Modulos vs Drata: AI Governance Comparison (2026)

In Modulos the EU AI Act is a framework with its own controls. Each AI system is classified across the Act’s four gates, including the Annex III high-risk use cases, and the controls for risk management, technical documentation and quality management follow from that result. Since its reference was published in the Official Journal on 14 October 2026, EN 18286 on quality management systems has been the first harmonised standard under the AI Act. It gives a presumption of conformity with Article 17(1) and the first sentence of Article 11(1), and the drafts prEN 18228 and prEN 18282 are already mapped. The library spans 26 frameworks, including the CRA, NIS2, DORA, GDPR, Singapore, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and the EU AI Act and NIST AI RMF share 58 controls.

Drata lists 30+ pre-built frameworks. Its AI entries are ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF and AIUC-1, an AI agent standard for which Drata describes itself as the first platform with native support. The EU entries are GDPR, NIS 2, DORA and the EU CRA, and Drata also covers Australian frameworks such as Essential Eight and CPS 230, which Modulos does not. The EU AI Act, however, is not in the catalogue as of 16 October 2026, and we found no CEN-CENELEC harmonised standard there.

The Modulos edge: A high-risk AI system is assessed against the AI Act itself and its first cited harmonised standard, in the same library as the rest of your EU obligations.

Modulos discovery starts in the platforms where enterprise agents are built and run. Scout inventories Microsoft Copilot Studio agents across a whole tenant, lists Azure AI Foundry agents and Azure OpenAI deployments, and reads usage from your OpenAI Platform organisation and Claude Console. It runs when a user asks, with read-only access. Each find becomes a Draft, and on submission Modulos runs an initial risk assessment and queues the system for a Registration Manager, who records the decision. Modulos has no runtime gateway. It governs at the conformity layer, reads Vijil guardrail and probe data, and accepts findings from Zenity, an agent-security partner, as evidence.

Drata announced AI Agent Governance in June 2026 and opened limited availability on 4 August 2026. A Drata Sensor watches AI activity on managed devices, and an MCP proxy evaluates each tool call against policy, so a violating action is stopped before it executes. Telemetry flows into a tamper-evident evidence feed. Drata writes that the full lifecycle “ships end-to-end for Anthropic today”, but native coverage for OpenAI, Google Vertex AI and AWS Bedrock is still in active development. The product page names all four as its intended scope.

The Modulos edge: Discovery already reads Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic sources, so agents from several providers land in one register with a risk assessment attached.

Agent Tests let a compliance team ask a conformity question in plain English, such as whether every declined credit decision in Snowflake has a logged human review, and have an agent answer it on a schedule. The agent uses read-only tools across code, cloud, the data warehouse and model telemetry, whichever provider runs the AI system. Each run returns a cited pass, fail or error verdict and is stored immutably. A fail sets the mapped controls back to not executed and notifies their owners. A pass never restores a control on its own, so a person still closes the gap.

Drata keeps all control statuses updated daily across more than 300 integrated tools. Its Test Library, released in May 2026, catalogues 1,000+ prebuilt infrastructure tests across AWS, Azure and GCP. These tests check cloud configuration and security evidence. AI Agent Governance adds a runtime check on agent tool calls, but we found no Drata test that judges an AI system against a written conformity criterion as of 16 October 2026.

The Modulos edge: Modulos tests the AI system against the requirement across providers, and a failure reopens the control it maps to.

ISO/IEC 42001 is met mostly at organisation level, and it shares more controls with ISO/IEC 27001, NIS2 and DORA than with the AI Act. Modulos maps those links, so evidence from your security programme counts where it applies and the AI-specific clauses get their own controls. The platform holds ISO/IEC 42001 product conformity, CertX certificate 213-001/24. Modulos experts serve on ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42, including JWG 6 on conformity assessment, and on CEN-CENELEC JTC 21. Xayn, the first German company certified to ISO/IEC 42001, was audit-ready in four weeks.

Drata announced its organisational ISO/IEC 42001 certification on 2 December 2025. In the same post, Drata writes that its SOC 2, ISO 27001 and privacy frameworks “covered approximately 35–40% of ISO 42001 requirements”, so the larger share of the standard needed new work. Drata’s ISO 42001 framework helps customers prepare for the same organisational certificate.

The Modulos edge: Modulos covers the AI-specific share of ISO/IEC 42001 that security frameworks leave open, on a platform that holds the product certificate.

Modulos produces the loss figure itself. The Fermi Risk Agent estimates an annual loss in EUR, GBP or USD for each AI risk, even where loss history is sparse, and re-runs as a step in a scheduled job when controls or evidence change. The AI System Graph traces each threat through its risk to the AI system in money. A portfolio view then shows how much of each Risk Limit is in use, from the whole organisation down to a single threat vector.

Drata scores risk as impact times likelihood on a configurable scale, with inherent and residual scores. Its help centre also shows how to build a custom formula that multiplies a probability by a Financial Loss currency field, but the loss amount in that field is one your team defines and enters.

The Modulos edge: Modulos estimates the annual loss and re-estimates it on a schedule, so the figure follows your controls without anyone re-entering it.