Compare

HackZero vs.
Vanta.

Vanta is the category leader in compliance automation, 16,000 customers strong, and if you need ten frameworks it is probably the right call. The comparison worth making is narrower: what does the subscription actually contain? Vanta automates the paperwork and sells the penetration test separately, through partners. We fold the test in, every month.

What a month buys, under 10 people

$299

HackZero

SOC 2 controls + a real AI pentest, monthly

Quote

Vanta

Platform only; pentest sold via partners

Vanta publishes no price list. Third-party procurement data (Vendr) shows contracts from $7,500 to $57,000 a year, median around $20,000, before the audit and before any pentest.

Side by side

	Vanta	HackZero
What the subscription includes	Compliance automation: controls, monitoring, evidence collection	The same SOC 2 controls and monitoring, plus an actual AI pentest of your running app every month
Penetration testing	Not included. Sold separately via partners (XBOW, Doyensec, Prescient)	Included monthly. Human-validated engagement $2,999 when a client demands one
Published pricing	Quote-based, no public price list. Observed contracts $7,500 to $57,000/yr, ~$20,000 median (Vendr procurement data, not Vanta's list)	Public: $299/mo under 10 people, $499/mo above. Annual $2,990 / $4,990
The audit / attestation	Auditor network; the audit firm bills you separately	Independent AICPA-member CPA, from $2,500, billed to you directly. No fee split, which is what keeps the opinion independent
Frameworks	35+ frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP...)	SOC 2 and HIPAA controls; pentest evidence maps to PCI-DSS 11.4 and ISO 27001 A.8
Scale and maturity	$300M ARR, 16,000+ customers, $4.15B valuation, hundreds of integrations	Seed stage, founder-led, small integration surface (GitHub, Slack, issue trackers, MCP)
Best for	Larger companies, multi-framework programs, procurement that wants the category leader	Teams under ~50 people that need SOC 2 plus real testing without two more vendors

On the pricing row, note whose numbers those are. Vanta's ranges come from Vendr's tracked buyer contracts, not from Vanta, because Vanta does not publish prices. Ours are on the pricing page. And credit where due: Vanta partnering with XBOW to bundle autonomous pentests is the compliance leader agreeing that a compliance program without real testing is incomplete. We just think it should be one subscription, not a platform fee plus a per-test SKU.

Which one

The paperwork, or
the paperwork and the test.

Pick Vanta when

You need frameworks we do not automate: ISO 42001, GDPR, FedRAMP, or a multi-framework program across hundreds of employees.
You want the category leader: 16,000+ customers, the largest auditor and integration network, and a platform procurement has already heard of.
You already have a pentest vendor you trust, so compliance automation alone is the gap.
Trust-center and questionnaire tooling at enterprise depth matters more to you than testing.

Pick HackZero when

You want the pentest and the compliance program to be one subscription instead of a platform fee plus a separate testing SKU. Even Vanta now sells AI pentests, through its XBOW partnership, as an extra.
You are under 10 people: $299 a month with the monthly pentest included, against a quote-based platform fee plus a per-test charge.
Your auditor or your customer asks "show me the pentest report", and you would rather hand them exploit-validated findings from last month than a scan summary.
You want public pricing you can budget without a sales call.

Get started See pricing

vs. Drata

Enterprise compliance automation; the test is a separate budget line.

vs. Horizon3

Internal network validation, not the product you ship.

vs. XBOW

$4,000 to $8,000 a test, against a monthly subscription.

vs. Strix

Open source, self-hosted, and what it costs you to run.

vs. Manual pentest

A yearly engagement against continuous coverage.