Most organizations carry a combination of obligations: a control framework or two (SOC 2, ISO 27001, the NIST or CIS baselines), one or more privacy laws (PIPEDA, a provincial privacy act, sometimes GDPR), and the rules for whatever they actually do (PCI DSS for card payments, a health statute, a public-sector policy). Very few live inside a single framework.
Vanta is very good at one path: SOC 2, ISO 27001, and the frameworks a SaaS company meets on the way to an enterprise deal. Inside that path it is strong, and Lavawall® will not pretend otherwise. The trouble is that most organizations are on more than that one path.
Lavawall is built for the combination. It ships the frameworks pre-built, walks you through each one with a guided wizard instead of a blank template, collects the evidence from your own systems rather than a wall of third-party connectors, and comes with the security platform (patching, monitoring, breach detection, remote support) that produces that evidence in the first place.
What a combination looks like
Here is one common shape. A twelve-person health-tech startup in British Columbia that takes card payments does not have one obligation. It has six, before it has twenty staff.
| Where it comes from | The instrument |
|---|---|
| Privacy | BC PIPA; PIPEDA for anything crossing a provincial or national border; BC's E-Health Act if it touches a health information bank |
| Payments | PCI DSS, at whatever SAQ (self-assessment questionnaire) level their integration lands them in |
| Customer-driven | SOC 2, the moment a health authority's procurement team gets involved |
| Breach | BC PIPA's notification duty, plus PIPEDA's real-risk-of-significant-harm test: two different clocks |
Six instruments before the company has twenty staff. Vanta ships one of them.
Your combination will look different. A manufacturer, a clinic, a credit union, an accounting firm, and a municipality each carry their own mix of a control framework, a privacy law, and an industry rule. Almost nobody has just one, and that is the case single-framework tools are not built for.
What Lavawall® does that Vanta does not
It ships your combination pre-built
Lavawall ships the frameworks most organizations actually carry, pre-built rather than left to a consultant or a build-it-yourself tool: SOC 2, ISO 27001, and the NIST and CIS baselines; PIPEDA, Alberta PIPA and POPA, BC PIPA and FIPPA, Ontario MFIPPA, and Quebec Law 25; the health statutes, including the Alberta and BC health information acts and the E-Health Act; PCI DSS; and the public-sector set, from the FBI CJIS Security Policy 6.1 and 5.9.5 to IRS Publication 1075, ADA Title II, and GovRAMP (formerly StateRAMP). Browse the full catalogue.
Guided wizards, not blank templates
Vanta hands you templates and control descriptions and leaves the tailoring to you, which is why so much of the work still ends up on your desk. Lavawall walks each framework through a guided wizard that asks about your actual environment (your systems, your data, the jurisdictions you operate in) and builds the assessment and the policies around your answers. A template assumes every organization is the same. A wizard produces something that fits yours.
A native platform, not a wall of integrations that break
Vanta reads your posture through dozens of third-party integrations, and when one drifts or disconnects the evidence quietly goes stale or a test starts failing for no real reason. G2 reviewers say Vanta’s integrations seem to break a bit too often
, and others note the automated tests are noisy and need constant tuning. Lavawall is the platform, not a connector to one: it runs its own agent on your endpoints and its own connectors into Microsoft 365, Entra, Intune, and Google Workspace, so the evidence comes from the same system that runs the control, with no third-party token to expire in the middle of your audit.
The security platform that produces the evidence
Most of compliance is technical controls you have to actually run and prove: patching, configuration hardening, access review, breach detection, backups. Vanta checks whether you did them. Lavawall does them. The same console patches Windows, macOS, and Linux, hardens their configuration, detects breaches across Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, runs security and attack-surface scans, and gives your team remote support and a help desk. The evidence is a by-product of running the tools, and you are replacing several products at once instead of adding one more on top. It is multi-tenant as well, so an MSP runs a whole book of clients from one console.
Evidence that names its subjects, and admits what it cannot see
Two specifics, because the generic version of this is what everyone says. A Lavawall check names its subjects: not MFA coverage 94%
but these five accounts have no second factor, and two of them are administrators. And it is honest about what it could not see: when a source is not connected, Lavawall reports that the check could not run and names what it needed, rather than scoring it as a pass.
Business continuity as a working module, not a template
Lavawall runs a business impact analysis with recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), and maximum tolerable downtime (MTD), a dependency graph with single points of failure flagged, and continuity plans generated from that live data. The proof point nothing else in the category produces: Lavawall flags a process whose recovery target is longer than the downtime the business says it can survive. Forty-eight hours against a twenty-four-hour tolerance is two numbers that cannot both be true. Vanta’s published continuity material is a downloadable template and a blog post.
Capability comparison
| Capability | Lavawall® | Vanta |
|---|---|---|
| SOC 2 and ISO 27001 | Yes | Yes, its core strength |
| Canadian provincial privacy (PIPEDA, PIPA, POPA, Law 25) | Pre-built frameworks | Custom-framework builder |
| Canadian health and records (HIA, E-Health Act, MFIPPA, FIPPA) | Pre-built frameworks | Custom-framework builder |
| US public sector (CJIS 6.1 and 5.9.5, IRS 1075, ADA Title II, GovRAMP) | Pre-built frameworks | Custom-framework builder |
| Business continuity (BIA with RTO, RPO, MTD; dependency graph) | Working module | Downloadable template |
| Evidence from your own tenant (M365, Entra, Intune, Workspace, endpoints) | Collected by the console | Via integrations |
| Framework setup | Guided wizard | Template library to fill in |
| Patching, breach detection, remote support, help desk | Included, same console | Out of scope |
| Reports a check as unknown when a source is not connected | Yes | Not documented |
| Multi-tenant for MSPs (parent and child scoping) | Designed in | One org per account |
| Published price | On the pricing page | From $14,000, AWS Marketplace |
"Custom-framework builder" means the vendor gives you tools to build the framework yourself; it is not the same as shipping a pre-built one. Compare each product's own published framework list before you decide.
Pricing, published
Almost nobody in this category publishes a number, and pricing opacity is the single most-cited complaint in Vanta’s aggregate reviews, ahead of missing features. So here is ours, beside theirs.
Lavawall® Complete
$89.50 /seat/year
Annual, two months free. A seat is the greater of your managed devices or your Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace licensed users, never both.
Starts at $2,240/year for the first 25 seats, and every compliance framework in the catalogue is included, along with the business-continuity module, your policies, and a Trust Centre.
No per-framework fee: the whole catalogue is in Complete. Volume discounts start at 51 seats.
Vanta
from US$14,000 /year
Essentials package, 1–20 employees, as published on Vanta’s own AWS Marketplace listing (accessed 28 August 2026). Marketplace and direct pricing can differ.
That floor covers one framework. The buyer this page is written for has four, five, or six.
Volume discount, by seat
| 1–50 seats | list price |
| 51–250 seats | 5% off |
| 251–1,000 seats | 10% off |
| 1,001–5,000 seats | 15% off |
| 5,001+ seats | 20% off |
A few scenarios
| Organization | Assumptions | Lavawall / year |
|---|---|---|
| 20-person BC health-tech | 25 seats (the minimum), every framework it needs included | $2,240 |
| 50-person services firm | 50 seats, every framework included | $4,475 |
| 250-seat organization | 250 seats at the 5% volume tier, every framework included | $21,256 |
For the 20-person band, Vanta’s published floor is US$14,000 for one framework. Lavawall®’s $2,240 covers every framework the buyer needs.
For most of these buyers, though, the real alternative to Lavawall is not another compliance platform at all. It is a consultant at $15,000 to $40,000 and a spreadsheet, repeated every year, with nothing left behind between engagements. See the full pricing page for the calculator.
When Vanta is the better choice
If your entire compliance obligation is SOC 2, you are a cloud-native SaaS company with no health, payment, public-sector, or provincial exposure, an enterprise customer has asked for the report, and what you most need is an introduction to an audit firm, then Vanta and Drata are built for exactly that path, and their auditor networks are worth paying for. Lavawall does not have an auditor network. Almost nobody reading this page is in that case, but the ones who are should buy Vanta.
Frequently asked
- Is Lavawall a SOC 2 platform like Vanta?
- Lavawall assesses and evidences SOC 2, and it is one framework of many in the catalogue. The difference is what happens when SOC 2 is not your whole obligation. If you also carry PIPEDA, a provincial privacy act, PCI DSS, a health statute, or a public-sector rule, Lavawall was built for that combination and Vanta was built for the SOC 2 path.
- Does Vanta cover Canadian and US public-sector frameworks?
- Vanta is built around SOC 2, ISO 27001, and the frameworks adjacent to them. Lavawall ships pre-built frameworks for PIPEDA, Alberta PIPA, POPA, and the Health Information Act, BC PIPA, FIPPA, and the E-Health Act, Ontario MFIPPA, Quebec Law 25, the FBI CJIS Security Policy, IRS Publication 1075, ADA Title II, and GovRAMP (formerly StateRAMP), among others. Compare each product's own framework list.
- We are a twenty-person startup. Isn't Vanta the obvious choice at our size?
- Size is not the variable; the shape of your obligations is. A SaaS company with one obligation is an easy Vanta customer at any headcount. A health-tech, fintech, or medtech startup usually has three to six obligations before it has twenty staff, and that is the buyer Lavawall serves from day one.
- When is Vanta the better choice?
- If your entire compliance obligation is SOC 2, you are cloud-native SaaS with no other exposure, and what you most need is an introduction to an audit firm, Vanta and Drata are built for that path and their auditor networks are worth paying for. Lavawall does not have an auditor network.
By region and industry
The comparison changes with your obligation set. These pages start from where you operate and what you make.
- Vanta alternative for US organizations: state privacy laws, HIPAA, and public-sector rules.
- Vanta alternative for Canadian organizations: PIPEDA, provincial privacy, and sector regulators.
- Vanta alternative for healthcare and medical devices: HIPAA, health-privacy statutes, and FDA section 524B.
- Vanta alternative for financial services: GLBA, NYDFS, CIRO, and FINTRAC alongside SOC 2 and PCI.
- Vanta alternative for government and public sector: CJIS, IRS 1075, GovRAMP, and ADA Title II.