Governance, Risk, And Compliance (GRC) Buyers’ Guide 2025

State of the market: Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) tools help organizations manage operational risk, adhere to legal and regulatory compliance requirements, and ensure they’re operating ethically.

The GRC market was valued at USD 50.5 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15.41% to reach a value of USD 104.5 billion by 2031.
Growth is being driven by the need to keep up with complex and frequently changing regulatory requirements (particularly among organizations that want to expand globally), an increase in sophistication and frequency of cybersecurity risks, increasing focus on executive accountability, and the need to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency.
- Organizations using compliance technology save an average of USD 1.45 million in compliance costs.
- Organizations with the least rigorous data privacy practices are almost twice as likely to suffer a breach than those with excellent data stewardship, and they lose seven times the number of data records when breached.

Why Trust Us: We’ve researched, demoed, and tested several dozen leading GRC solutions, spoken to organizations of all sizes about their governance, risk, and compliance challenges and the features that are most useful to them, and interviewed executives from leading providers in the GRC space.

You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 guides to the best GRC products on the market in our Compliance Hub.

Our Recommendations: Before we jump into the details, here are our top tips on how to get the most out of your GRC solution and make sure you’re choosing the right one for your business:

For compliance-focussed organizations: Choose a solution that offers features tailored to your specific location and industry, such as risk typologies and assessment templates. For example, cloud service providers working with federal government agencies will need a solution that helps ensure FedRAMP compliance, and manufacturing organizations will need a tool that specializes in managing third-party risk.
For busy teams: Utilize all the automation features built into your GRC tool to help improve efficiency and reduce the burden on your GRC team.
For getting the most out of your tool: Identify weak areas in compliance or areas where you tend to see the most risk before you start comparing GRC solutions. This will help you choose a tool that’s tailored to the specific challenges that you’re facing.
For streamlined management: Train your GRC team to make sure they know how to implement and manage your solution. And on that note, train all your employees on any compliance requirements relevant to your organization so your GRC team have fewer fires to put out!

How GRC Solutions Work: There are three key parts to GRC:

Governance means making sure that business and IT operations are aligned and managed ethically. It involves creating policies to help you achieve business goals, resolve conflict, share information transparently, manage resources securely, and define roles and responsibilities clearly.
Risk management means identifying, assessing, and mitigating operational risks (inc., security, financial, legal, and strategic risks).
Compliance management means making sure you’re adhering to federal and industry compliance standards. This involves identifying the regulations that are relevant to your business, considering the risk of non-compliance, assessing your current state of compliance, and addressing any blockers so that you can achieve full compliance.

GRC tools are unified platforms that help you carry out all of the above. They can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud, but most GRC platforms today are cloud-hosted. Once deployed, GRC tools integrate with all other components of your IT environment (e.g. cloud services, SIEM solutions, CRM platforms, etc.). They gather data from these various components, which you can use to:

Identify compliance breaches

For example, COPPA protects the data of children under the age of 13. If an underage person signs up to your service and your organization stores their data, a GRC tool would notify you and remove that data to uphold compliance.

Highlight risks

For example, a GRC tool would notify you if a user were to sign into their account out of their regular work hours.

Typically, modern GRC tools collect information and provide insights into security incidents, anomalous behavior, and compliance non-conformity in real-time. However, some vendors offer less automation, thus requiring you to carry out more of the analysis yourself.

Benefits Of GRC: There are four main use cases for implementing a GRC tool:

Improve your risk assessments.
- Risk is present is every organization. A GRC platform highlights this risk so you can decide whether to accept, transfer, or mitigate it.
- GRC tools can also help you identify and fix redundant or ineffective controls sets to improve the efficiency of your risk assessments.
Ensure compliance with strict regulatory requirements.
- GRC tools monitor all activity within your business and report on any potential compliance breaches, helping you avoid costly fines.
Reduce human error and make better decisions.
- Managing risks and meeting compliance requirements are two complex tasks. By automating the processes involved—including remediation—, GRC tools help reduce human error.
- GRC tools also offer powerful reporting capabilities that allow you to make informed, data-driven decisions when it comes to risk and compliance management.
Improve your reputation.
- GRC promotes ethical operations within a business. By implementing a GRC tool, you can show your customers and partners that you’re taking proactive steps to operate responsibly and sustainably.

Common GRC Challenges: While GRC tools have a lot of benefits, they’re also quite complex. As such, there are a few common challenges that you might come across when implementing a GRC solution. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them:

Cost: The initial cost for implementing a GRC can be quite high and smaller businesses may find it difficult to cover the upfront expenses. We recommend making sure you choose the right tool for your business by demoing and/or trialling it before you invest. If possible, try to choose a vendor that allows you to pay only for the specific features you need.
Siloed operations: Your GRC efforts may fall short if different departments in your business are operating independently and failing to communicate with one another. This can lead to overlapping responsibilities and a lack of accountability. We recommend establishing a central data repository, open channels of communication, and hosting inter-departmental workshops to improve collaboration and support your GRC efforts.
Integration: GRC tools can be complex to integrate with your existing IT infrastructure and business processes. Before deployment, we recommend mapping out all areas that you need the tool to cover, removing any systems that you no longer need, and choosing a tool that offers native integrations with your current IT management tools.
Management: GRC is a complex matter that requires ongoing management. We recommend training a dedicated team to manging your GRC platform and processes, and utilizing any training offered by your GRC provider.

Best GRC Providers: Our team of software analysts and researchers has put together a shortlist of the best providers of GRC solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:

Features Checklist: When comparing GRC solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

Risk management: You should be able to identify, categorize, assess, and mitigate risk across all areas of your organization.
Compliance management: Your solution should identify deviations from any compliance requirements relevant to your business, including industry and federal standards and internal policies.
Policy management: You should be able to create and enforce policies and controls, as well as assess how effective they are.
Audit management: Your solution should help streamline the process of internal auditing, including monitoring the status of each audit and securely storing all audit documentation.
Document management: Your solution should offer a central repository in which you can store and access digital content related to risk assessments and audits.
Automation: Your solution should automatically identify and categorize risks and compliance deviations, as well as automatically remediate incidents where possible. As part of this, you should be able to customize your GRC workflows.
Integrations: Your solution must integrate with your existing IT infrastructure.
Analytics and reporting: From a central management dashboard, you should be able to monitor your GRC processes at a high level and generate in-depth risk assessment, compliance, and audit reports. The best GRC tools offer real-time, customizable reporting.

Future Trends: The GRC market is well-established and thriving but, as with all areas of technology, there’s always room to evolve. As the market continues to grow, we expect to see two key trends.

First, we expect GRC tools to incorporate AI and machine learning to further automate tasks such as incident response, identify and classify high-risk behaviors more accurately, and improve reporting with more detailed behavioral and predictive insights to help improve decision making.

Second, we expect real-time, continuous monitoring and reporting to become a standard across all GRC platforms. Point-in-time snapshots of your risk and compliance status leave your organization vulnerable in between checks. By continuously monitoring your environment, GRC tools allow you to proactively detect and mitigate issues as soon as they appear.

Further Reading: You can find all our articles on GRC in our Compliance Hub

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