Sectum AI vs Vanta
TL;DR. These products solve different problems. Vanta is the leading compliance-automation platform (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR), it collects and aggregates control-test evidence from your cloud, identity, HR, and code systems and presents it to auditors. It does not produce AI-specific multi-tenant isolation evidence, that’s not what it’s built for. Sectum AI produces exactly that evidence, with a tamper-evident cryptographic chain, mapped per-finding to the same controls Vanta tracks (SOC 2 CC6.x, ISO 27001 A.5.15 / A.8.3 / A.8.12, GDPR Art. 17 / 32, NIST AI RMF MEASURE 2.7). Sectum AI is a Vanta complement, not a competitor: Vanta is the layer where evidence is organized and handed to the auditor; Sectum AI is the layer where the AI-isolation evidence gets produced.
The two products
Vanta (vanta.com)
Category: GRC / compliance automation. Continuously monitors a customer’s systems, aggregates evidence into a SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA / PCI / GDPR posture, and presents it to auditors.
2026 capability (Vanta Review 2026, SOC2 Auditors):
- Agentic Trust Platform (AI Agent 2.0, launched January 2026), autonomous policy drafting, questionnaire-automation answering from the evidence library, vendor-risk auto-scoring, Risk Graph.
- 95% acceptance rate on AI-generated questionnaire responses.
- Continuous control monitoring with alerts on drift.
- AI-generated remediation snippets (Terraform, AWS CLI).
- Control-mapping across frameworks.
Pricing (Vanta pricing 2026, multiple breakdowns, CostBench):
- Essentials: $10K-$28K / year (headcount-based).
- Plus: $15K-$30K / year.
- Growth: $15K-$25K / year.
- Scale: $30K-$80K / year.
- Add-ons (Vendor Risk Management Pro, additional frameworks): ~$5K-$15K each.
- Total effective annual cost often 30-50% above the base.
Buyer: CISOs, security ops, compliance leads at SaaS startups and mid-market. Direct rivalry with Drata and Secureframe.
Sectum AI (sectum.ai)
Category: multi-tenant AI verification. Produces a specific kind of evidence, auditor-acceptable, tamper-evident, control-mapped, that proves the tenant boundary holds across an AI stack’s surfaces.
License: Apache 2.0 OSS core. Sectum Cloud is the commercial hosting and scheduled-runs layer; the evidence layer in the OSS produces the same artifacts the hosted product does, by design.
Offerings (pricing):
- Erasure Attestation, per-engagement GDPR Article 17 attestation for a churned tenant.
- SOC 2 Tenant Isolation Evidence Pack, per-audit-cycle curated, control-mapped pack, available direct or through audit firms reselling to their clients.
- Continuous Multi-Tenant Verification (Sectum Cloud), subscription tiers; full probe suite + regression baselines + scheduled runs + dashboard.
- Open Sectum, free, Apache 2.0; the substrate, probes, adapters, evidence chain, and
sectum-ai verifycommand.
Different layers of the same buyer’s stack
Vanta and Sectum AI operate at different layers for the same buyer:
| Vanta | Sectum AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Role | Compliance automation / evidence aggregator | AI verification / evidence producer |
| Layer | Above the technical stack (collects, maps, presents) | Inside the AI stack (provisions, probes, attests) |
| Output | A continuously-maintained trust posture + questionnaire library + framework mappings | A signed, control-mapped audit pack for a specific multi-tenant AI run (RFC 3161 TSA + Sigstore Rekor + in-toto envelope) |
| Frameworks | SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, custom | OWASP LLM Top 10 (LLM08:2025 primary), NIST AI RMF, MITRE ATLAS, per-finding, mapped to SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / GDPR / EU AI Act / HIPAA controls in the audit pack |
| Trust signal | Continuous monitoring + control-test attestations | Cryptographic proof, independently verifiable via sectum-ai verify |
| Coverage of AI-specific risk | General controls catalog; NIST AI framework checks | The 11 implemented attack classes + GDPR Art. 17 erasure across all 7 configured surfaces |
| For | CISOs, compliance leads | CISOs, DPOs, and the audit firm |
The relationship is vertical, not horizontal. Vanta is the layer where evidence lives, gets organized, and gets handed to the auditor. Sectum AI is the layer where the AI-specific isolation evidence gets produced. They don’t substitute; they stack.
Why Vanta needs Sectum AI (and vice versa)
A Vanta-managed customer preparing for SOC 2 with a multi-tenant AI product hits a specific gap when the auditor asks about logical-access controls (CC6.1), boundary protection (CC6.6), and data-in-transit / segregation (CC6.7) for the AI portion of their stack:
- The auditor wants to see evidence that tenant A’s data cannot reach tenant B in the RAG pipeline, the vector index, the semantic cache, the agent memory, the fine-tune adapters, the eval sets, the search indexes, and the observability backends.
- Vanta can show cloud configurations (IAM, encryption, network segmentation, vendor inventory). It cannot run a probe that plants a marker in tenant A’s documents and confirms that marker doesn’t appear in tenant B’s agent’s memory.
- That’s a different kind of evidence, it’s not a control configuration, it’s a behavioural attestation over the AI surface.
Sectum AI produces exactly that evidence, and maps every finding to the same controls Vanta tracks:
| Vanta-tracked control | Sectum AI’s evidence answer |
|---|---|
| SOC 2 CC6.1 (logical access) | Per-finding owasp_llm + atlas[] + nist[] IDs in evidence.json; manifest-traceable per-tenant scope on each surface |
| SOC 2 CC6.6 (boundary protection) | Class 1 (direct tenant-boundary fetch), BOLA-style probe with zero-FP detection on canary surfacing |
| SOC 2 CC6.7 (segregation) | Classes 2-10, cross-tenant probes across RAG / cache / agent / model / search surfaces |
| ISO 27001 A.5.15 / A.8.3 / A.8.12 | Same evidence, same per-finding control IDs in the audit pack |
| GDPR Art. 17 (right to erasure) | Class 11, per-surface ERASED / RESIDUAL DATA verdicts in the attestation pack |
| NIST AI RMF MEASURE 2.7 | All 11 probes carry the MEASURE 2.7 NIST mapping |
The SOC 2 audit doesn’t have a checkbox for “AI tenant isolation” today, but the auditor’s CC6.x questions touch the AI stack the moment the product is multi-tenant AI. Vanta + Sectum AI together cover that question: Vanta tracks the cloud-config side, Sectum AI produces the behavioural attestation.
The SOC 2 Tenant Isolation Evidence Pack
The Sectum AI SOC 2 Tenant Isolation Evidence Pack is built specifically for this motion:
- A pre-curated, control-mapped pack covering the SOC 2 CC6.x controls (and the equivalent ISO 27001, HIPAA, EU AI Act mappings).
- Run once per audit cycle; delivered to the audit firm and the customer.
- Available direct or through audit firms reselling to their clients, the firm can include it as the AI-isolation evidence source.
- Verifies under
sectum-ai verify, the auditor doesn’t need to trust Sectum AI; they verify the pack themselves.
The customer’s experience is one platform (Vanta) for compliance posture and one cryptographic pack (Sectum AI) for the AI-isolation portion of that posture.
Where each is the right tool
Use Vanta when you need to
- Run continuous compliance monitoring across your cloud, identity, HR, and code systems.
- Centralize evidence collection for SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA / PCI / GDPR.
- Automate security-questionnaire responses (AI Agent 2.0).
- Maintain a public trust posture / trust page.
- Track control drift and get alerted on regressions.
- Work with auditors through a single managed platform.
Use Sectum AI when you need to
- Prove the multi-tenant boundary on an AI product to an auditor, a DPO, or a customer security review.
- Verify GDPR Article 17 erasure across every AI surface for a churned tenant, vector DB, tracing, agent memory, semantic cache, fine-tune adapters, search index, eval set.
- Hand a customer a cryptographically-attestable, independently-verifiable evidence pack, one they can verify with
sectum-ai verifywithout Sectum AI in the room. - Get per-finding control mappings (OWASP / ATLAS / NIST) into your audit evidence rather than control-level attestations alone.
- Run on an open-source evidence layer that doesn’t depend on a single vendor’s continued operation.
Why the “Vanta vs Sectum AI” framing is wrong
You’ll occasionally see Sectum AI described in the same breath as Vanta, “AI compliance” or “AI GRC.” That framing is incorrect. Sectum AI is not GRC; Vanta is GRC. The distinction matters because:
- Vanta-style GRC aggregates existing evidence into framework attestations.
- Sectum AI produces a specific class of evidence (multi-tenant AI isolation attestations) that doesn’t otherwise exist.
Sectum AI is not built for framework breadth (Vanta supports 20+; Sectum AI maps findings to ~7 frameworks). It’s built to produce evidence Vanta can’t, on a layer Vanta doesn’t reach.
Pricing
- Vanta, $10K-$80K / year depending on plan (Essentials / Plus / Growth / Scale) + headcount + add-ons. See Vanta pricing.
- Open Sectum (OSS), free, Apache 2.0.
- Sectum Cloud, see pricing.