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Alternatives to Very Good Security: Comparing Basis Theory to VGS

Basis Theory is a primary competitor to VGS for teams looking to centralize payment data, and avoid single-points-of-failure—without per-API-call pricing. 

What do teams evaluating VGS care about?

Holidays Landing

Engineering Perspective

1. Basis Theory is designed with built-in redundancy and automatic failover to deliver best-in-class availability. If there's an outage with AWS or Cloudflare, traffic is seamlessly rerouted in seconds—ensuring your systems stay online without disruption.
 
2.Basis Theory supports dual-writing for new card capture (CIT), allowing credentials to be stored both with Basis Theory and your processor at the same time. For recurring transactions (MIT) you can use processor tokens or network tokens, without having Basis Theory in the transaction flow. This design offers built-in resiliency, with clear, documented fallback options to ensure there's no single point of failure in your payments stack.
 
3.Basis Theory's developer experience is built for modern engineers using infrastructure-as-code to define, deploy, and manage your payments infrastructure. This approach allows for quicker go-live and for iterative changes to be made on your own timeline. 

"Controlling our destiny is what I've been after for all of 2025, and now we no longer have to wait for anything. Our payments are controlled in-house, I don't have to wait for anything; I can just go do it."

Clara Leigh
Technical Lead, YouPay
Holidays Landing

Business Perspective

1. No cost per transaction or API calls is perfect for high-volume businesses. Basis Theory is priced as architecture, not as a payments service. 
 
2. With token intents, Basis Theory customers can create short-lived tokens for one-time purchases or payment data that doesn't need to be vaulted. 

“We needed a solution that we could implement quickly and was not operationally heavy. It was clear to me that Basis Theory was what we needed, and I’d be hard-pressed to think there’s something more relevant to what we were trying to solve—which was to maintain PCI compliance.”

Matt Donofrio
Head of Revenue, Marble

How is Basis Theory Different from VGS?

The differences show up in how fast teams can ship changes, test, route, and control transaction flows. 

  Basis Theory Very Good Security
Compliance
  • PCI Level 1 Compliant
  • SOC 2 Type II Certified
  • HIPAA Compliant
  • NACHA Compliant
  • ISO 27001
  • PCI Level 1 Compliant
  • SOC 2 Type II Certified
Flexibility Designed for multi-PSP architecture with controlled routing, token, and rollout strategies. No partner or connection limitations.

Flexibility varies by integration approach and support model.
Customer Support Dedicated Slack channel for integrating customers to have direct comms with our team, included in every pricing plan.

Customers receive support by submitting a request through the support portal.
Integrations

Add or update endpoints without re-architecting the integration.

Integrate with PSPs, payment gateways, and third-party APIs.
Pricing Forecast costs based on architecture usage, rather than per-request. Plans start at $995/month

VGS pricing is custom, and you must contact sales to get started.
Documentation

Developer-focused with helpful getting-started guides.

Comprehensive API documentation
Migrating

Free migrations and migration guides to bring data in or out of the Basis Theory vault.

Annual migration fee, plus guides to migrate to VGS, but not easy to migrate off the platform.

 

 

Migrate from VGS to Basis Theory in Just a Few Hours

You're not alone. We've created a fast path to help companies migrate from Very Good Security to Basis Theory. No downtime required.

1. Add Elements

Use Basis Theory Elements to collect any type of sensitive data using modern, React-friendly UI components that keep your applications out of compliance scope.
 
 
 

2. Migrate your data

Move any type of data into our PCI-compliant and SOC2-certified environment using our migration application.

3. Upgrade your Proxy

Replace existing connections with Basis Theory's modern Proxy services.
 

4. Optimize and enhance tokens

Restructure and enrich your tokens to reduce costs and add new functionality, like search, to your implementation
 

Ready to start?

Learn more and start your migration