Vanta is a compliance platform. Its Questionnaire Automation sits inside it and drafts answers from the documents and policies you keep in Vanta. Evident is built for the response itself: the questionnaire, RFI or RFP a buyer sends, in whatever file or portal it arrives in, answered from your own evidence and sent back the way the buyer asked for it.
This page compares the two on questionnaire work only. Vanta’s features below come from Vanta’s own product page and help center, as of October 2026.
What does Vanta’s Questionnaire Automation do?
It drafts answers to security questionnaires from your Vanta knowledge base, and your team reviews and approves them before export.
Per Vanta’s Questionnaire Automation page, it imports spreadsheets, Word files, PDFs and third-party portals, reuses exact matches from past answers, and uses Vanta AI to draft cited answers where there is no match. Teams can assign questions to owners, comment, approve, and answer from Slack, then export in the original format. Answers can be tuned with tags for product, region and industry.
For web portals, Vanta uses a browser extension. A person opens the portal in Chrome, Edge or Brave, scans the questions into Vanta, reviews the drafts there, then fills them back into the page. Vanta’s help center says the extension fills text fields, radio buttons and dropdowns; multi-select checkboxes and file uploads are filled by hand.
How is Evident different?
Evident is the response workflow from intake to send-back, and it fills vendor portals itself instead of through an extension in your browser.
- Every answer shows its source. If your documents don’t cover a question, Evident leaves it for your team and says what is missing, instead of writing a plausible guess.
- Your file comes back intact. Answers land in the right cells of the buyer’s Excel file, with dropdowns, validation, formulas and formatting kept. Word questionnaires are written back into the document, and older .xls files work too.
- Portals, end to end. Evident opens the portal in its own browser, reads every question, including ones inside frames and pop-up dialogs, and fills text, single and multi-select choices, custom dropdowns, dates and file attachments. It can sign in with credentials from your 1Password vault.
- RFIs and RFPs. Mark an upload as an RFI or RFP and Evident answers company and product questions from your approved content, with the same sources and review.
- Experts answer where they work. Legal, finance and engineering answer their assigned questions in Slack or Microsoft Teams, and approve from the link in a reminder, without logging in.
- It gets better as you correct it. A fact you fix in an answer is saved and reused on later questionnaires. When two of your sources disagree, Evident shows both sides and lets you pick one.
“Not stated” means Vanta’s public pages don’t describe it as of October 2026, not that it can’t be done.
Which one should you use?
Use a compliance platform like Vanta for SOC 2 or ISO 27001 readiness. Use Evident when the bottleneck is answering what buyers send.
Plenty of teams run both. The compliance platform keeps controls and audit evidence current; Evident turns that evidence, plus your policies and past answers, into finished questionnaires, RFPs and portal submissions. If your evidence lives in Drata instead, Evident syncs your Drata policies directly.
Weighing other platforms too? See Evident vs Drata, or read how security questionnaire automation works from start to finish.