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How to choose the best regulatory compliance software: A buyer’s guide
Faisal Khan
GRC Solutions Expert
Accelerating security solutions for small businesses Tagore offers strategic services to small businesses. | A partnership that can scale Tagore prioritized finding a managed compliance partner with an established product, dedicated support team, and rapid release rate. | Standing out from competitors Tagore's partnership with Vanta enhances its strategic focus and deepens client value, creating differentiation in a competitive market. |
With regulations evolving faster than ever due to new technologies, emerging threats, and global market trends, maintaining the expected compliance posture is becoming increasingly complex and time-consuming.
Today, many organizations struggle to update systems and processes in response to regulatory changes, all while maintaining core business activities. According to a 2025 Vanta survey, more than 50% of organizations report feeling overwhelmed by tracking and managing these shifts before audits, particularly with the rising AI compliance expectations.
Regulatory compliance software provides an efficient path forward by automating critical workflows and centralizing compliance activities, making it easier to align with evolving regulations without the need for constant process updates.
In this guide, we’ll discuss how regulatory compliance software supports businesses and provide practical tips for choosing an option that fits your needs.
What is regulatory compliance software?
Regulatory compliance software helps organizations achieve and maintain alignment with the laws, regulations, and standards relevant to their industry. Compliance teams use it to break down requirements into actionable steps, monitor control effectiveness, and gradually speed up repetitive tasks with automation.
These tools can be particularly helpful during audits. With new-age features like automated evidence collection, version-controlled policy documents, and centralized dashboards, you can demonstrate compliance in real time and reduce the prep work and stress traditionally associated with regulatory audits.
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Without regulatory compliance software, it can be remarkably difficult to interpret and operationalize legal requirements. Parsing through “legalese” to understand what your organization actually needs to implement to comply with laws and regulations is time-consuming and can lead to unnoticed risk. Capable regulatory compliance software translates requirements into easy-to-follow controls."
Tim Blair
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-blocks"}} | The audit ready checklist
Does regulatory compliance software generate enough ROI?
Most organizations don’t consider compliance software as an additional cost of regulatory alignment but an investment that can unlock notable ROI. By automating manual-heavy workflows and enabling faster internal audits, the software minimizes the risk of violations and non-compliance fines. In many cases, it showcases diligence by providing stakeholders with verifiable, real-time proof of ongoing compliance activities.
These tools are heavily used in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, finance, technology, and manufacturing, where complexity can quickly overwhelm manual compliance processes. According to Vanta’s IDC White Paper, automating regulatory compliance has resulted in over 60% efficiency gains for policy writing, security reviews, and overall productivity.
That said, the true ROI lies in using technology for building repeatable and scalable compliance processes that support faster entry into regulated markets and consistent trust-building with new partners.
What to look for in regulatory compliance software
When evaluating regulatory compliance software, focus on solutions that provide out-of-the-box support for the frameworks relevant to your organization. If you need to comply with multiple regulations and standards, look for options with custom framework support that can map to scattered internal policies and industry-specific requirements for a more cohesive experience.
Here are some non-negotiable features to prioritize:
- Cross-framework mapping: Lets you reuse existing controls across multiple frameworks to reduce duplicative workflows and streamline oversight
- Evidence collection: The software should leverage integrations to collect relevant documentation from your systems and compile a centralized repository for faster audits and reporting
- Real-time monitoring: Provides current insights into your compliance status with daily or hourly tests and flags potential issues early, speeding up response times
- Workflow automation: Automates repetitive compliance activities, freeing up your team for other cognitive tasks such as risk management and control optimization
- Risk assessment tools: Helps identify, assess, manage, and categorize risks based on their impact and likelihood to optimize mitigation efforts
- Policy management: Automates policy creation and version control, supporting consistent enforcement and timely updates
- Scalable architecture: The software should handle increased compliance demands and additional users without exponentially bloating the costs
5 tips for choosing regulatory compliance solutions
Selecting the right regulatory compliance software requires a structured approach. Follow these five tips to ensure your chosen solution meets your long-term compliance goals:
1. Define your compliance needs clearly
Start by mapping your organization’s region, industry, and size to understand which compliance obligations apply or could be beneficial for business. This helps you focus on software options that align with your specific regulatory space. For instance:
- A US-based healthcare provider must prioritize HIPAA compliance, but may need to start preparing for GDPR before catering to clients in the EU
- A manufacturing firm may already follow several ISO standards, but must consider country-specific labor or safety laws for its global units
You may have to consult your leadership, product, and legal teams to map your current and future compliance needs, considering potential market expansions or product launches. Once done, you can draft a checklist of expected features, as well as automation and integration requirements.
2. Explore aligned solutions—but stay cautious
When exploring compliance solutions on the market, focus on options that offer the depth and specificity you need. For example, a generic HIPAA compliance software would only help with writing policies or finding compliance gaps, leaving teams to manually build workflows and interpret compliance requirements on their own. On the other hand, a more advanced solution would pinpoint specific security controls, manage evidence, and support auditors.
You also need to be cautious about what’s promised vs. real-world reliability. Explore customer reviews to gain insights into how well the solution performs for its intended use cases and how quickly it adapts to regulatory shifts.
Additionally, consider the difference between legacy software and modern, cloud-based solutions and what that means for your team. Legacy platforms have proven stability, but they tend to roll out updates slowly and might not integrate with new systems too well. Cloud-based solutions support quicker updates, better integrations, and evolving automation functionalities, but they can underperform due to insufficient testing.
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-blocks"}} | The audit ready checklist
3. Review integration capabilities and available support
Robust integrations are essential for automating and streamlining compliance workflows. See if your potential regulatory compliance solution can be embedded smoothly within your current tech stack—particularly, if it connects with essentials like HR and ERP solutions, cloud services, and security tools, and if the vendor offers enough support to enable smooth integrations.
If the software can’t fully integrate with your systems, you may have to implement additional manual workflows and middleware tools, which can reduce your team’s efficiency and increase the risk of human error. That said, this isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker; if a solution meets your automation needs, it may outweigh the connectivity limitations. Ultimately, it’s a tradeoff between efficiency and overall effectiveness or scalability and practicality.
4. Evaluate the cost-to-features ratio
Regulatory compliance software can range from $10,000 to $80,000 annually, depending on the organization's size, the range of features included, and the scope it supports. While every organization has specific needs, most teams don’t want to spend more than 6–10% of their IT security budget on compliance initiatives, which can impact what solutions they eventually get approval for.
Before committing to a regulatory compliance solution, look beyond the base price to understand the cost-to-features ratio. Key areas to consider include:
- Multi-framework coverage
- In-house support
- Help center or knowledge resources
- Feature tiers and add-ons
Be mindful of hidden costs, such as paid accounts for additional users or limited-use premium features. These can lead to unplanned expenses that increase your total investment or dilute agreed-upon ROIs.
5. Assess automation and monitoring capabilities
Regulatory compliance is ongoing and time-sensitive. Major regulations, such as the GDPR and HIPAA, require continuous monitoring to ensure your systems and controls are up to date with evolving requirements.
Automation is the key differentiator between software here: solutions with built-in automation for use cases like evidence collection, risk tracking, and reporting help teams detect and address potential issues before they escalate into regulatory violations.
When evaluating automation capabilities in software, look for the following:
- Real-time insights through dashboards
- Customizable workflows to kick off compliance tasks
- Automated updates for urgent compliance actions
Questions to ask a regulatory compliance software vendor
Before finalizing a purchase, prepare some targeted questions to ask the software vendor. The goal is to uncover gaps, deployment risks, and operational challenges that might not be evident right away.
Here are some general questions to consider:
- What part of the work will I still have to do manually, especially for audits, control testing, or risk assessments?
- How does the software adapt to regulatory changes? What is the wait time? Are the updates deployed automatically?
- Can it automate compliance across multiple frameworks simultaneously? What level of human oversight is expected?
- What happens to our data if we cancel the subscription? What is your data retention policy?
You can also expand the questions to cover your long-term compliance goals, such as integration expectations and training support.
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-blocks"}} | The audit ready checklist
Best practices for implementing regulatory compliance software
Proper integration is essential for realizing the full value of a compliance software solution. Follow these general practices for a smooth rollout:
- Prepare your systems for integration: Before deployment, assess your existing tech stack to identify potential compatibility issues, data silos, or other risks. That way, you can prepare measures in advance to minimize downtime.
- Back up sensitive data: Create backups of all sensitive information before implementing integrations to protect against accidental data loss or corruption during migration.
- Train stakeholders: Conduct training sessions to support your team members as they learn to navigate the new solution and shift toward automation.
- Track adoption and measure effectiveness: Establish metrics and KPIs such as time saved on audits, reduced manual effort, and faster issue detection to measure the ROI of your solution and justify continued investment to leadership.
- Review and update software configurations: Regularly revisit your software settings and integrations to maintain alignment with compliance workflows and new regulatory obligations.
Why Vanta is the best regulatory compliance solution
Vanta is the leading agentic trust platform that supports compliance through automation, built-in workflows, risk management, and regulation-specific resources. It can reduce manual compliance efforts for 35+ frameworks and regulations, including HIPAA, the GDPR, ISO 27001, and SOC 2. You also get support for custom frameworks, all from the same platform.
What makes Vanta stand out is how it enables real-time monitoring with 1,200+ automated, hourly tests. This helps teams be proactive in remedying gaps and significantly accelerates any compliance timeline.
Some of the core features of Vanta’s compliance automation product include:
- Automated evidence collection powered by 375+ integrations
- Public trust centers for one-click demonstrability
- Risk remediation through personalized AI-generated code snippets
- Pre-built, customizable policy templates aligned with major frameworks
- End-to-end audit support with guidance resources
If you’re operating in a complex compliance space, Vanta’s cross-mapping feature can reuse overlapping controls between frameworks to minimize redundancies.
Book a personalized demo to see how Vanta can streamline your compliance program.
{{cta_simple29="/cta-blocks"}} | Automated compliance
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