It’s likely your team already uses at least one SaaS app, and that number is set to increase as we navigate into the new year.
The usage of SaaS is growing, with 85% of business apps to be SaaS-based in 2025. This means that the SaaS market is extremely diverse, with a range of tools that businesses can consider to improve their operations.
SaaS can be used for most areas of business, due to the flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness of apps for businesses of all sizes. You might be interested in how you can expand your repertoire of SaaS products to make your operations more efficient.
Grouping SaaS into categories can help you decide where your business should invest in the coming year, keeping in mind long-term success and growth.
1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Keeping track of customers is a key concern for all businesses. Who are your customers, and how have they dealt with your business in the past? CRM software is used for tracking customer relationships so your business can effectively market to your customer base.
Sales and marketing teams use CRM software to maintain ongoing relationships with their customers as they communicate with them. Your business can’t grow without communicating with customers at scale, and a CRM helps you do this.
If you are a sales team, you use a CRM for visibility into your pipeline and to automate certain processes such as managing leads, follow-up emails and sales calls, to make the business of selling to customers much easier.
Why It’s Essential: If your business is growing, you’ll need to keep track of lots of prospective customers. A CRM helps with managing customer relationships, improving sales, and streamlining communication so that your sales and marketing teams can focus on interacting with customers in a personalized manner.
Top CRM Platforms: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho CRM.
Benefits: You can achieve better customer retention through a deeper understanding and insight into your customers. Foster more effective lead management with personalized views of customers to drive more sales. Data-driven insights allow you to see how your sales team is performing and where action is needed.
2. Marketing automation
Similar to a CRM, marketing automation tools are used for automating marketing tasks and campaigns. They keep track of customers so marketers don’t have to, guiding customers through the sales funnel and closer to making a sale. Digital campaigns can be automated with this software, segmenting customers and surfacing relevant content to each lead.
Marketing automation tools can be used for sending emails, posting on social media, and managing your lead contact information. It’s like a marketing assistant that automates routine tasks so your marketers can focus on design and strategy.
The purpose of marketing automation is to generate leads and nurture prospects through automated digital campaigns that are personalized to each user segment.
Why It’s Essential: Marketing automation results in increased efficiency, freeing marketers up for more important tasks. They generate the right action at the right time to gently nurture leads through the sales funnel. It results in improved targeting, by taking into account important information about the customer. You can achieve better ROI on marketing efforts by executing marketing campaigns automatically and at scale.
Top Marketing Automation Platforms: Marketo, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp.
Benefits: A marketer’s top priority is customer engagement leading to sales, and marketing automation automates many of these tasks. Automated workflows save time and effort for marketers, while lead nurturing throughout the customer journey to increase revenue and ROI.
3. Collaboration and communication tools
Working together is a top priority for any team, so you’ll want to invest in software designed to enhance team collaboration and communication. Collaboration can be in real-time or take place asynchronously, or may be part of a wider project or initiative.
Employees need better tools than just email. Collaboration and communication tools enable teams to function cohesively, driving projects forward and improving business outcomes. Teams can share information, collaborate on projects, or conduct remote meetings.
Better productivity and teamwork are the result of these tools. Whether your team is remote or office-based, you’ll need at least one of these tools to do your best work and bring your ideas to fruition.
Why It’s Essential: Collaboration and communication tools can facilitate remote work, no matter where your team is based in the world. Nobody works in isolation, and you can improve team coordination, and real-time communication, so employees are encouraged to collaborate.
Top Platforms: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom.
Benefits: These kinds of tools improve productivity so team members can get more done. Seamless communication helps build teamwork and enhanced team collaboration, allowing team members to work more efficiently together. Communication and collaboration tools can create a sense of membership in a team.
4. Project management and task tracking
Just like communication, project management is an essential element of any team. SaaS solutions designed for managing projects, tasks, and workflows, enable better teamwork and increase productivity.
What makes these tools unique is the fact that they bring projects to life, facilitating workflows and teamwork so everyone has visibility into a task. You use these project management tools from the beginning to the end of a project to ensure that everything gets done.
Teams work better together with project management and task tracking tools. It reduces back-and-forth when team members can check the project management tool for updates and new tasks.
Why It’s Essential: There’s no better way to ensure project deadlines are met when it’s all laid out before you in a project management app. You can allocate resources efficiently to spread the work burden, and track progress by assigning everyone to their own task.
Top Platforms: Asana, Trello, Monday.com.
Benefits: Project management and task tracking tools help you get more done, faster. You can achieve better task prioritization, set clear timelines to judge the viability of a project, and foster transparency across teams. These tools give better visibility into the project and help assign responsibility when everyone knows which tasks they own.
5. Accounting and finance management
Digitize financial tasks with SaaS tools that simplify accounting, invoicing, and financial reporting. Accounting and finance management tools help with financial responsibilities of the business and make finance easier.
Every business is responsible for a myriad of financial tasks which may start life as a spreadsheet. Accounting and finance management software comes equipped with features for helping you manage your finances, so you can be more efficient and compliant. You can budget more effectively, ensure employees can be paid on time, and make sure you are compliant with financial regulations.
Eliminate manual tasks with accounting software, and digitize your paper accounts for better accountability and visibility. Go beyond spreadsheets with accounting and finance management software.
Why It’s Essential: For growing businesses of any size, accurate financial tracking and reporting are crucial for business viability and compliance. As your business becomes more complex, accounting and finance management tools become essential. Teams of financial staff can collaborate with these software tools.
Top Platforms: QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks.
Benefits: Automated software reduces manual errors and saves time for your financial staff. Achieve enhanced decision-making with insights into your business’s financial history. Ensure that every task gets completed on time with reminders.
6. Human Resource Management (HRM)
Simplify the experience for your HR staff with Human Resource Management tools. These are tools that help you manage recruitment, employee records, payroll, and performance management. Human Resource Management tools make life easier for your HR staff by digitizing HR processes and enabling automations.
It’s more professional to use HR software, and you can create a better employee experience if you invest in the right tools. As your business grows, they’ll help you manage a high volume of employees right through from recruitment to exit.
It’s easier to manage your staff when you invest in Human Resource Management software, even with a high volume of employees. You can encourage employee retention with streamlined processes and a more professional face of your business.
Why It’s Essential: Essential HR processes benefit from automation, improving efficiency and employee satisfaction. Software takes care of employee HR, leaving HR professionals to focus on improving the employee experience.
Top Platforms: Gusto, BambooHR, Workday.
Benefits: Scaling businesses need the assistance of automated payroll, improved employee engagement, and simplified hiring. Every facet of HR should be covered by Human Resource Management software, giving your HR team insight into vital processes and the ability to adapt and make improvements.
7. Customer support tools
Help desks, knowledge bases, live chat, and chatbots are SaaS tools to provide support and help to customers during their relationship with your business. Customers will always get in touch with your business about particular problems, and you need the right software to communicate with them.
Email might be fine at first but you’ll need to graduate to a customer support tool once your business reaches a certain volume of customers. Improve the customer experience with a customer support tool and earn points from customers with your efficient, helpful service.
Keep track of customer interactions and provide better support with the right customer support tools. Offer support across channels for an omnichannel experience, increasing customer satisfaction and issue resolution.
Why It’s Essential: Customer support is an essential part of SaaS growth, and businesses need scalable, user-friendly platforms. Customer support tools enable teams to work together to collaborate on customer issues and improve customer retention, so you can do more with fewer agents.
Top Platforms: Help Scout, Intercom, Document360.
Benefits: Businesses can get closer to their customers with customer support tools. It’s a place to keep all your customer tickets and track interactions across their lifetimes. Collaborate and assign tickets, automate workflows, and access analytics for a superior support experience. Access analytics for detailed insights into agent performance.
8. Cybersecurity and data protection tools
Securing your business is more important than ever, and there are a number of tools designed to protect data, systems, and applications from cyber threats. The biggest threat to cyber security is human error and you need systems in place to provide roadblocks to malicious actors who want to attack your systems.
Invest in cybersecurity and data protection tools to safeguard your digital assets and networks, which is increasingly essential for remote teams. Control and monitor how employees access the system to reduce the risk of attack.
Reduce the risk of human error by automating access and providing stringent security layers that go beyond passwords. Look after your data and protect it from threats with data protection software.
Why It’s Essential: The growing risks of cyber-attacks make cybersecurity a top priority for businesses. Placing barriers between your systems and cyber threats is crucial for a high-functioning business that wants to protect its reputation from breaches. Once lost, a reputation is hard to rebuild.
Top Platforms: Cloudflare, LastPass, Norton.
Benefits: Reduce the likelihood of malicious attacks by securing your data against breaches. Comply with data security regulations and follow the law to make sure your business is handling data correctly.
9. Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) tools
Businesses today are overwhelmed with data and need a way to make sense of it. SaaS platforms that enable businesses to analyze data and make better decisions can help you gain insights that increase growth and success.
Analytics and Business Intelligence tools can bring together large amounts of data and automate the process of analysis. These types of tools can open up the process of analyzing data even to employees who are not employed as data scientists.
Becoming data-driven can help your business become more focused and make decisions based on factual input. Analytics and Business Intelligence tools make sense of large amounts of data that would otherwise be too overwhelming to understand.
Why It’s Essential: Data-driven decision-making is key to business optimization and growth. It provides a factual basis for responding to business challenges and makes it more likely to lead to a positive outcome. BI tools allow businesses to make the most of data that is already stored in their company.
Top Platforms: Google Analytics, Tableau, Power BI.
Benefits: Business Intelligence tools give you more in-depth insights based on data without the effort of employing data scientists. They result in better forecasting of future trends, and informed strategic planning that is based on more than subjective opinions.
10. Cloud storage and file management
Digitized documents are used in every phase of the project management process. Somewhere to store, sync and share files digitally is essential for the modern, paperless workplace.
You need tools that enable users to share files and collaborate on documents, with their own workspace to keep documents organized. You need filespace and secure access so that your organization can manage its digital assets.
Gone are the days of emailing files back and forth. Sharing files can be as simple as sharing a link, and the right software keeps track of versions and file history. Files can be managed easily and the organization can monitor usage.
Why It’s Essential: Cloud storage and file management improves access to documents and makes it easier to share files. Employees can collaborate on business-critical documents instead of storing them in their own local workspace.
Top Platforms: Google Drive, Dropbox, Box.
Benefits: Enhanced collaboration features help make documents more useful with commenting and version history. Files are protected with data security, and storage solutions can scale with the needs of your business.
Final remarks
Improve business operations with the right SaaS tools. Any area, from HR, to customer support, to finance, can benefit from implementing helpful SaaS applications that automate business functions and provide useful features.
There are many types of tools available for businesses that range from SMBs to the enterprise. All businesses are increasingly turning to SaaS tools to help them scale their operations, make efficiencies, and stimulate growth.
You may already be using SaaS technologies but it might be time to upgrade your stack or try new options. There are tools out there for every need and you’ll need to spend some time evaluating products to see where you can make improvements.
