A Drata alternative that publishes its price

The blank is worse than an inconvenience. A quoted SOC 2 number can mean two different purchases, and with one of them hidden you cannot tell which one you are being sold. So before any feature grid, and before any Drata alternative is worth weighing, the thing to understand is what the invoice is actually made of.

The two fees inside any SOC 2 quote

Every SOC 2 has two costs, wherever you buy it. Conflating them is what makes the published ranges disagree so wildly.

The platform fee

Software that collects evidence, tracks controls, writes policies and assembles the package. This is the part a compliance vendor sells you, and it is the part the largest vendors print no number for on their own websites.

The examination fee

A licensed CPA firm reads the evidence and issues the report. Only a CPA firm may do that, on any platform, and it is a separate engagement with its own letter.¹

Two of the three figures in the estimate above describe the second fee. They are a statement about what CPA firms charge, not about what the software costs. The third, the first-year total, folds both together, which is why it lands so much higher. Both fees end up on your card. How much SOC 2 costs compares the published figures across the market. Drata’s own software prices are on its AWS Marketplace listing rather than its website, and Drata pricing works through them, with each source named.

Not one company, a category

Drata is not unusual here. Vanta’s pricing page is a plan grid with no figure anywhere in it, and Secureframe prints a starting price for its entry plan and sends the rest to a quote:

• Vanta lists four plans on its pricing page and no dollar figure. The call to action is to request personalized pricing. Source.
• Secureframe lists its Fundamentals plan as starting at $7,500 a year and shows no dollar figure for its other two plans, Complete and Defense. Every plan links to a quote request. Source.

Vanta, like Drata, prints its software prices on its own AWS Marketplace listing instead, and Vanta pricing quotes them. The two head to head, for a team deciding between them, are in the Vanta alternative comparison. Every platform that prints its own number, on its website or on such a listing, is in SOC 2 software that publishes its pricing, and the best SOC 2 software for startups compares nine platforms.

What is the same whoever you buy from

At ten employees, on one cloud provider, with Security as the only Trust Services Criteria in scope, a large platform and a small one converge fast. The control set comes from the same AICPA criteria.² The evidence is the same evidence: access reviews, change tickets, incident records, scan output, onboarding and offboarding trails. Somebody at your company still has to produce it.

The examination is a CPA engagement in either case, held to the same AICPA attestation standards,³ and no platform moves that in either direction. What a platform changes is how long the evidence takes to assemble, and what you paid to get there. That is a real difference. It is a smaller one than the price gap implies.

Where Drata is the better buy

A comparison written by one of the two vendors is worth reading only for the parts that cost the writer something. Four of those follow.

You have a security team

This was built for the founder, or the first engineer, who has to produce a report between shipping features. If three or four people are going to work inside a compliance tool every day, buy the one with the deeper surface. That is not us.

You need a framework we do not sell

We sell SOC 2 through to the audit by an independent licensed U.S. CPA firm, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 readiness for certification, and HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS and NIST CSF 2.0 readiness. If SOC 1, FedRAMP or CMMC is on your list once you are selling into regulated buyers, running it in a second tool is its own product problem.

Your evidence lives in twenty systems

Our nine direct connectors are Amazon Web Services, GitHub, Google Cloud, Google Workspace, Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Linear, Jira and Slack, listed on the integrations page. Everything else is an upload. A long connector list is worth real money when your stack is wide.

Your buyer names the vendor

Some enterprise security reviews recognize a short list of compliance brands and treat everything else as an unknown. We are an unknown. If a large deal turns on that, pay for the name and stop thinking about it.

None of that is modesty. It is scoping. If two of those four describe you, buy the incumbent and close the tab.

What we charge

Polara Labs publishes its SOC 2 price: Orbit is $7,800 a year, and your SOC 2 Type 2 audit by an independent licensed U.S. CPA firm is included in every contract year.

If none of the four describes you, the decision narrows to price, and there is now a frame to judge one against. Star is $2,000 one time for onboarding. A SOC 2 Type 1 report adds $2,000, the fee for the independent partner auditor sitting inside that figure rather than arriving on a second invoice. Orbit is $7,800 a year, and your SOC 2 Type 2 audit is included in every contract year. Those are the numbers. No call in front of them.

There is no second price list for the years after the first. The audit renews with the plan, so nothing is left to negotiate once you have signed.

What the platform fee buys is the work between signing up and handing an auditor a finished package: a deterministic gap engine reading your questionnaire and your uploaded policies,thirteen Security policies written from your own stack rather than a template pack (plus one for each extra category you add, except Availability), and an evidence binder mapped control by control. The timeline: audit-ready starting at about a week.

The comparison, with the gaps left in

Every row below is either something one of us publishes, on our own site or on our own marketplace listing, or something we could not find published anywhere. Nothing here is filled in from a guess.

The rows reading Not published are not a rhetorical device. They are what a buyer runs into at eleven at night, trying to work out whether compliance is a four figure line item or a five figure one before a board update in the morning. You cannot budget against a blank.

One more thing we cannot show you. The customer proof row says None, and that is the whole of it. The product is new, and publishing numbers we do not have would be the same trick as hiding the ones we do. Judge the price, the method, and the license of the firm whose name goes on your report.⁴

Four questions to ask whoever you buy from

Ask both of us the same four things. The answers separate these products faster than the table above does. If you are still not sure which report your buyer is asking for, start with Type 1 versus Type 2.

1. Is the examination inside the price, or a second invoice? If it arrives later from a different company, add that invoice before you compare quotes.
2. Is the first examination included? In a proposal, “included” and “billed separately” look identical until you reach the order form. Make them write down which one it is.
3. What does year two cost? Renewal is where compliance pricing moves. Get the number in writing before you sign year one.
4. What happens to the evidence if you leave? Work you cannot export is work you will pay for a second time.

If the honest answer at the end of that is the bigger platform, take it. The wider version of this argument, across the whole incumbent set and including the places we lose, is written up in our head to head comparison.