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.