Vanta vs UpGuard: 2026 Comparison

Vanta vs UpGuard
Category	UpGuard	Vanta
General summary	UpGuard manages cyber risk everywhere it lives: your vendors, your internet-facing attack surface, and your workforce. You get one platform that connects all three risk areas instead of separate tools and spreadsheets stitched together. A risk in one surfaces in the others automatically. A breached vendor flags your own exposure. A leaked employee credential links straight to the account and the vendor involved. AI handles the repetitive work of triaging alerts, reviewing vendor evidence, and completing questionnaires. That means lean security teams can run programs that would otherwise need much bigger teams. UpGuard fits mid-market teams, deploys quickly, and slots in without replacing what you already have.	Vanta is a trust management platform focused on compliance automation. The platform unifies compliance and TPRM workflows under a single dashboard, reducing the time and complexity of achieving and maintaining alignment with popular standards like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Its AI-driven features and API extensibility support varied organizational needs, from startups to large enterprises.
Key strengths	UpGuard unifies vendor, attack surface, and workforce risk in one console. Customers describe finally seeing the whole picture, rather than paying for three tools that each cover only part of it. UpGuard also surfaces exposures that ratings tools and scanners miss, without the multi-week delay of a typical scan cycle. Lean teams can run the entire program without expanding headcount or adding a managed service.	Vanta's standout strengths include its broad compliance automation capabilities—covering 35+ frameworks—and its robust library of integrations for automatically collecting evidence. Its AI technology accelerates tasks like document reviews and security questionnaires. These combined capabilities reduce manual overhead, providing a unified risk and compliance posture.
Key weaknesses	UpGuard focuses on managing live, connected risk, not heavy, standalone compliance software. Full governance features, including policy and controls management, arrive later this year. Teams that need a mature governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) system of record today can run UpGuard alongside one for now. UpGuard also doesn’t translate risk into dollar figures. If financial risk quantification is a must-have, factor that into your evaluation.	Vanta is focused on automating evidence collection, documentation management, and monitoring policy-based controls. As a result, customers will need to deploy additional solutions where real-time attack surface visibility, asset discovery, and external threat intelligence capabilities are required. Additionally, licensing can become more complex as organizations add frameworks or grow vendor portfolios.
Usability and learning curve	Teams deploy quickly and get up and running without an extended onboarding period. New employees can learn the interface without lengthy training. A single console consolidates workflows that would otherwise require multiple tools, reducing the ongoing burden of learning and maintaining separate systems. Operating the platform doesn’t require a professional services engagement.	Vanta's prescriptive setup and ready-made policy templates keep the initial learning curve manageable. Its AI-driven assistance and guided workflows reduce the onboarding effort for core compliance frameworks. However, larger teams integrating many custom apps or requiring intricate multi-entity management (via Vanta 'Workspaces') may need extra configuration time before fully realizing a streamlined experience.
Cyber risk data accuracy	UpGuard’s data remains current. Vendor postures refresh continuously, and users can initiate a scan on demand instead of waiting for a fixed cycle. UpGuard attributes findings accurately, so teams do not spend weeks correcting assets assigned to the wrong company, a common issue with ratings tools. Threat Monitoring scans the open, deep, and dark web, along with social media, for leaked data, exposed credentials, and brand impersonation. AI filters out noise so the alerts that reach your team are worth acting on.	Vanta relies primarily on data from third-party integrations to deliver external risk insights. As such, the reliability of this data hinges on the quality of the information provided by external solutions. Organizations seeking more direct, real-time visibility into third-party risks must supplement Vanta with specialized external monitoring solutions.
Vendor risk management features	UpGuard runs the complete third-party risk management (TPRM) process in one platform: onboarding, assessing, remediating, monitoring, and reporting on vendors. Each vendor’s live external exposure and any linked leaked credentials appear directly within the vendor program, so teams can act on verified risk instead of relying on paperwork. AI-powered security questionnaires read vendor evidence and complete assessments automatically, cutting completion time by up to 95%. Instant risk assessments return a point-in-time report in under a minute, mapped to frameworks like ISO 27001 and NIST CSF 2.0.	Vanta offers VRM workflows for automating security questionnaires and document requests. These workflows are supported by AI for faster analysis of SOC 2 reports and DPAs. Automatic vendor discovery helps uncover 4th party relationships, reducing potential blind spots in the supply chain. Still, the platform's VRM relies on gathered documentation rather than continuous external scanning, limiting the depth of real-time visibility into vendor security postures.
Attack surface management features	UpGuard continuously monitors your internet-facing footprint. It maps assets, flags exposures such as misconfigurations, expired certificates, and open ports, and ranks remediation priorities. The UpGuard platform also detects typosquatting and lookalike domains set up to impersonate your brand before they’re used for phishing. Because attack surface monitoring runs alongside vendor and workforce risk, an exposed asset or leaked credential automatically links to the person and vendor involved. This gives teams visibility into both external exposure and vendor risk in a single view.	Vanta includes external asset scanning integrated into its compliance platform, enabling ongoing monitoring of known external-facing assets. However, it doesn't provide the same breadth of unknown asset discovery or extensive threat intelligence that specialized external attack surface management solutions offer. As a result, organizations with large or rapidly changing external footprints—or those needing deep, real-time telemetry—may benefit from pairing Vanta with a dedicated ASM platform.
Customer support	UpGuard supports every customer across all plan tiers, from the smallest plan to the largest. Support teams assist with both technical setup and larger program decisions. Customers frequently cite responsive, hands-on support as a reason they continue with UpGuard.	Vanta provides in-app chat, comprehensive documentation, and access to subject matter experts, especially for customers with higher-scale or complex deployments. Users typically report fast, helpful responses. As programs become complex, dedicated implementation support—often via Vanta's partner network—can be crucial for advanced customizations or specialized frameworks.
Workflow automation	Risk Automations turns a risk signal into action across the platform, with no code and no engineering ticket. On the vendor side, it automates onboarding from questionnaire data, triages vendor score drops, schedules recurring vendor reports, and opens remediation tickets in ServiceNow or Jira. On the threat side, a Breach Risk detection can trigger a workflow that alerts Teams or Slack and runs a system-level fix, like blocking a malicious IP or forcing a credential reset. This is the difference between a tool that reports on risk and one that resolves it.	Vanta provides rule-based triggers and AI suggestions to reduce manual effort for evidence collection, security questionnaires, and compliance management tasks. Vanta integrates with ticketing systems and supports automated workflows (such as automatically assigning remediation tasks), enabling users to focus on higher-value activities.
Artificial intelligence features	UpGuard’s AI performs specific, defined tasks, rather than vague “AI-powered” work. The AI Threat Analyst sorts and scores incoming threats across your attack surface, the dark web, and social media. It clears out approximately 60% of alerts as noise, so your team only reviews what matters. The same triage logic extends to vendor and workforce signals as well. Every AI result carries a citation back to the source, so your team can verify it before acting.	Vanta leverages AI to map policies to compliance controls and process evidence documentation, ultimately resulting in accelerated questionnaire completion times. Vanta additionally uses AI to enable efficient navigation of evidence and drill-downs into specific findings.
API and integrations	A well-documented REST API and webhooks let teams pull risk data into their own tools and trigger actions programmatically, without waiting on engineering support. For no-code work, Risk Automations adds more than 100 native integrations, including Jira, ServiceNow, Microsoft Entra, Slack, and Cloudflare. A Universal API Connector Node extends its reach to any open API.	Vanta's API and pre-built integrations allow organizations to extend coverage to additional solutions and pull data from proprietary systems. This includes common cloud providers, HRIS platforms, and project management tools.
Purchasing & licensing transparency	UpGuard publishes its pricing rather than hiding it behind a sales call. A free tier lets teams monitor up to five vendors and use Trust Exchange, UpGuard’s AI-powered questionnaire tool, at no cost. Paid Vendor Risk plans start at USD 1,750 per month, billed annually. Teams can start with one product and add others as they scale. One license covers both monitoring and assessments, so pricing doesn’t fragment across separate products.	While Vanta does not publicly disclose exact pricing, its tiered plans can be tailored to support the needs of smaller organizations as well as larger, more established businesses. Licensing costs may scale as additional frameworks or large vendor counts are added.
Customers	UpGuard customers include Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), Morningstar, TDK, PagerDuty, Hopin, and IAG. Read UpGuard’s customer stories to learn more.	Major customers include Duolingo, Intercom, Atlassian, and NYU Langone Health.
G2 rating Accurate as of March 2025	More than 700 verified reviews give UpGuard a 4.5 out of 5 rating on G2. UpGuard also holds G2’s top ranking as the leader in Third-Party & Supplier Risk Management for 15 consecutive quarters. The 2026 G2 Best Software Awards recognized UpGuard as one of the Top 100 Global Software Companies. Among verified reviewers, 98% give UpGuard four- or five-star ratings, and 94% approve of its product direction.	4.6, based on 859 reviews.
Security ratings	943 / 950	914 / 950

General summary

UpGuard manages cyber risk everywhere it lives: your vendors, your internet-facing attack surface, and your workforce. You get one platform that connects all three risk areas instead of separate tools and spreadsheets stitched together. A risk in one surfaces in the others automatically. A breached vendor flags your own exposure. A leaked employee credential links straight to the account and the vendor involved. AI handles the repetitive work of triaging alerts, reviewing vendor evidence, and completing questionnaires. That means lean security teams can run programs that would otherwise need much bigger teams. UpGuard fits mid-market teams, deploys quickly, and slots in without replacing what you already have.

Vanta is a trust management platform focused on compliance automation. The platform unifies compliance and TPRM workflows under a single dashboard, reducing the time and complexity of achieving and maintaining alignment with popular standards like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Its AI-driven features and API extensibility support varied organizational needs, from startups to large enterprises.

Key strengths

UpGuard unifies vendor, attack surface, and workforce risk in one console. Customers describe finally seeing the whole picture, rather than paying for three tools that each cover only part of it. UpGuard also surfaces exposures that ratings tools and scanners miss, without the multi-week delay of a typical scan cycle. Lean teams can run the entire program without expanding headcount or adding a managed service.

Vanta's standout strengths include its broad compliance automation capabilities—covering 35+ frameworks—and its robust library of integrations for automatically collecting evidence. Its AI technology accelerates tasks like document reviews and security questionnaires. These combined capabilities reduce manual overhead, providing a unified risk and compliance posture.

Key weaknesses

UpGuard focuses on managing live, connected risk, not heavy, standalone compliance software. Full governance features, including policy and controls management, arrive later this year. Teams that need a mature governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) system of record today can run UpGuard alongside one for now. UpGuard also doesn’t translate risk into dollar figures. If financial risk quantification is a must-have, factor that into your evaluation.

Vanta is focused on automating evidence collection, documentation management, and monitoring policy-based controls. As a result, customers will need to deploy additional solutions where real-time attack surface visibility, asset discovery, and external threat intelligence capabilities are required. Additionally, licensing can become more complex as organizations add frameworks or grow vendor portfolios.

Usability and learning curve

Teams deploy quickly and get up and running without an extended onboarding period. New employees can learn the interface without lengthy training. A single console consolidates workflows that would otherwise require multiple tools, reducing the ongoing burden of learning and maintaining separate systems. Operating the platform doesn’t require a professional services engagement.

Vanta's prescriptive setup and ready-made policy templates keep the initial learning curve manageable. Its AI-driven assistance and guided workflows reduce the onboarding effort for core compliance frameworks. However, larger teams integrating many custom apps or requiring intricate multi-entity management (via Vanta 'Workspaces') may need extra configuration time before fully realizing a streamlined experience.

Cyber risk data accuracy

UpGuard’s data remains current. Vendor postures refresh continuously, and users can initiate a scan on demand instead of waiting for a fixed cycle. UpGuard attributes findings accurately, so teams do not spend weeks correcting assets assigned to the wrong company, a common issue with ratings tools. Threat Monitoring scans the open, deep, and dark web, along with social media, for leaked data, exposed credentials, and brand impersonation. AI filters out noise so the alerts that reach your team are worth acting on.

Vanta relies primarily on data from third-party integrations to deliver external risk insights. As such, the reliability of this data hinges on the quality of the information provided by external solutions. Organizations seeking more direct, real-time visibility into third-party risks must supplement Vanta with specialized external monitoring solutions.

Vendor risk management features

UpGuard runs the complete third-party risk management (TPRM) process in one platform: onboarding, assessing, remediating, monitoring, and reporting on vendors. Each vendor’s live external exposure and any linked leaked credentials appear directly within the vendor program, so teams can act on verified risk instead of relying on paperwork. AI-powered security questionnaires read vendor evidence and complete assessments automatically, cutting completion time by up to 95%. Instant risk assessments return a point-in-time report in under a minute, mapped to frameworks like ISO 27001 and NIST CSF 2.0.

Vanta offers VRM workflows for automating security questionnaires and document requests. These workflows are supported by AI for faster analysis of SOC 2 reports and DPAs. Automatic vendor discovery helps uncover 4th party relationships, reducing potential blind spots in the supply chain. Still, the platform's VRM relies on gathered documentation rather than continuous external scanning, limiting the depth of real-time visibility into vendor security postures.

Attack surface management features

UpGuard continuously monitors your internet-facing footprint. It maps assets, flags exposures such as misconfigurations, expired certificates, and open ports, and ranks remediation priorities. The UpGuard platform also detects typosquatting and lookalike domains set up to impersonate your brand before they’re used for phishing. Because attack surface monitoring runs alongside vendor and workforce risk, an exposed asset or leaked credential automatically links to the person and vendor involved. This gives teams visibility into both external exposure and vendor risk in a single view.

Vanta includes external asset scanning integrated into its compliance platform, enabling ongoing monitoring of known external-facing assets. However, it doesn't provide the same breadth of unknown asset discovery or extensive threat intelligence that specialized external attack surface management solutions offer. As a result, organizations with large or rapidly changing external footprints—or those needing deep, real-time telemetry—may benefit from pairing Vanta with a dedicated ASM platform.

Customer support

UpGuard supports every customer across all plan tiers, from the smallest plan to the largest. Support teams assist with both technical setup and larger program decisions. Customers frequently cite responsive, hands-on support as a reason they continue with UpGuard.

Vanta provides in-app chat, comprehensive documentation, and access to subject matter experts, especially for customers with higher-scale or complex deployments. Users typically report fast, helpful responses. As programs become complex, dedicated implementation support—often via Vanta's partner network—can be crucial for advanced customizations or specialized frameworks.

Workflow automation

Risk Automations turns a risk signal into action across the platform, with no code and no engineering ticket. On the vendor side, it automates onboarding from questionnaire data, triages vendor score drops, schedules recurring vendor reports, and opens remediation tickets in ServiceNow or Jira. On the threat side, a Breach Risk detection can trigger a workflow that alerts Teams or Slack and runs a system-level fix, like blocking a malicious IP or forcing a credential reset. This is the difference between a tool that reports on risk and one that resolves it.

Vanta provides rule-based triggers and AI suggestions to reduce manual effort for evidence collection, security questionnaires, and compliance management tasks. Vanta integrates with ticketing systems and supports automated workflows (such as automatically assigning remediation tasks), enabling users to focus on higher-value activities.

Artificial intelligence features

UpGuard’s AI performs specific, defined tasks, rather than vague “AI-powered” work. The AI Threat Analyst sorts and scores incoming threats across your attack surface, the dark web, and social media. It clears out approximately 60% of alerts as noise, so your team only reviews what matters. The same triage logic extends to vendor and workforce signals as well. Every AI result carries a citation back to the source, so your team can verify it before acting.

Vanta leverages AI to map policies to compliance controls and process evidence documentation, ultimately resulting in accelerated questionnaire completion times. Vanta additionally uses AI to enable efficient navigation of evidence and drill-downs into specific findings.

API and integrations

A well-documented REST API and webhooks let teams pull risk data into their own tools and trigger actions programmatically, without waiting on engineering support. For no-code work, Risk Automations adds more than 100 native integrations, including Jira, ServiceNow, Microsoft Entra, Slack, and Cloudflare. A Universal API Connector Node extends its reach to any open API.

Vanta's API and pre-built integrations allow organizations to extend coverage to additional solutions and pull data from proprietary systems. This includes common cloud providers, HRIS platforms, and project management tools.

Purchasing & licensing transparency

UpGuard publishes its pricing rather than hiding it behind a sales call. A free tier lets teams monitor up to five vendors and use Trust Exchange, UpGuard’s AI-powered questionnaire tool, at no cost. Paid Vendor Risk plans start at USD 1,750 per month, billed annually. Teams can start with one product and add others as they scale. One license covers both monitoring and assessments, so pricing doesn’t fragment across separate products.

While Vanta does not publicly disclose exact pricing, its tiered plans can be tailored to support the needs of smaller organizations as well as larger, more established businesses. Licensing costs may scale as additional frameworks or large vendor counts are added.

Customers

UpGuard customers include Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), Morningstar, TDK, PagerDuty, Hopin, and IAG. Read UpGuard’s customer stories to learn more.

Major customers include Duolingo, Intercom, Atlassian, and NYU Langone Health.

G2 rating Accurate as of March 2025

More than 700 verified reviews give UpGuard a 4.5 out of 5 rating on G2. UpGuard also holds G2’s top ranking as the leader in Third-Party & Supplier Risk Management for 15 consecutive quarters. The 2026 G2 Best Software Awards recognized UpGuard as one of the Top 100 Global Software Companies. Among verified reviewers, 98% give UpGuard four- or five-star ratings, and 94% approve of its product direction.

4.6, based on 859 reviews.

Security ratings

943 / 950

914 / 950

Vanta vs UpGuard product overview

Learn more about the products and how they compare.

Vanta Overview

Vanta is a U.S. startup based in San Francisco, CA, offering security monitoring, cybersecurity assessment, and certification solutions services for businesses. They help organizations achieve compliance with auditing standards and security frameworks through automated processes and some risk visibility.

Source: vanta.com

UpGuard Overview

UpGuard is a third-party risk and attack surface management platform that helps global organizations prevent data breaches, monitor third-party vendors, and improve their security posture. UpGuard’s platform uses proprietary security ratings, data leak detection capabilities, and remediation workflows to proactively identify security exposures. UpGuard’s all-in-one third-party risk and attack surface management software intelligently groups risks into six categories: website risks, email security, network security, phishing & malware, reputation risk, and brand protection.

Usability and the learning curve

A product’s usability, design, and learning curve can play a large role in deciding which solution is right for you. The faster you and your team can get up to speed, the faster your return on investment.

Vanta: The Vanta platform offers a simple view of risk visibility and compliance with audit standards. However, the learning curve can be steep with very little customer support.

UpGuard: Clean interface offers intuitive navigation to precise risk insights, workflow management, and reporting. The cloud-based platform provides turnkey deployment with no installation required. Dashboards are easily customizable with multiple configurations to meet the customer’s needs. Any additional knowledge gaps are supported by the customer success team with <24-hour response times.

Capabilities

UpGuard and Vanta have similar security compliance and vendor risk management capabilities.

However, UpGuard is slightly different from Vanta in that UpGuard provides further visibility, documentation, and reporting of a specific vendor’s external and internal security risks and security posture that can also be summarized for executives. UpGuard uses data-driven security ratings to further enhance standardized security questionnaires to provide organizations with a better understanding of their attack surface and risks. Additionally, UpGuard’s industry-leading customer success team helps organizations align their business and security goals together.

Vanta focuses more on ensuring 1st and 3rd-party vendor compliance through guides and documentation. Vanta’s main capability is automating security certifications with limited to no functionality for external scanning and monitoring. Each individual certification or framework can also be purchased as a separate product for auditing needs.

Vanta: Vanta’s capabilities are heavily focused on providing security certification and framework compliance services, such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, or HIPAA. They also offer simple risk management services but do not incorporate data leaks, security ratings, or risk scoring for external or internal attack surfaces into their assessment and security monitoring.

UpGuard: UpGuard offers real-time visibility into any third and fourth-party vendor’s security posture by combining security ratings with risk assessments based on popular cyber frameworks and regulations. UpGuard provides end-to-end vendor risk management (VRM) services, including vendor due diligence, automated security questionnaires, remediation workflows, additional external scanning features, and continuous security monitoring.

Community support

Both Vanta and UpGuard offer comprehensive online resources to educate customers about emerging threats and best Vendor Risk Management practices.

Vanta offers a Vanta Academy for customers to learn about their platform and a regularly updated blog, community page, help guide, and education resources. In addition, they maintain a knowledge base covering compliance, audits, and integrations.

UpGuard hosts a quarterly virtual summit to keep the global cybersecurity community updated with the latest VRM and product developments. UpGuard also publishes regularly updated blogs that have been reviewed by industry experts to verify trustworthiness. UpGuard’s VRM/TPRM blog content takes an informative and educational perspective for customers to break down complicated processes. In addition to in-depth blogs, UpGuard sends a weekly data breach newsletter to inform subscribers of the latest global cyberattack events and publishes free downloadable checklists, ebooks, and internally-conducted research reports.

Vanta: Offers a Vanta Academy, along with a regularly updated blog, webinar series, various eBooks, and help education resources.

UpGuard: UpGuard keeps the VRM community continuously updated with the latest industry developments through its blog content, eBook/whitepaper reports, quarterly summit event, and a weekly data breach newsletter.

Release rate

The speed at which a security platform can incorporate changes determines how well it can respond to new threats and customer requests. An ideal security solution should continuously update, adjust, and improve its threat detection methodology in response to changes in the threat landscape.

Vanta: Vanta’s current release rate cycles are not publicly available. Vanta does release monthly product updates through their company website.

UpGuard: UpGuard has adopted DevOps principles internally to develop, test, and release software continuously, ensuring fast, consistent, and safe releases. UpGuard has a regular release rate every two weeks, with all features, changes, and improvements listed under UpGuard Release Notes.

Pricing and support

Cybersecurity solutions and services can be expensive, and confusing pricing policies often take power away from the purchaser. With most services offering tiered licensing options and add-ons, finding a solution that fits your needs and budget can prove more difficult without fully transparent pricing.

Vanta: Vanta pricing has not been released publicly. User reviews note that Vanta pricing models have been quickly pricing them out of the competition. See a breakdown of Vanta’s pricing based on user reviews.

UpGuard: UpGuard has a fully transparent and publicly accessible pricing model, which you can view here. If you have any questions, please email sales@upguard.com.

API and extensibility

Accessing the information in a cyber risk product outside of its graphical interface is important for integrated business strategies and consolidating data to a preferred system.

Vanta: Vanta uses Connectors API to pull security information and allow for compliance automation.

UpGuard: Offers a standard API to automatically pull data from UpGuard’s platform into other enterprise applications.

Third-party integrations

APIs are useful for technical staff, but not all information security teams employ developers. In this situation, standard third-party integrations are an essential part of decision-making.

Vanta: Offers integrations with 100+ third-party services, including AWS and GitHub.

UpGuard: Integrates with multiple services, including Zapier, to enable connections to 5,000+ apps; GRC platforms, ticketing systems like JIRA; VRM solutions like ServiceNow, and more.

Customers

The trust of prestigious companies is a powerful indicator of the effectiveness of a solution. Both UpGuard and Vanta have impressive customer bases trusting each solution’s vendor risk management capabilities.

Vanta: Major customers include Quora, Autodesk, Gusto, Shortcut, and Chili Piper.

UpGuard: Major customers include Accenture, New York Stock Exchange, Tech Mahindra, IAG, Hopin, NSW Government, and Morningstar.

Security rating

Vanta: Does not provide security ratings.

UpGuard: Uses a security rating scale of 0-950, ranked as A: 801-950, B: 601-800, C: 401-600, D: 201-400, F: 0-200. You can request your free security rating by clicking here.