Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies are clearly on the upswing, aided by the rapid growth of the larger cloud computing market. Years ago, much of the emphasis in the tech industry was on packaged software. Today, it’s nearly impossible to launch a startup based on packaged software only.
Although some companies are experiencing significant SaaS churn, and some on this list have recently been acquired or absorbed by others, many are transforming their products to meet new customer needs.
Top Software-as-a-Service Companies
The flood of activity among software-as-a-service companies shows no signs of slowing down. New SaaS companies are being launched, and most impressively, old guard software firms are engaging in impressive reinventions as SaaS companies.
Below is a list of 75 SaaS companies organized by the industries they usually fall under:
- Cloud SaaS Companies
- E-Commerce SaaS Companies
- Human Resources SaaS Companies
- Data Analytics SaaS Companies
- Financial SaaS Companies
- Marketing SaaS Companies
- Software Development SaaS Companies
- Cybersecurity SaaS Companies
- Education SaaS Companies
- Bottom Line: Top SaaS Companies
Cloud SaaS Companies
Cloud technology and software as a service (SaaS) works within enterprises across industries. SaaS can be expensive, but by using cloud technology, the price and efficiency will increase.
Big technology companies such as Salesforce and Microsoft have created their own cloud SaaS, but they are among competitors, including Box, Oracle, and Intuit.
Salesforce
Salesforce is a top SaaS company that launched the concept based on customer relationship management (CRM). It has since expanded into platform development, marketing, machine learning (ML), analytics, and social networking.
The company is considered one of the most innovative cloud software solution providers on the market and generates most of its annual recurring revenue from its cloud SaaS tool set. As of March 2022, Salesforce has a market cap of $208.91 billion.
Microsoft
One of the pioneers in business technology, Microsoft has since become one of the largest SaaS companies in the world after moving its desktop productivity suite Office 365 to the cloud. Now, Office 365 outsells the packaged, client version, and it offers Dynamics CRM, SharePoint collaboration, and even SQL Server databases on demand.
The Microsoft team also heavily invests in customer acquisition, customer onboarding, customer success, and customer retention, which makes it a strong contender for enterprise customers with a wide array of customers.
Intuit
Another software company that made a successful pivot to the cloud, Intuit has converted its flagship finance and tax prep software Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Mint to on-demand, cloud-based versions. These solutions now account for three-quarters of all company revenue and are a huge factor for planned revenue growth.
Veeva Systems
Veeva Systems develops several types of cloud-based applications, targeted at cloud-based industries like life sciences. With the help of these apps, the industry can assist with data, customer relationships, and content management. Because they are cloud-based, these apps can be accessed easily in an organization’s environment.
Oracle
Another software giant that turned to SaaS, Oracle has moved all of its line of business on-premises apps to the cloud, including enterprise resource management (ERP), CRM, supply chain management (SCM), human resources (HR), and payroll.
The company also acquired NetSuite in 2016, which sells CRM to small and midsize businesses (SMBs) not normally served by Oracle and Salesforce. As of March 2022, Oracle has a market cap of $218.25 billion.
Cvent
Cvent, a solution acquired by Vista Equity Partners, is a cloud-based event management and planning platform. It offers features that allow planners to manage all aspects of an event, such as online event registration, venue selection, event management, mobile apps for events, email marketing, and web surveys.
Druva
Druva offers cloud-based comprehensive backup, recovery, and archival services for cloud business apps like Office 365, Google Suite, Box, and Salesforce with full data visibility, access, and compliance monitoring.
Box
Box started as a cloud storage firm but has expanded to offer file collaboration and editing services for files stored on its servers.
E-Commerce SaaS Companies
Companies use e-commerce in SaaS to help with their sales, marketing, and payment operations to increase revenues.
Google Workspace
Google Workspace, formerly called G Suite, is mostly a collection of the individual services Google already offers, like Gmail, Storage, and Calendar, but with added features like custom email and 24/7 support. This solution comes at a subscription price over the free basic services offered, but it also comes with the benefits of Google Cloud and its large collection of enterprise solutions.
Zendesk
Zendesk offers cloud-based customer service and customer support solutions, with features like support tracking, purchase tracking, billing, shipping, and other customer data. As of March 2022, Zendesk has a market cap of $14.68 billion.
RingCentral
RingCentral provides business communications solutions to various organizations. Its product portfolio includes messaging and video options that allow organizations to communicate internally. Its premium product, RingCentral Office, provides multiple utilities, including conferencing and messaging. As of March 2022, RingCentral has a market cap of $11.57 billion.
GoToConnect
GoToConnect, formerly LogMeln, allows various individuals to connect and develop business relationships. It provides cloud-based communication services, including conferencing. It also offers options for customer engagement and support. This platform is widely used by businesses for remote management and support.
Avangate
Avangate, owned by VeriFone, is an e-commerce platform for software sales. It provides software registration services and also functions as a software reseller. It supports multi-language ordering along with multiple options for payment to buyers. Avangate also manages subscription billing for direct sales and channel sales.
Teem
Teem, now by iOFFICE and SpaceIQ, is a platform for booking rooms or venues and for conference scheduling. It provides a snapshot of the real-time availability of rooms. Based on the availability, a meeting or conference can be scheduled and the room booked. It also manages visits for external people attending conferences or meetings.
Pipeliner CRM
Pipeliner CRM, as the name suggests, offers CRM solutions for sales enhancement. It automates the sales process with a host of apps available in its app marketplace. Some of the key offerings are contact and account management, email integration, and even offline apps. It can automate the sales process, which helps in achieving stretch targets.
Meistertask
Meistertask is an intuitive platform for online task management. Its web-based solution is easily accessible from mobile platforms, such as iPads and iPhones. It features kanban-style project boards that can be used for flexible task management.
Travelperk
Travelperk provides several types of travel management services, including expense management. It automates spending limits and ensures compliance with organizational policies. It’s a one-stop solution for business and leisure travel.
Practical Ignition
Practical Ignition provides client management software with multiple features and benefits. It automates recurring billing on a specified date and in a particular payment channel. It also performs proposal management, including the creation of proposals themselves.
This platform offers multiple tools for client engagement and for facilitating better customer management while showcasing a business dashboard. These features particularly help to enhance forecasting.
Anaplan
Anaplan is a planning and performance management platform used in a variety of departments for business planning practices and SaaS metrics. It uses a variety of databases to generate models based on business rules, which can be changed for instant adjustments. There are plans for Anaplan to be acquired by Thoma Bravo.
Domo
Domo delivers a SaaS-based platform that helps CEOs and business leaders obtain business intelligence (BI) from business data without requiring the executives to know BI skills.
DocuSign
A SaaS company based in San Francisco, DocuSign started out as a platform for electronic signatures for legal documents. It has since expanded to help SMBs collect information, automate data workflows, and sign on various devices.
Slack
Slack is one of the most popular enterprise collaboration platforms, and it has significantly expanded its capabilities after being acquired by Salesforce. Based in San Francisco, this SaaS company offers messaging, archiving, and search for modern teams.
Twilio
Twilio is a cloud communication SaaS company that enables customers to use standard web languages to build a variety of telephony apps supporting voice, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), IP to traditional telcos, and SMS apps. Developers can embed voice, video, messaging, and authentication into their apps using the Twilio platform.
GitHub
A popular online software development tracking and version control repository, GitHub is particularly popular with open-source projects. It allows for full project management, including version control and splits/forks management.
GoToMeeting
A Citrix Systems spin-off, GoToMeeting is a popular online meeting program that supports secure connections over any device.
Cisco
Cisco offers a SaaS solution portfolio that keeps network security and business needs at the forefront. Among its offerings is WebEx, a professional video conferencing service, and Spark, a collaboration service for teams to work together on projects. The two are often pitched in tandem.
Human Resources SaaS Companies
Despite the large number of HR SaaS companies, only some will offer a comprehensive suite of services for employers to manage their workforce, while others specialize in various aspects of HR.
Personio
With its simplified HR solutions, Personio eases human resources management, from hiring to full and final settlement. Its four key offerings are Recruit, Manage, Develop, and Pay.
ADP
One of the world’s best-known payroll management brands has gone to the cloud to offer human capital management support, which involves HR, payroll, and employee benefits.
Clearlake Capital
Clearlake Capital is a top SaaS company, particularly due to its cloud-based talent management software solutions and its acquisition of Cornerstone. These solutions go beyond the basics of HR applications for things like recruitment, training, succession management, and career guidance.
Workday
Workday is a SaaS company that provides financial management and HR management to enterprise customers, with emphasis on complex, global industries as well as government.
ServiceNow
ServiceNow specializes in IT services management (ITSM), IT operations management (ITOM), and IT business management (ITBM). It offers real-time communication, collaboration, and resource sharing and primarily covers IT, HR, security, customer service, software development, facilities, field service, marketing, finance, and legal enterprise needs.
Workable
Based in Boston, Workable is a SaaS HR platform that helps a company hire new employees. Using security methods, applications, and assisted onboarding, it creates a great HR experience with less work from an HR team.
Namely
Namely, based in New York, is a human resources management systems (HRMS) SaaS company. Using HR software, Namely allows a company to personalize its platform as needed by businesses.
Data Analytics SaaS Companies
Companies are using SaaS data analytics companies to track their data and make smart decisions about their operations and business goals
Apptio
Apptio, another company acquired by Vista Equity Partners, is a provider of business management solutions for CIOs to better manage the business of IT. Its suite of applications uses analytics to provide information and insight about technology cost, value, and quality for making faster, data-driven decisions.
GoodData
GoodData provides a business analytics platform for enterprises to create smart business applications using existing data to automate, recommend, and make better business decisions.
Tableau
Tableau is a giant in its own right, and after being acquired by Salesforce, it has exponentially grown its reach and use cases. Tableau Online is the SaaS version of the company’s popular interactive data visualization and data analytics products focused on business intelligence.
New Relic
New Relic is a leading digital intelligence company, delivering visibility and analytics into website application and mobile app performance as well as real-time monitoring.
NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat is an analytics platform within the SaaS industry. It aims to help moderate, publish, analyze, and grow social media management for its customers.
Financial SaaS Companies
Financial SaaS solutions are being used by companies to help with their employee expenses, accounting, and payroll as well as invoicing and payments.
FreshBooks
FreshBooks is a cloud-based accounting SaaS product designed for sole proprietors and small business owners to bill clients for time and services as well as to track time spent with the client.
Paychex
Despite its older age on this list, Paychex has managed to avoid a lot of customer churn by leaning on a SaaS business model. Along with its subsidiaries, Paychex is a finance and payroll vertical SaaS company that provides payroll, human resources, and benefits outsourcing solutions for SMBs. It launched SaaS services for payroll, time and attendance, training, HR, and benefits in 2013.
Xero
Xero provides cloud accounting software for accounting professionals and small businesses. Its key features are automatic bank and credit card account feeds, invoicing, accounts payable, expense claims, fixed asset depreciation, purchase orders, and standard business and management reporting.
2Checkout
An online payment processing platform acquired by VeriFone, 2Checkout helps organizations receive global payments as much as they do local transactions, enabling businesses to expand and operate globally.
It also provides global tax management and compliance services, including professional management of VAT (value-added tax), sales tax, and remittances that are applicable globally. It features subscription billing to manage customer subscriptions, along with sending timely reminders for renewal.
Spendesk
Managing employee expenses and reimbursements can prove challenging. Spendesk manages employee end-to-end expense management with a SaaS approach. This includes approvals, limit automation on cards, automated accounting, and invoice management. Spendesk also helps to develop intuitive and interactive reports on expenses and reimbursement.
Bill.com
Bill.com provides users with tools to automate business bill payment and invoicing processes as well as cash flow management. These solutions integrate with accounting and banking systems, including QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, and Intacct.
Vista Equity Partners
Vista Equity Partners, which acquired former SaaS player, Xactly, is a SaaS company that offers a suite of products designed around sales and finance management to design, build, manage, audit, and optimize sales compensation management programs. It measures sales performance and effectiveness as well as employee engagement.
Zuora
Zuora is a SaaS company that serves customers that rely on a subscription-based business model to automate billing, commerce, financial operations, subscription payments tracking, invoicing, products, and catalogs.
Coupa Software
Coupa is a cloud platform that offers a strong SaaS model for business spend expenses tracking. It offers a fully unified suite of financial applications for business spend management, like procurement, invoicing, expenses, and sourcing.
Marketing SaaS Companies
SaaS is used in marketing to help companies run email and ad campaigns as well as manage customer relationships and communications.
Skyword
Skyword, previously known as Trackmaven, is a cloud-based marketing analytics solution that helps organizations design well-informed and data-based marketing campaigns. It uses the power of big data collected from multiple channels to develop powerful marketing insights.
Mobiniti
As text marketing becomes increasingly important in digital marketing, Mobiniti, acquired by PennSpring Capital, provides user-friendly, customized solutions to marketing agencies and resellers. Mobiniti also provides email marketing solutions customized for various industry segments that can be easily integrated with the existing applications and CRM tools in order to better promote customer engagement.
Intercom
Intercom is an intuitive communication platform that facilitates an organization’s interaction with potential and existing customers. It has multiple messaging apps for sales and marketing campaigns as well as others that support clients. Intercom aims to make communication easy through its cloud-based solutions.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a cloud-based email marketing solution that was acquired by Intuit in 2021. Widely known and used, it offers end-to-end solutions, from creating and managing the mailing list to automating campaigns.
Mailchimp can integrate contacts from an existing CRM tool and create a fresh mailing list. It also provides various analytical services through integration with Google Analytics.
Aurea
Aurea, formerly known as XANT and InsideSales.com, offers a sales acceleration platform built on a predictive and prescriptive self-learning engine, designed to help with a sale from first engagement until close. Its machine learning feature predicts and prescribes optimized sales activities, enhances performance and motivation, and increases live high-quality conversations.
Act-On Software
Act-On Software is a popular adaptive marketing automation provider for SMBs, providing email marketing, landing sites, and social media prospecting.
Marketo
Marketo, a subsidiary of Adobe, develops marketing automation software that provides inbound marketing, social marketing, CRM, and other related services.
NextRoll
NextRoll, previously known as AdRoll, is one of the top SaaS companies for marketing, with a marketing platform that enables companies of any size to create personalized ad campaigns based on their own website data.
HubSpot
HubSpot develops cloud-based, inbound marketing software that provides businesses with tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics, customer service, customer support, customer experience, and search engine optimization (SEO).
Software Development SaaS Companies
Companies use collaborative SaaS tools to help manage, iterate, and deploy applications compatible with their environments.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Another reinvention based in San Jose, Adobe was the king of desktop creativity software and has now pivoted to make Photoshop and other audio and video editing tools available via an annual cloud-based SaaS business subscription. The Creative Suite offers graphic design, video editing, web development, and photo editing.
Bitnami
With a wide range of services, Bitnami, acquired by VMware, enables faster and easier deployment of software on a selected platform, from native and on-premises to cloud deployment. It provides packaged applications that can be run on any preferred platform while offering a broad catalog of applications ready to run on the servers.
Blackbaud
Blackbaud is a provider of software and services designed specifically to help nonprofit organizations more efficiently operate and engage in things like fundraising, building relationships, marketing, advocacy, and web management.
Splunk
Splunk provides operational intelligence software that monitors, reports, and analyzes real-time machine data, including logs and big data sources, for operational intelligence. There is also talk of Splunk being acquired by fellow SaaS giant Cisco.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) SaaS
Amazon’s SaaS offerings cover both a platform for companies needing to build their own SaaS application as well as reselling a number of SaaS platform solutions from third-party vendors, many of which are on this list.
MuleSoft
MuleSoft, headquartered in San Francisco, is another SaaS company that was acquired by Salesforce in the last few years. MuleSoft provides a platform for application building.
Through its directory that functions as a social network, customers can share updates and information on application programming interfaces (APIs). It also provides integration for applications, data, and devices that are both on-premises and in the cloud.
Atlassian
Atlassian is an enterprise software company that develops products for software developers, project managers, and content management. Its flagship product is Jira, an issue-tracking and project management product.
Cybersecurity SaaS Companies
Cybersecurity companies use SaaS models to help customers identify, predict, and respond to cyberthreats on their networks.
Okta
Okta offers identity and access management solutions that help organizations manage and secure user authentication in modern applications. It also helps developers identify controls to make an application more secure. These controls can be built into web-based apps as well as devices. As of March 2022, Okta has a market capitalization of $22.64 billion.
Proofpoint
Proofpoint, acquired by Thoma Bravo, provides various cybersecurity solutions to protect organizations from cyberattacks, including coverage for campaigns and data. Some of the innovative offerings are prevention of outbound data loss, inbound email and mobile device security, electronic discovery, email encryption, and archiving.
KnowBe4
KnowBe4 provides security awareness training related to various classes of security issues. These include problems arising from phishing, ransomware attacks, and social engineering. The service offers enterprise-class training on risk management and compliance (RMAC). Overall, KnowB4 is a one-stop solution for all types of security training.
Rapid7
Rapid7’s IT security solutions collect data across a company’s users, assets, services, and networks. The tool is accessible on-premises, through a mobile device, and through the cloud, making instantaneous security decisions possible. As of March 2022, Rapid7 has a market capitalization of $6.39 billion.
Veracode
Veracode, acquired by Thoma Bravo, provides cloud-based application intelligence and security verification services for internally developed and/or purchased software applications as well as third-party components. It conducts testing and uses machine learning to identify and eradicate vulnerabilities.
Education SaaS Companies
Companies are using education SaaS tools to help students and teachers by offering assessments, course management, and training.
CodeSignal
CodeSignal, a subsidiary of the American company BrainFlights, performs skills-based assessments. It helps clients by recruiting the best technical talent, then running a tailor-made test according to the recruitment requirements. CodeSignal facilitates certifications, which are the standardized tests specified by the clients.
ServiceMax
ServiceMax, acquired by GE, is built on Salesforce’s Force.com platform and serves field service technicians through cloud and mobile software. This software solution offers workforce optimization, advanced scheduling and dispatch, parts logistics, inventory and depot repair, and installed base entitlement.
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey, now represented by Momentive, offers a cloud-based online survey and questionnaire platform for companies to gather survey-related information.
Blackboard
Blackboard Learn, now owned by Anthology, is a SaaS company that provides a virtual learning environment and course management system for online schooling. It offers online elements to classes usually available only in the classroom.
Eloomi
Eloomi is a software platform that can upgrade personnel skill sets within any organization and improve their workplace performance. By increasing employees’ skills, the platform aims to grow their output in areas such as compliance and strategy.
Grammarly
Grammarly, based in San Francisco, is a software platform to help with communication and grammar use. Used by students and professionals alike, Grammarly analyzes the text submitted into it to help clarify what customers mean.
Kahoot!
Kahoot! Is an assessment tool used in classrooms and educational platforms. The data is presented during the assessment and reports are generated for teachers and hosts in their server.
Bottom Line: Top SaaS Companies
Although some companies are experiencing significant SaaS churn, and some on this list have recently been acquired or absorbed by others, many are transforming their products to meet new customer needs.
Whether your company needs cloud, e-commerce, HR, data analytics, cybersecurity, or education SaaS tools, this list has some of the top SaaS companies to date.