Subscription-based software companies have changed the way today’s businesses operate, and their contributions continue to be an integral part of the future.
Software as a Service (SaaS) companies provides significant value to customers by hosting applications on their servers over the internet. This model is also called the cloud or cloud-based service.
Unlike traditional software, customers don’t need to create the infrastructure; they simply pay a fee to access the service often on a monthly or annual subscription for each user.
In a nutshell: SaaS companies provide instant access to apps in exchange for a subscription. All you need is your web browser or smartphone to enjoy the benefits without any startup costs.
In 2008, only 12% of businesses used cloud-based apps. Today, it’s entirely the opposite. According to a report from BetterCloud, 73% of organizations said nearly all of their apps would be SaaS in 2020.
In 2019, Gartner updated its online cloud forecast predicting SaaS revenues will total $266.4 billion in 2020. The global analyst firm expects that revenues will rise by 16% in 2021.
In this massive article, we’ve rounded up the top SaaS companies that have changed the way work. But before we get to the list, let’s learn more about SaaS and why it matters for businesses.
Why Businesses Use SaaS
Buying and using the latest SaaS products can be overwhelming. There are indeed thousands of them out there.
It’s hard to imagine running a business today without the luxury of modern SaaS software. Gone are the days of solely using Microsoft Office for your office activities. Today, vast office suites are now available through SaaS subscriptions.
Why did the shift to the cloud happen?
Business leaders focus on essential business applications software’s financial and operational impacts. They need to be agile, manage risk, and effect change quickly.
Before SaaS solutions, businesses of all sizes faced a few common problems: startup costs, maintenance, and inflexibility. Information Technology (IT) departments long held their tech stack close to the vest and have been perceived as adversarial to change. For a new application rollout, IT would often act as judge, jury, and executioner for new apps used in the office.
There had to be a better way. With SaaS, companies can adopt new software solutions at a much lower cost in a shorter amount of time.
Related: Business Listing Management: The Ultimate Guide for SMBs
An Example of SaaS Success
Look no further than your email for a perfect example of how and why businesses use the cloud.
At a technical level, email requires many resources. It needs specialized servers to send and receive email messages, manage user credentials, filter spam, and on top of all that, apply software updates. Oh, and we didn’t even mention the IT staff doing it all.
The gradual reliance upon cloud-based services began in information technology (IT) leadership roles. Maintaining a secure, scalable, and reliable email system required extensive efforts for IT administrators.
CIOs were initially reluctant to go all-in with the cloud. Over time, they moved their servers offsite using specialized hosting from Microsoft, Amazon, and Rackspace.
Established leaders like Google and Microsoft offered ready-to-use email infrastructure (Gmail and Outlook, respectively) that required minimal resources to establish and maintain.
Today, business leaders don’t even think twice about running their companies from the cloud—SaaS is how work gets done.
Top 75 SaaS Companies of the Decade
It takes a wealth of research to know what tools your business needs. Out of thousands of SaaS apps, we’ve compiled an extensive list of 75 powerful SaaS solutions to grow your business,
This breakdown includes a company overview, CEO, and why it’s notable.
Categories of SaaS Apps
- Business Communications
- Marketing
- Sales
- Workflow Automation
- Analytics & Measurement
- Finance & Accounting
- Human Resources
- Project Management
- Website Content
Business Communications
1) Cisco
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- Headquarters: San Jose, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Chuck Robbins
Telecommunications juggernaut Cisco is an industry leader in networking, security, collaboration and more. One of the longest-tenured companies on this list, Cisco was founded in 1984 and now has 35,000+ employees in over 115 countries.
You can turn to Cisco for everything from network architecture to web conferencing. An astonishing 85 percent of internet traffic travels across Cisco systems, so you’re in good company when you use Cisco.
2) Intercom
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Eoghan McCabe
Intercom offers businesses an integrated help desk and knowledge base to solve customer problems faster, giving customer assistance whenever it’s needed.
Intercom is a customer messaging platform that offers support and marketing services that keep businesses connected with customers throughout the customer’s journey.
Businesses can use bots and live chat to connect with customers. Its platform also provides employees the ability to become a part of a team inbox to stay connected. The service also offers capabilities for businesses to send targeted emails, as well as in-app and push messages.
Part of the new frontier in customer messaging, Intercom is a worthy addition to this list. Give them a look and see how the future of customer support is changing for the better.
3) LogMeIn
Logmein is a connectivity and workflow tool company that helps businesses with communication, collaboration, engagement, support, identity, and access. The company’s popular suite of products such as GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, LastPass, Rescue, and Join.Me are staple in the enterprise collaboration and communication field.
With its no-frills line of products, LogMeIn specializes in raw functionality, helping make working a pain-free and worry-free experience for professionals around the world.
4) Nextiva
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- Headquarters: Scottsdale, Arizona
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Tomas Gorny
Nextiva provides a complete business communications platform with VoIP, CRM, analytics, and automation capabilities.
The company’s Business Communications Suite provides everything a company needs to serve customers. Top features include its business phone service, sales pipeline CRM, online surveys, website chat, and analytics.
Renowned for its cloud phone system, Nextiva made a name for itself by serving businesses with a superior level of customer support above and beyond what’s typical in the industry.
Nextiva’s software is built for both small businesses and enterprises, making it infinitely scalable. Since its phone system operates exclusively in the cloud, employees and managers will both appreciate the freedom it provides. The company also has a free team collaboration app named Cospace.
See why Nextiva was just named the Best Overall Business Phone Service for 2020.
5) Slack
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- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Stewart Butterfield
Slack is a powerful and user-friendly team collaboration platform that achieved a meteoric rise in the 10’s on the back of superior user experience and infinite customizability.
With Slack, you can hold continuous discussions and share important documents anywhere and anytime. Specific channels also make sure your information is neatly organized and in one place. You can personalize avatars, react and respond to communications with emojis, and integrate team communication into your additional workflows via Slack APIs with a host of other tools.
Need to improve your team messaging? Give Slack a look and see what all the hype is about!
6) Twilio
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Jeff Lawson
Twilio is a cloud communication platform that allows software developers to use standard web languages to make and receive phone calls, text messages, and other types of communication.
The uber high-growth SaaS company offers its users the ability to program and build out their ideas to communicate with others. Startups such as GroupMe have been built on Twilio, making it a popular application for software developers and revenue leaders alike
7) Zoom
- Headquarters: San Jose, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Eric Yuan
Zoom is a video conferencing platform that offers businesses the ability to connect employees with each other and their customers. The platform provides webinar capabilities, business messaging, online meetings, and more.
Businesses can do Live videos and group video chats, for conversations, collaboration, and information sharing.
See why Zoom makes it easier to communicate with face-to-face conversations – give it a whirl for your business.
Marketing Tools
8) Act-On
- Headquarters: Portland, Oregon
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Kate Johnson
Act-On is an inbound and outbound marketing platform. It offers a variety of tools for business marketing, including list management, lead nurturing, email drip campaigns, search and social marketing, plus much more.
Since bursting onto the marketing automation scene in 2008, Act-On has built a loyal following of enterprise marketers at clients such as Samsung, 23andMe, and Stanford University.
9) ActiveCampaign
- Headquarters: Chicago, Illinois
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Jason VandeBoom
ActiveCampaign is an advanced email marketing, marketing automation, and sales customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps businesses grow by strengthening their relationship with customers.
The Chicago, Illinois-based company has built a sterling reputation based on ease-of-use and appeal to SMBs and startups operating with limited budget and personnel. Give ActiveCampaign a look and build better relationships with your prospects and customers.
10) Adobe
- Headquarters: San Jose, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Shantanu Narayen
One of the original behemoths in enterprise marketing software, Adobe is the province of digital media and marketing specialists, who use its leading-edge applications Illustrator, Photoshop, Creative Cloud, and Acrobat Reader to create content, collaborate across media and devices, and measure and optimize it over time.
Adobe has more than 21,000 employees around the world and has spent the 2010s watching its stock prices skyrocket. If you know someone who works in graphic design or digital publishing, chances are, you know someone who relies on Adobe products to get their work done and shared with the world.
The company is a perfect example of adapting to the shift from on-premises software to a subscription cloud model.
11) Buffer
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Joel Gascoigne
Buffer is a social media management tool that offers businesses the ability to save time with content posting.
It provides a calendar and a future scheduling feature, which allows employees to find the social content needed at one time.
They can then add it all to Buffer and choose the dates and times for when each piece of content will post, automatically, to specific social sites.
Posts on social media are then spread out and ready to go, with Buffer.
12) Constant Contact
- Headquarters: Waltham, Massachusetts
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Jeff Fox (Constant Contact is a subsidiary of Endurance International Group)
Constant Contact is an email marketing platform that provides businesses with email, social media, and event marketing tools. Users can automate their email marketing campaigns and conduct mass outreach to prospects and customers with built-in tracking and insights.
A favorite of small businesses and startups, Constant Contact is a powerful digital marketing solution that gives your business everything it needs to get buyers’ attention, spark their interest, create desire, and inspire action.
13) Cvent
- Headquarters: Mclean, Virginia
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Reggie Aggarwal
Cvent is a cloud-based enterprise event management platform. As an online event organizing solution for small businesses, Cvent offers users the ability to manage online guest registration, market their events, and process payments.
The company has had an eventful 2010s, acquiring numerous high-growth companies in its space such as DoubleDutch, Social Tables, and more to create one of the most robust event management platforms on the market. Cvent is worth a look for anyone running event marketing, so give it a look.
14) Drift
- Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: David Cancel
Drift is a conversational marketing platform that helps sales reps focus their time on quality conversations with warm prospects while creating a frictionless buyer’s journey for customers.
The purpose of Drift is to move businesses away from traditional, cumbersome marketing tactics and into conversational marketing, where sales reps can quickly launch conversations with prospects and convert them into customers.
With Drift added to your business website, you can generate bot-qualified leads. Instead of spending weeks trying to manually qualify a lead, you can now connect with your buyers in real-time, speeding up the qualification process.
15) Eventbrite
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Julia Hartz
Eventbrite is an event technology platform that offers businesses ways to find, create, and set up events.
Founded in 2006 and employing over 1,200 employees worldwide, Eventbrite is a place where businesses can sell event tickets online and discover a wide array of events worth attending.
With its assortment of tools and apps, Eventbrite provides businesses everything it needs to become a part of the “event community.”
16) Hootsuite
- Headquarters: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Ryan Holmes
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that offers businesses and individuals the ability to manage their social media programs across multiple social networks from one integrated dashboard.
The pioneers in social media automation are a favorite of small businesses and enterprise companies alike, offering everything you need to run multi-channel social media programs like a pro at a highly reasonable cost. See why Hootsuite is considered a must-have for social media managers around the world.
17) HubSpot
- Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Brian Halligan
HubSpot brought inbound marketing to the mainstream in the 2010s, creating a massive following and building out a fully-integrated marketing automation platform, CRM, and sales hub for companies of all shapes and sizes.
The company employs over 4,000 people and has sparked a new generation of digital marketing professionals who rely on content, digital channels, and an integrated sales and marketing funnel to capture new market share.
18) MailChimp
- Headquarters: Atlanta, Georgia
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Ben Chestnut
The granddaddy of all email marketing platforms, MailChimp is a marketing automation platform that is used to send marketing emails and automated messages, as well as to create targeted campaigns.
Renowned for its ease-of-use and integration capabilities with other SaaS platforms, MailChimp is a fan favorite of startups and enterprise companies alike. At nearly 20 years old, the company is going as strong as ever, continuing to roll out new features and surprise and delight its massive customer base.
19) Marketo
- Headquarters: San Mateo, California
- Type: Delisted
- CEO: Shantanu Narayen (Marketo is a subsidiary of Adobe)
Marketo is a marketing automation software that offers users inbound marketing, social marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and other related services. Acquired by Adobe in 2018, Marketo is built for marketers, by marketers and is setting the innovation agenda for marketing technology. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, with offices around the world, Marketo serves as a strategic partner to large enterprises and fast-growing startups across a variety of industries.
20) Terminus
- Headquarters: Atlanta, Georgia
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Tim Kopp
Terminus is an account based-marketing platform (ABM) that produces demand, increases pipeline efficiency, expands existing accounts, drives revenue, and measures business success.
Founded in 2014, Terminus quickly shot to the top of the ABM movement, spearheading a new set of software platforms aimed at synergizing the customer acquisition process for large accounts. If your sales team hunts for big deals, give Terminus a look and see what it can do for your business.
Sales Tools
21) Chorus
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Roy Raanani
Chorus is a conversation intelligence cloud platform that is helping businesses take the guesswork out of selling and making it 10X easier to build top sales and revenue teams.
The platform assists sales reps by securely capturing, storing, and analyzing team calls and meetings, offering data-driven insights on the language that buyers prefer, among other things.
At a high level, Chorus enables businesses to learn from their teams’ conversations to provide better experiences for their customers. It’s like having Moneyball for your sales force.
22) ZoomInfo
- Headquarters: Vancouver, WA
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Henry Schuck
ZoomInfo is the kingpin in sales and marketing intelligence, offering the world’s most powerful platform for gaining company and individual contact data for sales and marketing outreach.
ZoomInfo’s customer information is fresh, accurate, and continuously being updated and further enriched with additional data points, to assist businesses in identifying prospects.
Fresh off acquisitions of ZoonInfo, RainKing, and other customer data providers, DiscoverOrg gives businesses the ability to create personalized, meaningful interactions from the first touch to a closed deal.
23) DocuSign
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Dan Springer
The undisputed leader in eSignature platforms, DocuSign is a cloud-based electronic signature software that makes it dead simple for users to sign and collaborate on legal documents online. No matter the location, you can quickly and easily electronically sign your name on the dotted line.
DocuSign has had a banner decade, going public in 2018 and appearing in the Top 5 of Forbes Cloud 100 list multiple times. At one point, Business Insider reported that a staggering 90% of Fortune 500 companies used DocuSign. That’s the definition of industry dominance, and it’s earned DocuSign a spot on this list.
24) Gong
- Headquarters: New York, New York
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Amit Bendov
Gong is a conversation intelligence tool that gives sales teams unprecedented insight into how buyers and prospects are responding to their messaging and demos.
Used to improve sales rep performance, Gong provides powerful insight into customer conversations, pulling back the curtain on what your best reps are doing to hold meaningful, winning demos and meetings.
Gong is like equipping your sales team with the world’s best data-driven coach – complete with game film and statistical insights on team performance.
25) Outreach
- Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Manny Medina
Outreach is a sales engagement platform that offers businesses the ability to track sales activities and to engage with prospects.
Since bursting onto the scene in 2014, Outreach has changed the landscape of sales engagement, removing the need for multiple tools and replacing them with a single powerful platform for connecting with customers.
Outreach helps businesses become more efficient and productive to reach desired goals. Get Outreach for your sales force and see how it enhances employee workflows, helps sales operations run smoother, and creates better conditions for closing deals.
26) Salesforce
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Marc Benioff
The heavyweight champions of CRM, Salesforce brought Customer Relationship Management to the mainstream in the 2010s, holding the highest market share in all of CRM and employing more than 40,000 people the world over. Salesforce took on the incumbent Oracle with tenacity and ferociousness and was victorious.
Known for its innovative AppExchange, Trailblazer online community, and annual Dreamforce conference, Salesforce set the path for what CRMs could be, and just celebrated its 21st birthday this month. Have a drink on Salesforce and the benefits it brought to sales organizations the world over.
27) Xactly
- Headquarters: San Jose, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Christopher Cabrera
Xactly is a sales performance management and incentive compensation company that offers accurate, rapid, and impactful performance management and analysis tools on a completely cloud-delivered platform.
Founded in 2005, Xactly has impacted the sales performance management space more than any other platform over the 2010s. The company now houses over 700 employees and thousands of customers around the world. If your sales force needs help with performance management and compensation, give Xactly a look.
Workflow Automation Tools
28) Zapier
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Wade Foster
Discovering Zapier is like a beautiful rite of passage in the world of SaaS operators – especially those who work in sales and marketing ops. Zapier is a tool that allows businesses to integrate tools and automate workflows. It connects with thousands of apps to make work easier. As the company’s tagline says, “Zapier makes you happier!”
Zapier enables businesses and their employees to enrich their work processes with built-in apps they already know and use. Want to auto-route new leads from a Google Sheet into your CRM? Zapier can do that. Want to auto-post a new blog post to your social media feed? Zapier’s got your back. Need to log an email in Asana or Trello? Yup, Zapier can do that, too. Stop doing redundant, mindless, manual work. Leave that up to Zapier.
The company recently surpassed 2000 integrations on their platform, which is no small feat. The capabilities are endless with Zapier.
29) Citrix
- Headquarters: Fort Lauderdale, Florida
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: David Henshall
A true powerhouse in the world of SaaS, Citrix was founded more than 30 years ago in the unlikely location of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and is still going as strong as ever. The multinational software company was one of the first to bring productivity, collaboration, mobile, and networking functions into the cloud – and holds powerful partnerships with just about every major SaaS company out there – from Google Cloud to Amazon Web Services to Microsoft.
Cheers to another three decades of Citrix unifying workplace productivity for the greater good.
30) Evernote
- Headquarters: Redwood City, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Ian Small
A true innovator in the world of SaaS productivity platforms, Evernote is a note-taking app that keeps employees organized and on task.
Evernote was founded on a simple premise: when tasks are written down, arranged, and tracked, it is much easier for employees to get more work done. Since its founding in 2008, the company has delivered on that promise and then some – offering employees a single powerful application for organizing their thoughts, publishing documents, collaborating, and more.
To ensure projects are not overlooked, Evernote provides businesses with the ability to capture and prioritize ideas, projects, and to-do lists. See why everyone from developers to marketers love Evernote.
31) Google
- Headquarters: Mountainview, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Sundar Pichai
It feels silly and reductive to even attempt a capsule writeup explaining Google’s impact on the SaaS world. But let’s give it a whirl.
Beyond its search engine, Google specializes in internet services and products which range from online advertising technologies to Google Analytics and G Suite, one of the most powerful and user-friendly business collaboration tools on the market. Heck, this article was initially written on a Google Doc. If you have never had the pleasure of using a G Suite product, do yourself a favor and give it a try ASAP.
32) Grammarly
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Brad Hoover
A godsend to editors, writers, Grammarly is a spelling and grammar checking tool that assists businesses with writing clear and concise documents.
Employees can send error-free emails with the use of Grammarly. It is a tool that scans information added to it or via its add-ons to improve employees’ written skills and communication. The company has gone beyond the typical online app with live editing within your keyboard on your smartphone, too.
Grammarly is a classic example of a tool whose premise – while simple at heart – is so universally applicable and beneficial that it truly qualifies as a must-have. Get your team using Grammarly and never worry again about error-fraught emails, articles, and memos.
33) Microsoft
- Headquarters: Redmond, Washington
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Satya Nadella
Here’s a little company that you might have heard of. Sure, you know Microsoft for its contributions to the world of computing such as Windows, Word, and Excel throughout the decades. But did you know that Microsoft is also one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies on the planet?
Microsoft spent the 2010s building a spectacular set of tools into its SaaS platforms like Office 365 and Azure, which thousands of companies rely on for collaboration, productivity, and hosting. You can’t go wrong with one of the most trusted technology companies of all-time (and the world’s largest software company as of 2019).
Expect further growth and innovation to keep Amazon and IBM at arm’s length.
and delivers a better customer experience.
34) Oracle
- Headquarters: Redwood Shores, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Safra Catz
The world’s second-largest software company, Oracle is a bona fide cloud computing giant, offering a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of cloud applications and platform services. Its database software, Oracle Database, is the number one RMDBS on the planet ahead of contemporaries Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Teradata.
In an ocean full of whales, Oracle remains a true kingpin, with decades of clout under its belt and one of the largest, oldest, and most loyal customer bases in all of SaaS.
35) ServiceNow
- Headquarters: Santa Clara, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Bill McDermott
Over 80% of the Fortune 500 uses ServiceNow to manage IT workflows and define, structure, manage, and automate services for enterprise operations. Whether you’re planning sprints, enriching internal data, or improving incident management, ServiceNow’s robust, comprehensive platform has the ability to make your life 10X easier.
The 2010s were boom times for the Santa Clara-based company. In 2017, ServiceNow became the fastest-growing enterprise software company with more than $1B in revenue – no small feat considering who it was competing against.
36) VMWare
- Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Pat Gelsinger
Over 20 years old and boasting over 24,000 employees, VMWare is a true leader in the virtualization software space. A pioneer in the cloud infrastructure and IT management space, VMWare helps businesses securely access the apps and data they need, from anywhere.
The company spent the 2010s continuing to set the bar for enterprise SaaS companies, distinguishing itself in terms of innovation (the company has made early forays into IoT and Blockchain products in addition to its traditional platforms) and workplace culture VMWare is regularly named a Best Place to Work and ranks high in employee compensation metrics.
37) Atlassian
- Headquarters: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes
The SaaS wunderkinder from Down Under, Atlassian have changed the way companies collaborate, manage projects, and get things done for the better over the 2010s. Before Slack, there was Atlassian HipChat. Before Trello and Asana, there was JIRA. Before Guru, there was Confluence.
How did Atlassian reach a billion in revenue without an enterprise sales team? Simple. By creating extremely user-friendly collaboration software for business teams with products including JIRA, Confluence, HipChat, Bitbucket, and Stash. Check them out and see what all the hype is about.
Data Analytics Tools
38) Mixpanel
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Amir Movafaghi
Mixpanel is a product and user behavior tool that lets businesses analyze, measure, and improve the customer experience across websites and apps making it a must-have for marketers and developers alike.
Quickly identify trends and set business goals based off of the data collected by Mixpanel. Learn the truth about how your website and application are performing using Mixpanel data. Mixpanel lets you stop guessing and start using data to see the light – a beautiful thing for anyone who is looking to generate happy customers, more revenue, and a better product or service.
39) New Relic
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Lew Cirne
A fan favorite in the SaaS world for dev ops teams, New Relic is a software analytics and application performance management solution. Users can track changes across all entities to uncover the root causes of any issue and to solve them quicker.
This insightful information offers users the ability to develop and build smarter applications. See why web developers swear by New Relic for objective reporting and performance analysis.
40) Okta
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Todd McKinnon
Okta is an identity and access management software that enables organizations to both secure and manage their extended enterprise, transforming customers’ experiences and connecting the right people with the right technologies at the right time.
Security became more paramount than ever in the 2010s, and Okta is leading the way in creating safe, secure applications for businesses to run on. More than multi-factor authentication, Okta provides administrators fine-grained control employee and data security.
41) Pendo
- Headquarters: Raleigh, North Carolina
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Todd Olson
Pendo is a product cloud tool that helps businesses create better customer experiences with their products. With no coding required, businesses can collect, track, and analyze user activity, allowing them to evolve and meet customer needs in the best way possible.
Pendo offers tools like feedback surveys to develop useful products that deliver amazing results. Whether you’re looking to improve product adoption, customer loyalty, or team innovation, Pendo is a great option for you and your team.
42) Qualtrics
- Headquarters: Provo, Utah
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Ryan Smith
The mother of all survey platforms, Qualtrics is an experience management company that offers a single system of record for all experience data. Qualtrics surveys give you the ability to gather valuable information to improve customer, product, employee, and brand experiences.
Launched in 2002, the Provo-based company took the business world by storm in the 2010s, leading to a 2018 acquisition by the next company on this list. Check out Qualtrics for your business and get the insights you need to become a better business.
43) SAP
- Headquarters: Walldorf, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein
A global stalwart of the technology industry, SAP is a business application and technology solutions that help owners digitize their business. The company spent the 2010s making aggressive moves into SaaS, acquiring SuccessFactors, Concur, Callidus Cloud, Gigya and Qualtrics for tens of billions of dollars.
Over 425,000 businesses in 180 countries use SAP to help drive their business. Nearly five decades after its founding, SAP shows no signs of slowing down.
44) Segment
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Peter Reinhart
Segment unifies the data floating across your disparate apps and platforms to create one seamless hub for all the relevant data your company needs. What initially started as a tag manager for website tracking—before Google launched Tag Manager—it has become so much more.
In today’s app overload world, the impact of this simple premise is game-changing for data-driven companies. Segment provides customer data infrastructure that businesses use to achieve a common understanding of their prospects, customers, and app users – empowering them to use data to create customer-first decisions and experiences.
First launched in 2012, Segment has exploded into a SaaS industry leader employing over 500 people and helpings thousands of businesses use data to make better decisions.
45) Splunk
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Doug Merritt
As of May 2019, 90% of Fortune 100 companies used Splunk to help machine-generated data analysis and search. The data analytics juggernaut specializes in application management, security, and compliance, providing businesses with advanced web analytics and data collection.
The company is admired by developers and systems administrators for its beastly performance for slicing and dicing log files and data. The company’s mission, bring data to everything, offers insane value for just about any company. See what Splunk can do for your business.
46) SurveyMonkey
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Zander Lurie
SurveyMonkey is a cloud-based survey tool you use to manage people-driven data. An early forerunner in the survey space, SurveyMonkey allows you to create surveys and collaborate on them with team members. Whether you’re looking to gain customer feedback or perform market research, SurveyMonkey has you covered.
See why millions around the world have participated in a survey run by SurveyMonkey.
47) Tableau
- Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Adam Selipsky
A true giant in the business intelligence space, Tableau is a data visualization company that offers businesses the ability to see and analyze their most valuable asset, their data. The company spent the 2010s setting the standard for business intelligence tools, before becoming purchased by Salesforce at the end of the decade.
If your business thrives on big data, you’ll love Tableau.
48) UserTesting
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Andy MacMillan
UserTesting is a human insight platform that gives businesses a more in-depth look at the customer experience – via deep analytics, live surveys, and videos.
The benefits of UserTesting are immense – using a variety of functions, businesses can locate areas of their customer experience that need improvement, execute changes, and track the results.
If a business is looking to find out whether or not they are customer-centric and empathetic enough, UserTesting can help you. See why over half of the Fortune 100 relies on UserTesting to maximize their customer experiences.
Human Resources
49) BambooHR
- Headquarters: Lindon, Utah
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Bradley Rencher
A rising star in the HR space, BambooHR is a software company that gathers and organizes information that comes from the employment lifecycle of each employee.
The data BambooHR gathers about your employee experience has wide-ranging applications within your company. Businesses can use BambooHR data to assess and improve hiring, onboarding, or culture-building processes.
On balance, BambooHR’s software offers businesses the ability to hire productive employees and to structure collaborative teams who are driven to produce great things, which is a worthy goal for any company looking to grow.
50) Cornerstone OnDemand
- Headquarters: Santa Monica, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Adam Miller
One of the pillars of HR software, Cornerstone OnDemand is a cloud-based learning and talent management software. The system provides recruitment, training, management, and collaboration solutions for all business sizes.
The scope of Cornerstone’s applications is immense – covering learning, talent management, and employee experience. The platform gives HR leaders a powerful tool for getting the maximum value out of their talent.
51) Glassdoor
- Headquarters: Mill Valley, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Christian Sutherland-Wong
Democratizing the employee experience is the mission of Glassdoor. The company has grown to prominence by offering an online job and career community which enables employees and employers to find the most suitable job and talent for each posting.
One of the most innovative aspects of Glassdoor is its review functionality, which offers current and former employees the ability to anonymously review companies and their management. By bridging the gap between internal company culture and external job candidates, Glassdoor provides the insight needed for effective recruitment and employment.
The company also compiles the best employers in the nation and announces it every year. It’s no surprise that Nextiva was ranked #64 in the United States for 2020.
52) WorkDay
- Headquarters: Pleasanton, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Aneel Bhusri
It’s been an incredible run for WorkDay since its founding in 2005. The HR giant employs over 12,000 people and gives businesses a single system for finance, HR, and planning. Whether you’re looking for a human resource hub, a better way to manage payroll, or an integrated people and financial management platform, WorkDay has what you need to work better.
The platform makes it easy for users to execute core tasks like candidate management, employee training, payroll, and more and is relied upon by thousands of the world’s top companies.
Finance & Accounting
53) ADP
- Headquarters: Roseland, New Jersey
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Carlos Rodriguez
Looking to simplify HR and payroll? Automatic Data Processing (ADP) has been helping companies to do just that for over 70 years. Since transitioning its core offering into human resources management software, ADP has continued to be a market leader in the finance and accounting space, making it dead simple to do basic payroll, comply with federal regulations like the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and manage employees across borders.
ADP currently employs over 60,000 people, which makes it larger than many state universities, and shows no sign of slowing down.
54) Gusto
- Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Josh Reeves
Gusto burst onto the tech scene in 2011 with a simple-yet-pivotal vision: make payroll, benefits, and HR software geared towards small businesses and startups. The market has responded.
Gusto now employs over 1,100 people and helps more than 100,000 small businesses perform payroll, provide benefits, and keep their teams happy. The beauty of Gusto lies in its simple, elegant UI—the antithesis of clunky financial software of yore. So easy that any business owner can use it, so integral that your company can’t live without it, and priced accordingly for small business – Gusto is setting the tone for payroll and benefits software companies in the 2020s.
55) Intuit
- Headquarters: Mountainview, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Sasan Goodarzi
There’s a 99.999% chance that you or someone you know has used an Intuit product in the last year. The makers of leading financial applications TurboTax, Quickbooks, and Mint have been setting the bar for financial software companies since their founding nearly 40 years ago.
Intuit’s products span financial, accounting, and tax preparation software. Whether you’re an individual, a business owner, or a financial professional, chances are you rely on Intuit products to make your life easier and keep your finances in order. You can add using Intuit products as one of the three certainties in life, death and, yup, taxes.
56) Square
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Jack Dorsey
Every business needs to be able to do things – accept payments from customers and pay their employees. Since its founding at the turn of the previous decade, Square has been on a mission to make those two crucial components of business simple and – dare we say – even enjoyable.
Square is a mobile payment solution that offers businesses the ability to get paid via debit and credit card payments, mobile devices, invoices, desktops, and websites. Whether you’re looking to get paid via the point-of-sale system, invoicing, or online store, Square has you covered.
The CEO’s side job is running Twitter, so it’s safe to say he understands startups and cloud computing more than most SaaS founders.
57) Stripe
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Patrick Collison
Entire industries have been built on SaaS payment pioneers, Stripe. Ridesharing companies Lyft and Uber? Proud Stripe clients. Food Delivery companies like DoorDash and Postmates? Also Stripe clients.
Unlike Square, Stripe’s focus was serving developers with tools to make payment processing easy in their applications.
Stripe is a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. Businesses use the software to accept online payments and run complex global operations. So the next time you take an Uber from the airport or order dinner via Postmates – thank Stripe. See what the online payments juggernaut can do for your business.
58) Zuora
- Headquarters: San Mateo, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Tien Tzuo
Countless traditional businesses have switched to a subscription model with the help of Zuora. The 2010s were boom times for the subscription economy – and Zuora was powering industry stalwarts like Ford, Fender, and the Guardian into brave new eras of subscription-based business models and recurring revenue.
Zuora helps companies offer subscription billing models to customers via their cloud-based invoicing software. Designed for enterprises, Zuora offers applications that are designed to automate recurring billing, collections, quoting, revenue recognition, and subscription metrics.
If you’re considering switching to a subscription-based revenue model, look no further than Zuora.
Project Management Tools
59) Airtable
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Howie Liu
Airtable is every project management software on steroids. Unbelievably robust, fun-to-use, and flexible, Airtable is rapidly replacing traditional spreadsheets, databases, and project management tools with an uber-customizable platform that can be used by virtually anyone for any purpose.
Looking to collaborate on projects? Create a customer database? Map timelines? Organize your content calendar? AirTable makes it seamless and visual, offering a ton of apps, integrations, calendars, content sharing, configuration, and group sorting capabilities.
The end result: Businesses have the freedom to arrange work and projects in ways that best suit their processes. Plus, AirTable comes with a ton of awesome templates to kickstart your usage.
60) Asana
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Dustin Moskovitz
A rising star in the world of project management, Asana is a work management platform that helps businesses assign and track tasks, keep employees organized, and ensure projects get completed on time.
The platform offers a smooth workflow where tasks can be easily transferred from employee to employee without any extra tools or hassles. Businesses can easily manage their employee’s projects and productivity.
The 2010s was a boom time for Asana – and anyone looking to create a team that is task-oriented and results-driven.
61) Basecamp
- Headquarters: Chicago, Illinois
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Jason Fried
A favorite of graphic designers and developers, Basecamp is a highly-visual project management tool that offers a private, secure space online where people working together can organize and discuss various projects.
Over 3.3 million people use Basecamp to collaborate on projects and get things done. See what makes the platform so popular and check out the project management tool for yourself.
62) Box
- Headquarters: Redwood City, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Aaron Levie
Cloud content management is dead simple with Box, one of the first pioneers in online file sharing and cloud content management services. Box enables businesses to create, collaborate, and disseminate content safely and securely.
Boasting major clients such as GE and FICO, plus over 1,400 integration partners, Box gives you total control and power over your content, offering unlimited storage, custom branding, and administrative controls in addition to a host of other great features.
63) Dropbox
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Drew Houston
Dropbox has been making the world safe for file hosting and content collaboration since 2007, giving businesses the ability to seamlessly create and share content on one digital workspace. The platform offers massive benefits for anyone working in graphic design, legal, finance, content marketing, or project management, allowing users to safely and securely share key documents without worry.
Whether you’re looking to back up files, sign documents, or push a project to completion, Dropbox has the tools you need to get the job done. Take a free test drive of the platform and see how your productivity improves with the help of Dropbox.
64) LucidChart
- Headquarters: South Jordan, Utah
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Karl Sun
Visual tools, like diagrams, can be an effective teaching method to learn about sales processes and workflows, plus more. Thanks to the folks at Lucid, it is becoming easier than ever to craft and share visual depictions of your workflows, organizational charts, and processes.
The company’s signature tool, LucidChart, is an online diagram and visual solution businesses use to ensure employees and teams are on the same page with diagrams. Businesses can make diagrams and collaborate and communicate with their teams anytime, anywhere with Lucid. If you need help outlining your processes visually, give Lucid a look.
65) Monday.com
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Roy Mann
A relative newcomer to the project management space, Monday.com is a team management platform offering businesses the ability to plan projects and to keep employees aligned with goals. The platform allows everyone to see work changes and gives a clear overview of what everyone needs to do.
Using Monday.com, businesses can easily keep track of who is doing what, its progress, and the date of completion. Monday.com provides teams with the tools necessary for creating effective collaboration and meeting deadlines.
Website Content
66) GitHub
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Nat Friedman (GitHub is a subsidiary of Microsoft)
The province of world-class web developers, Github is an open-source version control service that enables users to create public or private repositories — allowing other users to copy, share, manage, and store versions and revisions of a project.
Sounds nerdy, huh? The numbers aren’t. Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion, which is impressive no matter how you look at it. In terms of sheer volume, the number of users and companies relying on GitHub is staggering.
Over 40 million developers and 2.1 million companies use GitHub to help develop projects. The company’s innovative App marketplace and API integrations ensure maximum functionality and allow the platform to work seamlessly among your other platforms. You may not know GitHub, but your developers sure do.
67) Medium
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Evan Williams
In a decade when everyone started publishing content online, Medium broke new ground and blazed its own territory as a content publishing hub. The company created the world’s first online publishing platform that allows businesses to connect with insightful writers and storytellers.
As one of the co-founders of Twitter, Williams has a deep appreciation for user-generated content. At the turn of the decade, Medium is a trusted place where business employees can read and write stories to share with their audiences.
Workers can learn new information from others across the globe or write useful blog-style posts to share. The company also publishes excellent digests that send readers tailored picks of the best content for them.
68) Prezi
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Peter Arvai
Known as the cure for “Death-by-Powerpoint,” Prezi is a presentation software businesses used to share information with groups of all sizes in a wonderfully immersive and flexible format.
Prezi makes the presentation process easier, more collaborative, more data-driven, and more customizable, allowing creators the ability to build multimedia presentations with non-linear formatting, so they can tell stories instead of just jumping from one slide to the next.
Share useful data and charts with a presentation style that will take your business to the next level, using Prezi.
69) Shopify
- Headquarters: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Tobias Lutke
Thanks to Shopify, it’s literally never been easier to build a business, find customers, and sell them your products. The cloud-based commerce platform is the force behind the eCommerce revolution of the 2010s, offering its users the ability to design, set up, and manage their stores across multiple sales channels.
Used across 175 countries, Shopify enjoys one of the most loyal and vocal customer bases on the planet. It’s a small wonder given the numbers that Shopify users show from using the product – one study in 2018 found that the exports of businesses using Shopify are nearly 7X the rate of the market average.
If you’re looking to join the eCommerce movement, Shopify is your starting point.
70) Squarespace
- Headquarters: New York, New York
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Anthony Casalena
Need to build a website, but have zero web design or development experience? Fret not. Squarespace has your back.
Over a million websites have been built using Squarespace. The Squarespace platform offers businesses the ability to build expert style websites without the hassle of coding. Employees and teams can also choose to stand out with a professional website, portfolio, or online store.
For anyone looking to build a great-looking website quickly, Squarespace is an all-in-one platform with everything you need to run and grow a business website.
71) Unbounce
- Headquarters: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Rick Perrault
Since 2009, Unbounce has been bringing data insights and scientific rigor to the art of website and landing page building. A conversion rate optimizer’s best friend, Unbounce remains one of the most robust landing page builders and conversion platforms on the market. It’s an invaluable resource for helping businesses with their marketing efforts.
Looking to convert more leads from your advertising dollars into sales? Use Unbounce. Need to create new landing pages, pop-ups, and sticky bars to grow your business? Use Unbounce. Want to A/B test new messaging for your company? You guessed it, use Unbounce.
Give the king of landing page builders a whirl and see what it can do for your conversion rates and your bottom line.
72) Vimeo
- Headquarters: New York, New York
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Anaji Sud
The 2010s were a banner year for online videos. For those who were responsible for creating, distributing, embedding, and analyzing those videos, Vimeo was a must-have. Admired by filmmakers and videographers for its quality and prosumer features, it’s a premium alternative to YouTube.
The all-in-one hosting, sharing, and streaming video platform grew by leaps and bounds over the course of the 2010s, offering a fast, customizable, high-quality, and easily embeddable ad-free video player for businesses and individuals.
As video continues to proliferate in the 2020s, expect more major moves from Vimeo in the decade ahead.
73) Wistia
- Headquarters: Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Chris Savage
Wistia is a video hosting platform that offers businesses video hosting, creation, and editing solutions that make it dead simple for creators to produce new videos, house them in one central location and track views, engagement rate, and conversions.
Previously, companies had one choice, Brightcove, but that was cost-prohibitive and difficult to use for most small businesses.
Despite YouTube’s rise in popularity, it wasn’t ever optimal for commercial use. This is where Wistia comes into play. For businesses that want to generate leads, track consumption, and so much more, Wistia is a perfect fit.
74) Wix
- Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Abrahami Avishai
Wix hosts a whopping 160 million websites —yes, you read that number right. A rising star in the website development space, Wix is a cloud-based web development platform that gives users everything they need to create high-converting eCommerce sites, beautiful portfolio pages, slick and professional company websites.
With Wix, you can choose from hundreds of templates for your site and have unlimited pages. The platform is perfect for novice website developers looking to make their first site – in other words, 95% of you reading this article. Give Wix a look and upgrade your business’s digital storefront.
75) Automattic
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Matt Mullenweg (Founder of WordPress)
The undisputed heavyweight champion of website development and online publishing, WordPress is an open-source web publishing software where users can create a website or blog, then supercharge it with dozens of plugins and themes. WordPress powers 35% of the entire internet. Wow!
76) Cincopa
- Headquarters: Tel Aviv
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Oren Shmulevich
Powerful digital asset management, Cincopa has really made a name for itself in terms of video hosting and management. Offering a variety of lead generating features, such as on-video forms, CTAs, chapters, and annotations, Cincopa empowers modern companies to untap their videos’ true business potential.
With its free Chrome extension, RecTrace, you can record yourself, your screen or both and send out to-the-point, personalized videos to leads and customers.
Honorable Mention: CloudApp
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Scott Smith
Our Honorable Mention company, CloudApp, is one of the rising stars in the enterprise content creation space. CloudApp makes it dead simple to create instantly shareable GIFs, videos, and personalized messages using their simple-yet-robust screen capture, editing, and analytics tools.
Record and share images and videos, collaborate on projects and communicate more easily and powerfully using CloudApp.
These tools are meant to make your business stronger, effective, and focused.
When your team’s equipped with the right tools, they can spend more time where they are needed most — with the customer.
Key trends and insights from over 1,000 professionals.
