Software as a service (SaaS) companies have transformed the way global businesses work. Ever since its inception in the 1960s, SaaS has evolved from a mere time-sharing system to innovative and efficient applications that can be accessed on multiple computers. Growing at the same pace, a report from BetterCloud had anticipated that 73% of the organizations will have all SaaS apps by 2020. And the result is visible! In this blog we’ll talk about SaaS business and top 50 SaaS companies.
SaaS businesses are organizations that provide subscription-based software applications that are centrally hosted on their servers over the internet. Instead of buying and installing the infrastructure, customers can simply bear the subscription costs of the functionalities they use.
69% of enterprise companies say that majority of the apps will be SaaS by 2020.
As each company is increasingly interested to use SaaS as a winning strategy, several recent trends in 2020 have been observed amongst top SaaS businesses:
- For top SaaS companies in 2020, the product is to become the driver of growth. Product-led growth and usage of the data for customer success and other strategies can be a powerful proposition.
- Customer spending growth is winning over the number of unique apps that directly suggests focusing on the existing vendors. With product differentiation as a pivotal factor, SaaS companies are going niche-specific. Vertical SaaS grows as more focus on specific customer needs, through a bottom-up approach, is observed.
- There has been a gradual shift from client/server architecture to the options provided by a hybrid cloud – the integration of public and private cloud. Owing to cost-effectiveness and confidentiality attributes, SaaS company continue to opt for cloud services. See here how we architected a cutting edge Customer Success platform.
- According to a report by Blissfully, SaaS companies are churning through more than 30% of their apps every year. This is increasing the spending as more and more features are being offered, through acquisitions or expansion.
- 18% of purchased software products have a user satisfaction rating lower than 4 stars – reported by G2.
- A noteworthy contribution by AI has fortified cloud security. Thus, any potential threats can be easily recognized and captivated before they cause any damage to the infrastructure.
- The gigantic explosion of SaaS companies posed a need for efficient integration and data migration. This is achieved with the assistance of third-party APIs. Hence, APIs are ubiquitously used for most SaaS businesses.
SaaS companies build their business in three steps: setup, growth, and stabilization. Setting up a SaaS company requires a tailored approach to ensure rapid installation and seamless integration with customers’ systems. Building the business necessitates strong product focus and lower implementation costs to provide the customer with better deployment experience.
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Important SaaS Stats for 2021
- 73 % of companies feel that most of their apps will be SaaS by 2021
- By 2021, the corporate mobile market is expected to be around $7.4 billion
- By 2021, the SaaS workload will reach 380 million
- Close to $ 142 billion will be generated due to SaaS by 2022
To ensure the best names reach you, we have analyzed several ranking reports of the top SaaS companies in the world in 2021 and compiled the top 50 SaaS companies here:
See how leading SaaS companies use SmartKarrot to monitor product usage and customer health, predict and prevent churn, spot upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and drive customer advocacy. Request a free, personalized demo today.
IT & Security
- Founded: 1999
- Headquarters: Bellevue, Washington, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Birger Steen
In the field of technology, nothing remains stagnant. But ever since 20 years, Parallels continues to rule the world of cross-platform virtualization software solutions for macOS. The SaaS company recorded a $100 million revenue within just 9 years of its inception in 1999.
- Founded: 1999
- Headquarters: Austin, Texas, U.S.
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Kevin Thompson
A leading provider of powerful and affordable IT infrastructure management software, it has over 275,000 customers in 190 countries. Solarwinds enables organizations to monitor their IT environments in the cloud or in hybrid models.
- Founded: 2010
- Headquarters: Clearwater, Florida
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Stu Sjouwerman
One of the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform handles IT problems for global companies. Known for ‘conquering human error’, KnowBe4 has achieved #161 Inc. 5000 Rank in 2019 in the security industry.
- Founded: 2016
- Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Zack Blum
A SaaS-based Apple fleet management platform, Fleetsmith automates device setup, intelligence, patching, and security for Apple devices. The founding team targeted multiple commercial solutions with similar device management problems to be addressed.
- Founded: 2003
- Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: William Wagner
This SaaS and cloud-based remote connectivity services company has recorded a revenue of $1.2 billion in 2017. Being one of the world’s top 10 SaaS companies, its products support tens of millions of daily users worldwide.
Customer Support
The Atlassian Corporation has reached billions in revenue even without an enterprise sales team, all by creating user-friendly software development, team collaboration, project management tools including JIRA and Confluence.
- Founded: 2007
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Mikkel Svane
Initially, Zendesk hired people from Denmark, their home country, instead of Silicon Valley because they weren’t aware of the environment. Their belief in the ‘creativity’ of their engineers and the ‘culture’ of their organization proved to be productive in creating multiple products and apps for agents, managers, end customers, and developers.
- Founded: 2011
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Karen Peacock
In 2019, Intercom was reported to generate $50 Million annual recurring revenue. A success rate like this is rarely found in the world, without even spending insane money on marketing. Intercom uses powerful marketing strategies like dynamic keyword insertion, CTAs, and SEO growth strategies in the most unconventional ways.
- Founded: 2011
- Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Nick Francis
Believing in the value of remarkable customer service, HelpScout provides an email-based customer support platform with a knowledge base tool, and an embeddable search/contact widget for customer service professionals.
- Founded: 2013
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Mathilde Collin
Combining productive workflows, help desk analytics, and the ease of email in one, Front serves for 5000+ companies with just one product. They believe in turning ‘emails into action’!
- Founded: 2018
- Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Laduram Vishnoi
Acquire is a top-class customer management SaaS platform with the ultimate objective of providing a modern-day digital customer experience. The company has earned a reputation of being one of the best customer engagement platforms providing a super-rich digital customer experience. The company’s CEO believes in giving a free-hand to its engineers, which ensures an open-ended culture conducive for high-quality product development primarily targeted towards enriching the customer experience in the long run.
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Human Resources
- Founded: 2002
- Headquarters: Sunnyvale, California, U.S.
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Ryan Roslansky
A prodigy for professionals, LinkedIn will soon be celebrating its 17-year anniversary. Within 17 years, 65 million monthly users have trusted it with job postings, recruitments, business handling, and content sharing. What started as a recruitment platform, finds 94% of B2B marketers using it as a content marketing platform and 84% using it for lead generation.
- Founded: 2011
- Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Josh Reeves
Gusto provides a platform for businesses to support their team and handle all business operations in a flexible and scalable manner. It recorded a $3.8 billion valuation in 2019.
- Founded: 2008
- Headquarters: Lindon, Utah
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Bradley Rencher
Often, it is found that small businesses do not find appropriate offerings and solutions for ERP, payroll, etc. BambooHR is optimized for small businesses. They provide free trials, rapid implementation, and easy-to-use customizable solutions.
- Founded: 2012
- Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Nate Smith
Raising a $2.8 million seed fund, followed by several other seed rounds, Lever boasts of one of the best recruiting software, applicant tracking system, and recruitment marketing tools that is used by the top companies across the globe.
- Founded: 2015
- Headquarters: Santa Clara, California, United States
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Hayden Brown
With 12 million registered freelancers and 5 million registered clients, Upwork provides a creative working space for freelancers on its SaaS platform.
Product-based
- Founded: 2012
- Headquarters: Barcelona, Spain
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Joaquim Lecha
This SaaS company started with a simple, yet powerful solution – creating exceptional forms and empowering meaningful brand interactions.
- Founded: 2011
- Headquarters: San Jose, California, United States
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Shantanu Narayen
Adobe is a pioneer among product-based SaaS companies. With 20+ desktop and mobile apps, it facilitates various features like design, video editing, web development, photography, and more for around 15 million subscribers.
- Founded: 2010
- Headquarters: European Union (EU)
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Pieter Omvlee
Transforming the design landscape since 2011, Sketch continuously upgrades itself for the newest technical environments. Sketch 63 promises to have better experiences for Cloud users in 2020.
- Founded: 2014
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Pelin Kenez
Facing the requirements of designers, developers, and managers, Zeplin provides a comfortable connected space for all the product teams to collaborate. In 2020, they are all set with Zeplin 3.0 and 3 million users to serve.
- Founded: 1972
- Headquarters: Walldorf, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Christian Klein
SAP has grown two streams of revenue: cloud and software revenue, and services revenue. With this, it is expected to grow by 5% annually.
- Founded: 2018
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Yazan Sehwail
Userpilot is a Product Experience Software that helps product teams improve user activation, feature engagement, and boost overall product adoption at every stage of the user journey. The tool allows creating in-app experiences that help with user adoption and retention without code, thus empowering product managers and marketers to combat churn without engaging the development team.
Engineering
- Founded: 2008
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Nat Friedman
The ‘haven for programmers’ – GitHub has been providing its services through a SaaS model since 2008. Today, it has more than 40 million users contributing to over 100 million projects.
- Founded: 2001
- Headquarters: Prague, Hlavni mesto Praha, Czech Republic
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Maxim Shafirov
Developed by Jetbrains, the renowned cutting-edge software vendor, IntelliJ IDEA is designed to maximize developer productivity. One of the most efficient Java IDE supporters, it leverages deployment experience.
- Founded: 2011
- Headquarters: Mumbai, India
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Ritesh Arora
A cloud-based web and mobile testing platform, BrowserStack is being used by 25,000 customers globally. This SaaS company ensures seamless integration with the existing setup and easy testing with direct and quick results.
- Founded: 2011
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Jim Rose
To assist in the development process, CircleCI furnishes software companies with continuous integration and delivery. Running over 35 Million builds every month, it has been named a Leader in SaaS continuous integration by Forrester in 2019.
- Founded: 2007
- Headquarters: Västerås, Vastmanlands Lan, Sweden
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Sam Nurmi
Having the top customers like Pinterest, Facebook, and Spotify with other 700,000 more on its portfolio, Pingdom provides website performance data that affect the search ranking, conversions, bounce rates, page views, and revenue of the customer. It has over 70 test locations across Europe, the US, and Asia-Pacific.
Dev Ops
- Founded: 2009
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Jennifer Tejada
PagerDuty alleviates the real-time operations in businesses with its versatile platform, capturing data and insights, interpreting them, engaging with the concerned people and developing concise results. It offers over 350 integrations for streamline processing of organizational operations.
- Founded: 1904
- Headquarters: Stevens Point, Wisconsin, USA
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Pete McPartland
More than 1 million developers use the Sentry SaaS platform to discover and address software errors. With cross-functional visibility, provisioned servers, and reliable performance monitoring, Sentry is your armor to fend off the code bugs.
- Founded: 2000
- Headquarters: Los Angeles, California, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Richard Kirkendall
Namecheap is an ICANN-accredited domain name registrar. They assist 11 Million registered users with over 10 Million domains at easy rates. They even allow customers to sell off domains purchased through them.
- Founded:2010
- Headquarters: Austin, Texas, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Heather Brunner
Providing the combination of software innovation and service, WP Engine is the leading WordPress digital experience platform. With annual recurring revenue of $132 Million, they’re expected to cross the $200 Million mark in 2020.
- Founded: 2010
- Headquarters: New York City, United States
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Olivier Pomel
Owing to stellar analytics and monitoring services for cloud-based workflows, Datadog was one of the 2019’s most successful IPOs. As a constantly upgrading SaaS company, it’s dollar-based net retention rate exceeded 146% which naturally depicted how customers loved the upgrades. Moreover, extensive R&D proves to be a good choice for SaaS.
Business Ops
- Founded: 2006
- Headquarters: Mountain View, CA
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Sundar Pichai
In 2019, more than 5 Million paying businesses were using G Suite and it is an unnecessary obligation to comment on the massive customer base Google has. G Suite and Google Analytics are the most powerful business collaboration tools in the market.
- Founded: 2009
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Stewart Butterfield
Slack has witnessed one of the most explosive growths in the history of SaaS businesses. Interestingly, the way they sell their platform adds to their profits. There are more than 1500 apps in their directory.
- Founded: 1984
- Headquarters: San Jose, California, United States
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Chuck Robbins
Cisco’s growth is often referred to as the ‘growth by acquisition’. The worldwide IT leader of the present times had once tried to make cameras to expand its presence.
- Founded: 2011
- Headquarters: San Jose, California, U.S.
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Eric Yuan
This video-conferencing Saas company is expected to hit a market of $43.1 billion by 2022. Interestingly, Zoom is growing at over 100% a year!
- Founded: 2006
- Headquarters: Redmond, Washington
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Satya Nadella
No introduction would suffice for a giant that serves 200 million active users monthly. But additionally, growing a large base slows down in terms of percentage if the same growth in users is achieved.
Finance & Accounting
- Founded: 1998
- Headquarters: San Jose, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Daniel Schulman
The SaaS company has a phenomenal history and today it operates in 202 countries worldwide. It records an average of 32 payment transactions per active account. It was acquired by eBay in 2002 but split in 2014.
- Founded: 2006
- Headquarters: Palo Alto, California, United States
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: René Lacerte
In a press release, the financial process automation firm confirmed a 124% increase in its payment volume. Indeed, assisting SMBs with invoicing and payments does work for this SaaS company.
- Founded: 2004
- Headquarters: Seattle, Washington, United States
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Scott McFarlane
The leading provider of tax compliance automation software for businesses was ranked in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500. Its SaaS solutions for transaction taxes and communications, etc addresses businesses of all sizes.
- Founded: 1949
- Headquarters: Roseland, New Jersey, U.S
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Carlos A. Rodriguez
‘Automatic Data Processing’ provides payroll, HR, and tax solutions to midsize businesses. In the last 2 years, it has recorded a 15% revenue growth due to the drop in unemployment rates and high client retention rate.
- Founded: 1983
- Headquarters: Mountain View, California, U.S.
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Sasan Goodarzi
Empowering financial prosperity for its clients, Intuit spends a great time empathizing with the customer and understanding them. It also focusses on innovations that motivate the staff towards R&D.
Marketing
- Founded: 2001
- Headquarters: Atlanta, Georgia, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Ben Chestnut
This 18-year old email empire welcomes 14,000 customers signing up every day! Mailchimp was born out of a trash web business and it started succeeding when it stopped charging everyone.
- Founded: 2008
- Headquarters: Boston, U.S.
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Oleg Shchegolev
The leading competitive research platform for online marketing took just 11 years to expand on two continents with just 800 specialists.
45. Aritic Pinpoint
- Founded: 2013
- Headquarters: Asia (Bengaluru, Karnataka, India)
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Prem Gupta
Aritic PinPoint is a full-stack marketing automation software platform for marketing operations teams. It has a landing page, lead scoring, lead tracking, lead nurturing, email campaigning features with mobile optimized interface, CRM, and Social integrations.
- Founded: 2012
- Headquarters: Sydney, Australia
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Melanie Perkins
Having acquired over 15 million users in less than 7 years, Canva boasts of its product and business model. Reducing the complexity of graphic design tools, they have gained excellent customer growth.
- Founded: 2006
- Headquarters: San Francisco, United States
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Julia Hartz
Growing from $0 to $10 billion, the CEO of the online ticketing platform claims the first rule of their success to be a singular focus.
- Founded: 2008
- Headquarters: Portland, Oregon, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Kate Johnson
Act-on proves how a sophisticated marketing tool can grow up to be a first-choice marketing automation software for medium-sized businesses. It still continues to gain acclaim for its growth, product, and leadership.
49. Elementor
- Founded: 2016
- Headquarters: Ramat Gan, Israel
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Yoni Luksenberg
Elementor has become the go-to platform for web creators looking to build WordPress websites code-free. Powering more than 6.5% of the world’s websites. Elementor enables just about anyone to create their dream site. Tools such as its code-free popup builder have led Elementor to be a sought-after solution for those looking to build websites with strong marketing and sales features.
Sales
- Founded: 1999
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Marc Benioff
The list of one of the most successful SaaS companies often starts by the name of Salesforce. Being a tech-giant and one of the leading CRM software companies, Salesforce provides cloud-based sales applications. With a market capitalization of over $117.8 billion, Salesforce has been benefiting more than 150,000 companies since 1999.
- Founded: 2006
- Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Brian Halligan
The pioneer of CRM, social media marketing, content management, web analytics, and SEO tools, Hubspot has figured out that generating lots of great content is the key to their success. Being extremely data-driven, Hubspot boasts a very powerful cloud-based marketing automation software.
- Founded: 2010
- Headquarters: New York, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Raj Sabhlok
Having generated international customers from over 100 countries in just 5 years of launch, Pipedrive owes a valuable learning experience to an incubator program that they were accepted into, just after one year of existence. When 4-5 months of existence had got them only 80 customers, they started applying into the various incubator programs and were also selected for a few, which turned out to be the catapult for them.
- Founded: 2011
- Headquarters: Seattle, Washington, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Manny Medina
In an attempt to solve the sales problem with GroupTalent, their recruitment platform business, the founders started building software to make their sales representatives more productive. In 7 years, this product has accounted for a valuation of $1.1 billion and $60m revenues.
- Founded: 2010
- Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts, United States
- Type: Private Company
- CEO: Joel Stevenson
Awarded 2020 ‘Most Implementable’ SaaS company from G2 Crowd, Yesware is one of the best sales engagement platforms used by the top 1 million sales professionals and account managers. They use the ease of installation and integration of their software to leverage their brand value.
55. Xero
- Founded: 2006
- Headquarters: Wellington, New Zealand
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Steve Vamos
Xero is a SaaS company whose subscriptions are for small and medium sized industries. It is a cloud-based accounting platform catering to over 2 million global subscribers. The single unified ledger which is its base allows users to work without location or operating system barriers.
56. Shopify
- Founded: 2006
- Headquarters: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Tobias Lutke
Shopify is an e-commerce company that offers an online platform as a product. It gives retailers a suite of shopping aspects including marketing, payments, customer service, customer engagement, and shipping.
57. DropBox
- Founded: 2007
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Drew Houston
DropBox is a valuable startup that offers file and cloud storage, client software, and personal cloud and file synchronization. It operates on iOS, android, Windows, macOS, and Linux. The SaaS company has a freemium model where users can get more capacity on purchase.
58. DocuSign
- Founded: 2003
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Daniel Springer
With over 500,000 customers, DocuSign has users in over 180 countries. The platform offers eSignature that enables users to sign on different devices electronically. The signatures are in line with EU Qualified signatures, US ESIGN Act, and EU regulations.
- Founded: 2011
- Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts
- Type: Public Company
- CEO: Chris Comparato
Toast is an all-in-one restaurant technology platform, made by restaurant people, for restaurant people. In 2022, Toast was ranked as G2’s leading restaurant point of sale system. Toast’s product suite also includes handheld POS devices, contactless ordering, online ordering and delivery, marketing and loyalty programs, payroll and team management, and more.
We wanted to share a quick mid-year update on the performance of the SaaS companies and the impact that the global pandemic has had on them.
SI: SaaS Insider
As evident from the data in the above image, barring 2 companies who reduced their stock price, most other have grown in this period amidst all the panic, lockdowns, and emergencies.
The Top 10 SaaS companies from this list of 25 have grown between 44% to 254%.
Key Takeaways
2021 is the year of SaaS businesses and undoubtedly, they won’t see a downfall in the near future as well. It is judicious to take this list as an instrument to look into each company’s niche and features and deduce the attributes that made it reach the top 50.
Anshi has over 12 years of experience in demand generation, digital marketing, and managing global teams. In her prior role as head of marketing operations for a high growth US healthcare tech organization she transformed marketing from cost to revenue center.
Published April 13, 2020, Updated September 06, 2024
