Why CISOs Don't Trust Commercial GRC Tools for SOC 2 Evidence (73.6% Use None)
73.6% of CISOs use no commercial GRC tool for SOC 2 audits. Instead of buying platforms, highly technical security leaders rely on custom builds and open source because traditional tools fail to automate the actual screenshot evidence collection auditors require.
The people who control the budget for compliance software are actively choosing not to buy it. When preparing for a SOC 2 audit, you would expect the highest-ranking security leaders to purchase the most expensive platforms. Instead, data shows they are building custom tools or just using spreadsheets. Why? Because most commercial platforms do not solve the core problem: collecting application-level evidence. They provide a dashboard, but the actual automation of capturing screenshots and formatting documentation is still left to your engineers.
If a tool doesn't eliminate the manual labor of an audit, highly technical buyers simply won't adopt it.
What Does the State of GRC 2026 Data Actually Say About CISOs?
The State of GRC 2026 report by Ayoub Fandi surveyed 795 compliance and security practitioners. The data reveals a massive disconnect between the people managing compliance day-to-day and the executives overseeing the security program.
Exactly 73.6% of CISOs use no commercial GRC tool. Their tooling breakdown looks like this:
- Custom builds: 22.2%
- Spreadsheets: 18.5%
- No tool at all: 18.1%
- Open source: 14.8%
Only 7.4% of CISOs use enterprise tools like ServiceNow, compared to 17.3% for the rest of the industry.
The survey also measured technical proficiency. CISOs scored the highest of any seniority level, averaging 6.5 out of 10. They are highly technical evaluators who look at the current market offerings, assess the actual engineering hours saved, and decide that building a custom Jira workflow or chaining together open-source scripts is a better investment than a six-figure software contract.
Why Do Technical Security Leaders Reject Commercial Platforms?
When a mid-level compliance manager looks at a GRC platform, they see a beautiful dashboard that organizes their frameworks. When a CISO looks at that same platform, they see a glorified task manager.
CISOs know that passing an audit is about producing verifiable proof that controls operate effectively. A dashboard showing a green checkmark next to a control ID does not pass an audit. The underlying proof passes the audit.
If you look at SOC 2 CC6.1 (Logical Access) or CC7.2 (Change Management), the typical GRC platform will tell you that you need to upload a screenshot showing how a user's access was revoked or how a pull request was approved. The platform issues an alert. It assigns a ticket. It sends a Slack reminder.
But it does not take the screenshot.
Your engineers still have to stop what they are doing, open the admin panel, take the screenshot, crop it, and upload it to the platform. The CISO recognizes that they are paying a premium price for a tool that delegates the actual work back to their own engineering team.
Where Traditional SOC 2 Automation Stops
The fundamental limitation of traditional compliance tools is their reliance on APIs.
APIs are excellent for infrastructure. A tool can ping AWS to confirm that S3 buckets are encrypted or check Google Workspace to ensure MFA is enforced company-wide. But APIs are blind to the application layer, which is where the bulk of manual audit work lives.
What traditional tools cannot automate:
- Custom Admin Panels: Proving that your proprietary back-office tool restricts access based on role.
- Complex Workflows: Showing the visual connection between a Jira ticket, a GitHub pull request, and an AWS deployment log.
- Legacy Systems: Gathering configuration settings from older, on-premise, or non-API-enabled software.
- UI-Level Toggles: Documenting feature flag configurations in systems that lack granular API read access.
Because traditional platforms cannot see the user interface, they leave a massive gap in your evidence collection. CISOs refuse to buy software that solves the easy 80% of the audit while leaving the hardest, most time-consuming 20% untouched.
How the Auditor Format Problem Kills Platform Value
There is another reason CISOs stick to spreadsheets and custom tools: the auditor format problem.
You can spend months configuring a commercial platform to track your controls perfectly. But when the audit begins, the external auditor often refuses to log into your platform. They do not want to click through your proprietary dashboard. They want raw, exportable evidence.
Auditors expect specific formats. They want timestamped screenshots. They want PDF evidence packs. They want spreadsheet exports showing populations and samples.
If your GRC tool outputs data in a proprietary format that the auditor rejects, the tool's value collapses entirely. You end up having to manually take screenshots of your own GRC tool to prove to the auditor that the tool is tracking the controls. Technical leaders have experienced this cycle enough times to know that starting with raw, auditor-friendly evidence is faster than fighting with a platform's export limitations.
What Does Automated Evidence Collection Look Like When It Works?
For a tool to earn the trust of a highly technical security leader, it has to actually do the work. It cannot just monitor the work.
This is where AI agents are changing the dynamic. Instead of relying purely on APIs, modern compliance automation uses computer-use agents to interact with systems exactly like a human engineer would.
When it is time to test a control, the system navigates to your internal admin panel, captures a screenshot of the permission settings, verifies that the configuration matches your policy, and generates a timestamped PDF. It handles the UI-level evidence that APIs miss.
What used to burn a whole engineering sprint now runs in the background. The output is a standard evidence pack that an auditor immediately recognizes and accepts.
CISOs don't hate compliance software. They hate paying for software that leaves the hardest work on their plate. When automation shifts from simply tracking compliance to actually executing the evidence collection, the build-versus-buy math finally changes.
Learn More About GRC Platform Integration
For a complete look at how to bridge the gap between your dashboard and your actual audit proof, see our guide on integrating application-level evidence automation with Drata, Vanta, and GRC platforms, including how automated screenshot capture works alongside your existing API monitoring tools.
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