 27001 (because a customer asked, because procurement requires it, because you're chasing enterprise deals). Privacy compliance is a separate, later concern.
Pick Privacy Automated if: your immediate pain is privacy-operations work — DPIA pressure from a new processing activity, DSARs landing in your inbox without a routing process, a customer asking for your DPA + sub-processor list. You may already have SOC 2 or you may not need it yet.
Pick both if: you're scaling a SaaS company past 50 people, you're chasing enterprise deals that require SOC 2, AND you have EU / California / Canadian customers asking privacy questions. This is the most common mature SMB shape and the two products genuinely complement each other.
How the two complement each other
If you do run both:
- Vendor inventory: maintain the master list in Privacy Automated (since you need it for the DPA / sub-processor side anyway). Export to Vanta for security-questionnaire workflow.
- Policies: Vanta tracks that you have an information security policy. Privacy Automated grounds the Q&A engine in the actual content of your privacy policy.
- Audit trail: both products produce audit logs. Keep them separate — Vanta for SOC 2 evidence, Privacy Automated for GDPR Article 30 evidence.
- Customer trust pages: Vanta's Trust Center is great for security questionnaire response. Our security page + sub-processors list + DPA handle the privacy side of the same procurement conversation.
Add privacy operations alongside your security programme.
Free 14-day trial of Privacy Automated — runs cleanly alongside Vanta, no overlap to manage.