SaaS spend management software allows organizations to manage and optimize their cloud-based software spending, helping to streamline business operations, reduce costs, and improve overall efficiency. These solutions offer useful features such as expense tracking, subscription management, budgeting, reporting, and optimization. Together, these tools help businesses to get a better understanding of their SaaS-related expenses. As cloud-based software continues to become a more integral part of organizational infrastructure, ensuring that you have an efficient SaaS spend management solution (and strategy) in place allows you to ensure value for money and configuration optimization.
The best SaaS spend management tools integrate seamlessly with various cloud platforms and SaaS applications, providing real-time visibility into expenses and usage patterns. This helps organizations to identify underutilized software, eliminate duplicate and redundant subscriptions, manage renewals, and negotiate better pricing for their SaaS subscriptions. Some of these solutions also provide tools for forecasting future SaaS spending, allowing companies to make data-driven decisions on their software investments.
Selecting the ideal SaaS spend management software can be a challenge for businesses needing to find the right solution for their unique use case. This guide will explore the top 10 SaaS spend management solutions available today. We will assess each platform’s key features, ease of use, integrations, and customer feedback, allowing you to make an informed decision.
BetterCloud offers a zero-touch SaaS management solution that automates user lifecycle processes and daily operations in a multi-SaaS environment. This allows IT managers to eliminate up to 78% of SaaS management work and focus on more strategic projects. User Lifecycle Management (ULM) is a critical aspect of BetterCloud’s solution, which controls costs and optimizes SaaS usage within organizations.
By managing entitlements, automating mid-lifecycle management and self-service, and effectively handling offboarding processes, ULM contributes to SaaS spending management, reduces IT ticket volumes, and promotes operational efficiency. BetterCloud’s vendor-agnostic approach supports a wide range of popular SaaS applications, allowing organizations to manage and govern their entire SaaS ecosystem from a single platform.
In the ever-evolving SaaS management space, BetterCloud stands out as an effective platform with advanced security capabilities, continuous innovation, and a proven track record. By starting with the foundation of ULM and leveraging BetterCloud’s SaaS Management Platform, organizations can optimize their SaaS utilization, enhance security, and unlock the full potential of their SaaS ecosystem, while managing costs efficiently.
CloudEagle is a comprehensive SaaS management platform that assists businesses in reducing costs and gaining visibility into their software stacks. The platform delivers a range of functions, such as eliminating shadow IT, managing licenses, tracking usage, and streamlining renewals within a single solution.
CloudEagle allows businesses to quickly discover all applications in their stack, thanks to out-of-the-box connectors that integrate with SSO, finance systems, browser extensions, and desktop agents. It can then centralize contract and vendor data to prevent the loss of critical contract information in emails or personal drives. Metadata extraction from contracts ensures easy access and management.
The platform simplifies the contract renewal process, alleviating last-minute stress. CloudEagle’s automatic renewal workflows provide reminders and assign tasks to appropriate stakeholders up to 90 days in advance, with notifications sent via Slack and email. Optimized license management enables businesses to track and reallocate underutilized or unused licenses, avoiding unnecessary software expenses.
CloudEagle also offers custom reporting capabilities, catering to various business needs such as board meetings, budget planning, M&A, quarterly reviews, and funding diligence. Users can explore data on budgeting, tech changes, SaaS spend per employee, and request custom reports to suit their specific requirements.
Genuity SaaS & Vendor Expense Management is a comprehensive solution for managing software expenses, usage, contracts, and compliance, allowing businesses to optimize their entire tech stack. Developed to simplify and level the playing field for businesses of all sizes, Genuity provides a clear overview of SaaS and vendor expenses, helping you discover savings opportunities and optimize spending.
To visualize your SaaS costs, Genuity automatically syncs business transactions, enabling you to identify spending patterns and gain valuable insights. The platform provides clear spend visualization and charts your spending over time, ensuring you have complete clarity into where your money is going. Additionally, Genuity offers actionable insights to help organizations streamline their expenses.
The setup process for Genuity is quick and user-friendly, with the ability to easily sync a business account and map transactions with repeat vendors. The platform takes care of automatic transaction tracking, specific vendor spend visualization, and sends alerts and notifications for price spikes. This ensures businesses can optimize their spending, without paying for unnecessary or unplanned expenses.
NachoNacho is a comprehensive SaaS management platform designed to help businesses save money and time by streamlining their SaaS stack. Trusted by various small and mid-sized organizations worldwide, NachoNacho offers a centralized solution to manage all existing subscriptions effectively and easily.
With NachoNacho, users can create virtual payment cards with specific spending limits for each SaaS provider, earning 1.5% cashback on their purchases. The platform features a single dashboard that provides real-time visibility into all active subscriptions and their expenses. Waste identification is made simple by the platform’s search and filter functionalities, allowing users to quickly pinpoint duplicate or hidden subscriptions.
NachoNacho also addresses common pain points such as cancellation issues and protecting against unexpected charges or misuse. The ability to cancel individual payment cards ensures hassle-free termination of unwanted services, while setting spending limits and isolating each vendor payment guards against potential financial risks. Additionally, NachoNacho simplifies employee onboarding and offboarding processes, offering seamless migration of subscriptions and elimination of unauthorized access to company assets.
Productiv is a Spend Management Platform that is designed to integrate with your core operating systems and utilize AI-powered data to enhance collaboration, thereby streamlining the decision-making processes. This solution gives you more control over purchases, renewals, and SaaS, vendor management, empowering you to make informed decisions about your organization’s spending.
This platform provides intelligent data paired with scalable processes and workflows, resulting in full visibility into your spending patterns. This helps you to make strategic procurement decisions. It also combats third-party risk with comprehensive compliance tracking and intuitive vendor assessment workflows, allowing your organization to manage risk efficiently. The platform automates manual processes through no-code workflows, bringing data and insights to your core processes and enabling smarter, more collaborative decision-making.
The AI-driven platform offers features such as renewals management with customizable workflows, pricing benchmarks, usage data, and custom alerts. It can also facilitate purchase management processes, app access management, intelligent app recommendations, and streamlined access requests. The vendor management features deliver detailed vendor insights and compliance tracking. Overall, Productiv is a spend management platform that allows you to scale procurement processes, maintain governance, manage app access with ease, and seamlessly collaborate on renewals.
Vertice is a platform designed for finance and tech leaders to optimize their SaaS and cloud spending. The platform offers granular visibility into expenses, delivers advanced forecasting, and customizable workflows. This can help you to save up to 20-30% annually. With Vertice, organizations can gain control over their SaaS and cloud usage while minimizing costs.
The platform automates cost saving decisions by using algorithms for buying and selling reserved instances and optimization tests for identifying cost-saving opportunities. Additionally, Vertice provides insights, granular visibility, and negotiation tools to help you understand, control, and forecast your costs. It encourages efficient collaboration between finance and tech teams, ensuring they work together to optimize cloud spending.
Vertice’s Reserved Instance Optimizer (RIO) can reduce your compute spend by up to 60% using advanced algorithms that automate coverage based on your unique usage trends. The recommendation engine continuously monitors your cloud environment, identifying detailed and actionable saving opportunities with minimal engineering effort. The platform also supports effective collaboration between finance and tech teams by breaking down cloud costs into digestible dashboards, displaying expense distribution and potential savings.
Setting up Vertice is simple and hassle-free. It connects to your cloud environment via read-only permissions, aggregating all cloud spend in one platform for immediate access to automated savings and deep insights.
Zluri is a comprehensive platform that combines granular SaaS management and cloud-first identity governance to help businesses prevent shadow IT, control spending, and secure access for all apps. It aims to discover 100% of a company’s apps by utilizing SSOs, 800+ integrations, agents, and a database of over 250,000 apps. This helps organizations identify and manage all SaaS applications, optimize costs, and eliminate redundancy.
The platform offers usage-based license and app optimization, enabling businesses to slash spending and rationalize redundant apps. With its centralized contract management, Zluri categorizes and maps every license and contract while keeping track of renewals. It also provides 360° visibility into all apps and allows IT managers to make data-driven decisions.
Zluri not only analyzes sub-optimal apps and licenses to uncover real savings outcomes, but also examines five different usage buckets across apps to generate a savings output. By utilizing historical analysis and predictive models, Zluri’s license forecasting feature helps businesses predict and save on future license needs. The platform also supports automated thresholds for app usage, allowing licenses to be reclaimed, and can create a perpetual savings cycle. Zluri also aids in rationalizing the SaaS environment by identifying and consolidating duplicate apps or shared features, thereby optimizing a company’s software stack.
Zylo is a SaaS spend management platform that helps businesses monitor and optimize software expenses and usage. With a centralized view of all SaaS purchases, organizations can easily track and manage their subscriptions, renewals, and negotiations.
By providing insights into application usage, contract terms, and renewal dates, Zylo enables better decision-making when it comes to software investments. Users can identify redundant applications and underused licenses, helping to eliminate waste and ensure resources are allocated efficiently.
Zylo’s platform is backed by a database of over $30B in SaaS spend, which provides industry-leading benchmarks for software pricing. This information empowers users to negotiate effectively with vendors and secure the best possible deals. Additionally, Zylo offers negotiation services by a team of experts who can manage the process from start to finish, saving time and effort while maintaining professional relationships with vendors. As a vendor-agnostic solution, Zylo supports negotiations with any software provider, focusing on securing the most favorable terms for the tools that suit each organization’s unique needs.
Everything You Need To Know About SaaS Spend Management Software (FAQs)
What Is SaaS Spend Management Software?
SaaS spend management software gathers data regarding the features and capabilities of your SaaS tools, then enables you to make more informed decisions regarding their usage. These platforms may indicate that you are paying for systems that you rarely use, or that have shared features. In these cases, it may be prudent to terminate a contract and adapt your workflow. A spend management tool will also be able to keep track of contracts, alerting you to renewals and possible savings. Some platforms are able to assist with negotiation; they can help to ensure that you get an effective tool at the right price.
Common features of SaaS spend management software includes:
- SaaS product discovery
- Cost optimization
- Usage analysis
- Centralized contract, licensing, and billing management
How Does SaaS Spend Management Software Work?
SaaS spend management software helps organizations to streamline and optimize their operations through canceling redundant SaaS subscriptions and better utilizing the ones they do keep.
This type of tool begins by identifying the SaaS tools that your organization uses. Once identified, the platform can log key metrics such as contract date, cost, and usage. This metrics can be visualized through a centralized management dashboard.
The SaaS spend management tool will use usage metrics and feature lists to assess if you are making a prudent investment in each SaaS tool. It can identify any SaaS tools with overlapping feature sets, thereby allowing you to remove a tool and streamline your infrastructure.
Beyond this, SaaS spend management tools can assist as you look to make further investments and integrate additional SaaS tools. They can incorporate AI analysis to forecast future spending levels, ensuring that you get value for money. This AI analysis ensures that you SaaS spend is necessary and accounted for, ensuring that processes are as optimized and economically efficient as they can be.
What Features Should You Look For In SaaS Spend Management Software?
It may seem counter intuitive to invest in a new tool when trying to make savings and reduce overspend. However, the benefits (and cost savings identified by SaaS spend management software) can outweigh that initial investment. It is important, however, that you select the right platform for your unique use case. With this in mind, we have identified some of the key features that you should look for in a SaaS management software to ensure that it is effective and will be an asset to your organization.
Effective AI analysis – The real value of a SaaS spend management solution is in its ability to analyses your current usage and trends, allowing you to focus your spend on key areas, rather than areas that are underused. AI analysis can provide extensive insight, guiding you to make smart and prudent business decisions.
Contract Monitoring And Tracking– An effective solution should monitor when contracts are up for renewal, giving organizations sufficient time to decide if they will continue with the contract. This gives organization’s visibility into their network, meaning that they can predict spending and don’t have to make any last minute decisions.
Budget Tracking – Some SaaS services will charge you extra for services out with the contracted package. This additional spend can quickly rack up if not monitored effectively. Spend management tools should alert you when additional spending is happening, ensuring that you can stay on top of it.
User-Friendly Interface – Your platform should present the data and analysis that it has generated in a straightforward and practical way. It should be easy to identify key metrics and have easy ways of sharing or exporting this information to key stakeholders.
