Compare
Compared on the evidence, not the feature list.
Every comparison here asks both products the same eight questions: where the evidence lives, who can recompute it, whether it is tamper evident, whether gaps are declared, how remediation is gated, whether AI agents are covered, how federal packages are produced, and how you evaluate it. Competitor cells restate public documentation; where a vendor is silent, the cell says so.
01 Where the evidence lives 02 Verifiable by a second party 03 Tamper evidence 04 Gaps declared 05 Remediation model 06 AI agent coverage 07 Federal packaging 08 Evaluation # one row per question, both answers on the record
Six comparisons, one set of questions.
Six comparisons, indexed by what each vendor states about itself. The full eight-question table, the narrative, and the questions buyers ask are on each page.
| Comparison | As they describe it | Where evidence lives | Remediation model | Federal packaging |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PolicyCortex vs Vanta | Commercial compliance automation (GRC) | Vendor cloud, multi-tenant SaaS | Findings and tasks for your team | CMMC on the framework list; packages not stated |
| PolicyCortex vs Drata | Commercial compliance automation (GRC) | Vendor cloud, multi-tenant SaaS | Findings assigned to your team | Limited CMMC support; packages not stated |
| PolicyCortex vs Wiz | Cloud security posture management | Not stated by vendor | Findings routed to ticketing, SIEM, SOAR | No authorization package |
| PolicyCortex vs Prisma Cloud | Enterprise cloud security platform | Not stated by vendor | Runbooks and SOAR integrations | Not stated; custom policy work for CMMC |
| PolicyCortex vs RegScale | Federal GRC and documentation | Not stated by vendor | POA&M tracking, human-driven | SSP, POA&M, ATO packages, one-click OSCAL |
| PolicyCortex vs GCC High | FedRAMP High hosting (Microsoft 365 and Azure) | Your Microsoft tenant; hosting, not an evidence system | None; hosting | Authorized hosting; your system's package not provided |
PolicyCortex cells restate the register pages. Competitor cells restate the vendor's public product documentation as read in March 2026; where it does not state a fact, the cell says so. Corrections to [email protected].
The eight questions, and our answers.
The eight questions, with our answers. Every cell below is sourced from a PolicyCortex page, and each comparison prints the same cells next to the vendor's.
- Where the evidence lives
- The customer's tenant. Collectors, policy engine, evidence store, decision layer and export surface all run there. No telemetry pipeline to PolicyCortex servers and no egress of evidence.
- Verifiable by a second party
- By recomputation. Export the stream, recompute SHA3-256 over each record plus the digest of the record before it, compare: INTACT, or the first sequence number where integrity fails. No PolicyCortex account or API in the loop.
- Tamper evidence
- Hash chained and append-only. There is no update or delete verb in the store; an edit breaks the edited record and every digest after it.
- Gaps declared
- Declared. When a collector is down or a scope is unobserved, the chain carries a gap record: stream, interval, reason, declared_at.
- Remediation model
- Approval-gated proposals. The reasoning layer proposes and cannot execute. SHADOW executes nothing; GATED, the default, puts a named human on each action; AUTONOMOUS is limited to narrow, well-tested action classes with all three policy gates still run.
- AI agent coverage
- Proof of agency: the envelope that permitted each autonomous action, the chained record of what it did, and the counterfactual that would have blocked it. Models and agents in scope are inventoried and mapped against 64 MITRE ATLAS techniques, with unbounded techniques recorded as declared gaps.
- Federal packaging
- OSCAL 1.1.2 export with SSP, SAR, POA&M, eMASS XML and evidence indexes generated from one implementation record. AWS and Azure boundaries for ATO packaging.
- Evaluation
- Request Access. Our team reviews your requirements and agrees on scope and commercial terms before onboarding in your tenant.
How to read the tables.
PolicyCortex cells come from our own pages: the architecture, the three proof pages, AI governance, and federal. Competitor cells come from the vendor's public product documentation as read in March 2026, restated in the vendor's own terms. Where a vendor does not state a fact, the cell reads Not stated by vendor, and that is all it means: not that the capability is absent, only that we could not find it stated.
Corrections are welcome at [email protected]. Corrections are dated on the page.
The PolicyCortex facts are stated on the architecture, proof of state, proof of change, proof of agency, and the federal record.
What a comparison is not.
Ask us the same eight questions, in your own tenant.
Request Access