Why We Switched from Sprinto to Venvera for DORA Compliance

The best thing about switching? We stopped pretending.

Let me explain. Our compliance team had been using Sprinto for about eighteen months. Good experience, genuinely. The SOC 2 automation was excellent, the pricing was fair - around $8,000-10,000 a year, which is a fraction of what Vanta charges - and the Bangalore-based support team was responsive. For a mid-market fintech running SOC 2 Type II audits, Sprinto was doing its job well.

Then our head of legal walked into the compliance team's Monday standup and said seven words that changed everything: "We're subject to DORA. Figure it out." The Digital Operational Resilience Act. Regulation (EU) 2022/2554. Fully enforceable since January 17, 2025. Applicable to over 22,000 financial entities across the EU. We spent three weeks trying to make Sprinto work for DORA before admitting the obvious: it can't. Not "it's limited." Not "it needs workarounds." It genuinely cannot do what DORA demands.

DORA is not a checklist framework. SOC 2 is fundamentally a set of trust service criteria you map controls to. ISO 27001 is an information security management system with auditable clauses. Both are well-structured, relatively predictable, and tools like Sprinto handle them beautifully. DORA is a regulation - not a standard, not a framework - with five pillars that each demand purpose-built functionality.

The first thing I noticed was that Venvera's data model actually mirrors DORA's structure. ICT providers aren't just a vendor list - they're entities with LEI codes, ESA classifications, jurisdiction mappings, linked to contractual arrangements, linked to business functions, linked to legal entities. It's a graph, not a spreadsheet. And that's exactly what DORA's Register of Information requires.

The xBRL-CSV export is what sealed it for us. I'd spent two weeks researching how to convert our data into the ESA reporting format manually. Venvera just... does it. You populate your Register of Information, click export, and get a valid xBRL-CSV package. I genuinely didn't believe it until I ran the ESA validation tool against the output and it passed.

The incident classification uses DORA's actual ESA criteria - duration thresholds, geographical spread assessment, data integrity impact, service criticality scoring, economic impact calculation. With built-in workflows for the 4-hour initial notification, 72-hour intermediate report, and one-month final report.

We're also doing GDPR, NIS2, and ISO 27001. When we implemented an access control policy for DORA Article 9, Venvera automatically flagged the corresponding requirements across our other frameworks. We estimated that saved us 40% of the work on overlapping controls.

Sprinto is affordable for SOC 2 - genuinely. But the moment you need DORA, the math changes dramatically because Sprinto simply cannot do DORA. You'll need consultants, additional tools, and manual reconciliation.

All hosted in Amsterdam. AES-256-GCM encryption per tenant. No US data transfer concerns. When our regulator asked where our compliance data lives, we said "Amsterdam" and they nodded. That's the answer they wanted to hear.

Sprinto, like most US/India-origin compliance platforms, doesn't guarantee European data hosting. For a financial entity under DORA - where your regulator may specifically ask about data residency - having your compliance platform store data outside the EU creates an unnecessary risk. Venvera eliminates that conversation entirely.

But if you're a tech startup that needs SOC 2 and ISO 27001 at a sensible price point, keep using Sprinto. Seriously. It's good value for what it does, the automation works, and their team is improving the product steadily. Don't switch for the sake of switching. Sprinto's ~$8K-10K/year for SOC 2 is genuinely competitive. It's just that DORA isn't something Sprinto was designed for - and that's not a knock on them, it's a recognition that different regulations need different tools.

Last updated: March 2026. Pricing and feature information based on publicly available data and direct platform experience. Sprinto is a trademark of Sprinto Technologies Pvt. Ltd.