Software-as-a-Service companies (SaaS) have been developing at a rapid clip since the turn of the millennium. Then, the pandemic supercharged the entire market. Nowadays, corporations run up to 93% of their work on SaaS solutions rather than traditional software models.
The reasons for this are evident. SaaS providers offer a massive range of advantages for companies and end users. Hosted software applications eliminate the need for complex local installations. Clients can access them from any internet-enabled devices. And providers promise fast IT support and reliable network security.
Plus, SaaS offers easy scalability, low-cost updates, and maximum geographical mobility.
Thus, the rapid growth of the corporate and consumer SaaS market is hardly surprising. Statista projects that global end-user spending on SaaS solutions alone will exceed $230 billion in 2024 – a 15% plus.
But what are the biggest SaaS players in the field now and going forward? What companies should investors keep an eye on?
Here’s the full run-down. We’ve based it on companies’ size and growth trends, as well as how omnipresent their products are in today’s business world.
* This list is not sponsored. The companies are listed in no particular order *
1 – Salesforce
Leading this list of the best SaaS companies of 2023 is Salesforce. The company builds Customer Relationship Management systems, or CRMs. Salesforce’s CRM was one of the very first software offers to use the SaaS model from its inception.
A CRM tool allows businesses to keep tabs on their customers. This includes data on their purchases, response to advertising, and interactions with customer service. Ultimately, CRM data helps companies optimize their workflows, personalization, and outreach and so grow their revenue.
Today, CRM systems are a staple tool in any digital marketing arsenal. However, it was Salesforce that brought them into the mainstream over the past two decades.
One of Salesforce’s strong points is the huge number of integrations with other SaaS business platforms. They range from email marketing to task management, and you’ll find a few of these on this list as well!
With more than 150,000 customers worldwide and a revenue of $31 billion for its 2023 fiscal year – a plus of 17% year over year – Salesforce is a true SaaS giant.
2 – Zoom
Zoom is no surprise on our 2023 list of the best SaaS companies.
Few SaaS players saw as big a boom as this video conferencing provider during the pandemic. Or that have become as essential a staple in our everyday digital lives. It rapidly grew into the video call and conferencing – for business, education, and personal communication.
By March 2020, Zoom was handling 200 million daily video calls. By autumn, the verb “to zoom” had vaulted the company into the realm of giants like Kleenex, FedEx, Google, and Adobe. At the end of the year, Zoom’s market capitalization had quintupled its 2019 value. Owing to the end of lockdowns – and some investor hype – the market cap consolidated at $18 billion.
Zoom’s major advantages are its reliable connection, versatile features, easy usability, and fairly lightweight software. Partly, this is due to the company’s origins. Its founder, Eric Yuan, wanted to create a straightforward way to communicate with his girlfriend (now his wife), who was studying at a university across the country.
Competitors like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, GoTo Meeting and rookies like Jitsi and Big Blue Button have tried to contend for Zoom’s top spot in the videoconferencing world, but with limited success. Video calling is now also a standard feature of business communication services such as Nextiva farther down on this list.
Zoom’s revenue gains have slowed owing to the return to offices, and the quarterly revenue now stands at $1 billion.
3 – HubSpot
HubSpot defined inbound marketing as we know it today throughout the last decade. It now offers a fully integrated marketing automation platform. The suite includes a CRM and a sales hub, among other tools, making it a marketing technology leader.
Businesses dramatically stepped up their digital marketing game during the pandemic. This trend has slowed slightly, but shows no sign of stopping, even as budgets for traditional ad campaigns are shrinking.
HubSpot’s Q2 report for 2023 saw customer numbers climb to nearly 185,000, 23% more than a year before. Around the world, the company now employs some 7,400 people.
4 – Mailchimp
Next up is Mailchimp, one of the most widely-used email marketing solutions.
Founded in 2001, Mailchimp is among the most venerable – and biggest – email marketing platforms out there. The Atlanta-based SaaS company offers integrated marketing automation services for highly targeted email campaigns.
However, the range of Mailchimp’s features extends much further. It includes complex automated messaging set-ups, detailed statistics and analytics insights, and segmentation of recipients. Furthermore, Mailchimp offers integration with major CRM tools, as well as platforms like Google Analytics.
Mailchimp’s strong suits are its ease of use, flexibility, and scalability. It also offers countless integrations for other SaaS tools – including HubSpot and Salesforce. As of its last report, Mailchimp has over 14 million customers and claims a 60% market share in its industry. The service now powers email for over a million domains. Honoring this, Mailchimp was acquired by Intuit in 2021 in a $12 billion deal.
5 – Nextiva
Nextiva is an Arizona-based company that began as a provider of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) business phone services. Led by CEO Tomas Gorny, the company grew from a tiny startup in 2008 to one of the biggest players on the VoIP market.
It reached more than $200 million in revenues without accepting outside funding, though the company has recently also raised $200 million from investors.
From its beginnings in cloud phone services, Nextiva has expanded into an integrated business communications platform, including video calling and conferencing, a CRM system, a host of automation features, and an analytics suite powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Early in 2020, Nextiva also released a team collaboration app, Cospace, to help clients struggling with the transition to telecommuting during the pandemic. It has now evolved into a secure solution for putting the entire office in all team member’s pockets.
6 – Grammarly
Some business models are as simple as they are brilliant. Grammarly’s is one of them. The San Francisco SaaS unicorn is on a mission to combat spelling and grammar mistakes in anything you write.
A saving grace for overworked editors and jet-lagged businesspeople too tired to puzzle out whether it’s “it’s” or “its”, Grammarly improves any text you type. It offers its own writing app, but also has plug-ins for Word, various browsers, and email clients.
It helps users generate grammatically correct content across a wide variety of business contexts, from email campaigns to industry whitepapers by harnessing AI-based text enhancement.
To this end, Grammarly leverages artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing (NLP). Based on this technology, the tool can improve readability, and generate suggestions on style and word choices.
Founded in 2008, the SaaS company now helps over 30 million users improve their writing. Its latest coup was to secure over $200 million in funding for extending the capabilities of its natural language processing AI to further improve its services. It raised this investment at a valuation of a whopping $13 billion.
7 – Hootsuite
Based in Vancouver, Canada, Hootsuite is a social media management platform. It helps both businesses and individuals step up their social media game. With Hootsuite’s tools, they can manage multiple accounts across all platforms – from X/Twitter to Instagram – in a single dashboard.
Hootsuite also allows users to automate processes, schedule posts, keep on top of social media campaigns, and gain analytics insights.
Considering that social media has become a crucial channel of customer communication – 4.88 billion people use one or multiple platforms – Hootsuite’s success is not surprising. Most recently, the company boasted over 18 million users in 175 countries.
8 – Atlassian
Though the name Atlassian might not ring a bell for most people, the Australian SaaS company’s products certainly do – at least among developers. Jira, Confluence, BitBucket, Trello, OpsGenie – these are just some of them. The powerhouse from Down Under basically offers a full suite of tools for remote teams.
Jira is a complex project management platform, especially aimed at agile development teams. Trello, in contrast, is a more broad-spectrum team collaboration and project management app. Based on boards and cards, it allows teams to coordinate tasks and manage workflows.
Atlassian’s strong service offer helped the company navigate the pandemic. In its latest quarterly report (Q4 of fiscal 2023), it could boast a revenue of $939 million – fully 24 % higher than a year before. Its full-year revenue stands at $3.5 billion, and the customer base has expanded to over 250,000.
9 – Shopify
When it comes to setting up eCommerce stores, no platform is more popular than Shopify: It powers nearly 30% of the sites in this market. The Canadian company makes it possible for any eCommerce entrepreneur to grow their business, connect with customers, sell their products, and handle shipping. Over the years, Shopify has expanded beyond a strictly online offer, and now also provides POS hardware for brick-and-mortar stores.
Since its foundation in 2004, Shopify has been one of the driving forces of the eCommerce revolution of the past decade. In Q2 of fiscal 2023, it clocked a revenue of $1.7 billion, 31% more year over year.
Today, the platform hosts over 4.6 million stores in 175 countries. It, too, has seen a giant pandemic boost: Shoppers more than doubled from 218 million in 2019 to 457 million in 2020.
10 – Adobe
The next entry on this list is Adobe with its Creative Cloud, the go-to SaaS solution for creatives – from graphic designers to video editors. It includes staples such as Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Lightroom, and basic applications like Adobe’s PDF editor.
Creative Cloud allows countless businesses – from big-brand firms to freelance graphic designers – to create layouts, edit photos, design logos, and manage PDF documents. Adobe’s cloud storage library also allows teams to collaborate remotely. Some years ago, the company supercharged the offer by launching Adobe Sensei, an AI design solution.
Overall, there are few businesses whose marketing campaigns can do without Creative Cloud.
Adobe’s revenue from Creative Cloud has been rising steadily – from $5.34 billion in 2018 to $12.84 billion in 2022. Piggybacking on the release of a host of AI features, the company’s creator segment brought in $2.91 billion in Q3 of fiscal 2023 alone, growing 11% year over year.
11 – Microsoft
Next up, Microsoft is another software veteran that successfully navigated the transition to the SaaS sphere. It transformed its local Office suite into Microsoft 365, a ubiquitous cloud collaboration tool.
Microsoft 365 provides secure cloud data storage and a wide range of tools fundamental to the operations of pretty much any business. It’s fair to say that there are few people in today’s business world who hasn’t written a report in Word, put together a presentation in PowerPoint, or tried to make sense of a spreadsheet in Excel.
In addition, Microsoft expanded into the collaboration and communication market. In 2017, it launched Microsoft Teams, which became a staple among remote workers during the pandemic.
The company’s revenues from Microsoft 365 are continuously increasing. According to recent figures, revenue from Office products alone has risen to $11.5 billion in Q1 2023, which represents a nearly 7% growth year over year. Apart from being one of the best SaaS companies in 2023, this also makes it one of the most profitable.
12 – Google
When you say remote collaboration, you say Google Workplace (formerly G Suite).
This is Google’s challenge to Microsoft 365 and similar offers. It includes a very similar set of features. You can edit text documents in Google Docs, spreadsheets in Sheets, and presentations in Slides. Google Calendar allows you to keep track of your appointments, and Gmail manages your messages. If you need a video conferencing solution, Google Meet has you covered.
Especially during the pandemic and the general shift to remote operations, Google Workplace saw a huge surge. Now, it is the standard remote collaboration platform for countless businesses and freelancers.
In 2023, Google’s quarterly cloud revenue grew to $8 billion, nearly doubling from 2021’s $4.63 billion.
13 – Proton VPN & Proton Mail
Mixing things up a little is Proton AG. Unlike most other entries on this list of the best SaaS companies, Proton is not a well-established company, but a startup.
Founded in 2016 and based in Switzerland, this company’s main solutions are an encrypted mail service and a VPN (virtual private network) service. VPNs help businesses and consumers encrypt their internet traffic and keep their data safe. In the face of growing cybersecurity threats, this is becoming increasingly essential.
Consequently, Proton VPN, Mail, and the company’s other solutions have signed up over 100 million users as of 2023.
14 – SEMrush
In the world of digital marketing, there are few SaaS tools better-established than SEMrush. This tool allows companies to get ahead on search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing.
SEMrush provides insights into various sources of internet traffic, as well as the performance of businesses’ own websites and those of their competitors. Marketers also use the tool to research which search phrases are trending on Google and could help drive interested customers to their sites.
In addition, SEMrush provides tools for outreach and content marketing, social media integrations, and paid advertising features.
It maintains a database of 21 billion search terms, 808 million domains, and 500 terabytes of traffic data from 190 countries, outperforming major competitors like Ahrefs and Moz on numbers.
15 – Freshworks
The final entry on this list is Freshworks. Founded in 2010, it provides end-to-end solutions for small to mid-sized businesses for purposes such as HR, CRM, and IT service management. To this end, it has developed extensive AI features as well as numerous integrations.
Some of Freshworks’ most well-known products are Freshdesk, Freshteam, Freshcaller, and Freshchat. Freshdesk, for instance, is one of the most widespread customer support solutions in the SaaS sphere.
In 2022, Freshworks’ revenue hit $338 million, a 35% YOY growth, with an overall valuation of over $9 billion.
Conclusion
The SaaS space is hyper-competitive and in constant flux. The companies on this list have managed to navigate it successfully and turn their products into omnipresent business staples.
Do you agree with our ranking? Or still think we’ve left an important contender out? Let us know your top picks for the best SaaS companies of 2023 – and your picks for 2024 – in the comments!
