Best Compliance Software of 2026

Here's what we'll cover:

What you need to know about compliance software

What is compliance software?

Essential features of compliance software

Benefits and competitive advantages of using compliance software

How to choose the best compliance software for your business

Software related to compliance

More resources for your compliance journey

What you need to know about compliance software

Compliance software describes a wide-reaching category of software that helps businesses ensure their processes are aligned with applicable laws, organizational policies, and the standards of consumers and business partners. With the right compliance software, you can not only ensure your business stays out of legal trouble but also make processes more efficient and transparent.

But with over 1,000 compliance software products on our site for different compliance needs and industries, and over 4,600 verified reviews of those products published on our site in the last year alone, how do you find the right system for your organization? [1]

Knowing how much to budget for a new compliance system is a good starting point. According to our pricing research, entry-level systems average around $129 a month, but this cost can scale as high as $805 a month or more, depending on the number of user seats you need and the functionality offered. [2]

Besides determining your budget, you should also meet with stakeholders in your organization to figure out answers to critical questions about your compliance software purchase, like:

• What processes do we need to track and measure?

• What reports do we need to generate?

• Do we need more comprehensive risk management functionality?

• What kind of implementation and IT support do we need from the vendor, if any?

• What integrations do we need to keep in mind?

Buying new compliance software can feel like a long and daunting process. In this guide, we’ll break down everything you need to know to make the right compliance software purchase decision with confidence.

What is compliance software?

With laws, regulations, and industry standards constantly changing, it can be a challenge to keep business processes aligned with the latest requirements. Compliance software helps by tracking important processes and automatically flagging issues that represent a compliance risk.

There are essentially three kinds of compliance management software (also known as corporate compliance and oversight tools) on the market:

• All-purpose compliance management platforms that offer generic capabilities for compliance management across industries.

• Industry-specific compliance management tools that help businesses in heavily regulated industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services meet specific legislative and commercial requirements.

• Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software that includes generic compliance management features alongside a broader set of capabilities for risk management and corporate governance.

Common features of compliance software include audit management, compliance tracking, and document management.

Essential features of compliance software

In general, you can expect to find core features like audit management and compliance tracking in almost all the compliance management systems you encounter. Other features like version control and incident management are common as well. 

To help you hone in on the most essential compliance software features, here are the ones that reviewers of compliance software rate as the most important. [2] 

Core compliance software features

Common compliance software features

Because compliance software is heavily industry-dependent, you’ll want to hone in on products that have features that support your industry’s specific compliance needs. For example, if you’re in healthcare and need to track HIPAA compliance, make this a specific feature requirement during your research.

Benefits and competitive advantages of using compliance software

According to Gartner’s Compliance Program Management Primer for 2025, “a changing regulatory environment, shifting employee needs, and an evolving business and technology landscape pose many challenges to building an effective compliance program.” [3]

Even the smallest businesses need to stay on top of compliance. But with 66% of buyers we talked to in the past year currently relying on spreadsheets or nothing at all to get the job done, compliance lapses are common. [4] This can not only lead to legal trouble and costly fines, but can also damage organizational trust with employees, customers, and partners. 

With the right compliance software, however, you’ll have a powerful resource to stay on top of critical compliance issues with less manual oversight and more consistency, putting you at ease to focus on other business priorities.

Some other benefits that reviewers say compliance software brings include:

• Expert support: Besides helping you get your new system up and running, compliance software vendors have a lot of knowledge about the regulations they cover. Reviewers often say their vendor has been an excellent resource to rely on to better understand their compliance requirements.

• Improved quality assurance: A positive side effect of better compliance, reviewers say, is that they have more data and insights to improve production processes and overall product quality. 

• More efficient reporting: Customizable templates for different reporting needs make it easier to generate and submit necessary compliance reports without having to create them from scratch.

How to choose the best compliance software for your business

Step 1: Define your requirements

The #1 thing regretful software buyers would do to avoid regret on their next purchase, according to our research, is to define their goals and desired outcomes more clearly at the outset. [5]

Once you’ve identified the stakeholder group that will be responsible for your compliance software purchase, it’s important to get aligned on not only what kind of software to look for, but what kind of measurement you’re going to use (quality metrics, usage rate, reporting timeliness, etc.) to define whether your new software is a success or failure. 

Here are some tips for defining your requirements.

Map out important integrations

Compliance systems don’t operate in a silo. In fact, they rely heavily on data from other systems to work. So, if you’re monitoring manufacturing compliance, what manufacturing and supply chain systems data do you need? Where is all your customer data that you need to monitor for compliance like GDPR?

Identify critical systems and data ahead of time so you can bring them to compliance software vendors and ensure their offering will fit in seamlessly.

Budget for how much compliance software really costs

The pricing for compliance software can vary widely depending on the size of your business, the functionality offered, and how complex the regulatory requirements are for your industry. According to our pricing research, entry-level systems average around $129 a month, but this cost can scale as high as $805 a month or more for a premium compliance management system. 

There are often other costs associated with compliance software besides the license itself. Vendors may charge for things like implementation, data migration, customization, user training, or more premium levels of customer support. Their website might not tell the whole story, so be sure to bring up these potential costs with vendors before committing to a purchase.

Get ahead of potential compliance software challenges

According to our reviews, some of the most common criticisms of compliance software products are that document uploads are buggy and that customer support can be slow to respond and resolve issues. Knowing these are common issues, you can keep them in mind when researching systems, reading reviews, and talking to vendors.

Step 2: Make your compliance software shortlist

Once you’ve dialed in your requirements, it’s time to research your options and come up with a shortlist of 2-3 systems to evaluate further. 

Explore our list of compliance FrontRunners

If you want to do the research yourself, a good place to start is our compliance FrontRunners report. Only products that earn top user ratings make this list. Check out our full methodology description for more details on how the report is compiled.

Step 3: Pick the best option

Once you’ve made your shortlist, it’s time to evaluate your final options further. At this stage, you should set up meetings with vendors, attend demos, and get some hands-on time with different products through free trial periods.

Here’s our advice for navigating this stage.

Come to demos with the right questions

Though demos are vendor-led, it’s still important to put vendors to task and ask pointed questions to ensure they’re not hiding blemishes in their product that are deal-breakers. After all, if your chosen vendor has a compliance misstep, you’ll bear the consequences.

Some questions to ask include:

• Where in the world will you store our data?

• How often do you audit your systems?

• What kind of security certifications and features do you have in place?

• What kind of access control options do we have?

• What kind of user training resources and support do you offer?

We encourage you to take advantage of our ultimate software vendor comparison chart to keep track of the answers and how your team is scoring different options.

Don’t skip free trials

Compliance software vendors often offer free trial periods ranging from 7 days to a whole month. This is your chance to get hands-on experience with a product before making a purchase decision, so take full advantage of it.

Test the system out for your top use cases using dummy data, taking note if it has the features you need and is easy to use. Also be sure all types of users (administrators, employees, IT) get to try it out so you can capture the user experience from all angles.

Give every option on your shortlist a fair shake

It can be tempting to settle for the first option you demo if it meets most of your requirements and saves you time. But we find that buyers achieve success more often when they engage all of the vendors on their shortlist. This way, you can get a comprehensive understanding of every product on your shortlist before making a decision.

Step 4: Make the most of your compliance software

Once you’ve made a purchase decision, you’re good to go, right? Not so fast. The success of your new purchase will hinge on the success of your implementation.

With this in mind, here are some important considerations as you implement your new compliance software:

• Data migration: Look through the current data you have, making sure it’s consistently formatted and cleaned of any obvious errors. If your data is corrupt, your compliance software won’t work properly.

• Training: Take advantage of all the training resources your vendor offers, and don’t assume different employees can figure it out themselves without hands-on guidance.

• Test and iterate: Software implementations don’t happen overnight. You should adopt a continuous improvement mindset, going use case by use case to test that the system is working as intended.

Our 5 critical steps to a successful software implementation can help guide you through this process.

Software related to compliance

Maybe you realize you actually need something related to compliance software, but a little different. To help, here are some types of software that are closely related to compliance software:

• Financial reporting software: This software helps businesses automate the collection and reporting of financial data in compliance with tax laws and regulations.

• Quality management software: This software automates tasks related to maintaining standards in various industries, such as the manufacturing and service sectors.

• Environment, health, and safety (EHS) software: EHS software helps companies monitor their employee safety and environmental responsibilities.

• Business process management (BPM) software: BPM software helps organizations discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, and optimize business processes.

• Audit software: This software automates the various steps in the audit lifecycle, allowing businesses to conduct audits in a single, comprehensive framework.

More resources for your compliance journey

• What You Need to Know About Effective Compliance Risk Management

• Accelerate Your Risk Management Software Implementation by Learning From Buyers With Experience

• 5 Steps To Build a Risk Management Process for Your Business

About our contributors

Author

Brian Westfall is an associate principal analyst at Software Advice, covering human resources, with a focus on recruiting, talent management, and employee engagement. Over the past decade, Brian’s research on the intersection of talent and technology has been featured in Bloomberg, Fortune, SHRM, TIME, and The Wall Street Journal.

Brian’s research and analysis is informed by more than 250,000 authentic user reviews on Software Advice and over 20,000 interactions between Software Advice software advisors and HR software buyers. Brian also regularly analyzes market sentiment by conducting surveys of HR leaders and practitioners so he can provide the most up-to-date and helpful information to small and midsize businesses purchasing software or services.

Editor

Caroline Rousseau is a senior content editor at Software Advice.

A former content analyst, Caroline has, for the past five years, built, written, and edited research reports about technological trends, opportunities, and challenges with an SMB audience in mind. Her content has been featured in French Tier 1 media including Le Monde, L’Express, and Le Figaro, among other publications.

Her previous experience as a graphic designer, translator, and LQA specialist in various industries converged into a skill set that allows her to create compelling content about today’s business matters. Caroline’s personal interests include literature and art and she has a passion for Albert Camus, graphic novels, and drawing.

Sources

1. Software Advice reviews data: Software Advice reviews are collected from verified users for individual software products. For this report, we analyzed reviews from the past year as of the production date. Read the complete methodology.

2. Software Advice software pricing data: Only products with publicly available pricing information and qualified software products within the category, as of the production date, are included in the pricing analysis. Read the complete methodology.

3. Compliance Program Management Primer for 2025, Gartner (accessible to Gartner clients)

4. Software Advice advisor call notes: Findings are based on data from telephonic conversations that Software Advice’s advisor team had with small-to-midsize businesses seeking compliance software. For this report, we analyzed phone interactions from the past year as of the production date. Read the complete methodology.

5. Software Advice’s 2025 Tech Trends Survey was conducted online in August 2024 among 3,500 respondents in the U.S. (n=700), U.K. (n=350), Canada (n=350), Australia (n=350), France (n=350), India (n=350), Germany (n=350), Brazil (n=350), and Japan (n=350), at businesses across multiple industries and company sizes (five or more employees). The survey was designed to understand the timeline, organizational challenges, adoption & budget, vendor research behaviors, ROI expectations and satisfaction levels for software buyers. Respondents were screened to ensure their involvement in business software purchasing decisions.