About Cledara's SaaS Insights**Real rankings based on real data

Over the past 18 months, the tech industry has faced plenty of challenges. Despite these challenges, the industry's demand for software continues to surge. Although the growth rate has decelerated, spending is still anticipated to rise 18% in 2023. Moreover, businesses have increased the number of tools they use by 21% in the past year.

Here at Cledara we have a privileged view of the market with data from over 1,000 companies across the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union who trust Cledara to manage their software. As such, Cledara is uniquely positioned to assess the real picture of software purchasing across the tech industry; tracking renewals, usage and churn in real-time, across a significant segment of the market. Our sample consists of businesses, with between 30 and 1000+ employees.

The following rankings, the first in a series of monthly industry reports, can shed light on the market as a whole.

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The top 20 SaaS tools by spend**We ranked SaaS tools by how much Cledara customers spent on them. These were the top 20 by expenditure.

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Insights

• Salesforce, Atlassian, and Hubspot, tech stack staples, seem inevitable winners of the top three tools by spend according to our data. 
• Slack’s entry at #4 is interesting. Alongside a small price increase, the company has been focussing heavily on enterprise customers. This data reveals the tactic is paying off with ACV increasing significantly in the last year—Slack is now generating a similar price-per-customer to the industry’s biggest names. ‍
• Zoom, at #9, seems to have successfully weathered its privacy dispute earlier this year. We can only assume that its quarantine-era reputation was strong enough to pull through.

Spotlights

The top 20 SaaS most-used SaaS tools**We ranked our catalog of SaaS tools by the number of businesses paying for them. These were the top 20 with the most paying companies on their books.

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Insights

• Atlassian and Github—essential tools for developers—are unsurprising silver and bronze winners of the ‘most-used’ charts. 
• Microsoft’s suite of software tools has moved up six spots on the “most used” list since the same time a year ago, leapfrogging over smaller companies. 
• Canva, at #20, launched a plugin for ChatGPT at the start of September, allowing users to create customized graphics by prompting ChatGPT. This may revolutionize formulaic design tasks.

Spotlight

The top 20 SaaS fastest-growing tools**We ranked our catalog of SaaS tools by their growth in the last three months. These are the 20 fastest-growing tools.

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Insights

• Of the twenty fastest-growing software products, more than half are built on new artificial intelligence technologies. 
• Supernormal, in the top spot, uses AI to write up notes from meetings held in Google’s video conferencing tool. Their clientele includes illustrious brands like Google, Github, and Forbes. 
• Pinecone, coming in second, allows companies to develop AI systems from their own data, for the purpose of more efficient search functions, or creating dedicated chatbots. 

Spotlights

Key takeaways for 2023**Riding the AI wave  

Many of the products topping Cledara’s usage and spend charts have been tech stack staples for over three years. Yet, the story of this year in software buying stars new tech, in the form of artificial intelligence.

• AI adoption by the biggest tools - We analyzed the homepages of each tool on the rankings lists and found a staggering 75% of the ‘Top tools by spend’ mention AI on their homepage, including leading tools like Salesforce, Notion, Hubspot, and Intercom. This pivot en masse to new technology is unprecedented.
• AI in the fastest-growing tools - Similarly, 55% of the fastest-growing tools were focused on applications of AI across a range of industries. This use of new technology in early-stage, high-growth businesses is expected but it also goes to show just how remarkable the pivot to AI has been from the big players. 

According to data from our platform, AI is entering the workplace in unexpected ways, becoming ubiquitous with the velocity we were warned about. In the coming months, it will be fascinating to watch this trend mature and see which of its new applications prove enduring.

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