Security Questionnaire Software Pricing Compared

Security questionnaire software costs from about $1,400 to $25,000 a year in 2026. Published prices run from $119 a month billed yearly for Complies Growth, $300 and $900 a month for 1up, $899 a month for AutoRFP.ai and $9,600 a year for Conveyor Business. Loopio is quote-only with a $24,209 Vendr median, and Vanta and Drata bundle questionnaire tools into quote-only platforms.

The spread is wide because the tools are not really the same product. Some are response platforms built for proposal teams answering dozens of RFPs. Some are answer engines sold by the questionnaire. Some are compliance platforms where questionnaire automation is one module next to SOC 2 or ISO 27001. Which one you should pay for depends less on the sticker price than on how many questionnaires arrive, who answers them, and where the true answers live. Every figure below was read off the vendor's own pricing page, or Vendr's brokered contract data where the vendor publishes nothing, in October 2026.

How much does security questionnaire software cost?

For a company of 10 to 200 people, expect roughly $1,400 to $11,000 a year at published prices, and $20,000 to $25,000 a year at the median for the quote-only enterprise tools. The cheapest option is a compliance platform that already includes questionnaires. The most expensive is a dedicated response platform with seats for a proposal team.

Two cautions on reading that table. Vendr medians are negotiated contract values, not list prices, so treat them as the range a quote will probably land in. And Conveyor's free tier is a trust center only; its own pricing page says it has no access to questionnaire automation, so the real entry price for questionnaires is the Business plan.

The four pricing models, and which one punishes you

Once you strip out the branding, vendors charge for questionnaire automation in four ways. Knowing which one you are buying tells you what happens to the bill when sales has a good quarter.

Per questionnaire or per credit. 1up sells a number of questionnaires a month and Conveyor sells credits. This is fair when volume is steady and painful when it spikes: a quarter with three enterprise deals in procurement at once can push you up a tier. Ask how a 300-question spreadsheet is counted, and whether a follow-up round from the same customer uses a second credit.

Per project. AutoRFP.ai prices by projects a year, with unlimited users. It suits proposal teams who already think in projects. For a security team, the question is whether one customer's questionnaire, the follow-up questions and the security addendum count as one project or three.

Per seat. Traditional response libraries such as Loopio price by seat and tier. That works for a dedicated proposal team and works badly when the people who know the answers are six engineers who each touch two questions a month.

Bundled into a compliance platform. Vanta, Drata and Complies include questionnaires with the compliance program. The bill does not move with questionnaire volume at all. The trade-off is that these tools are built to answer security questions, not sales or product questions, so a team that also answers commercial RFPs may still want a response platform.

A worked budget for a 40-person SaaS company

Here is the arithmetic for a common case: a 40-person B2B SaaS company with SOC 2 in place, answering two security questionnaires a month, about 24 a year, of 100 to 250 questions each. The prices are the published ones above. The staff time assumption is ours and is stated so you can replace it.

Now the part that justifies buying anything. Suppose a 200-question review costs a senior engineer 15 hours once you count finding out what is actually true, chasing a colleague for the backup answer and formatting. At a loaded cost of $100 an hour, that is $1,500 a questionnaire and $36,000 a year across 24. If a tool cuts the work to review and approval, even a reduction to 5 hours each saves around $24,000 of engineering time. Every option in the table pays for itself at that volume. The real decision is which one also keeps the answers true.

Is security questionnaire software worth it for a small company?

Yes, once questionnaires arrive more than about once a month or block deals worth more than the tool. Below that, a well-kept spreadsheet of past answers is honestly enough, as long as someone checks each answer against current evidence before it goes out. The risk with a spreadsheet is not speed. It is that an answer which was true at last year's audit gets pasted into this year's contract.

That is also the risk with some automated tools. An answer library or an AI model fed your old documents will happily produce a confident yes on a control that lapsed in the spring. When the answer lands in a security exhibit attached to a customer agreement, it is a representation your company signed. Teams that sign a lot of these usually track the commitments the same way they track any other clause, in their contract management software, so the security promises made in March are visible when the renewal comes up.

Response platform or compliance platform?

Buy a response platform such as Conveyor, Loopio, AutoRFP.ai or 1up when questionnaires are a sales workflow: many a month, mixed with RFPs and product questions, answered by a proposal or sales engineering team, and often typed into customer portals. Their strengths are speed, formatting and portal support.

Buy a compliance platform with questionnaires built in when the same few people run the security program and answer the questionnaires about it. Then the answer should come from the program itself. In security questionnaire automation in Complies, each question is matched to one of 17 control areas, and the draft says what your workspace records: whether the control has current evidence and when it was collected, how many recurring tasks for it are done and current, and which approved policies cover it. Stale evidence is called out in the draft, and questions it cannot match are left for a person rather than guessed. A human approves every answer, and the set exports as a CSV with its sources.

Larger companies often end up with both: the compliance platform keeps the facts true and the response platform handles the volume. If you are still choosing the compliance side, our comparison of compliance software for startups covers the platforms that also run SOC 2, and the compliance software pricing guide lists what each one costs.

What to ask before you sign

Five questions settle most of the price difference between quotes.

• How is a questionnaire counted? Per file, per question, per project, or per credit, and what a follow-up round costs.
• Where do the drafts come from? Past answers, uploaded documents, AI, or live evidence. Ask what the tool does with a question it cannot answer.
• Who has to have a seat? If engineers need seats to approve two answers a month, a per-seat price will grow faster than your questionnaire volume.
• What formats come back out? Writing into the customer's Excel layout or a procurement portal is a real feature some tools have and others do not.
• Is it bundled with something you already pay for? If you are buying a compliance platform for SOC 2 anyway, check whether questionnaires are included before buying a second tool. With Vanta and Drata the answer depends on the quote; see our Vanta pricing and Drata pricing breakdowns.

Our take on security questionnaire software pricing

If questionnaires are a sales function, pay for a response platform and budget $10,000 to $25,000 a year. If they are a security function done by the people who run the program, do not pay twice: use a compliance platform that answers from the evidence you are already keeping. Complies includes questionnaires in Growth at $119 a month billed yearly, with prices published and no sales call. See the plans on Complies pricing, or paste your next questionnaire and see how many questions your records already answer.