How to Migrate from Vanta to Drata (2026): A Step-by-Step Guide and the Timing Math That Decides

1Decide your cutover timing before you touch anything

The single biggest determinant of how painful this migration feels is when you do it relative to your audit calendar — more than any technical step below. If you're in the middle of an active SOC 2 Type II observation period, don't start the migration now. Auditors test the operating effectiveness of controls over a continuous window, and switching evidence sources mid-period creates exactly the kind of gap an auditor is trained to flag.

The safe window opens the day your current observation period closes and ideally closes a few weeks before the next one begins, giving you buffer for the parallel-run step later. If business reasons force a mid-cycle switch anyway, plan to keep your Vanta evidence exports archived and hand your auditor both data sets for that window — don't try to backfill Drata evidence for a period Drata wasn't installed for.

2Audit and export your existing Vanta environment

Before you touch Drata, take a full inventory of what's actually running in Vanta: which frameworks are enabled, which controls map to which, every connected integration, your employee onboarding/offboarding tracking, open items in your risk register, and any active vendor assessments. Then export what you'll need later. Vanta's evidence tab lets you export the evidence list, a policy packet, and security awareness training records; its Exports section also produces an immutable copy of your latest automated test run — the "Workpaper" option is built specifically to meet auditor standards, so pull that for every framework before you start unwinding anything.

3Handle the Vanta contract exit

Find your actual renewal date and your actual notice requirement — don't assume it matches the boilerplate. Vanta's standard Master Subscription Agreement auto-renews for successive one-year terms unless you give notice of termination at least 30 days before the term ends, but negotiated Order Forms can specify longer windows (60–90 days isn't unusual). Miss that date and you can end up paying for a full extra year you no longer need.

Calendar a reminder at least 45–60 days out as a buffer, send written notice through whatever channel your contract specifies, and get written confirmation back. If you want to negotiate a pro-rated early exit or a shortened overlap instead of running to the contract's natural end, this is the point to raise it — not after you've already signed with Drata.

4Set up Drata and reconnect integrations one at a time

Drata's onboarding sprint — connecting integrations, customizing policies, and remediating the initial round of failing tests — typically runs 2 to 6 weeks; simple, single-framework environments can close in as few as three, while more complex, multi-framework setups usually land in the 4-to-6-week range.

None of your Vanta integration authorizations carry over — every connection has to be re-authorized from scratch in Drata. Prioritize your highest-evidence-volume connections first: cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), identity (Okta or Google Workspace), and source control (GitHub or GitLab) typically cover the bulk of your automated tests and each usually takes under an hour to connect. HR and payroll integrations (Rippling, Gusto, or Deel) matter too, since employee onboarding/offboarding evidence feeds several controls — if you're also weighing HR platforms for other reasons, our Deel vs. Rippling comparison for engineering teams covers the integration and API angle in more depth. Budget real time for policy customization on top of the connections themselves — figure 4–8 hours per policy if your team hasn't done this before.

5Remap controls and frameworks — this is where most of the real work lives

Vanta and Drata don't use identical control taxonomies. A control that satisfies "encryption at rest" as a single item in Vanta's mapping might be split into two more granular controls in Drata's framework, or combined differently across frameworks. Nothing about this is broken — it's just a different structural approach — but it means someone on your team needs to walk each framework's control list and confirm it maps to an equivalent (not just similarly-named) control in Drata before you trust the automated pass/fail status.

This step is also where the framework-cost math from earlier becomes concrete: if you're running more than one framework, Drata's lower per-framework add-on price is realized here, as you re-enable each one and see the actual line-item cost on your new contract. If you haven't settled which certification to prioritize first, our breakdown of ISO 27001 vs. SOC 2 and which to get first walks through the sequencing math in more detail.

6Migrate policies and rebuild what doesn't transfer

Policies are the one category that genuinely moves across as documents — export them from Vanta and re-upload them into Drata's policy center. What doesn't come with them is the automated mapping from policy to control to framework; that linkage has to be rebuilt manually inside Drata, control by control.

Historical evidence — past automated test runs, past audit workpapers — stays in Vanta. It doesn't migrate, and once your access ends, it's gone unless you exported it in Step 2. Evidence "freshness" clocks also reset the day each integration reconnects in Drata, which means your day-one dashboard will show a wave of tests as stale or pending until the first automated collection cycle finishes. That's expected, not a regression — but it's worth warning your team and leadership in advance so nobody mistakes it for a compliance step backward.

7Run a parallel evidence-collection period

Keep both platforms live for 2–4 weeks before you decommission anything. This is the step that catches integration gaps, missing controls, or mapping errors while you still have Vanta as a safety net — and it's also the real "hidden cost" of this migration, more than any per-seat price difference between the two vendors. Budget for double billing during this window; treat it as the price of not discovering a coverage gap the hard way, mid-audit, six months from now.

8Brief your auditor and preserve the continuity narrative

Tell your auditor about the switch before the cutover, not after. Auditors evaluate operating effectiveness over a continuous observation window; if part of that window ran on Vanta and part on Drata, they need a clear, documented bridge showing continuous control coverage across the switch — not two disconnected data exports and an assumption that it's fine. Hand them the exported Vanta workpapers from Step 2 alongside Drata's evidence for the overlap period, and flag the exact cutover date in writing.

9Decommission Vanta

Once Drata has run a full evidence-collection cycle and your auditor has confirmed coverage, revoke Vanta's integration credentials across cloud, identity, and source control, pull any final documentation or workpapers you haven't already archived, and let your contract lapse or cancel per the notice timing you locked in during Step 3. Archive everything you exported per your framework's document retention requirements — most call for 3–7 years of audit evidence retention regardless of which vendor originally collected it.