In the past year, PCMag's skilled business editors and reviewers tested and rated several hundred Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications that are geared toward helping businesses with specific tasks in various categories. The 13 categories these SaaS apps fall into are accounting & finance, business operations, collaboration, communications, data analytics, e-commerce, human resources, IT management, mobile, sales & marketing, security, and web hosting. The vast majority of the robust apps did what they claimed to do, while we think the weaker apps could benefit from making marked improvements in the coming year.
In this list, we're narrowing down the hundreds of SaaS apps we have reviewed to just the best apps available for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) as well as large enterprises. This was a more difficult task than you'd expect, but in the end, we're left with a list that comprises the best of the best. Only the strongest contenders are included in this list, which will make your purchasing decisions for 2017 that much easier.
For 2016, we've got 42 SaaS apps that span the aforementioned 13 categories. All 42 of these apps earned our coveted Editors' Choice Award. To be included in this list, the review had to be published by PCMag between November 1, 2015 and today. Editor Ratings on the apps in this list are either 4.0 or 4.5 stars (and, in one case, one product garnered a perfect Editor Rating of 5, which is rare).
So, as you conquer your personal holiday shopping list, take a few minutes to review what your business will need in the new year as well. Within our list, you are sure to find at least one product that can help your business thrive in 2017.
ENTERPRISE ACCOUNTING
Intacct
Starting Price: $2,510.00
(Visit Site at Sage Intacct) For midsized general ledger accounting, Intacct is a clear leader, with an excellent Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployment model, a friendly price tag, a thorough feature set, and excellent performance. Its intuitive interface is very similar to that of NetSuite OneWorld and shares much of that product's ERP functionality and modular architecture, though edging ahead just slightly when it comes to straight general ledger accounting though that's based mainly on user-friendliness. Frankly, these two apps are similar enough that they're almost interchangeable.
ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING (ERP)
NetSuite OneWorld
Starting Price: $999.00
(Visit Site at Oracle NetSuite) Acquired by Oracle this year, NetSuite OneWorld is a standard in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) and small to midsized enterprise (SME) accounting and financials space. NetSuite's depth of core functionality is extended with a wide variety of add-on modules that let customers build exactly the right business operations solution for them, covering the spectrum of ERP capabilities from core financials to human resources, purchasing and supply chain management, project management, customer relationship management (CRM), and more. Whether you're an enterprise or a midsized business, there's no way to go wrong with NetSuite.
EXPENSE TRACKING
Certify Now
Starting Price: $8.00 per seat
(Visit Site at Emburse Certify) With its great optical character recognition (OCR) scanning capabilities, Certify Now is a well-rounded expense tracking product that's geared toward small to midsize businesses (SMBs). It is an easy to use, end-to-end expense reporting and submission software solution that offers handy features such as corporate card integration, direct deposit reimbursements, foreign currency reimbursements, geo-location services, multicurrency reports, real-time reporting, and receipt capture from smartphone cameras. Pricing for Certify Now is user- or expense report-based, which means small companies with a tiny staff can choose user-based pricing, while their midsize counterparts can opt for expense report-based pricing. Certify Now's free mobile app is simple to navigate and available on Android, Blackberry, iOS, and Windows. Using Certify Integration Services, Certify Now can also integrate with accounting software solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, QuickBooks Online Plus, and SAP.
BUSINESS OPERATIONS
Palo Alto Software LivePlan
Starting Price: $19.95
($19.95 at LivePlan) Palo Alto Software LivePlan is the best business planning software on the market. That's because it offers an impressive range of customizable features, an impressive and easy-to-use interface, and it's just $19.95 for a monthly subscription. Planners will love the expert walkthrough, which will help you create a business plan that will make sense to potential investors.
MEMBERSHIP MANAGEMENT
Zen Planner
Starting Price: $70.00 per month
For gyms, exercise studios, and other workout-related businesses that need help managing their customer base and employee scheduling, Zen Planner offers a highly customizable, cloud-based tool. Designed solely for athletic businesses at the moment, Zen Planner is among the best designed membership management tools available. Its clearly laid out dashboard shows important metrics such as the number of new clients an establishment has gained or which customers have past-due accounts. Zen Planner offers impressive email automation, offering over 50 customizable and automatic emails that can be used to send members expiring credit card or upcoming class reminders. Staff members also can be assigned different levels of access to the software; this role-based security helps businesses maintain the privacy of their customer data and the security of their financial information. Zen Planner also offers flexible payment processing to ensure a positive cash flow.
CONTRACT MANAGEMENT
Agiloft
Starting Price: $2,700.00 per year for five users
Deployable on-premises or as a cloud service, Agiloft is an easy to use and highly customizable contract management system. Using simple wizards, administrators can customize logos, colors, headings, tabs, and buttons as well as add videos, hot links, and embedded forms. Admins can also create alert boxes and automate business rules, which can help streamline workflows. Users can either use a search saved for them by an admin or do their own text search, which searches both the data entered about a contract and its attachments. Agiloft is equipped with optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities so it can read PDF and other file formats. Agiloft can be integrated with social media and instant messaging (IM) software, can easily scale from a single user to five or more, and it's one of the few contract management programs currently on the market that offers a completely free level of service.
DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
Zoho Docs Standard
Starting Price: $5.00 per user per month
Zoho Docs Standard is our top-rated document management system because it offers generous file sharing, tracking, online editing, and collaboration features. It can be used on its own or integrated with other Zoho products. Users can sign up for a free trial of Zoho Docs Standard with no credit card required or try a plan that offers unlimited file and folder sharing, desktop sync, editing tools, user management, and version history. Other plans add password-protected documents and role-based access plus the ability to email documents directly to a Zoho account, restore deleted documents, and transfer file ownership. You can also get additional gigabytes of storage for a small fee and a discount on all paid plans if you pay annually. Zoho Docs Standard also offers integration with Dropbox, Google Drive, and Adobe Sign.
IDEA MANAGEMENT
Expert Software Applications Mindomo
Starting Price: $36.00 per user for a six-month-long license
Expert Software Applications Mindomo is available in both cloud and desktop versions. The software is the only product in the idea management category that combines idea mapping features with social ones, including an impressive Comments feature that lets you open a resizable window in which comments can be inserted in any part of a map. You can create new idea maps in your preferred language, and select from over 50 themes in categories such as basic, business, and education. Maps can be shared in multiple file formats, including HTML and RSS. Expert Software Applications Mindomo can be integrated with learning apps as well as with Google Docs and Office 365 (along with backup functions to Dropbox, Google Drive, OneBox, or an FTP account). Our only complaint is that its licenses are sold in 6-month increments, which we'd like to see change to year-long increments.
ONLINE COLLABORATION
Slack
Starting Price: Starting Price: $8.00 per user per month
(Visit Site at Slack) Slack is the industry standard when it comes to modern business collaboration and messaging. The simple, inviting user experience, customizability, and wealth of integrations make it an ideal fit for internal communication within businesses of any size. Slack makes communication among team members not only easier but better. Once your team starts collaborating on Slack, you'll likely never go back.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Zoho Projects
Starting Price: $50.00 per month (as tested); free version available
(Free Trial at Zoho Projects) Zoho Projects lets you pay a monthly fee for just the amount of users you need. Its free service plan lets you try out the project management software under no time restrictions. With the paid plans, you get tools for time tracking, budgeting, invoicing and expensing, and reminders. With some paid plans, you get unlimited projects and users, handy project templates, the ability to view or edit Gantt charts, and the ability to enable two-factor authentication which helps keep accounts secure. Teams working on software or interactive web projects can use a neat bug-tracking feature which lets them import and track bugs from file formats such as CSV, XLS, and XLSX as well as from Atlassian JIRA. Zoho Projects has support for integration with other business tools including Google Apps, and provides numerous add-on services that let your Zoho Projects account grow over time.
BUSINESS VOIP
Fonality Hosted PBX
Starting Price: $24.99 per user per month
(24.99 Per User Per Month at NetFortris) Fonality Hosted PBX is a hosted, business-class voice over IP Private Branch eXchange (PBX) system that provides a rich set of PBX services, including the most recent version of its Heads-Up Display (HUD) app. All pricing is per-seat and volume-based so the rates change as you add users. Fonality Hosted PBX offers installation and technical support, which comes in handy because setting up a complex PBX can be difficult. Small businesses that probably don't have VoIP experts on staff will find Fonality's technical support reassuring. Depending on the plan you choose, Fonality Hosted PBX offers features such as audio conferencing, call routing, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), call-center queues, and one-on-one assisted setup with free softphones. You can also get a very capable unified communications (UC) app, customer relationship management (CRM) integration, as well as advanced call center features such as barge/monitor/whisper, voicemail transcription, and HD video conferencing.
WEB VIDEO CONFERENCING
ClickMeeting
Starting Price: $30.00
($40.00 Per Month Per Host at ClickMeeting) Anyone can create a video conference from their phone, but few services give you the enhanced functionality that ClickMeeting provides. ClickMeeting's Android, Apple, and BlackBerry apps let you schedule meetings, stream audio and video, share your screen, and record your events, all from a smartphone. Starting at $30, you can use ClickMeeting on any laptop, tablet, phone, or desktop to make international calls, to create whiteboard sessions, and to share sessions on social media.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Tableau Desktop
Starting Price: $999.00 per user per year
(Visit Store at Tableau) Though it can be expensive, Tableau Desktop is one of the most mature and user-friendly tools in the business intelligence space. It features an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface, a slick finish, a visual storyboarding editor that can produce live charts, excellent support for Big Data and cross-relational querying, a robust online learning community, and a large online library of samples. Tableau Desktop has dozens of visualizations and data connectors either built in to the various editions or via various add-on tools. Depending on the version, you can import Hortonworks, MapR, and Cloudera Hadoop files as well as Amazon Elastic Map Reduce and Google BigQuery files. There's also a new web data connector so that developers can write their own data connectors to any web data source (such as Google Sheets or Facebook). There is also a data extract application programming interface (API) where you can obtain data from various outside programs.
DATA VISUALIZATION
Microsoft Power BI
Starting Price: $10.00 per user per month (as tested); free version available
(Visit Site at Microsoft Power BI) A powerful tool that's available mostly for free, Microsoft Power BI is an easy to use, self-service business intelligence (BI) tool with strong data visualization capabilities. Microsoft Power BI supports more than 40 different data sources, including Hadoop, QuickBooks Online, Tableau Desktop, and Google Analytics. Microsoft Power BI comes in a Windows desktop version aimed at business analysts or a browser version aimed at rank-and-file business execs. The main difference is that you can perform some basic analysis in the cloud, such as dragging and dropping data collections to create visualizations. The cloud version can access all of Microsoft Azure's data sources, but you will want to use the desktop version if you need to build models and manipulate loads of your local corporate data. Users will also like Microsoft's new "Power BI Publish to web" feature, which lets you publish visualizations created in Power BI to the web and related targets such as emails or social media.
POS AS A SERVICE
Square Chip Card Reader
Starting Price: $42.88
(Visit Site for Pricing at Square) Ask most any retail expert and you'll find the answer the same: Cash registers are on their way out. Today's retail pay stations need to be smarter and more flexible than ever, which is why Point of Sale-as-a-Service (POSaaS) is such a fast-growing segment. Products in this category provide immediate payment data to back-end accounting systems, are generally mobile for more flexible customer interactions, and can take multiple forms of payment from cash to digital. Leading this space is Square Chip Card Reader, with a sleek, innovative solution that provides all those capabilities and more. While POS will continue to develop over the next few years, you can bet Square will remain at the top of the heap in terms of feature depth, price, and user friendliness.
E-LEARNING AUTHORING
Articulate Storyline 2
Starting Price: $1,398.00 for one license
(1,398.00 Starting Price at Articulate 360) Articulate Storyline 2 is head and shoulders the best eLearning authoring tool, especially if you have experience using Microsoft PowerPoint. Thanks to its borrowed design, anyone who has ever used the slide creation tool can pick up and begin creating courses immediately. Furthermore, Articulate Storyline 2 has streamlined the content creation process, and it's anticipated almost every imaginable course-creation use case. Articulate Storyline 2 is smooth, well-designed, and it makes life easier for course creators and learners alike. It packs more functionality into one system than any other software we reviewed in this category, and it does so deftly and without any overbearing technological or navigational complexity.
APPLICANT TRACKING
Bullhorn Staffing and Recruiting
Starting Price: $99.00 per user per month
(Visit Site at Bullhorn) Bullhorn Staffing and Recruiting is the Rolls Royce of the applicant tracking (AT) market. It's highly customizable, feature-rich, and a pleasure to navigate. Although Bullhorn Staffing and Recruiting is more expensive than competitors such as Workable and BambooHR, it offers tremendous value for your money—especially if your large enterprise has high volume or data-heavy recruitment needs.
BENEFITS ADMINISTRATION
Zenefits
Starting Price: Free
(Get Price Quote at Software Advice) Zenefits has built its startup success on providing an all-in-one platform that makes human resources (HR) management easy. The company's recent reboot and redesign as Z2 adds new features such as an HR App Directory, HR Advisor apps for SMBs, Zenefits Payroll, an automated benefits shopping experience, and more as part of a rebranded and revamped platform that's second to none in benefits administration (BA).
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (HRMS)
BambooHR
Starting Price: $7.00 per employee per month
(Free Trial at Bamboo HR) Managing a company's human resources (HR) network is a full-time job. The best HR software and management systems let you conduct applicant tracking (AT), benefits administration (BA), and performance reviews from any device, anywhere. BambooHR is a well-organized, visually appealing tool that is simple to set up and run. An open application programming interface (API) allows the software to be integrated with a company's existing HR tech vendors, and its performance review function is state-of-the-art.
PAYROLL
Gusto
Starting Price: $39.00 per month
(Starting at $35 Per Month + $6 Per Employee at Gusto) Gusto, formerly ZenPayroll, offers a comprehensive set of payroll features and an intuitive automated user experience (UX) within its online payroll and benefits platform. Gusto rebranded itself this past year as an all-in-one HR platform to rival Zenefits, but the core strength of the platform lies in its arsenal of payroll, tax, 401k, and accounting tools for businesses.
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
SuccessFactors Perform and Reward
Starting Price: $8.00 per employee per month
(Visit Site at SAP) Human resources (HR) specialists have a long list of duties, but a key task with which they all need to be familiar is employee performance tracking, and to do that they need a top-notch tool. Enter SuccessFactors Perform and Reward. This tool can compete as an overall HR management tool, but it was originally forged as software specifically to address performance tracking and evaluation and that expertise shines brightly when the software is evaluated through this lens. It excels at employee on-boarding, goal setting, and the all-important performance review process, offering customers flexible options in that area so they can choose the review process that best meets their culture. The software also does a good job of communicating data to related software, such as payroll systems, for example. As an all-up HR tool, SuccessFactors Perform and Reward does well enough, but as a tool specific to the performance evaluation process, it's way out in front.
TRAINING
Docebo
Starting Price: $230.00 per month
(See Demo at Docebo) Docebo is the best online learning platform we've tested here in our labs. It features intuitive navigation and content creation, the best reporting of any system we've tested, and a host of features that make learning and training fun for everyone on your team. Anyone at any level of technological proficiency will be able to pick up this tool and begin creating or taking courses.
APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Stackify
Starting Price: $15.00
(Visit Site at Stackify Retrace) IT professionals today need management tools that can stretch beyond any one technology silo. That's where Stackify does a great job. The software was stellar as an application performance management (APM) tool, but it can also act as a competent infrastructure management tool—even one that crosses firewall and cloud boundaries. Stackify does a great job of parsing log data for both application performance and infrastructure health data and then rendering that data visually to harried IT and DevOps administrators. The information is clearly presented and offers excellent drill-down capability, too.
ASSET MANAGEMENT
ManageEngine AssetExplorer
Starting Price: $795.00
(Visit Site at ManageEngine) Even as much of what IT administrators have managed is moving to the cloud, new software and devices are showing up behind your firewall to take their place. To keep track, IT professionals need effective asset management software and ManageEngine AssetExplorer is perfect for the job. ManageEngine, whose parent company is Zoho, has long been known for creating efficient, well-built IT tools, but AssetExplorer stood out with some advanced features as compared to other asset managers—notably its relationship maps and its outstanding reporting capabilities. Combine this with support for tracking even virtual infrastructure across firewall and cloud boundaries, as well as simple integration with the large portfolio of other ManageEngine and Zoho software apps, and AssetExplorer is easily a one-stop asset management shop, with healthy innovation thrown in for good measure and future proofing.
DISASTER RECOVER-AS-A-SERVICE (DRAAS)
Microsoft Azure Site Recovery
Starting Price: $16.00
(16.00 Per Month Per Virtual Instance at Microsoft Azure) Once upon a time, effective disaster recovery (DR) plans cost a fortune and so remained the purview of the well-heeled enterprise set. But today, DR has moved into the cloud via DR-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solutions, which have drastically reduced both the cost and complexity of building an effective DR contingency. High up on our favorites list for this category is Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (ASR), which is the DRaaS offering from Redmond's leading cloud service Microsoft Azure. ASR may come from a company that focuses on enterprises but the service is specifically designed to aid small and midsize business (SMB) customers with building a quick, effective, and low-cost DR plan that will allow employees fast access to the software, servers, and data they use every day—no matter what happens to their primary data center. A wealth of advanced features, deep integration with other Microsoft back-end server platforms, and a great price make this a must-see for anyone looking into a DRaaS solution.
HELPDESK
Vivantio Pro
Starting Price: $60 per user per month (as tested), free version available
(Get Price Quote at Software Advice) If a helpdesk tool is on your wish list, then you can go big or you can go small. Vivantio Pro is definitely on the big side but, if your needs extend to internal IT service desk duties as well as external, customer-facing helpdesk and support needs, then it's got you covered no matter which way you go. Vivantio Pro conforms to enterprise IT standards for helpdesk management, including ticket management and problem resolution. You'll find all of the bells and whistles, too, such as support for multiple channels (phone, email, and social media), integration with a wide variety of third-party software such as customer relationship management (CRM) solutions or business intelligence (BI) apps, a knowledge base, role-based security, a self-service portal, and much more. For the Swiss Army Knife of helpdesk tools, Vivantio Pro is your best bet. But if your needs aren't quite this expansive, then check out our other, more small business-oriented Editors' Choice winner in the helpdesk category, HappyFox.
INFRASTRUCTURE-AS-A-SERVICE (IAAS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Starting Price: $6,415.00
($6,415.00 at Amazon) For almost any back-end cloud service, Amazon Web Services (AWS) can be considered a pioneer, but that's especially true for one of the earliest cloud platform offerings, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions. These solutions allowed your IT staff to spin up virtual servers outside of their data centers in minutes and then only pay for them when they were used, radically transforming the traditional IT economy. Today, IaaS has evolved to include not just virtual servers but also advanced virtual storage networks, customizable virtual switches, and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) to name just a few. Essentially, you can build a complete mirror of your on-premises data center in the cloud, in a fraction of the time it takes to do it in real space, and for much less money. AWS is our current favorite for this kind of solution, not just because Amazon remains a technology leader in this space (though it's closely pursued by both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform), but also because Amazon can bundle so many different kinds of cloud services into its IaaS solution. From cloud databases to Big Data analytic tools to electronic payment and e-commerce solutions, Amazon has it all. And this flexibility only gets richer when you consider the company's huge list of value-add partners. For building an end-to-end, entirely cloud-based infrastructure solution, AWS is still out in front.
INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
MMSoft Pulseway
Starting Price: $3,200.00 per user per year
(Visit Site at Pulseway) Managing networks is simultaneously becoming simpler and more complex, with software-defined infrastructure making day-to-day management and deployments easier while seemingly endless cloud deployment targets and service opportunities are giving network managers more options (and headaches) than ever. What's needed is a single tool stack to manage today's cloud-enabled architectures easily and efficiently. MMSoft Pulseway doesn't have it all figured out, but the product is well on its way towards providing such a solution, covering cloud-capable infrastructure management, application performance management (APM), and asset management all under one software roof. While it's capable in all of these categories, the package really excels at infrastructure management and managing your IT assets, and even has some muscle in the mobile device management (MDM) category.
MOBILE DEVICE MANAGEMENT
VMware AirWatch
Starting Price: $6.33 per device per month
VMware AirWatch is the market leader in mobile device management (MDM) and for good reason. The platform's reasonable price coupled with a well-designed user experience (UX), enterprise integration with other VMware products, and broader enterprise mobility management (EMM) capabilities make it a no-brainer for IT departments managing a broad ecosystem of business devices.
NETWORK MONITORING
LogicMonitor
During testing, we were told pricing is available only as a custom quote.
(Get Price Quote at Software Advice) A competent network monitoring tool needs to cover a lot of ground—from watching application workloads and traffic to giving basic health indicators on all kinds of network-attached hardware. These tools need broad functionality and in that department LogicMonitor excels. The tool supports more than 100 connectors to specific hardware manufacturers and manages the rest by using common management protocols, including SNMP, WMI, and more. And, while it's not quite on par with an application performance manager (APM), it's definitely competitive as a website monitoring tool. While we're not big fans of providing pricing only as a custom quote (which is LogicMonitor's method), the software is feature-rich enough to keep it a winner as an all-purpose IT and network management and monitoring platform.
WEBSITE MONITORING
AppDynamics
Starting Price: $3,300.00 per unit per month
($3,300.00 at AppDynamics) AppDynamics is a powerhouse website monitoring and application performance management (APM) platform. For enterprises with a wide array of digital infrastructure and applications to oversee, the depth of monitoring, customizable dashboards, analytics, reporting, and alerting in AppDynamics will have you more than covered.
MOBILE BUSINESS
Expensify
Starting Price: $5.00 per user per month (as tested); free version available
(Visit Site at Expensify) If you're looking for the best expense report software and the must-have mobile business app of 2016, then look no further than Expensify. Available on Android and iOS, Expensify will change the way you manage expenses and expense reports—both on the employee and administrative end. The app lets you upload receipts via OCR SmartScan, which helps make it the best tool we reviewed at accurately processing scanned data. This saves employees and administrators time when inputting and processing expenses.
MOBILE SCANNING
Abbyy FineScanner
Starting Price: $4.99
(Visit Site at ABBYY) Having the ability to quickly scan documents—photos, receipts, even ideas sketched on whiteboards—can be critically important to mobile workers. Fortunately, you can find a slew of mobile scanning apps on all of the major app stores. But, for an all-around leader in the category, you don't need to look farther than Abbyy FineScanner. The company has been involved in scanning technology for many years, and the execution and feature-depth of this latest offering shows off that expertise. From full-sized documents to oddly shaped receipts, Abbyy FineScanner does it all. Plus, Abbyy's opt-in optical character recognition (OCR) service was the most accurate we've reviewed. Tag on a very friendly price and Abbyy FineScanner comes out on top for business-grade, mobile scanning apps.
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGMENT (CRM)
Zoho CRM
Starting Price: $20.00 per user per month for Pro plan, billed annually
($24 Per User Per Month, Billed Annually at Zoho CRM) This isn't the first year we've labeled Zoho CRM one of our Editors' Choices for customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, but the platform's evolution this year bears recognition. Zoho offers a wide range of software and services for businesses, but in its flagship CRM application this year, the company completely overhauled the user interface (UI) and added "multi-channel" support. This support includes a smart SalesInbox, immersive gamification features, and deeper reporting. All of this support can further empower and motivate sales and marketing teams within a business.
EMAIL MARKETING
Campaigner
Starting Price: $19.95 per month
(Starting at $59 Per Month at Campaigner) Campaigner is an advanced email marketing service that's easy to use to promote your business. Users can sign up for a free 30-day trial, which requires a credit card to do so, but you get full access to Campaigner's features for up to 1,000 contacts. Campaigner includes many handy features such as a friendly user interface, 24/7 phone and email chat support, attractive templates that include mobile-friendly builds, the ability to send an unlimited number of messages per month, CRM and Salesforce.com contact uploads, email workflows, and robust reporting capabilities (including which email platform your contacts are using). You can also create email auto-responders that will send emails to your contacts based on their behavior (such as clicking a link in a newsletter) or for special promotions.
Editors' Note: J2 Global, the company that owns Campaigner, also owns Ziff Davis and PCMag.com.
ONLINE SURVEY
SurveyGizmo
Starting Price: $22.50 per month
($25.00 at SurveyGizmo) If you need to conduct market research studies, or gather and analyze data for any reason, then SurveyGizmo can help you build, style, test, and share those online surveys as well as examine the results. A powerful, mobile-friendly tool that's easy to use, SurveyGizmo offers a free version that places no limits on the number of surveys, questions, or responses you can manage. Depending on the paid plan, you get lots of themes and styling options, survey logic, and a robust question library. Its advanced capabilities also include custom email campaigns and scripts, advanced text analysis tools, multi-user support, and third-party integration. SurveyGizmo also lets you easily track email campaigns, letting you see who took the survey, track each contact's progress, send reminders to contacts who didn't complete the survey yet, and email a thank-you to those who did. You can also share the survey on social media such as Buffer, Facebook, and Twitter.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)
Moz Pro
Starting Price: $79.00 per month, billed annually
($79.00 Per Month, Billed Annually at Moz) Moz Pro is one of the most established names in search engine optimization (SEO). Much of the space relies on Moz metrics such as Domain Authority (DA) to gauge SEO difficulty. The company itself has finally brought all of its SEO tools across position monitoring, keyword research, crawling, and everything in between, under one roof with Moz Pro.
SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS
Sprout Social
Starting Price: $99.00 per user per month
($199 Per User Per Month at Sprout Social) Sprout Social is the social media management and analytics platform for the small to midsize business (SMB) that wants all of its social tools in one easy-to-use place. Sprout Social includes intuitive publishing across social networks and apps, listening and influencer identification features, reports, messaging, and social team collaboration—all within one dashboard, at an affordable price.
SOCIAL MEDIA LISTENING
Synthesio
Starting Price: $1,200.00 per month
(Get Demo at Synthesio) Synthesio does it all when it comes to social listening and influencer identification. The enterprise-scale platform's scope of social monitoring, social audience breakdown tools, and business value metrics are unmatched. This is particularly the case with its stunning data visualizations such as psychographics and metrics, which tie social media efforts directly to your company's return on investment (ROI).
IDENTITY MANAGEMENT
Okta Identity Management
Starting Price: $2.00 per user per month
($2.00 Per User Per Month at Okta) The Identity Management space is filled with solid competitors, none of which can outduel Okta Identity Management. Its robust support for multiple identity providers, coupled with how well it does everything else expected from an Identity-Management-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solution, pushes Okta Identity Management to the top of the list. In particular, its ability to fine-tune how attributes are moved between your directories and cloud services is the most impressive we've seen.
ENDPOINT PROTECTION
Webroot SecureAnywhere Business Endpoint Protection
Starting Price: $30.00 per endpoint per year
(150.00 Per Year for 5 Endpoints at Webroot) Webroot SecureAnywhere Business Endpoint Protection is the best Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) endpoint protection software available to businesses today. Webroot includes outstanding client protections and its graphical policy management is a standout feature. The software features a well-designed hosted management console, innovative policy management mechanics, highly customizable email alerts, and a lightweight client with fast installation and scanning.
WEB HOSTING
HostGator Web Hosting
Starting Price: $10.95 per month (as tested)
($3.75 Per Month With Free Domain Registration at HostGator) HostGator Web Hosting is undoubtedly the best web hosting tool. It is a reliable web hosting service that's simple to use and offers an array of useful plans for consumers and small businesses.. It's especially useful for novice webmasters. HostGator Web Hosting is also remarkably stable so you don't have to worry about your website going down for extended periods of time.
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