Today’s business market is extremely diverse and competitive.
But without data-driven strategies to accelerate your business’s growth and the ability to provide your customers with the features and benefits they want, you might find your business falling behind.
And that’s the last thing you want to happen.
So how can you be proactive and gather data about your customers, company, competitors, and product performance?
By using SaaS tools.
Easy, right?
Well, not exactly.
The SaaS tools market is just as diverse as the SaaS market itself. There are a ton of feature-rich tools out there that your business can take advantage of, but that comes with the problem of decision paralysis: it can be extremely overwhelming trying to find the best tools to improve your business’s efficiency, productivity, and profitability.
So let’s break it down into an easily-digestible list. Instead of you having to sift through a plethora of tools and basically flip a coin to decide which ones you’re going to add to your tech stack, we’ll do the heavy lifting for you so you can start with our top recommendations in each category.
But before we get started, let’s take a step back and outline exactly what SaaS tools are.
Chances are you already use SaaS tools in your business operations today. From marketing to sales to financials, SaaS tools are the pieces of software that your business relies on to create campaigns to reach new and existing customers, manage leads, and organize customer information, including contact details and financial information (e.g., subscription details, monthly spend, user count).
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Types of SaaS Tools |
Description |
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SaaS Monitoring Tools |
Allows you to keep tabs on networks, servers, your applications, and much more to ensure that your services are running smoothly for your customers |
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SaaS Bi Tools (Business Intelligence) |
Allows you to monitor the performance of your cloud-based SaaS offering, allowing your customers to gather information about their business like analytics and reporting without having to download additional software |
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SaaS Reporting Tools |
Utilizes specific metrics to give insight into the performance of a SaaS company, like Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Cohort Analysis, Sales metrics, and more |
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SaaS Management Tools |
Helps IT managers control the variety of SaaS applications in their tech stack (e.g. Microsoft 365, Google Suite, etc.) by establishing security policies, procedures, usage requirements, and more |
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SaaS Testing Tools |
Ensures that the SaaS application(s) you’ve built functions as designed usingtest automation tools |
|
Allows SaaS companies to keep track of user engagement, behaviour, and more to create strategies to reduce SaaS churn, aid in company growth, and more |
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SaaS Marketing Tools |
A wide range of software offerings that allow SaaS companies to keep track of customer engagement, keep track of leads, automate customer engagement tasks (e.g., sending an email upon sign-up) and more |
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SaaS SEO Tools |
A wide range of tools that aid in SaaS companies efforts to increase rankings in search engines, mainly by assisting in SaaS content marketing, Pay-Per-Click Advertising, and more |
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SaaS Sales Tools |
Assist SaaS companies in outreach, lead management, managing sales pipelines, and more |
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IT, Infrastructure & Security Tools |
Allows SaaS companies to secure their software offerings, maintain the performance of their software, and ensure a high-level of performance whether the SaaS offering is cloud-based or an on-premise solution |
|
Collaboration Tools |
Software that allows customers using the SaaS tools to collaborate with their customers, business partners, and more (usually external tools that have compatibility with the SaaS software, such as Slack, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.) |
|
Automation tools |
Automate some aspects of the SaaS tools to save time and reduce errors, including back-end administrative tasks, customer outreach, and more |
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Data Quality Tools |
With SaaS tools like Salesforce, Pipedrive, and other CRMS, data quality tools (DQ tools) help ensure the accuracy of data within the system, including customer information, account relationships, and more |
|
SaaS Onboarding Tools |
Helps new and existing users understand how to use the SaaS application through tutorials, callouts, pop-ups, tips, and more |
Now that we’ve defined the different SaaS tools available, let’s get into our recommendations for each category.
If you’re looking for a clean and effective SaaS monitoring solution that offers a complete infrastructure monitoring solution, then Site24x7 is worth a look. It supports Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and has a centralized data log to make finding and acting on operational issues easier and more efficient.
Features:
Best for: According to Site24x7 themselves, their solution works for businesses of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 companies and governments. Reviews from companies of all sizes solidify that Site24x7 is indeed a solid choice for everyone.
As part of the Cisco suite of products, AppDynamics is no stranger to the SaaS technology space. Its unique “central nervous system” promises to bring a singular, interconnected view of cloud-based, hybrid cloud, and on-premise SaaS application components for easy operational understanding.
Features:
Best for: enterprise and public sector businesses
As a flexible and time-saving data reporting and representation tool, datapine makes it easy for you to gain valuable insights into different aspects of your SaaS business, from internal KPI data (e.g., finances, performance) to your customer’s behavioral patterns, including website visits, app access, and use metrics, and much more. You can do all of this without having to get your IT team to pull data from your other tools, such as your CRM, or the need to install local hardware; everything is accessed online via a cloud-based environment.
Features:
Best for: small and mid-market businesses
The conversation around Domo in terms of how it stands in the SaaS Bi tools space is that it is an easy-to-use, all-in-one solution. It’s used by large and small organizations (although most of their customers seem to be large corporations) to access actionable insights from any internet-connected device.
Features:
Best for: large corporations and enterprise businesses
If you’ve spent any time in SaaS marketing, then chances are you’ve heard of Google Data Studio. It’s a highly customizable reporting tool for any business, including SaaS. The way that Google Data Studio works is by taking data from Google Analytics and other database systems, such as BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, social media platforms, and other data sources like Google Sheets, Google Search Console, and more, and displaying it in an easy to read report.
Features:
Best for: any type of business, from small businesses to large enterprise organizations
An effective B2C or B2B content marketing strategy requires paying careful attention to your customer’s behaviour, including how they interact with your website, how they respond to your marketing campaigns, and where they are coming from online. If you already use HubSpot for your website, it’s worth considering HubSpot’s robust marketing analytics tools. They also connect with Google Analytics and Search Console, as well as the major social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn).
Features:
Best for: Businesses of all sizes, businesses that already use HubSpot
A typical SaaS business is likely going to be using a lot of different tools in their tech stack. Software like BetterCloud helps those businesses manage them effectively, plus allows IT teams to have a centralized location for data protection and security. With BetterCloud specifically, you can easily control user access levels, zero in on who is accessing sensitive data, and ensure that your SaaS tools meet regulatory requirements. Your security measures are standardized across all your SaaS applications, and you can even create automated workflows to reduce manual labour with tedious administrative tasks.
Features:
Best for: Mid market and enterprise businesses
As an Identity and Access Management (AIM) tool, Youzer allows you to control every aspect of how users are accessing and using your organization’s SaaS tools, from onboarding and offboarding, setting privileged access levels, M&A, security, and more. Youzer is laser-focused on user management, so you can see everything regarding how users access applications and move through them from start to finish.
Features:
Best for: All business types, from small businesses to large corporations and enterprises
If you’re a SaaS company offering applications to end users, you already know the importance of effective software testing. As your business scales, having individual QA testers test features in siloed environments is not enough. Instead, the whole process should be monitored and managed to ensure consistency and practicality as the software grows. Practitest is an all-in-one Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution that offers this solution by giving IT teams the ability to reuse test cases and provide information to the rest of the team via visual reports and dashboards.
Features:
Best for: ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) and IT divisions in large companies
As another SaaS testing tool, QMetry marries exploratory andautomated testing services, saving time and adding productivity and efficiency to your teams. For example, a site investigation is prioritized over having the tester record notes, as the software automatically creates documentation based on the tester’s inputs and recorded sessions. Testers can also easily log issues with the click of a button.
Features:
Best for: Enterprise organizations
Knowing how your customers navigate and interact with your website is extremely valuable for getting insight into your audience’s behaviour. Crazy Egg is a heat map, A/B testing, andwebsite traffic analysis tool that gives you valuable insights into your user’s behavioural patterns on your website with the click of a button. With this information, you can understand where the problem areas on your website or a client’s website lie and identify potential design changes that may help solve the problem. In addition, you can see demographic reports, view user session data (to see where users are getting stuck), and quickly identify website errors that might be frustrating your users.
Features:
Best for: Agencies, eCommerce, Small, medium, and large businesses that engage in lead generation
Understanding how users interact with your website is key to optimizing conversions and user experience. Lyssna is one of the best website testing tools for usability testing, user research, and feedback collection. It allows teams to run moderated and unmoderated tests, gather survey responses, and analyze prototype interactions to pinpoint friction points. With these insights, businesses can refine their digital experiences, eliminate usability issues, and ensure their websites meet user expectations.
Features:
Best for: UX designers, product teams, and marketers seeking real user insights
Since behavioral analytics have been a focus for websites, Hotjar has been on the radar for SaaS marketers everywhere. Like Crazy Egg, Hotjar is heatmap software that also provides user session recordings, A/B testing capabilities, and user feedback. The main difference between the two offerings is that Hotjar combines user feedback with behavioral data, giving you more insight into the “why” behind page performance (according to Hotjar). For instance, you can place feedback pop-ups directly on pages using Hotjar and use the information gleaned to see where your pages went wrong. So if someone leaves negative feedback, for instance, you can immediately switch to their session on your website and view the exact path that they took, giving you better insight into the source of their issue.
Features:
Best for: Agencies, eCommerce, Small, medium, and large businesses that engage in lead generation
As a growth marketing tool, TrueNorth aims to be the one-software solution to your marketing efforts, replacing spreadsheets, PM software, and reports. The main focus of the software is to keep your marketing team focused on business goals and growth projections by giving employees insight into what they’re working towards with Gantt charts, milestones, and funnel insights.
Features:
Best for: Agencies, mid-size businesses
While most SaaS marketing tools offer some sort of management capabilities, few offer audience insight like Sparktoro. With this audience research tool, you can uncover hidden gems of information that really speak to what your audience is all about by gaining valuable insight into demographics, audience behavior online, and text data. This includes the social media accounts that make up your audience or are influencers in that space, commonly used hashtags, popular websites, and much more.
Features:
Best for: Agencies, small to midsize SaaS businesses, subject matter experts, journalists, and more
Every SaaS business should understand how their solution sits within the larger conversation around their audience’s search intent, and SaaS SEO tools like Semrush can help with that. Aside from robust keyword research capabilities, including organic search results and paid search, Semrush also provides SEO site audits (so you can see which pages need to be optimized for search or identify opportunities for SEO), competitor research (so you can see how your pages rank compared to your competitors, and if there are any keyword gaps that you can take advantage of) and more. What makes Semrush stand out from other tools in this space, however, is the inclusion of robust written content creation tools that help with topic creation, keyword distribution, competitor comparison, and grammar and spelling for articles.
Features:
Best for: businesses of all sizes, including agencies, SaaS companies, eCommerce, and more
While Semrush loads on the additional features, Ahrefs takes a more focused approach by sticking to what it does best: keyword research and SEO optimization. You’ll find all the usual suspects here regarding an SEO tool, including a keyword explorer, site audit (to give you insight into your SEO), competitor analysis, and much more.
Features:
Best for: businesses of all sizes, agencies, eCommerce, SaaS, and more
Effectively managing your leads is extremely important for SaaS businesses. On top of that, being able to prioritize your salespeople to reach out to the leads that are the most qualified and organizing which leads still need to be contacted is paramount. With Pipedrive, everything to do with connecting incoming leads to the right salespeople is managed in one easy-to-use platform. In addition, task automation saves your salespeople time and reduces human error with tedious administrative tasks.
Features:
Best for: startups, small to midsize businesses, SaaS companies
As a conversation intelligence platform, Gong gives you insight into the conversations that your sales team is having with customers and allows you and your sales team to identify risks, opportunities, and zero-in on the messaging that resonates with your customers. Gong works by not only capturing data from conversations with its speech analytics for call centers feature but also by giving sales reps a path to closing deals by allowing management to turn that data into actionable guidance.
Features:
Best for: small to midsize businesses, call centres, and customer support teams
As a Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) and all-in-one IT solution, Atera is great for Managed Service Providers (MSP) and IT companies alike. The software provides robust automations, such as the ability to automate mundane tasks in the background, reducing errors and saving IT professionals time. Rules can also be set to execute certain tasks on a regular basis. Patch management, cybersecurity, and helpdesk features allow IT departments to manage every aspect of their security, software updates, and customer interactions in one centralized location.
Best for: Small businesses
Another RMM solution is NinjaOne. This software has a clean, easy-to-use interface and a plethora of integrations to increase its functionality. While Atera has a straightforward pricing structure and treats its platform as one solution, NinjaOne separates its platform into different products that offer different features, and pricing is determined in what seems like an a-la-carte method, charging users per device and depending on what features they need.
Features:
Best for: Small and mid-size businesses
Chances are you’ve heard of Slack before. It’s become one of the quintessential collaboration tools for most businesses, large and small. With Slack, you can not only organize conversations across your organization into channels, you can also create groups with limited access, direct message individuals or groups for private conversations, share files, and even make video and voice call to others within slack. You can also invite people from outside of your organization as guests to participate in conversations as needed.
Features:
Best for: Businesses of all sizes, agencies, startups, and more
As project management software, Basecamp is a great tool for remote and distributed teams. Its features don’t blow other solutions like ClickUp out of the water, but what it does (and that’s enough for most smaller teams), it does extremely well. Projects, tasks, schedules, group chats, and more are organized in dynamic cards on dashboards, with the ability to create separate dashboards for different clients or departments. With these dashboards, it’s easy to see everything that’s going on with a specific project or deliverable in one place without having to sift through emails, file managers, chats, meeting notes, and more on different platforms. On top of that, the software itself is intuitive and easy to use for even the least tech-savvy among us.
Features:
Best for: startups, agencies, small to midsize businesses
When it comes to automation, Zapier is often the first tool that companies look toward. With Zapier, you can connect all the applications you use every day together so that they work seamlessly. The image above really describes the process well — you pick a “trigger”, which then sets off a chain reaction of automations that provide context and simplification to a standard workflow process. The automations can be straightforward or more complex, depending on your business, the applications involved, and the process that you want automated.
Features:
Best for: SaaS businesses, startups, small and midsize businesses, enterprise organizations
Email automation can be a tough nut to crack, especially when the complexity of your customer information and ABM marketing strategies complicate the simple schedule and send the process of email marketing. With Userlist, you get a full stack SaaS email automation tools solution that works with every aspect of your SaaS business, from lead nurturing to onboarding. Send an automatic email once a user logs into your app for the first time, giving them usage tips specific to their industry and onboarding information. Manage company accounts rather than just individuals, and tailor your messages based on relevant ABM campaigns.
Features:
Best for: small and midsize SaaS businesses
When you have incomplete or duplicate customer data within your Salesforce or other CRM environment, it can severely affect how you connect and communicate with your customers. With WinPure, the hassle of manually going through your customer data and cleaning it up is eliminated through their Clean & Match tool, which not only freshens up your CRM data, it also expands to spreadsheets, mailing lists, databases, and more. Process automation and an API add to this software's functionality and ensure that you have the most accurate information possible.
Features:
Best for: small and mid-market businesses
As a Salesforce data clean-up tool, Cloudingo makes it easy to ensure that you have accurate and clean customer data. It combs through Salesforce to find and consolidate duplicate records while at the same time giving you the flexibility to determine how the system will handle said records. For instance, duplicate records can be merged manually, in bulk, or automatically depending on your needs.
Features:
Best for: Small and midsize businesses
First impressions are extremely important, especially in the competitive SaaS market. When you follow SaaS onboarding best practices, users feel empowered to utilize the application to its fullest capabilities, resulting in them relying on your software for their business needs. But to get to this point, you need robust SaaS onboarding tools, and Appcues doesn’t disappoint. With Appcues, you can create amazing in-app experiences that direct customers without being invasive and track the effectiveness of your direction.
Features:
Best for: Small and midsize businesses
When it comes to SaaS onboarding tools, Userflow is worth a second look. With Userflow, you can build customized in-app tours, checklists, surveys, and more without coding. It also has one of the most intuitive flow builders on the market, with drag and drop functionality that makes it easy for even the least tech-savvy employee to create user onboarding experiences.
Features:
Best for: Small and midsize businesses
And there you have it, a comprehensive review of the best SaaS tools on the market today. If you work for or own a SaaS company and want to streamline your business operations, ensure you have clean customer data, and support long-term growth, then you’ll want to adopt some of these SaaS tools.
On the other hand, if you’re a SaaS business that’s looking for inbound marketing strategies, then give Roketto a call. We’re waiting to hear from you!