episki vs Vanta
Autonomous GRC vs automated evidence collection
Vanta automates evidence on a dashboard. episki automates the program — agents draft policies, answer security questionnaires, manage vendors, and keep your audit evergreen, with humans approving the work that matters.
Why teams evaluate Vanta alternatives
Vanta defined automated evidence collection. By connecting cloud, identity, and HR systems, it turned SOC 2 from a spreadsheet exercise into a monitored dashboard — and that remains a genuine strength for teams whose main goal is scraping evidence from a known stack with minimal effort.
Teams look for alternatives when they want more than a dashboard:
- Work that runs itself — instead of a human typing every policy, narrative, and questionnaire answer, agents draft the work and the team approves it. The program advances between audits, not just at audit time.
- Predictable, transparent pricing — Vanta's per-seat model gets expensive as compliance responsibilities spread across engineering, HR, IT, and leadership. episki publishes a flat platform price with unlimited users.
- Built-in AI governance — as organizations adopt AI internally, they need to govern it. episki ships a dedicated AI Governance module and maps ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF, and the EU AI Act out of the box.
Where episki is different
Legacy GRC automates evidence. episki automates the program. Agents draft policies, answer security questionnaires, map controls across frameworks, and keep evidence evergreen — but the AI authors deterministic recipes that then run without AI in the loop. That means the output is reproducible and defensible in front of an auditor, not a black-box generation. A human always approves the work that matters.
Underneath the agents sits a connected workspace: programs, assessments, controls, tasks, risks, and evidence link together, and a fast, keyboard-first editor makes the daily work of writing and reviewing feel like a modern tool rather than a compliance form.
When Vanta might still be the better fit
Vanta is a strong choice when your priority is automated evidence collection across the widest possible integration library, with a mature continuous-monitoring engine, and your program is primarily SOC 2-focused. If integration depth across a long tail of niche tools is your single most important requirement, Vanta's breadth is compelling.
episki vs Vanta: feature comparison
See how the platforms compare across the capabilities that matter most to security and compliance teams.
| Feature | episki | Vanta |
|---|---|---|
| Approach | Autonomous GRC — agents run the program; humans approve the work that matters | Automated evidence collection with continuous monitoring dashboards |
| Pricing model | Platform $750/mo (or $7,500/yr) + optional modules; unlimited users, frameworks, and vendors. Only AI tokens are metered, and every model call is attributed to a surface and an operation so you can see what consumed them | Per-seat pricing that scales with headcount |
| AI capabilities | Agents draft policies, answer questionnaires, map controls, and recommend tasks — AI authors deterministic recipes auditors can accept | AI-assisted risk and compliance workflows |
| Controls & evidence | Continuous controls that produce a verdict — every check evaluates the evidence it collected and writes pass, fail, or inconclusive against the control, and a failing check raises a finding. Empty or undecodable evidence returns inconclusive and attests nothing | Automated evidence collection from 200+ integrations |
| AI governance | AI Governance module — agent and use-case registry with allowlists and safety floors, AI risk treatments wired to controls and evidence, and ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF, and the EU AI Act mapped. episki governs its own agents through the same module | ISO 42001 generally available with ~70 controls, model inventory, and EU AI Act risk tiers — sold as an add-on framework |
| Framework coverage | 34+ pre-built frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, NIST CSF, CMMC, FedRAMP, ISO 42001) plus custom — all unlimited | SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, and 20+ frameworks |
| Integrations | AWS (multi-account, multi-region, and Organizations), GitHub, Google, Microsoft, Slack, Teams, Jira, Linear, Supabase, Vercel, and Netlify — each writing evaluated control coverage, not just collected files | 200+ native integrations |
| Trust & vendors | Trust module with agent-answered questionnaires, NDA-gated docs, and a branded trust center; TPRM module with unlimited vendors | Trust reports and vendor risk add-ons |
| Exception handling | An approved exception can satisfy a specific check for named records — it requires a recorded approver and justification, and it expires, so the control returns to failing on its own when the acceptance lapses | Findings can be accepted or excluded; the acceptance is not itself an expiring, approver-bound object tied to the check |
| Scope & boundaries | Programs report against individual boundaries, with scope rules on cloud account, region, resource, and tag — so a PCI CDE or a single business unit is a real boundary, not a saved filter | Framework-level scoping, with boundaries usually separated into their own workspace |
| Remediation workflow | Bi-directional Jira, Linear, and GitHub sync — remediation lives in the tracker your engineers already use, and status flows back without anyone copying it | Ticketing integrations that push tasks outward |
| API & agent access | REST API, a published entity-ontology catalog with a drift checksum, and a hosted MCP server (OAuth 2.1 + PKCE, 20 tools) whose writes route through the same API as the UI — an agent's write is indistinguishable from a hand-made one in the audit log | REST API, webhooks, and an MCP server in beta |
| Editor experience | Notion-like, keyboard-first editor for policies, narratives, and responses | Standard form-based interface |
Why teams switch from Vanta to episki
Real differences that affect how fast your team ships audits and proves trust.
Autonomous operators, not another dashboard
Vanta and Drata pulled the industry from spreadsheets to dashboards. episki pulls it from dashboards to autonomous operators that draft, answer, and map — while your team approves the work that matters.
- Agents draft policies, narratives, and questionnaire answers from your evidence
- AI authors deterministic recipes; the recipes then run without AI in the loop, so auditors can trust the output
- Continuous controls and evergreen evidence instead of an annual evidence scramble
Transparent pricing, expand by module
One Compliance Platform at $750/mo, plus optional modules for Risk, TPRM, Trust, and AI Governance. Unlimited users, frameworks, and vendors — only AI tokens are metered.
- No per-seat tax as compliance spreads across engineering, HR, IT, and leadership
- Add capabilities when you need them instead of buying an enterprise bundle
- Annual prepay gives two months free; Operator Partner discounts for vCISO and MSP firms
A verdict you can defend, not just a green check
Most platforms tell you evidence was collected. episki tells you what it proved. Every check evaluates its own evidence and writes pass, fail, or inconclusive — and the ways a check can quietly pass without proving anything are closed by design.
- Empty, undecodable, or partially collected evidence returns inconclusive and attests nothing
- A failing check raises a finding with the offending records attached, not a dashboard tile
- An approved exception can satisfy a check for named records — but it needs an approver and it expires, so an accepted risk is never a permanent carve-out
episki vs Vanta — frequently asked questions
Yes — particularly for teams that want GRC to run itself rather than maintain another dashboard. episki's agents draft policies, answer security questionnaires, map controls across frameworks, and keep evidence evergreen, with humans approving the work that matters. It also publishes its pricing, and every check it runs writes an explicit pass, fail, or inconclusive verdict rather than a posture score.
episki publishes its pricing — $750/mo (or $7,500/yr) for the Compliance Platform, plus optional modules for Risk, TPRM, Trust, and AI Governance. Users, frameworks, and vendors are unlimited; only AI tokens are metered. Vanta uses quote-based, per-seat pricing that scales with headcount, which is harder to predict as compliance work spreads across the company.
Agents draft policies, answer questionnaires, map controls across frameworks, and recommend tasks — then a human reviews and approves. Crucially, the AI authors deterministic recipes that then run without AI in the loop, so the output is reproducible and auditor-acceptable rather than a one-off generation an auditor cannot trust.
Yes. Beyond SOC 2 and ISO 27001, episki ships 34+ pre-built frameworks including CMMC, FedRAMP, ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF, and the EU AI Act, plus an AI Governance module that keeps an agent and use-case registry with allowlists and safety floors for organizations adopting AI internally.
Vanta's integration library and continuous-monitoring engine are deep and mature. If your priority is hands-off automated evidence collection across a very long tail of SaaS tools, and you do not yet need program-level autonomy or built-in AI governance, Vanta's automation breadth is hard to match.
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