Top 25 SaaS Examples And Applications To See In 2024

The pandemic has taught us many lessons.

We won’t forget the major and multiple impacts of the Coronavirus Pandemic, which has changed our lives in many ways. When strict lockdowns were imposed worldwide, we almost became dependent on technology. Technologies have made it easier for us to sail through this pandemic that has shaken the whole world.

Technologies, especially SaaS, have changed how we do everything. They have changed the world and created new paradigms for how people leverage technologies daily.

By now, you might have heard of SaaS, and if you are not aware, you have used SaaS in your routine. How? This blog will show you how and also help you understand what exactly SaaS is with the SaaS examples.

SaaS is an acronym for “Software as a Service.”

What Is SaaS?

SaaS (Software as a Service) is one element of cloud computing. SaaS delivers applications over the Internet based on subscription, and you do., You think about hosting, maintenance, and upgrades, making your business easier than thinking about infrastructure and scalability.

It is also famous for ‘On-demand’ software and web-based software. SaaS has changed how people use software applications. It is centrally hosted and allows users to connect to and use cloud-based applications over the Internet.

Users must pay for software according to a subscription model, usage(monthly or annually), number of licenses, and the required features.

If we see this by numbers, SaaS is growing at a pace and shows no signs of decline. The global Software as a Service (SaaS) Market is expected to reach a market size of $185.5 billion by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 21.4% during the forecast period according to one report by KBV research.

Also, Gartner forecasted end-user spending on public cloud services to reach $396 billion in 2021 and grow 21.7% to reach $482 billion in 2024.

SaaS has taken a significant lead among other cloud options due to its various business functions. SaaS software is affordable, flexible, easy to set up, and easily scalable.

The pandemic has increased SaaS usage more than ever as remote work has become a norm, and many businesses have shifted to the digital model. SaaS applications have become the go-to options for many companies because they can meet the modern challenges created by pandemics.

Breaking Boundaries: SaaS Innovations of 2024

OneTab, a workplace SaaS startup, has been making waves by challenging established players like Slack and Asana. Launched in November 2023, OneTab aims to simplify software project management by integrating multiple apps for development.

Cornerstone Ventures is focusing its investment strategy on enterprise SaaS and planning to increase its investments in Indian SaaS startups, anticipating significant growth in the ecosystem.

The SaaS market has seen a positive start in 2024, with Paddle’s Q1 statistics indicating a market reconciliation. B2B and B2C founders are provided with strategies to thrive as the market undergoes a reset

Popular SaaS application examples include many well-known organizations and products you use daily. Let’s look at the top examples of SaaS companies.

Top 25 SaaS Examples: Popular Software As A Service Companies

• Adobe
• Atlassian
• Google
• Microsoft
• Salesforce
• Shopify
• Netflix
• HubSpot
• Dropbox
• Zoom
• Slack
• Square
• Wix
• AWS
• Zendesk
• Sprinklr
• MailChimp
• DocuSign
• Workday, Inc.
• Oracle
• New Relic
• Tableau
• Canva
• Snowflake
• ServiceNow

#1 Adobe Inc.

Adobe (Adobe Systems Incorporated) is a popular company in the creative document management space. Its creative companies are top-rated, and it has established a historical presence in software that offers the creation and publication of a wide range of content. This includes graphics, illustrations, text, photography, motion pictures, animation, multimedia video, etc.

Adobe’s flagship products—Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Reader, and Portable Document Format (PDF)—are users’ most widely used and go-to tools.

Adobe is an American multinational computer software company with millions of users worldwide. It offers software for web design, graphic design, video editing, visual effects, eLearning software, audio editing, server software, and digital marketing management software. Adobe Creative Cloud is a subscription-based SaaS offering that bundles its products.

It was considered one of the top global leaders in Customer Experience Management in 2021.

#2 Atlassian

Atlassian Corporation PIc is an Australian-American software company offering products for developers, project managers, and teams.

Atlassian’s flagship product, Jira, is a proprietary issue-tracking product popular for bug tracking and agile project management.

Jira was primarily developed as an issue-tracking software, but later, it evolved as a project management tool and was adopted by non-IT organizations. Atlassian provides Jira as commercial software; organizations can purchase licenses for on-premises or hosted applications.

#3 Google

We don’t need any introduction here, as Google doesn’t need one. Google’s G Suite, also known as Google Workspace, is a popular example of a SaaS. Google Apps consists of Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Meet, Chat for communication, Drive for storage, Currents for employee management, Google Docs Suits for content creation, and an education edition.

We have all used these apps, which are among Google’s best and most free SaaS offerings. Unlike Microsoft Office 365, Google Workspace is purely cloud-based SaaS and can’t be downloaded on a personal laptop or desktop. Google Apps are very useful and used by millions of users every day for their various day-to-day activities.

Google is one of the Big Five companies in the American information technology industry, along with Amazon, Apple, Meta, And Microsoft. Google offers many products and services that have built a digital foundation for businesses worldwide.

#4 Microsoft

Microsoft is one of the biggest and oldest cloud service providers, including PaaS and SaaS. Microsoft 365, a popular software suite, is available in various subscription plans and aims to serve different market needs and segments.

Microsoft 365 comprises home, business, and enterprise apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and more. Microsoft apps we use, such as email, calendaring, and office tools, are examples of a SaaS model. However, you can download and use these apps on your personal computers.

Microsoft is market-dominant in operating systems and cloud software products such as Azure, gaming, consumer electronics, and hardware. According to a 2021 survey, Microsoft was selected as the year’s best company. Along with the other four—Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta—Microsoft is one of the Big Five information technology companies.

#5 Salesforce

Salesforce is an American cloud-based software company offering customer relationship management services and software. It also provides enterprise applications for customer service, analytics, marketing automation, and application development.

It was founded in 1999 as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company and is considered one of the leading SaaS examples. Its flagship CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software provides customers with a wide range of software categories: commerce, Sales, Service, Data, Marketing Cloud, and so on.

Salesforce users are giant worldwide, and it is popular for its CRM, analytical tools, and issue and task management software. Major acquisitions and partnerships with leading tech companies have made Salesforce one of the best SaaS companies.

#6 Shopify

Shopify is all about eCommerce. This one-liner introduction is adequate for this widely-used eCommerce platform.

Shopify Inc. is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario; according to BuiltWith, 1.58 million websites run on the Shopify platform as of 2021. It is also the largest publicly traded Canadian company by market capitalization.

It provides its users with end-to-end eCommerce services that include easy setup, marketing, analytics, and integration with various platforms and tools, making eCommerce development easier than ever before.

As Shopify is a SaaS-based system, users do not need to worry about internal architecture, server management, or infrastructure setup. The subscription plans are designed according to different business sizes and market segments so users can select according to their needs.

Shopify has redefined eCommerce development and made it easier to create eCommerce stores through the SaaS model.

#7 Netflix

Netflix Inc. is an American subscription streaming service and production company. It offers various award-winning TV shows, movies, anime, and documentaries on various internet-connected devices. Netflix is the most trusted and largest entertainment/media brand globally, with a huge user base worldwide.

It has played a prominent role in popularizing independent film distribution, where media services are directly offered to viewers via the Internet. It is also called an OTT platform (Over-the-top) as it eliminates the need for companies to act as controllers and distributors. Thanks to the SaaS model, Netflix has over 214 million subscribers as of October 2021.

Initially, Netflix sold and rented DVDs by mail and introduced streaming media and video on demand in 2007. It is headquartered in Los Gatos, California, in Santa Clara County.

#8 HubSpot

HubSpot provides tools for social media marketing, content management, lead generation, SEO, web analytics, and customer support. It was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah at MIT in 2006.

HubSpot software is categorized as Packaged SaaS products that help companies manage sales, marketing, and customer relationships. It has integration features for salesforce.com, SugarCRM, NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

HubSpot’s social, l media blogs, webinars, and white papers are excellent resources for comprehensive digital marketing.

#9 Dropbox

Dropbox offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. It brings files together in one central place and creates a particular folder on the user’s computer. The contents of this folder are synchronized to Dropbox’s servers and other devices where the user has installed Dropbox software.

It uses a freemium business model, where users are offered a free account and must pay for more storage and additional features if they want them.

Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup. It has been ranked as one of the most valuable startups in the US and the world.

The SaaS product offers lower costs, scalability and integration, easy upgrades, and time savings so that businesses can focus on their core business functions.

#10 Zoom

The pandemic has introduced us to many new words, one of which is’ Zoom.’ Zoom meetings became a part of our daily routine for various reasons during the lockdown period. Zoom is a video communications company that offers remote video conferencing using cloud-based computing.

It is a collaborative platform that allows users to set up virtual video/audio conferencing, screen-sharing, live chats, distance education, and webinars. As a SaaS software, Zoom meetings can be easily set up, and users can access the video conferencing software via the Internet.

Zoom Video Communications, Inc., is an American communications technology company headquartered in San Jose, California—Zoom’s software products focus on video telephone and online chat services.

#11 Slack

Slack is a proprietary business communication platform developed by American software company Slack Technologies. Salesforce now owns it.

It has provided users with a modern way to communicate with the team in the workplace through appealing, faster, and better-organized persistent chat rooms, channels, messaging, and private groups.

Slack has replaced traditional email for team communication, making work-based communication fun and engaging. It is so popular among professional companies, teams, and communities. It offers many IRC-style features that make communication faster, searchable, and topics.

It integrates with many third-party services and platforms and is available in 8 languages. Slack was built as an internal tool for Stewart Butterfield’s company, Tiny Speck, during the development of an online game.

#12 Square

Square, Inc., is a financial service and digital payments company based in San Francisco. It focuses on mobile payment systems and offers various products, including business software, point-of-sale systems, hardware payment products, and other small business services.

In December 2021, it retitled itself Block, Inc. The company was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey(co-founder of Twitter) and Jim McKelvey. It is a popular payment platform allowing mid-sized businesses to accept credit card payments and use a point-of-sale system.

Square payment systems are widely used to sell online, book appointments, hire staff, manage inventory, and handle omnichannel cash flow all in one place.

#13 Wix

You don’t require a web developer if you want to build a website. Yes, Wix makes website development easier. Wix com Ltd. is an Israeli software company that provides users with cloud-based web development services.

Using drag-and-drop tools, users can create HTML5 websites and mobile sites. Today, Wix offers a wide range of customizable website templates and tools. This world-class SaaS platform was founded in 2006 by Israeli developers Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami, and Giora Kaplan.

Wix website builder is based on a freemium business model and makes money through premium upgrades.

#14 AWS

Amazon Web Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon, offering reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services.

As of 2021, AWS offers over 200 products and services, including computing, storage, networking, database, application services, analytics, deployment, management, mobile, machine learning, and developer tools. The most popular products of AWS are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Connect, and AWS Lambda(a serverless function).

It is the world’s leading cloud computing service provider and is widely used by businesses across various industries. The most prominent users of AWS include Netflix, Unilever, Kellogg’s, Airbnb, Apple, BBC, Adobe, Baidu, Siemens, NASA, General Electric, Samsung, Pinterest, Reddit, Lyft, Coursera, Docker, and so on.

In the third quarter of 2021, revenues of AWS grew 39 percent compared to the preceding quarter as per one Statista report.

It offers customers on-demand cloud platforms and APIs through the pay-as-you-go model.

#15 Zendesk

Zendesk is popular in customer services, support, sales, and communications. Zendesk’s software-as-a-service products are used by a large number of organizations and popular brands such as Siemens, GrubHub, Instacart, Shopify, Mailchimp, Udacity, Vimeo, The Boston Globe, SQUARESPACE, Homebridge, and so on.

Zendesk is an American company founded in 2007 that mainly offers SaaS products related to customer management. It has helped many businesses improve their customer service. Zendesk also provides many other products, such as Sunshine Platform, Marketplace, Zendesk for sales, CRM, and so on.

Zendesk is a leading solution offering customizable tools to create customer service portals, knowledge bases, and communities.

#16 Sprinklr

Sprinklr offers a unified SaaS platform for customer experience management (CXM). It is an end-to-end platform that helps businesses monitor and interact with customers’ digital channels.

It is an American software company based in New York City that offers products related to social media marketing, advertising, content management, employee advocacy, customer care, collaboration, social media research, and monitoring.

Sprinklr was founded in 2009 by Ragy Thomas. In June 2021, it began trading as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange under the CXM symbol.

#17 MailChimp

MailChimp is an American marketing automation platform and email marketing service. It is an end-to-end marketing platform for small businesses that includes a marketing CRM, content studio, creative assistant, insights and analytics, and content optimizer.

This all-in-one marketing platform helps manage the marketing needs of today’s digital-first businesses. In November 2021, Intuit Inc. acquired it.

Ben Chestnut, Mark Armstrong, and Dan Kurzius founded MailChimp in 2001. It is also one of the leading SaaS product examples.

#18 DocuSign

DocuSign is the most reliable and globally trusted company that offers electronic signatures and approvals. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, DocuSign Inc. allows organizations to manage electronic agreements. It is known for its reliable eSignatures and approvals.

With DocuSign, users can access, sign, and send important documents anywhere on any device. DocuSign has over 85 million users worldwide, and many well-known companies such as LinkedIn, Tata, Yahoo, and many more use DocuSign to manage and sign documents.

These services are free of charge through the DocuSign mobile app on iOS, Android, and Windows platforms.

#19 Workday, Inc.

Workday, Inc., is an American cloud-based financial management and human capital management provider. It offers a software suite that integrates finance, HR, planning, and analytics so businesses can manage these foundations faster and better.

It is recognized as a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suite, Cloud HCM Suites, and Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis.

Workday was founded in 2005 by David Duffield, founder and former CEO of ERP company PeopleSoft, and Aneel Bhusari, former chief strategist at PeopleSoft. Oracle acquired PeopleSoft. Workday’s SaaS products are used by small, medium, and large enterprises to manage resources, finance, and human capital.

#20 Oracle

In 2020, Oracle was the second-largest software company in the world in terms of revenue and market capitalization. It is an American multinational computer software corporation based in Austin, Texas.

Oracle is famous for its dominant database software, technology market, cloud engineering, and enterprise products. The company offers ERP, HCM, CRM, EPM – Enterprise Performance Management, and supply chain management (SCM) software.

Oracle was founded by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates under Software Development Laboratories in 1977. Today, It is a leading technology company and is considered one of the best SaaS examples, offering a diverse range of software, middleware, servers, workstations, databases, and storage solutions.

Oracle has made several acquisitions, mainly in the areas of enterprise software applications, cloud services, and technologies. The most significant game-changing decision Oracle made was the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which created the Java programming language and various software and hardware.

Products and services offered by Oracle are widely used across industries and businesses, including FedEx, Nokia, Mayo Clinic, Honda Motor, Aviva, Panasonic, Bayer, and many more.

#21 New Relic

New Relic is the leading observability platform or a full-stack data analysis platform where Dev and Ops teams come together to solve problems. Its cloud-based software helps businesses track website and app performance through metrics, events, and logs.

It offers SaaS-based, end-to-end monitoring products and services, including Infrastructure Monitoring, Network Monitoring, Serverless Monitoring, ML Model Monitoring, Browser Monitoring, Tracing, Application Monitoring, Log Management, Synthetics Monitoring, and much more.

“New Relic” is an anagram of founder Lew Cirne’s name. The world’s prominent organizations also use New Relic’s monitoring platform, a leading AIOps platform that helps businesses enhance their IT operations.

#22 Tableau

Tableau promotes data literacy. Tableau’s products and services help businesses see and understand data through analytics, visualization, and OLAP (online analytical processing services.)

Tableau is an American interactive data visualization software company focused on business intelligence and analytics. It was acquired by Salesforce in 2019. The company was founded by three researchers from the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University: Christian Chabot, Pat Hanrahan, and Chris Stolte.

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online, Tableau Mobile, Tableau Public, and Tableau Reader are some essential products Tableau offers for data visualization and analytics.

Montclare has named Tableau one of the top 20 SaaS companies in the world. Also, the company was recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for nine consecutive years between 2012 and 2021.

#23 Canva

Canva is a free graphic design platform that allows users to create any kind of graphics, presentations, documents, posters, and social media images. It provides users with an easy-to-use and intuitive platform to develop diverse visual content.

Canva is also available in paid subscriptions such as Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise. This SaaS application example has a massive number of users worldwide as it offers a set of tools and components to let even novice users create beautiful designs.

Canva was founded by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, and Cameron Adams in Perth, Australia.

#24 Snowflake

Snowflake Inc. is a cloud-based data warehousing company based in Montana. It allows users to store and analyze data using SaaS-based software and hardware. Snowflake is a ‘data also use-a-service’ company that enables data storage, processing, and analytic solutions.

Snowflake is an advanced data platform that entirely runs on cloud infrastructure. It was founded in San Mateo, California, by three data warehousing experts in 2012.

Snowflake’s products and services are faster, easier to use, and more flexible. They are used by leading brands such as Dropbox, Fitbit, Instacart, Adobe, Rakuten, DocuSign, Okta, Hewlett Packard, S&P Global, Sainsbury’s, etc.

#25 ServiceNow

ServiceNow provides technical management support for IT service management, IT operations management, IT asset and business management, DevOps, help desk functionality, and modern digital workflow.

It is a cloud-based platform that helps businesses manage digital workflows and operations. ServiceNow was founded as Glidesoft, Inc. by Fred Luddy in 2003.

ServiceNow’s products and services help enterprises deliver a great experience and enhance productivity through modern digital workflows across all areas and levels.

Top Software as a Service Examples: Tapping Into a SaaS Power

Due to the rise of SaaS applications, we have seen dramatic changes over the years. More and more companies are adopting SaaS models, and SaaS products will continue flourishing in the coming years.

There will be increased demand for SaaS software, as it offers many benefits over traditional models. SaaS has changed the way businesses operate in the digital era.

Using SaaS software has become more accessible. It allows you to reach a broad audience, launch apps faster, and streamline business operations. It also frees you from the burden of upgrades and maintenance and allows you to focus on your core business.

SaaS is growing, and we will see more innovation in this space. It is suitable for businesses of all types and sizes. It efficiently and effectively solves the challenges of modern companies, such as scaling, cost, and faster time to market.