Certification tooling, policy governance, and systems of record all get sold as AI compliance software. They answer different questions from different people — and the wrong one is a year of budget spent on the right answer to a question nobody asked you.
Sorted by who asks the question, because that is how budgets get approved — and how audits get failed.
Security & compliance leads
“Is this company well run?” — evidence collection, control mapping and questionnaires for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA.
Who sells it: Vanta, Drata, Sprinto, Secureframe
Buy it when: An enterprise customer asks for your SOC 2 before signing.
Risk & legal teams
“Do we have a defensible AI policy?” — model inventories, risk assessments, review workflows, framework alignment.
Who sells it: Credo AI, Holistic AI, OneTrust
Buy it when: The board asks who owns AI risk, and nobody has an answer on paper.
Whoever answers the regulator
“What did the agent actually do, and can you prove nobody edited the answer?” — per-action evidence a third party can verify.
Who sells it: Auditant
Buy it when: Your agents act autonomously and someone outside the company can demand the record.
One request separates the shelves faster than any demo: show me what one agent did last Tuesday, and prove the record was not edited since.
Shows you the control that says logging exists — not the log.
Shows you the policy the agent was meant to follow — not what it did.
Shows you the action, the rule it passed, who approved it, and a file your own auditor can verify offline.
We pass our own test in public: our trust page is computed from our live record on every request, and the demo needs no account.
Including which to buy first, where the honest answer depends on who asks you questions — not on us.
Whichever question gets asked of you first. If a customer wants your SOC 2, buy certification tooling. If a regulator or auditor can demand per-action records — you run agents in finance, HR, healthcare, or anything the EU AI Act calls high-risk — the record has to exist before the question does, because it only counts if you were already keeping it.
Increasingly they map AI frameworks — ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF — the same way they map ISO 27001: as controls your company attests to. What they do not do is record what a specific agent did on a specific day. A control saying “we log agent actions” and the log itself are different artefacts.
Probably, by acquisition — categories this adjacent tend to merge. Today no vendor does all three well, and a buyer who waits for the suite has none of the three questions answered in the meantime.
Ours is published — a flat band by agent count, from $1,500 a month, unlimited recorded actions. Most of the category is quote-only, which tells you the price depends on what they think you can pay.