Trending Apps
Across SME, Mid-Market and Enterprise
While established platforms such as Salesforce, Microsoft and Google remain staples across businesses of all sizes, our data reveals that Stripe and Twilio have jumped into the top ten most popular SaaS tools among SMEs and mid-market companies – signalling a growing demand for flexible, API-driven applications.
In contrast, enterprises continue to invest heavily in comprehensive platforms such as Workday, ServiceNow, Adobe, and SAP – tools designed to handle the complexity, scale, and integrated demands of larger organizations.
Popular SaaS Apps
A key indicator of ROI is a high utilization rate, signaling that a tool is relied upon, trusted, and likely delivering consistent value.
Not only has HubSpot entered the top five for the first time, but as of Q2 2025, it is the most utilized software application. A possible reason for this is that aside from being an all-in-one platform for marketing, sales, and customer service teams, it is continually innovating and expanding its feature set, with recent AI-driven enhancements further boosting value and adoption.
Figma, Productboard, and Freshworks all maintain strong positions due to their focus on collaboration and product management, and in Freshworks' case, it’s comprehensive customer engagement solutions. Looker’s rise reflects a possible growing investment in data analytics and business intelligence, driven by the increasing need for data-driven decision making.
On The Rise
OpenAI remains the fastest-growing SaaS vendor for the fourth consecutive quarter, as organizations continue to integrate AI into their tech stacks, features, and even day-to-day tasks.
With a 45% increase in spend, Airtable solidifies its position as a leading project management platform, with its growth indicative of the widespread need for streamlined collaboration and adaptable solutions that help teams organize and automate their workflows efficiently.
SaaS Insights
SaaS Inflation vs. Market Inflation (Apr'24 to Jun'25)
SaaS inflation rate
A business that spent $1,000,000 per annum on software in 2024 can now expect to pay an additional $139,000 for the exact same tech stack – with no extra features, seats, capabilities, or services.
While SaaS inflation has fluctuated over the past year, it continues to remain far higher than US annual CPI inflation – currently 5x more so.
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December 2024 saw SaaS prices surge by an average of 11.4% when compared to December 2023, outpacing the U.S. inflation rate by over four times.
28% of SaaS contracts impacted by shrinkflation
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SaaS shrinkflation
By the end of March 2025, over a quarter (28%) of the contracts we renewed for our customers across the globe had been affected by “SaaS shrinkflation” – a practice in which vendors charge the same price for reduced functionality.
Worryingly, SaaS shrinkflation is not only becoming harder to spot, but it is on the rise, having increased by 18.5% since 2024. Vendors are employing various opaque techniques, such as product bundling, unbundling, and currency harmonization to mask reductions in features, while maintaining the same price point. If these terms emerge during negotiations, it’s important that you’re challenging the vendor to ensure you’re not paying for less functionality.
These examples of software shrinkflation are particularly common in enterprise-level plans, as their pricing is often customized making it easier to conceal. As an example, vendors will often reduce the number of licenses, admin users, and contacts included within the plan, without adjusting the list price.
Nearly 1 in 4 SaaS contracts in the past year have been impacted by "SaaS shrinkflation," where vendors quietly reduce features while keeping prices steady.
SaaS Spend Per Employee (Q4'23 to Q2'25)
SaaS Spend Per Employee
As of Q2, 2025, employees cost organizations an average of $9,100 per annum in SaaS spend, compared to an average of $8,700 across the whole of 2024, and $6,900 in 2023 – a 32% increase.
This sharp rise in SaaS spend per employee is down to a perfect storm of factors:
- SaaS price increases - Software inflation has been climbing steadily over the past couple of years, reaching a record high of 14.0% in October 2024 and a Q2 2025 average of 13.5%.
- Headcount cuts - More than 150,000 tech jobs were cut in 2024, and a further 63,000 in the first half of 2025. Companies, however, can’t immediately reduce their SaaS spend, as they are often locked into annual contracts, typically tied to user counts, regardless of workforce changes.
The proliferation of point-SaaS - Many companies have built their tech stacks with ‘point solutions’ to solve specific problems, often resulting in a costly accumulation of tools and higher overall spend per employee.
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Driven by rising SaaS prices and headcount reductions, businesses are facing record-breaking software costs per employee - up 30% in 2 years.
SaaS by Pricing Type (Jun'24 to Jun'25)
SaaS Pricing Models
While the transition has been slower than some experts predicted, we are beginning to see a pattern emerging. Between April 2025 and June 2025, seat-based pricing decreased by 4%, with usage-based pricing increasing from 31% to 33%, and hybrid pricing increasing from 24% to 26%.
It will be interesting to see how this trend continues throughout the year, as companies demand more flexibility in their payment models.
Nick Riley, Global Head of Purchasing at Vertice, explains:
“Household names like Salesforce and Snowflake have announced moves away from charging by user or seat, which has likely given the impression that the switch to usage-based pricing is happening more quickly. In reality, many vendors seem to be watching and waiting - seeing how it plays out in the long term before making drastic changes.”
It’s not surprising, then, that hybrid pricing models are slowly increasing in popularity as vendors test out different pricing strategies to cater to different products and customers.
Usage-based pricing is increasing in popularity, but not as quickly as commentators may have you believe.
Average SaaS Applications Per Business (Apr'24 to Jun'25)
SaaS Apps Per Business
The number of SaaS tools being used by organizations continues to rise, with the average company now using 134 different tools – nine more than they were at the same time last year.
Advancements in technology can, to some extent, explain this surge, as companies continue to invest in new, innovative tools such as AI-driven solutions. Additional data from Vertice indicates that AI tools now account for 0.5% of total software spend within the average organization, up almost 400% in enterprise organizations.
Lack of procurement oversight may also be contributing to rising numbers, with as many as 21% of tools going entirely unused, and a further 45% underutilized within organizations. In the average company, 18 tools are entirely redundant.
To avoid wasting valuable budgets and ensure that software stacks aren’t experiencing unnecessary sprawl, companies need to implement robust software procurement strategies. This involves obtaining full visibility of the software applications in use across the business and ensuring that each one is right-sized and delivering measurable value to the organization.
Business tech stacks have grown significantly, with the average company now juggling 130 SaaS tools - 7.4% increase YoY.
Top SaaS vendors by renewals
Stickiest SaaS tools
For finance and procurement leaders, tracking the most widely retained applications not only offers valuable insight into what’s working across the market, but also highlights potential gaps in their own technology stacks – ultimately helping to guide smarter investment and renewal decisions.
Interestingly, we’ve seen a significant change to the top five stickiest software applications over the past three months, with four being entirely new entries to the list.
Algolia takes over from Salesforce as the stickiest SaaS tool in Q2 2025, demonstrating an increasing demand for software that can deliver immediate and measurable ROI. NetSuite sits in second position, reflecting the continued need for comprehensive, scalable ERP solutions that centralize critical business operations. Finally, Udemy, OneTrust, and Thomson Reuters round out the top five, highlighting a broader shift towards tools that support workforce development, compliance management, and access to crucial, specialized industry knowledge.
Renewal trends reveal a growing appetite for collaboration and connectivity platforms, as security and data-analytics tools are overtaken.
Top SaaS categories by duplication
& Productivity
& Productivity
Tool Overload
As department heads gain more autonomy to purchase software, it's increasingly common for organizations to find they have adopted multiple tools that overlap in functionality. This redundancy not only leads to overspend and waste, but also introduces security and compliance risks.
Development and Security tools have the highest instances of duplication, either within the departmental stack or across different teams' investments. For example, security monitoring platforms are being utilized by both security and IT operations teams, as both require real-time threat detection and system integrity monitoring to maintain security and ensure operational continuity.
Sales and Marketing platforms also have a high likelihood for duplication. Both categories are highly competitive, prompting vendors to continually expand their functionality in a competitive arms race. And with both departments typically having extensive tech stacks, this creates a perfect storm – numerous technologies, each with overlapping features capabilities.
Sales, Security, Marketing and Development SaaS vendors are all expanding their capabilities to increase stickiness, but also creating their own redundancy.
Unused SaaS Applications (%)
Software Wastage
Between June 2024 and June 2025, SaaS application usage increased from 77% to 79%, reflecting a growing emphasis on maximizing value from existing software investments, amid rising costs and mounting pressure to do more with less.
Despite this growth, more than one-fifth (21%) of all SaaS tools remain entirely unused. With the average company using 134 applications, this represents a significant amount of wastage – contributing to the millions of dollars lost each year by many organizations.
One major driver of this is maverick spending, where employees bypass procurement processes to purchase their own tools. Without centralized oversight, these tools often go unused — either because they lack integration, don't gain team-wide adoption, or simply fall off the radar.
A staggering 45.7% of SaaS licenses were underused or completely unused in 2024.
Top SaaS categories by cancelations
& Compliance
& Compliance
Most Canceled saaS Tools
Vendors in the Sales and Marketing categories often market themselves based on quick, substantial ROI. But in reality, they heavily depend on other foundational elements, such as robust internal sales processes and quality data to deliver results. For procurement and finance teams, it’s essential to evaluate the company’s readiness for these tools before making an investment.
With companies facing growing pressure to reduce spending, tools for Office Management, Governance, Risk & Compliance, and CAD & PLM may be viewed as being too niche to justify their cost at the point of renewal.
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Sales software remains on the chopping block, while Commerce and HR tools continue to churn.
Top SaaS categories by underutilization
& Productivity
SaaS Underutilization
Software underutilization often happens for a number of reasons, including duplication of SaaS applications and overprovisioning of licenses. Content Management and Project Management lead the way for Q2 2025 as the least utilized categories – likely due to their per-user pricing models, which suggest widespread over-contracting.
New to the list this quarter is marketing, with an increasing number of organizations failing to make use of the features they’re paying for. One possible reason for this could be due to a misalignment between tool capabilities and actual team needs.
All of this ultimately puts the onus on procurement to guide negotiations of these tools, ensuring that the contract and fees scale with any headcount changes, and that the true usage rates are taken into account at the point of renewal.
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IT Management tools top the most underutilized software categories.
Top SaaS categories by Share of spend (June 2025)
& Productivity
& Productivity
SaaS Share of Spend
There are some notable differences in how SaaS budgets are allocated between enterprise organizations and small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs), reflecting distinct priorities and operational needs.
Within enterprise organizations, 12.5% of the average software budget is allocated to CRM tools, compared to just 8.1% within SMBs. This disparity may be due to larger businesses managing more complex sales operations across multiple teams, regions, and customer segments – in turn requiring more advanced CRM capabilities and integrations. In contrast, smaller companies often operate with leaner sales teams and may opt for more affordable, lightweight solutions.
SMBs, however, dedicate a greater share of their software spend (around 10%) to collaboration and productivity tools. This suggests a focus on flexibility and efficient communication, which are critical for smaller teams trying to scale. Enterprises, by contrast, allocate a larger portion of their SaaS budgets to security tools, which is expected given their greater exposure to risk, compliance obligations, and complex infrastructure.
One of the most significant shifts across both segments is in AI-related software. While it still represents a small share of total SaaS spend – 0.7% in enterprises and 0.2% in SMBs – it is growing rapidly. Over the past year, enterprise spend on AI tools has surged by 394%, and SMB investment has increased by 57%, highlighting the growing appetite across the board to explore AI’s potential, even if adoption remains in early stages.
Enterprises are prioritizing CRM and security, while SMBs focus on productivity & collaboration.
SaaS wastage by company size (% vs. $)
Cost of Unused SaaS
Organizations with between 100 and 500 employees waste an average of $865,000 a year on tools that are either entirely unused or underutilized. This figure only increases as a company scales, surpassing $1.5 million a year for those with more than 500 employees, and as much as $10 million a year for enterprises with more than 10,000 employees.
This trend highlights the growing complexity of managing sprawling software stacks and the lack of visibility into actual usage. With such vast sums at stake, even modest SaaS management improvements can yield major savings. Rightsizing contracts based on real usage data is one of the most effective ways that organizations can cut unnecessary costs and improve operational efficiency.
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Companies stand to save millions of dollars by rightsizing their contracts and eliminating unused tools and licenses.
Procurement Insights
Additional savings achieved compared to contract negotiations started <30 days before renewal
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Renewal Savings vs. Negotiation Time
Contract renewals typically need less runway to start a negotiation when compared to a new purchase. However, procurement needs to be careful not to become complacent.
Significantly larger savings can be made in SaaS renewals if negotiations are started 90 days or more before the renewal date - 49% greater than if started under 30 days before, and 19% more if negotiations are begun between 30 and 90 days.
Notable examples include Analytics and Monitoring suppliers - with whom it’s almost a necessity to start renewal conversations over 90 days before the renewal date, otherwise the chance of discount improvement is almost nil. Start earlier though, and procurement can improve their discount on Analytics tools by an astronomical 74%.
It’s a similar story in many categories, from HR and IT infrastructure to Monitoring and Project Management. And in Customer Service, it’s even possible to more than double your discount simply by starting a conversation earlier.
Having a well-structured, collaborative and data-driven procurement workflow can give the procurement team the process they need to start negotiating as soon as possible. Many get stuck in trying to manually push new intake requests and renewals through the workflow and fight fires along the way, leaving them very little time to get ahead of the game and work on early negotiations.
Those who start negotiations 90+ days in advance of contract renewal dates achieve significantly higher savings across all SaaS categories - with on average 49% greater discount than the vendors’ standard offer.
Vendor ISO 27001 vs SOC2 certifications (%)
Supplier Compliance Rates
Monitoring the compliance certification of vendors helps avoid regulatory penalties by ensuring your suppliers don’t undermine your security, data privacy or procedural frameworks and safeguards. And for some businesses, will even be crucial for working with their own customers.
And given how many SaaS vendors do not hold both of the most commonly-requested certifications, it emphasizes how important it is to consider having your compliance approval stage as early in the request workflow as possible - perhaps even at the intake stage itself.
Categories like CRM, Project Management, Customer Service, Monitoring and Analytics all process a lot of customer data, so seeing that 100% of the vendors that Vertice has worked with in these categories within the last 12 months have SOC 2 compliance is to be expected. But then large swathes of these vendors then make themselves harder to work with - for some, impossible - as so many lack the broader IT security certification of ISO 27001.
Granted, many of these vendors may be targeting businesses below enterprise level and therefore not deem it vital. And for many procurement teams, ISO 27001 may not be a requirement. Or at least not today… procurement then has to consider if their growth ambitions mean they will require ISO 27001 later down the line, and within the period of the contract.
While the number of SaaS vendors holding either SOC2 or ISO 27001 is generally high, the number holding both is less than half (45%).
Time to approve by department (Days)
Approval times By function
Software approval times are relatively consistent across departments, averaging around 10 days. However, there are some notable variations that may reflect how different teams prioritize and justify their technology needs. IT teams, for example, see the fastest approval turnaround at just seven days – likely due to the critical nature of their tools in maintaining core systems and infrastructure.
In contrast, HR requests take slightly longer to approve, averaging 18 days. This delay could be a result of HR tools being seen as less urgent, carrying more compliance or privacy considerations, or facing closer scrutiny around cost and integration with existing systems. It’s also possible that HR software often affects multiple parts of the business – such as payroll, onboarding, or employee engagement – prompting longer review cycles involving several stakeholders.
This is just one metric that top procurement teams use to set their performance apart. Find out what the others are in our Procurement Metrics that Matter report.
Teams are taking 11 days on average to approve contracts, but some take significantly longer than others.
Average contract length by SaaS category (Months)
Average Contract Length
With an average of just over 19 months, companies seem to prefer shorter contract terms - even in the face of attractive discount offers, placing higher value on flexibility.
It is however noticeable that businesses are more willing to commit to longer contract terms in certain areas. HR systems, CRM platforms and ERPs stand out as among the longest average commitments - approx 2 years - largely because businesses seek to minimize the disruption of regularly reviewing options and re-negotiating for platforms that are central to business operations.
On the flip side, Project Management, Collaboration and Development tools tend to have much shorter contracts, between 14 and 17 months - as departments experiment with the efficacy of these tools and find it much easier to chop and change them.
But this is the sort of data that only the top 1 in 6 procurement leaders are using. See what other data points they use, and compare them to your own metrics.
Companies are locking in SaaS for over a year and a half on average.
Average post vendor-selection stage completion time (Days)
Procurement process stage completion times
(post vendor selection)
Negotiations take, on average, 21.4 days to complete - and even as much as 37 days. This explains, for example, why renewal negotiations that start more than 90 days before the auto-renewal point deliver such greater discounts, as leverage is not lost.
While many subsequent approval stages take less than a week, procurement leaders should be wary of the tendency for some of these to stages to drift - often needlessly - into two weeks. By assessing what is causing these delays, whether not having necessary data to hand, poor prioritisation, or failing to integrate the workflows with the collaboration / project management tools they prefer to use, procurement can cut crucial time from the process and help the business move faster.
But only 1 in 6 leaders use these metrics. The Procurement Metrics That Matter Report reveals the metrics the top performers use, and why they are so much more impactful than those traditionally used.
With high percentages of most stages taking less than 24 hours to complete, this suggests there is room for improvement.
Deviation between minimum and maximum benchmark prices by SaaS category
Pricing benchmark deviation
Knowing a ‘fair’ or ‘common’ price for B2B software is often impossible. Given the variations in contract terms, pricing models, feature sets and user tiers, plus how few vendors make pricing public, it can be hard for procurement teams to know where to start a negotiation.
This of course makes benchmark data crucial. But even then, the gap between minimum and maximum pricing benchmark per SaaS category can vary wildly. Sales tools show the biggest deviation, with some companies paying over 3x more than others for near-identical functionality and terms. Marketing and ERP tools also have high rates of deviation (2.85x and 2.5x).
Sales and Marketing tools are some of the most duplicated, as teams often bring in tools whose functionality partially overlaps, creating a dual problem - high potential prices, plus high wasted spend.
Companies can pay over 3x more for similar tools than others.
Requests missing required intake information (%)
Missing Required FIelds
When requesting new software, employees tend to omit important details needed for procurement to accurately evaluate and process requests. Only about half of all optional fields are completed, with the most commonly missing information including signing entity, additional notes, vendor contact email, and contract length.
While not every missing field is critical, the signing entity and contract length are particularly important for procurement and finance teams to draft contracts and manage budgets effectively. Incomplete submissions often lead to delays, as procurement and finance must follow up to gather necessary information before proceeding with the purchase request.
This suggests the need for many organizations to evaluate the intake process. Making truly essential fields mandatory, improving form design, and providing clearer guidance could help reduce information gaps, subsequently helping to streamline software requests, speed up approvals, and reduce administrative bottlenecks.
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Almost half (49%) of all optional fields are left blank within purchase requisition forms, impacting the efficiency and speed of software procurement.
Cloud Insights
Share of AWS Spend (Mar'24 vs Mar'25)
Share of spend
Compute instances continue to dominate AWS spend, with a 17% increase in share between March 2024 and March 2025, followed by Databases and Network & Content Delivery.
Interestingly, the share of spend for Network & Content Delivery did decrease from 22% to 10% in the same time period, reflecting a shift towards more data-intensive services such as Analytics and Databases for long-term cloud performance and cost efficiency. It should, however, be noted that this decrease is likely to be a simple mathematical outcome of the extreme growth seen in some of the other areas, rather than a sign of active deprioritization.
Finally, spending on Management & Governance, Containers, and Security, Identity & Compliance have also increased, as businesses prioritize not only the efficient management of cloud environments, but also enhanced security and governance in response to growing concerns about data privacy and regulatory compliance.
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Surging investments in Analytics, Security, and Containers reveal shifting priorities in cloud spend optimization.
% Increase in Average Spend on AWS per Business
AWS Spending
Conversely to Q4, the US kept cloud spending at much higher rates than the rest of the world, increasing it by 38%. The EU and particularly Asia-Pacific dramatically cut their cloud spending, with Asia specifically decreasing their spend by 39%, and the EU by 8%.
Both regions have been grappling with more acute micro-economic challenges surrounding inflation, higher costs of living, and decreased consumer spending. Asia-Pacific had already decreased their spending by 9% in Q4 2024, so this continues their trend but at a slightly alarmingly faster rate.
But this isn’t a time to panic. Q1 in 2024 saw a post-Christmas dip in spending, driven by a lack of consumer activity and business spending forecasts limiting available cloud budgets between January and the end of the tax year in April. Plus, many companies will be using the time to experiment and shift to AI, inevitably creating a ‘downtime’ in BAU spending.
Gartner still forecasts that public cloud spending will exceed the 1 trillion dollar mark before the end of this decade. But what’s driving the global acceleration?
- Application modernization - as companies continue to spend their energy on modernizing their infrastructure and moving from on-premise to the cloud.
- Increasing investment in generative AI tools and infrastructure.
AWS is expected to double down on AI in 2025, given their CEO’s remarks in Amazon’s Q3 earnings call when explaining $75bn worth of investment focusing on AWS and GenAI:
“It is a really unusually large, maybe once in a lifetime, type of opportunity. And I think our customers, the business and our shareholders will feel good about this long term that we’re aggressively pursuing it.”
Cloud spending soared at the end of 2024 as businesses integrated GenAI to empower their 2025 activities and offerings.
AWS Cloud Spend by Service
AWS spend by service
In line with the downturn in overall AWS spending we have seen in Q1, every service saw less spending bar one – Security, which experienced a modest increase.
- Security, Identity, and Compliance rose 4%, both reflecting the tightening of budgets in Q1 2025 whilst continuing to address heightened concerns around data protection and regulatory requirements.
- Compute spending rose to an all time high of 104% in January 2025, before drastically dropping back to under its Q4 2024 average at 24% – highlighting a drop in usage over the early months of 2025 whilst keeping demand for generative AI.
- Network & Content Delivery saw a spending decrease of more than half – from +14% to - 47%. This cut may be due to lower bandwidth costs - coming with the drop in Compute capabilities, or advancements in network infrastructure making it more efficient and cost effective.
- Storage spending also fell by 18%, given its link to Compute needs - again reflecting the slowdown in need to facilitate such a high level of service needed in Q4 2024.
For businesses, focusing on optimization in these areas can significantly impact overall AWS costs, especially as usage expands to support innovation and compliance.
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Compute, Containers, Management and Security have seen the increases in AWS spending, amongst a raft of decreases.
AWS on-demand and commitment levels by percentage
Discount pricing model trends
Users have shifted to using Savings Plans instead, which has seen an increase of 14% in the 12 months leading up to March 2025.
Savings Plans tend to provide more simplicity and flexibility than Reserved Instances, despite offering lower cost saving opportunities. This makes them a particularly appealing choice for organizations with complex, multi-regional needs.
“Unlike RIs, which are specific to their nominated instance types and regions, savings plans can be repurposed or transferred to different regions and instance types as needs change. For many organizations, Savings Plans’ flexibility is more valuable than the few extra discount percentage points that Reserved Instances provide, so we’ve seen a distinct trend of customers actively moving across.”
The dip in the popularity of RIs could also be attributed to AWS’ move to disallow the transfer of discounted RIs, which temporarily pushed more enterprise organizations towards Savings Plans and On-Demand usage while they adapted their cloud cost optimization strategies.
Cloud cost optimization behavior is shifting away from Reserved Instances towards Savings Plan. What’s driving it?
Split of AWS on-demand and commitment plans
On-demand vs. discount plans
While it’s the most flexible, on-demand resources are the most expensive way to operate in the cloud - and customers are evidently starting to prioritize cost efficiency over flexibility.
Commitments and rightsizing are two of the main ways you can get more value from your cloud investments.
- Commitments - Discounts agreed with your cloud service provider e.g. committed spend up front, or set usage rates per application.
- Rightsizing - Ensuring the correct quantity of services, applications, and usage capabilities for your capacity.
We recommend teams aim to reduce on-demand to between 20-30% of their overall coverage, so there is huge scope for optimizations to be made.
Businesses now favor commitment plans, revealing a rising focus on cost optimization.
