Trust Center vs. GRC Tool: What European Buyers Actually Need
You probably already have a GRC tool. The question isn't whether you need one — it's whether you also need a trust center, and whether they should come from the same vendor.
The US market has blurred the line between trust centers and GRC tools. Drata bought SafeBase. Vanta bundles a trust center with compliance automation. OneTrust includes everything in a massive suite. If you follow US analysts, "trust center" and "GRC" are converging into a single category.
In the European market, this convergence creates more problems than it solves. Here's why.
The Functional Distinction
A GRC tool and a trust center solve different problems for different audiences.
A GRC tool manages internal compliance. It helps you build and maintain your ISMS, track controls, collect evidence, manage risks, and prepare for audits. The audience is your security team, your compliance officers, and your auditors. It faces inward.
A trust center manages external proof. It helps you share your compliance posture with buyers, prospects, customers, and regulators. It makes your security documentation accessible, structured, and current — without emailing PDFs. The audience is your market. It faces outward.
The internal system tells you whether you're compliant. The external system proves it to the people who need to know.
These are complementary functions, not competing ones. The question isn't which one you need — most companies need both. The question is whether they should be bundled or separate.
Why the US Market Bundles Them
US compliance automation vendors (Vanta, Drata, Secureframe) started with internal compliance — primarily SOC 2 automation. As the market matured, they added trust centers as a logical extension: if you're already managing compliance internally, why not expose a curated version externally?
This makes strategic sense for the vendors. It increases average deal size, reduces churn (more functionality = stickier customer), and creates an integrated data flow from compliance evidence to external presentation.
It also makes sense for a specific customer profile: companies that don't yet have an ISMS, are getting SOC 2 for the first time, and want a single vendor to handle both compliance automation and external presentation. This is a common profile for US SaaS start-ups entering enterprise sales.
It does not match the profile of most European companies evaluating trust centers.
Why Bundling Is a Problem for European Companies
Most European Companies Already Have an ISMS
If you're ISO 27001 certified — and many European companies evaluating trust centers are — you already have an ISMS. You have controls, evidence collection processes, risk management workflows, and audit preparation procedures. These may be supported by DataGuard, Secureframe, internal tools, or even spreadsheets and document management systems.
Buying a GRC platform to get a trust center means buying compliance automation you already own. You either run two parallel systems (wasteful) or migrate your existing ISMS into the new platform (expensive, disruptive, and risky).
A standalone trust center avoids this entirely. It reads from your existing ISMS. It extends your compliance programme to the outside world. It doesn't require you to change how you manage compliance internally.
The Framework Hierarchy Is Different
US bundled platforms are built around SOC 2 as the primary compliance framework. The GRC side automates SOC 2 evidence collection; the trust center side presents SOC 2 status to buyers. The integration is tight and optimised for this specific workflow.
European companies lead with ISO 27001. They need to present NIS2 readiness, DORA compliance, and GDPR Article 28 transparency. The trust center's content structure, default templates, and visitor experience should reflect this hierarchy.
A bundled platform that organises everything around SOC 2 — even if ISO 27001 is "supported" — creates friction. The internal compliance workflow doesn't match your reality, and the external presentation defaults to the wrong framework hierarchy.
Pricing Penalises Trust-Center-Only Buyers
When a trust center is bundled with GRC, the pricing reflects the full platform — even if you only need the external-facing layer. This is particularly problematic for European mid-market companies that have already invested in their ISMS and only need the external proof capability.
A trust center that costs €5,000/year standalone becomes €15,000-25,000/year when bundled with compliance automation you don't use. That's not a pricing difference — it's a different product with a different value proposition, sold under the same name.
When Bundled Makes Sense
Bundling isn't always wrong. It makes sense in specific scenarios:
You're starting from zero. No ISMS, no compliance framework, no security programme. You need everything — internal compliance, evidence collection, external presentation. A bundled platform gives you a single system that covers the full stack.
SOC 2 is your primary framework. If your market is US enterprise and SOC 2 is the gate, a bundled US platform optimised for SOC 2 is a reasonable choice. The integration between compliance automation and trust center is tight and well-tested.
You want to consolidate vendors. If you're running separate tools for compliance, trust center, vendor risk management, and security questionnaires, and you'd prefer a single platform, bundling reduces operational complexity.
You have budget for the full platform. If the pricing difference doesn't matter because you're enterprise-scale with enterprise budget, the total-cost argument is less relevant.
When Standalone Makes Sense
Standalone is the better choice when:
You already have an ISMS. Whether it's DataGuard, Secureframe, Vanta's GRC side, or internal systems — if your internal compliance workflow works, don't replace it. Add the external layer.
ISO 27001 is your lead framework. A standalone trust center built for European compliance frameworks presents your posture correctly from the start — without adapting a SOC 2-first product to your reality.
You need NIS2/DORA vendor assurance. Bundled platforms treat trust centers as document-sharing layers. Standalone trust centers built for the NIS2/DORA era include vendor assurance profiles, incident communication, and evidence-on-demand capabilities that go beyond document downloads.
You want to control costs. Pay for what you need — the external proof layer — without subsidising compliance automation you already own.
You want to avoid vendor lock-in. A standalone trust center doesn't require you to move your ISMS. You can switch trust center vendors without disrupting your compliance workflow, and vice versa.
How NIS2 Changes the Calculus
Before NIS2, a trust center was a sales acceleration tool. It helped close deals faster. The bundled model — trust center as an add-on to GRC — made commercial sense because the trust center's value was tied to the sales process.
NIS2 changes the trust center's function from sales tool to compliance infrastructure.
Under NIS2, your customers need continuous vendor assurance. They need incident communication channels. They need evidence on demand for supervisory authorities. These are operational requirements, not sales features.
A bundled trust center that's designed as a "nice-to-have" add-on to compliance automation doesn't meet these operational requirements. A standalone trust center that's designed as the external compliance layer — purpose-built, with vendor assurance, incident communication, and evidence retrieval — does.
The regulatory shift creates a structural argument for standalone: your trust center is too important to be a secondary feature of a platform you bought for a different purpose.
The Integration Model
Standalone doesn't mean disconnected. The best architecture connects your ISMS and trust center without merging them:
ISMS → Trust Center: Compliance status, certification validity, control posture, and evidence metadata flow from your internal system to the external presentation layer. When you update a control in your ISMS, the trust center reflects the change.
Trust Center → CRM: Visitor engagement data (who visited, what they viewed, what they downloaded, whether they signed an NDA) flows to your sales pipeline. Your sales team sees trust center activity as buying signals.
Trust Center → Customers: Vendor assurance profiles, incident communications, and compliance updates flow to your customers through the trust center. Your customers' compliance teams get structured data for their own NIS2/DORA documentation.
This is an integration model, not a bundling model. Each system does what it does best. The ISMS manages compliance. The trust center communicates it. The CRM tracks it. No system tries to do everything.
Decision Framework
| Scenario | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| No existing ISMS, starting from zero | Consider bundled — you need everything |
| Existing ISMS, need external proof layer | Standalone trust center |
| SOC 2 primary, US market focus | Bundled US platform is reasonable |
| ISO 27001 primary, EU market focus | Standalone EU trust center |
| Regulated customers (NIS2/DORA) | Standalone with vendor assurance capabilities |
| Budget-constrained, only need trust center | Standalone — don't pay for GRC you don't use |
| Enterprise with consolidation goal | Bundled may reduce vendor count |
Sources
- Directive (EU) 2022/2555 (NIS2) — Supply chain security creating external proof requirements.
- Regulation (EU) 2022/2554 (DORA) — ICT third-party risk management creating vendor assurance needs.
- ISO/IEC 27001:2022 — Information security management system standard.