Okta vs Vanta

Okta

Identity and access management for organisations

Okta is an identity and access management company. Its platform helps organisations control who can access which applications and data, providing single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, user lifecycle management and identity security for employees, partners and customers. Identity has become the centre of enterprise security. As companies moved from on-premises software to hundreds of cloud applications, managing separate passwords and accounts for every tool became unmanageable and risky. Okta lets employees sign in once and access all their work applications, while IT teams manage access centrally: when someone joins, they automatically get accounts in the right apps; when they change roles, permissions update; and when they leave, access is revoked everywhere at once. The workforce identity platform includes single sign-on with thousands of pre-built application integrations, adaptive multi-factor authentication that considers device and location risk, Okta Verify for push and passwordless authentication, universal directory, lifecycle management, and identity governance for access reviews and certifications. Privileged access and identity threat protection features address attacks that target identities directly. For customer identity, Okta owns Auth0, a developer-friendly platform that lets companies add sign-up, login and authorisation to their own applications. Okta has also focused on securing AI agents, which need identities and permissions of their own. Okta is sold by subscription per user per month, with pricing that scales by product and features. As a security provider, it has faced scrutiny after security incidents affecting its support systems, which prompted significant investment in its own security practices. Implementation for large organisations requires planning. Alternatives include Microsoft Entra ID, dominant in Microsoft-centric organisations; Ping Identity for enterprise identity; JumpCloud for small and mid-sized businesses; Google Cloud Identity; OneLogin; Auth0 alternatives such as Clerk, Stytch and WorkOS for developers; and Keycloak for open-source identity. Choose Okta when you need a vendor-neutral, enterprise-grade platform for workforce or customer identity.

Vanta

Automated compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more

Vanta is a compliance automation platform: it connects to a company's cloud infrastructure, identity provider, and HR system, continuously checks the resulting configuration against framework requirements such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR, and collects the audit evidence automatically. The problem it targets is that compliance is mostly evidence gathering, and evidence gathering done by hand is brutal. A SOC 2 Type II audit asks you to prove that every production server had encryption enabled, that every departing employee lost access promptly, and that every engineer completed security training - continuously, across the observation window, for hundreds of controls. Doing that with screenshots and spreadsheets is what makes a first audit take six months. Vanta's argument is that most of those checks are API calls, so they should run every day and produce their own evidence trail. What it covers: automated evidence collection across 400+ integrations, policy templates and employee acceptance tracking, personnel and access management, security training, vendor and third-party risk management, security questionnaire automation, a public Trust Center for sharing compliance status with prospects, risk management, AI governance, and auditor-facing workflows that shorten the audit itself. Vanta does not publish list pricing. There are no figures on its pricing page - every plan routes through sales, and the quote depends on company size, the number of frameworks, and whether add-ons like Trust Center or questionnaire automation are included. Treat any specific number you read elsewhere as second-hand. Budget for the audit separately: Vanta prepares you for an audit and integrates with audit firms, but the auditor's fee is a distinct cost. Who it is for: B2B software companies whose enterprise deals are stalling on a security review, and startups told by a prospect that they need SOC 2 before signing. The honest trigger for buying compliance automation is almost always a blocked deal, not an internal decision. How it compares: Drata is the closest direct competitor and the usual head-to-head, comparable on framework coverage and also sales-priced. Secureframe and Sprinto compete on the same automation model, with Sprinto typically positioned as the more affordable option for smaller teams. Scrubbed manual approaches - a consultant plus spreadsheets - are cheaper in cash and far more expensive in engineering time, and they do not produce continuous monitoring, which matters for the Type II observation window. The real evaluation question is not which tool has more controls. It is how many of your systems each one integrates with natively, because every gap becomes manual evidence collection again.