Modulos vs Vanta: AI Governance Comparison (2026)

Modulos covers the AI Act’s high-risk obligations in the platform. It classifies each AI system across the Act’s four gates, including the Annex III use cases, and carries the work through Article 9 risk management, Article 11 technical documentation and Article 17 quality management. EN 18286, the quality management system standard, became the first harmonised standard under the AI Act when its reference was published in the Official Journal on 14 October 2026. It now gives a presumption of conformity with Article 17(1) and the first sentence of Article 11(1), and prEN 18228 and prEN 18282 are mapped as drafts. The library holds 26 frameworks, with the CRA, NIS2, DORA and GDPR beside the AI Act, and 453 of its 929 controls serve two or more of them.

Vanta’s EU AI Act product spans over 150 controls, 16 policies and dozens of required artefacts. It offers role and risk classification, model behaviour tracking and incident logging. On CE marking, its FAQ says Vanta “can connect you to a specialist”. The AI Act sits in a catalogue of 35+ frameworks that also covers NIS2, DORA, GDPR and, since August 2026, Germany’s C5:2026 cloud attestation, but we found no CEN-CENELEC harmonised standard in that catalogue as of 16 October 2026.

The Modulos edge: Classification, technical documentation and the first cited harmonised standard sit in one platform, so high-risk conformity work stays in one place from first triage to the quality management system.

Modulos holds ISO/IEC 42001 product conformity, assessed by CertX under certificate 213-001/24. The platform itself was checked against the standard you are implementing. Modulos experts serve on CEN-CENELEC JTC 21 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42, including JWG 6 on conformity assessment. Xayn, the first German company certified to ISO/IEC 42001, reached audit readiness with Modulos in four weeks. Modulos does not automate SOC 2 for customers. Modulos itself holds a SOC 2 Type 2 report, so the platform that stores your AI evidence has passed the audit your own customers ask about.

Vanta announced its organisational ISO/IEC 42001 certification on 24 April 2025, which certifies the AI management system Vanta runs as a company. Its ISO 42001 product helps customers prepare their own management system for the same kind of certificate, and AI companies such as Writer, Synthesia and Jasper appear on that page. SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001, HIPAA and PCI DSS remain the core of Vanta’s business.

The Modulos edge: Of the two, Modulos holds the ISO/IEC 42001 product certificate, and it also holds the SOC 2 Type 2 report your vendor review will ask for.

Modulos starts from the AI already running in your tenants. On request, Scout lists Azure AI Foundry agents and Azure OpenAI deployments, inventories Microsoft Copilot Studio agents across a whole tenant, and reads usage from your OpenAI Platform organisation and Claude Console, which shows who uses AI through API keys. Each find arrives as a Draft that a person confirms. When the owner submits it, Modulos checks completeness, runs an initial risk assessment and places the system in the review queue. A Registration Manager then approves or rejects it with a recorded reason, and the AI system keeps its own history of who changed its owners, frameworks, risks and evidence.

Vanta’s AI Governance product maps AI agents “across developer laptops, production code, and vendor platforms” into the Trust Graph. It links each agent to the systems and vendors it touches and flags activity outside approved boundaries. The product page invites teams to join a waitlist for early access, and the launch post of 30 July 2026 describes monitoring across agent platforms, endpoints and gateways as work Vanta is still building.

The Modulos edge: Discovery and registration ship today as one flow, so each AI system Scout finds becomes a reviewed record with a first risk assessment attached.

Modulos Agent Tests check conformity questions against the AI systems themselves. A test is written in plain English, for example whether every Azure OpenAI deployment behind a claims model sits in an EU region. It runs daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. An agent with read-only tools inspects the connected code, cloud, warehouse and model telemetry, then returns a cited pass, fail or error verdict, and every run is stored immutably. A failed verdict sets the mapped controls back to not executed and notifies their owners. An error leaves control state as it was, so a source the agent cannot read is reported and never passed.

Vanta says its Trust Graph spans 400+ integrations and 1,400+ continuous tests, and its SOC 2 product describes tests that monitor controls hourly. Those tests read cloud, code, identity and device data, which suits security controls well. Four named agents work on top: the Compliance Agent, TPRM Agent and Customer Trust Agent from March 2026, and Agent for Risk from June 2026. AI Governance plans to monitor agent behaviour, but we did not find a Vanta test that checks an AI system against an AI Act or ISO/IEC 42001 criterion as of 16 October 2026.

The Modulos edge: A failed check against the AI system itself reopens the control, so AI conformity is re-verified between audits on the cadence you set.

The Fermi Risk Agent in Modulos estimates an annual loss in EUR, GBP or USD for each AI risk. It runs as a step in a scheduled job, so the figure moves when controls or evidence change. The portfolio view drills from the organisation down to one threat vector, coloured by how much of each Risk Limit is in use, and the risk value over time shows whether remediation is working. Modulos is a founding member of PACT AI, a coalition on AI assurance and insurance, where risk has to be stated in money.

Vanta keeps risks in a register, and Agent for Risk, generally available since June 2026, helps risk owners act on them. Mapping from risks to controls is in preview. We did not find a published monetary method for AI risk as of 16 October 2026, however, so Vanta fits teams that report risk as scores in a compliance view.

The Modulos edge: Your board sees AI risk as an annual loss against a set limit, in the same currency as the rest of its risk reporting.