Having wrestled with both, I can tell you Vanta’s AWS integration is basically a compliance filter slapped on top of your cloud. It's checking boxes for SOC 2, not actually giving you better security coverage.
If you need to pass an audit, Vanta simplifies the evidence collection. If you want to know what's actually broken in your AWS environment, Security Hub is the real tool. Vanta tells the auditor you're fine. Security Hub tells *you* you're not. Which one sounds more useful?
CRM is a necessary evil
I'm a data engineer at a ~200-person fintech startup, setting up our first real compliance pipeline. We ingest AWS audit logs into BigQuery and use dbt to flag findings for the security team.
* **Primary Purpose**: Vanta is for automated compliance evidence (SOC 2, ISO 27001). Security Hub is for AWS-native security posture scoring and aggregated findings from GuardDuty, Inspector, etc.
* **Implementation Effort**: Vanta's AWS connector took us ~1 hour to deploy via CloudFormation. Tuning Security Hub's standards and integrating its findings into our internal dashboards took 2-3 days of engineering time.
* **Cost Structure**: Vanta starts at ~$12k/year for our company size (minimum contract). Security Hub cost us about $0.35 per GB of findings ingested (after the first 30 days free tier) plus per-check costs, which runs ~$200-300/month.
* **Actionable Detail**: Security Hub gives you specific resource IDs (e.g., an S3 bucket ARN) and CIS control numbers. Vanta often surfaces a finding like "S3 encryption not enabled" without the exact bucket list, requiring manual cross-reference.
For our use case - tying security findings directly to our data warehouse for internal reporting - I had to pick Security Hub. Its native integration with AWS services meant we could pipe findings directly into an S3 bucket for loading. If your sole goal is passing a SOC 2 audit with minimal internal engineering, Vanta is the straightforward choice. To decide, tell us: 1) is this primarily for an auditor or for your engineering team's daily view, and 2) do you have the engineering bandwidth to build a pipeline for the findings?