There’s an entire cottage industry of guides on migrating between Vanta, Drata, and Secureframe — because the switch is genuinely painful, not because anyone’s exaggerating it. If you’re evaluating TracesOn alongside a tool you already run, the honest answer is: TracesOn isn’t asking you to make that switch. Here’s what the real cost of switching platforms looks like, and what the alternative actually is.
This isn’t a hypothetical. Public migration guides — written by teams who’ve done it — describe the same friction points every time:
You keep both platforms running side by side while the new one gets configured, tested, and trusted — which means paying for both during the overlap.
AWS, the identity provider, the code host, HR — each connection has to be manually reconnected and re-scoped in the new platform. There’s no bulk transfer of live integrations between vendors.
Continuous-monitoring platforms track how recently each control was last verified. Moving platforms restarts that clock, even for controls that were passing a day earlier.
Standard advice in every migration guide: keep the old platform active until your auditor has actually sampled evidence from it for the current period. That’s a second bill for a tool you’re trying to leave.
Vanta, Drata, and Secureframe are built around continuous monitoring: standing, always-on access into your AWS account, identity provider, and code host, so the platform can check control status on a schedule. TracesOn was built differently on purpose — it’s push-based. A control owner uploads a specific artifact in response to a specific request; there’s no standing credential into your production systems and no background scanning to reconfigure. That architectural difference is exactly why adopting TracesOn doesn’t force a decision about what to do with your existing monitoring tool.
Continuous-monitoring tools need broad, persistent read access into your infrastructure to do what they do — that access is the product. It’s also a real attack surface. In May 2025, Vanta disclosed — in its own published root-cause analysis — that a code change removed the safety filter separating customer data pulled in through its third-party integrations, writing data from under 20% of its integrations into the wrong customers’ tenants. Under 4% of customers were affected. It wasn’t an external attacker or a stolen credential; an internal application bug was sufficient on its own.
TracesOn’s evidence model doesn’t create that exposure, because there’s no standing credential into your systems to begin with. That’s not a claim that automation is bad — grabbing a raw artifact automatically is genuinely useful. It’s a claim that the review-and-attest step automation doesn’t eliminate is worth building for directly, which is what TracesOn’s attestation-on-upload does: every artifact carries a timestamped attestation from the control owner, making that unavoidable step fast and organized instead of skipped.
A client on its first SOC 2 usually has no incumbent GRC tool — easy fit. A client on its second or third cycle is disproportionately likely to already run Vanta or Drata for continuous monitoring, and asking them to rip that out to bring TracesOn onto the engagement is a real objection, not a minor one.
You don’t have to make that ask. TracesOn runs as the evidence-and-RFI layer for the audit itself, independent of whatever the client uses for day-to-day monitoring. We’re also actively building a direct, read-only import that pulls a client’s existing evidence and control status out of Drata — on demand, never a background scan — so it counts toward a TracesOn-issued RFI without re-collection. That connector isn’t live yet; today, the fit is that TracesOn doesn’t require displacing what’s already there to start the engagement.
Keep your continuous-monitoring tool exactly where it is. TracesOn handles evidence collection and RFIs alongside it — no standing access, no integration re-work, no parallel-billing window.
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