Vanta → Prowler
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
Vanta does not publish prices: its pricing page lists Essentials, Plus, Professional and Enterprise and asks you to request personalized pricing (checked 2026-10-03). Prowler's open-source CLI, SDK and self-hosted Local Server are free under Apache-2.0; you pay only for the machine and databases that run them. Prowler Cloud, as listed on 2026-10-03: $99 per cloud account per month billed monthly, 20% off with annual billing (5 accounts = $495/mo at list price), with a 15-day free trial; Prowler Private Cloud is custom-priced. Your auditor's fee is separate in both cases. Replacing Vanta also adds staff time for the policy, HR, device and vendor evidence Prowler does not collect, so compare Vanta's quote against Prowler plus that time, not against $0.
Moves cleanly
Cloud-configuration testing moves: Prowler maps each check to framework requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, CIS, NIST, GDPR and others; 70+ frameworks per its pricing page) across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Microsoft 365, GitHub and more, and writes one CSV per framework under the compliance/ output folder. Your Vanta records export too: documents as ZIP, policies as a PDF packet with acceptance history, framework evidence as ZIP, controls and test evidence as CSV or workpapers.
You rebuild
Everything that is not a cloud API call: policies and employee acceptance tracking, onboarding and background-check evidence, security-training records, computer monitoring, access reviews, vendor and risk registers, security questionnaires, the public Trust Center (Vanta's export guide says it is a live page only) and the auditor workspace where auditors accept or flag evidence.
What Vanta costs you today
No public pricing — quote only, sold as an annual contract and commonly bundled with an audit. That opacity is itself the most-cited complaint: buyers cannot compare without entering a sales cycle, and renewal quotes rise with headcount and framework count.
What actually holds you in
Policies, evidence history, vendor reviews and the trust page live in Vanta's platform. Cloud connections are read-only and easy to revoke, but the audit trail and policy documents are the sticky part — export them before a renewal decision, not after.
What you are moving to
Scans AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes against hundreds of checks and maps them to compliance frameworks including CIS, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR and NIST. Runs as a CLI in CI or as a self-hosted app, and produces the technical-control evidence a compliance platform would otherwise gather for you.
Free / self-host; optional paid hosted Prowler Cloud
Prowler strengths
- Framework mappings are built in — SOC 2, CIS, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST and more, not just raw findings
- Runs in CI, so posture is checked on every change rather than the week before an audit
- Covers the part of compliance that is genuinely automatable: technical control state
What you give up
- Produces evidence, not an audit — no auditor relationship, no report
- No policy management, security training tracking or vendor review workflow
- Someone has to own the findings; the tool will not chase them
The migration, step by step
- 1Export everything from Vanta before the contract ends: Export all framework evidence (ZIP), Download Policy Packet (PDF with acceptance history), Documents > Export All, test workpapers, and the People, Computers, Access, Vendors and Risk exports.
- 2Decide what replaces each non-cloud area (a document store for policies, your HR system for onboarding and training records, a spreadsheet or GRC tool for vendors and risks) and name an owner for each, because Prowler will not collect any of it.
- 3Set up Prowler with read-only access: for AWS, create a role with SecurityAudit, ViewOnlyAccess and Prowler's prowler-additions-policy.json, assumed with an external ID; list frameworks with prowler aws --list-compliance and scan with --compliance <framework>, or connect the accounts to Prowler Cloud.
- 4Parallel run for one full monitoring cycle: keep Vanta's integrations on, run Prowler on a schedule, and map every Vanta automated test to the Prowler checks that cover it, flagging each test that has no Prowler equivalent.
- 5Agree with your audit firm, before the audit window opens, which Prowler outputs (compliance CSVs, findings history) and which manual evidence it will accept, and how it will receive files now that there is no shared Vanta workspace.
- 6Cut over at renewal: route alerts from Prowler (Slack or Jira on Prowler Cloud), archive the dated Vanta exports, then disconnect Vanta's integrations and revoke the cloud roles it used.
The gotcha
Prowler is a cloud security scanner that reports against compliance frameworks, not a compliance programme. Its documentation says that if it cannot find a resource related to a check in a requirement, that requirement is omitted from the output, and requirements carry Pass, Fail or Manual badges. A clean Prowler SOC 2 report therefore means no failing cloud checks, not audit-ready: the omitted and Manual requirements are largely the policy, people and vendor work Vanta was tracking. There is also no auditor seat. Vanta gives auditors limited in-app access to review, accept or flag evidence and comment on it; with Prowler you hand them files. Finally, Vanta's Trust Center cannot be exported (only individual certifications download), so any customer-facing security page has to be rebuilt somewhere else before the Vanta contract ends.
When to stay on Vanta
Stay if you hold or are pursuing SOC 2, ISO 27001 or HIPAA with a small team and your auditor already works inside Vanta; if you rely on its policy acceptance tracking, device monitoring, Trust Center or questionnaire automation; or if no engineer can own a scanner and triage its findings. Prowler can also run alongside Vanta for deeper cloud checks rather than replacing it.
More migrations
Figures verified 2026-09-01 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.