SOC 2 Compliance: Manual vs. Automation Vendor

Policy Creation

Write policies from scratch (may adapt free templates). Needs legal/security review. Takes weeks.

Pre-built, auditor-approved templates you customize in hours.

Evidence Collection

You track screenshots, exports, and reports in shared folders/spreadsheets. Very time-intensive during audit prep.

Automated integrations pull AWS, GCP, GitHub, Okta, etc. evidence continuously in the background.

Task Tracking

Manually maintain a compliance tracker (Excel, Jira, Notion). Requires discipline to keep up-to-date.

Built-in dashboards showing control status, gaps, and pending actions. Automatic reminders for overdue items so you dont lose the certification

Monitoring Controls

Manually schedule quarterly access reviews, DR drills, vulnerability scans. Easy to miss deadlines.

Continuous monitoring — system flags non-compliance (e.g., inactive MFA, new public S3 bucket).

Vendor Management

Manually collect SOC 2 / ISO certs from your vendors, track renewal dates.

Vendor portal + automated vendor risk tracking and reminders.

Audit Readiness

Heavy scramble before the audit — weeks of pulling evidence, formatting it, and mapping to TSC.

Evidence always up-to-date; auditor gets direct platform access, reducing prep time drastically.

Audit Relationship

You find and contract your own auditor, negotiate scope, and handle submissions manually.

Many vendors have preferred auditors and bundle audit services or introductions.

Team Time Required

High — expect 150–250+ hours spread across engineering, DevOps, HR, and management in Year 1.

Lower — often 40–70% less time commitment in Year 1;

Year 2 is even lighter.

Scalability for Yearly Renewal

Each year you repeat manual evidence gathering; some documents reused but many controls revalidated from scratch.

Continuous monitoring means Year 2 renewal is much lighter — mostly gap-closing and small updates.

Cost (Tools)

Low direct cost for tools (using existing cloud & ticketing), but high labor cost internally.

Vendor subscription cost — typically $8k–$25k/year for your company size.

Cost (Audit)

External auditor: $15k–$25k for SOC 2 Type II, billed separately.

Same audit cost — sometimes vendors have preferred rates ($10k–$18k).

Learning Curve

You build deep internal expertise in SOC 2, trust criteria, and control mapping.

Lower learning curve; but team may rely heavily on the vendor and know less about the “why” behind controls.

Sprinto

~$7.5k–$25k/year

Strong AWS/GCP/Azure integration, good for remote teams.

Vanta

~$10k–$20k/year

Very polished UI, lots of integrations, widely used by startups.

Drata

~$12k–$20k/year

More automation for complex orgs, strong continuous monitoring.

Manual

$0 vendor fee

Time-heavy; high internal labor cost and audit risks if something is not in good shape.