What SaaS software do SMBs use every day?
By: Sumner Douglas
Tags: Saas Tools, Startup, SaaS

Our SearchMyDocs product helps users select from an ever growing list of SaaS software platforms and have these form part of their personal (and corporate) universe which they can search across from the single SearchMyDocs location.

Examples would be users connecting Dropbox, Gmail, Slack, Evernote and more, and then being able to search across them all from SearchMyDocs.

As part of our product development, it obviously matters that we know which platforms are popular with our users and potential customers. We can then prioritise our upcoming integrations accordingly to continue building value for our users and prospects.

Survey of 40k small business users

To get a handle on what software matters to our users and prospects, we surveyed around 40k SMB business owners to see what software they use every day. The question was:

Q. Which are the five pieces of SaaS software you use most often?

The respondents for the survey are generally fairly tech savvy, and many users of recommendation and sales sites and so that skewed the results a little. Nonetheless, there was some really interesting data shared, some of which is included below in aggregate.

(% respondants using)

Most Popular CRM Platforms

1. Hubspot

2. Salesforce

3= Zoho

3= Pipedrive

5 Copper

Most Popular Communications Tools

1. Gmail

2. Slack

3. Hotmail/Outlook

4. Zoom

5. Skype

Most Popular Project Management Tools

1. Asana

2. Trello

3. Jira

4. Basecamp

5. Plutio

The Takeaways

Aside from the crude numbers, there were a couple of takeaways from the survey which are worth noting.

Firstly, there is no #1 undisputed king of SaaS. There is no one product that has a lion’s share of the usage. Gmail, the most used product, is deemed one of the most important pieces of software used daily by less than 10% of the respondents.

There are a few things to read into that.

SaaS is competitive. Every SaaS product has a number of competitors, many of which offer similar features and functionality. For every 10 users who rate Gmail as one of their most vital, 90 are using other solutions to achieve similar ends.

Utility rules. The lack of a single dominant player — although there were some dominant sectors — suggests that users are buying based on utility and proposition rather than ‘brand’ in the SaaS space. Vendors have to get the right balance of cost and benefit.

Secondly, and this leads from the learning above that users appear to value the right blend of cost and benefit proposition over brand, we were told several times that “Worth noting that my list seems to change every XYZ months”.

This was interesting to hear and points to the increasing maturity of the market. As SaaS software matures, there is increasing parity between the providers and users want to switch if it makes sense for them to do so from a usability perspective.

File storage, particularly, can be viewed as an increasingly commoditized space and with products such as our Cloud Storage Switching tool making it easier to move from one provider to another, the storage market particularly is becoming the utility sector of tomorrow.

Google Docs, Dropbox, Box, pCloud and OneDrive all made strong showings in our survey and as the broader SaaS space continues to mature the increasingly homogeneous nature of the file storage sector specifically — quality products going head to head with feature parity — must surely be reflected into other SaaS areas, such as CRM and Project Management.

Thanks again to all those who took part in the survey.