Trending Apps
Across SME, Mid-Market and Enterprise
While tools such as Salesforce, Microsoft and Slack are heavily relied on by businesses of all sizes, our data shows that SMEs tend to value adaptable, user-friendly tools that support rapid growth, and are more willing to adopt new innovative ‘challenger’ vendors. In contrast, larger enterprises are favoring established, scalable solutions to support advanced functionality and integration.
CRM & project management:
While Salesforce remains the dominant CRM across all segments, HubSpot has become a popular second choice, particularly for SMEs. For project management tools, Atlassian has gained significant traction among small and mid-market companies.
IT infrastructure:
Within the IT infrastructure sector, Snowflake is favored by both SMEs and enterprise companies for its scalable data warehousing, while Oracle holds steady with enterprises, appealing to their preference for established ‘all-in-one’ platforms. Interestingly, Databricks has emerged as a new entry, with SMEs and mid-market organizations increasingly adopting it for its advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities.
HR:
While SAP and Workday remain dominant applications among enterprise organizations, no HR tools top the charts for the SME and mid-market sector, signifying that smaller companies do not have the same scale of HR needs as larger companies, and that these tools do not warrant the same level of investment.
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.
NetSuite remains the most utilized software application for the second consecutive quarter, indicating that it integrates well, is user-friendly, and reliably performs its intended tasks. It also suggests that contracts can be easily rightsized at the point of renewal, and can scale to accommodate headcount growth.
Gong and Looker’s increased utilization highlights a continued shift towards greater data analysis and business intelligence within organizations, as purchased licenses continue to see increased usage.
Figma and Google’s continued inclusion as two of the top five most utilized SaaS tools underscores the growing importance of collaboration, design, and communication tools in modern organizations, reflecting their central role in daily operations.
On The Rise
OpenAi remains the fastest growing SaaS vendor for the third consecutive quarter, as organizations continue to integrate AI into their tech stacks, features, and even day-to-day tasks.
With a 58% increase in spend, Monday solidifies its position as a leading project management and collaboration platform, with its growth indicative of the widespread need for efficient project tracking and team collaboration tools.
IT and compliance tools such as Vanta, Solar Winds, and OneTrust have also seen a stark rise in popularity, reflecting the increasing focus on regulatory compliance, data privacy, and risk management.
SaaS Insights
SaaS Inflation vs. Market Inflation (Jan'24 to Mar'25)
SaaS inflation rate
This means a business that spent $1,000,000 per annum on software in 2024 can now expect to pay an additional $113,000 for the exact same tech stack – with no extra features, seats, capabilities, or services.
While the data indicates a decreasing pattern in the last six months, with the exception of February which saw a sudden rise to 13%, we have seen this false dawn before – see August to October 2024. What is clear is that while software inflation has fluctuated over the past year, it continues to remain far higher than US annual CPI inflation – currently 4x more so.
The surge in SaaS inflation has varied across product categories, with hosting software experiencing the most rapid price hikes (17.9%). This is followed by sales tools (16.6%) and project management systems (16.1%).
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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 (Q3'23 to Q1'25)
SaaS Spend Per Employee
As of Q1 2025, employees cost organizations an average of $9,000 per annum in SaaS spend, compared to an average of $8,700 across the whole of 2024, and $6,900 in 2023 – a 30% 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 Q1 2025 average of 11.9%.
- Headcount cuts - More than 150,000 tech jobs were cut in 2024, and a further 28,000 this year to date. 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 (Jan'24 to Apr'25)
SaaS Pricing Models
While the transition has been slower than some experts predicted, we are beginning to see a pattern emerging. Between January 2025 and March 2025, seat-based pricing decreased by 1%, with usage-based pricing remaining steady at 31% and hybrid pricing increasing to 24%.
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 (Jan'24 to Mar'25)
SaaS Apps Per Business
As businesses expand, SaaS spend tends to scale accordingly. More employees, customers, and products, along with the increased complexity that comes with this growth, all contribute to rising software costs.
Additionally, specialized point solutions have become increasingly popular due to their ability to address specific challenges, contributing to this increase in the size of a typical SaaS stack.
In the past 12 months, there has been a notable shift towards solving data infrastructure challenges, with companies investing heavily in data analytics and AI tools. The latter sector alone has grown by 65% in popularity, the largest proportional rise in any category of tech spend.
This growth is not solely powered by investment, though. Much of it stems from a lack of control over SaaS procurement, for example instances of maverick spending – where individuals and teams purchase tools outside of centralized procurement processes.
Without a robust procurement strategy, finance and procurement leaders risk losing control, allowing the tech stack to expand unchecked. The first step in regaining control is to obtain visibility of all software applications in use across the business, ensuring each one is right-sized and delivering real, 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
In the last three months, there has been a significant change to the top five stickiest SaaS apps, with four new entries to the list.
Salesforce takes over from LinkedIn as the stickiest SaaS tool in Q1 2025, demonstrating its unparalleled scalability, security, and feature-rich capabilities.
Atlassian, which includes Jira, Confluence, and Trello, remains in second position, solidifying its dominance in the project management sector. It also indicates that the company’s suite of tools continue to play an integral role in supporting businesses with streamlining operations and enhancing team productivity, both of which continue to be essential for hybrid and remote work environments.
Google, DocuSign, and Miro have all entered the leaderboard for the first time, reflecting the increasing reliance on innovative solutions that address the evolving needs of modern workplaces.
Renewal trends reveal a growing appetite for collaboration and connectivity platforms, as security and data-analytics tools are overtaken.
Top SaaS categories by duplication
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 (Mar'24 vs Mar'25)
Software Wastage
Between March 2024 and March 2025, SaaS application usage increased from 76% 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 132 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
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.
Similarly, security tools often suffer from a mismatch between expectation and reality. While there’s no doubt that security solutions are critical for any organization, many struggle to fully integrate them into their existing infrastructure. Over time, these tools become another layer of complexity, rather than a seamless solution, driving many organizations to either cancel or downgrade.
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Sales software remains on the chopping block, while Commerce and HR tools continue to churn.
Top SaaS categories by underutilization
SaaS Underutilization
Underutilization often happens for a number of reasons, including duplication of SaaS applications or overprovisioning of licenses. Content Management and Project Management tools, for example, are usually contracted for on a per-user basis, suggesting prolific over-contracting in these categories.
All of this puts the onus on procurement to guide these contract negotiations to make sure 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.
Procurement Insights
Average renewal discount improvements by negotiation start date (%)
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 the vendors’ standard offer, versus only 19% 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
Relying on external stakeholders is where procurement can lose control of the timeliness of the procurement process. It therefore pays to know how long each department takes to approve a contract so that the process can compensate and adapt accordingly.
With huge disparities between the fastest to approve (IT - on average, 7 days) and the slowest (HR - 18 days), procurement teams need to consider how to best manage the approval stages of their workflows.
Monitoring each department’s average approval time - and not relying on anecdotal feedback - gives procurement the chance to adapt the process.
Options may include communicating and collaborating with slower departments to ensure approvals are prioritized; providing the support or data they may need to help them approve, or even adapting the intake process so that this data is requested at the outset; or it may be a case of simply running approvals in parallel so poor performers don’t become a blocker.
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.
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.
