OneTrust reports.Ethyca governs.
In the Al era, questionnaire and spreadsheet management tools like OneTrust can't keep up. Ethyca is the choice of forward-thinking governance, risk, and privacy teams in the world's best companies.
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Why Ethyca?
"5 minutes of working with Ethyca and their team is the equivalent of working with OneTrust for months."
OneTrust automates the paperwork around the decision, not the decision itself. Ethyca is an end-to-end platform for privacy and AI governance, built for a new era of data speed and scale.
OneTrust vs. Ethyca Comparison
| Feature | OneTrust | Ethyca | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer support | 1.7 / 5 on Trustpilot — rotating contacts, ticket-based, slow post-contract resolution. | Direct expert access — privacy implementation specialists, fast resolution. Partner model. | Talk directly to a privacy engineer when you need help. |
| Renewal risk | Documented uplifts of 50%+ at renewal; audience growth compounds at renegotiation. | Cost changes only with planned integration expansion. No surprise uplifts. | No surprise price hikes at renewal. |
| Architecture | Workflow and dashboard layer — compliance is monitored, not enforced at the system level. | Privacy as infrastructure — policy enforced inside your data systems, not reported on top of them. | Compliance gets enforced inside your systems automatically. |
| Consent visibility across domains | Configuration complexity at scale makes it difficult to validate correct deployment across all properties. | Full, testable visibility into what each user receives — site × region × experience, no guesswork. | Know exactly what every user sees, everywhere. |
| Implementation speed | Standard enterprise: 3–18 months; external consulting often required at additional cost. | Enterprise deployments measured in weeks — large publishers live on 90+ websites within a month. | Live in weeks instead of months. |
| DSR / DSAR automation | DSAR available; friction increases in complex multi-owner, multi-system environments. | End-to-end orchestration across distributed systems, flexible to your intake model. Fulfillment, not just intake. | Requests get fully resolved end to end. |
| AI governance | AI risk module available as a separate product; governance assessed, not enforced at model level. | Astralis: native AI policy enforcement inside AI systems; built for EU AI Act compliance. Native, not add-on. | AI Act-ready policy enforcement, built in. |
| Automated data inventory | Data mapping available; relies heavily on manual configuration and self-reported system entries. | Real-time automated discovery, classification, and RoPA generation across cloud and vendor systems. Always-on. | Your inventory stays current on its own. |
| Open-source foundation | Closed platform. Audit trails depend on vendor tooling. | Fides: fully open-source, inspectable, IAPP-recognized; no black boxes in your privacy stack. | Inspect the code yourself. Nothing stays hidden. |
Night and day. Ethyca turned our data governance from a bottleneck into a strategic enabler for scale.
SurveyMonkey replaced OneTrust with Ethyca. These were the results.
SurveyMonkey's implementation began by stabilizing their most fragile process: data subject access requests. Ethyca configured DSAR fulfillment workflows to integrate directly with their unique SQL Server environment, delivering consistent, policy-driven responses within 48 hours - down from seven-day manual coordination cycles.
7 days -> 48 hours
Data subject request response time.
4 PB
Volume of data governed by Ethyca
40m users
Protected by Ethyca
Ethyca does governance, risk, and compliance in a single layer
Ethyca does governance, risk, and compliance in a single layer
Discover personal and sensitive data across your infrastructure, websites, and third-party apps, or enrich existing DSPM and catalogs. The result is a unified source of data intelligence, risk, and insight to support governance obligations.
Replace forms and template maintenance with continuous risk assessments. Astralis, made by Ethyca, knows the internal and external policies you must follow, and continually analyzes risk across your data, purpose, and vendor inventories.
Purpose based access control monitors and enforces data access across AI agents, teams, and data projects. Policies provide a governance framework that proves how data is used, not just who accesses it, ready for audit.
Fine-grained, high-performance consent and preference management. Model any consent or preference framework, from GDPR to CCPA, and respect user choice wherever data is accessed - models and agents included.
A flexible, policy-based data access and de-identification engine enables targeted, scaled data rights enforcement across your infrastructure, integrating with databases, warehouses, and third-parties to meet data obligations.
Ethyca's platform is built on Fides, the world's most used open-source taxonomy for data governance and privacy. It lets you consistently describe the data you process, its purposes, and ownership for consistent enforcement.
Frequently Asked Questions
For most teams it replaces the Al governance layer, and it can replace the wider privacy program too - SurveyMonkey moved off OneTrust entirely. Where a OneTrust deployment is entrenched, Astralis runs alongside it and supplies the enforcement and evidence that the program record can't produce on its own.
Astralis enforces policy directly inside the systems running your AI, at the point data moves: training, retrieval, inference. The same policy that classifies your data also governs what your models can train on and output. OneTrust's AI Governance module works differently. It sits beside the core workflow platform as a separate product, assessing risk and generating documentation for review, but nothing in that process changes how your AI systems behave at runtime. Astralis was built for the EU AI Act's demand for demonstrable control, and it delivers that control natively, instead of asking you to bolt on another dashboard and hope the underlying systems comply.
Infrastructure-first means policy runs inside the systems where your data lives and moves, enforced automatically every time that data is touched. Ethyca sits inside your data pipelines, applications, and AI systems, so a policy change takes effect the moment it's deployed, the same way a code change does. OneTrust operates a layer above: a workflow and dashboard platform that tracks compliance status, assigns tasks, and produces reports for auditors. It monitors what your systems are supposed to be doing. It doesn't change what they do. That gap is why OneTrust deployments depend on manual configuration to stay accurate as systems change, while Ethyca's Astralis policy stays enforced by the infrastructure itself, with nothing left for someone to check by hand.