Top 9 Application Portfolio Management Software in 2024

Managing SaaS applications for seamless business operations is crucial for IT teams. Application portfolio management tools play a vital role in this process. In this blog post, we'll explore some of the best Application Portfolio Management software tools.

With the rise of SaaS solutions, IT teams find it increasingly difficult to track all their applications, resulting in \"SaaS sprawl.\" It's essential to distinguish between useful and unnecessary applications. Application portfolio management software helps manage and optimize technology resources to meet organizational goals efficiently.

APM tools enable IT teams to make decisions about applications, such as which to invest in, eliminate/terminate, keep, or migrate. They provide complete visibility of your application landscape, both on-premise and in the cloud, and help you effectively utilize each application. Automating the discovery of the enterprise-wide software stack also helps bring risks of shadow IT and unused licenses to the surface.

Ultimately, APM software aids in optimizing your ROI by giving you guidance on how much to spend on the right software and licensing.

Key Features Of Application Portfolio Management Software

Effective APM software provides comprehensive insights into an organization's software inventory, streamlines IT operations, reduces costs, and enhances overall efficiency. Let's explore the key features of application portfolio management software that make it an indispensable tool for modern businesses.

1. Application Rationalization: This involves controlling costs by consolidating and streamlining the IT portfolio. A company can reallocate resources more effectively by identifying and removing duplicate or redundant applications.
2. Lifecycle Management: It is crucial to understand the lifecycle of applications and how they impact the business. Knowing when to renew, update, or replace applications and the potential consequences of these actions allows for confident decision-making.
3. Integration Management: This overviews how applications integrate with other systems and tools. It helps IT teams understand which technologies enable integrations, how data flows between them, and who manages and maintains these integrations.
4. Application Hosting and IT Governance: This involves maintaining the relationships between applications and the underlying infrastructure. It includes identifying the type of infrastructure, its location, and the people responsible for it, ensuring proper governance and maintenance.
5. Real-Time Reporting: Effective APM solutions offer real-time reporting capabilities, enabling organizations to make better-informed decisions about their IT landscape. This feature helps track application performance, usage, and costs.

How Does Application Portfolio Management Software Benefit Your Organization?

Application portfolio management software offers a range of benefits that optimize and streamline the management of software applications within an organization. Here are the key advantages, detailed with self-explanatory subpoints:

1: Cost Reduction

APM software helps find and eliminate duplicate or unnecessary applications, reducing overall software costs. It ensures that software licenses are utilized efficiently, avoiding over- and under-licensing issues. By retiring outdated or redundant applications, APM reduces the costs of maintaining legacy systems.

2: Improved Decision-Making

APM provides comprehensive data on application performance and usage, enabling better decision-making. It helps plan future application investments based on detailed insights into the current application landscape. Further, it provides information on potential application risks, aiding in proactive risk management.

3: Enhanced Efficiency

Application Portfolio Management Software automates tasks like tracking application usage and performance, reducing manual effort. Thus, it simplifies application management, leading to more efficient IT operations. It also frees IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives by reducing time spent on routine management tasks.

4: Risk Management

APM tools continuously monitor applications for compliance with regulatory requirements and organizational policies. They identify potential security vulnerabilities within applications, helping to mitigate risks. In short, they ensure that all applications are audit-ready, reducing the risk of compliance violations and associated penalties.

5: Better Alignment with Business Goals

These platforms ensure that the application portfolio supports the organization's strategic objectives. They evaluate each application's business value and technical health to prioritize investments that align with business goals. Further, the platform tracks applications' performance against business objectives to ensure they deliver expected outcomes.

Implementing Application Portfolio Management software can significantly transform the management of software applications within your organization, leading to cost savings, enhanced efficiency, better decision-making, and alignment with strategic goals.

This article will discuss different portfolio management software for managing SaaS applications.

9 Best Application Portfolio Management Software

With numerous APM solutions available, choosing the right one can be daunting. Let’s explore the top 10 Application Portfolio Management software, highlighting their features and benefits to help you make an informed decision.

1. Zluri

Zluri’s SaaS management platform designed to streamline your SaaS operations. It provides a unified solution for discovering, managing, securing, and ensuring compliance across a wide range of SaaS applications, all through an intuitive dashboard. 

The platform enables you to explore and manage even third-party SaaS applications and their security and compliance from their command center. In short, it gives IT teams greater visibility and control over the SaaS stack. Zluri offers a range of advanced features, including:-

Key Features

1. Comprehensive Discovery Methods: Zluri boasts the industry's largest app library with over 225,000 applications. Using nine discovery methods such as MDMs, IDPs & SSO, direct integrations, finance systems, CASBs, HRMS, directories, optional desktop agents, and browser extensions, Zluri ensures 100% detection of SaaS app licenses across your entire IT infrastructure. Further, Kuppingercole's report highlights Zluri's discovery and analysis of data as a single source of truth.

1. Zluri’s 9 robust discovery methods

2. Effortless SaaS License Management: Zluri enables IT teams to monitor IT assets, user licenses, and types within a unified platform. It provides insights into subscriptions, contracts, and perpetual licenses, helping identify unused and abandoned applications. Zluri allows the rightsizing of underutilized licenses, optimizing software spending effectively.

3. Renewal Intelligence: Zluri eliminates renewal guesswork with proactive alerts before payment deadlines and contract renewals. Customizable alerts prioritize high-value contracts, streamlining renewal management. For instance, Zluri notifies you 60 days before Salesforce contract renewals, facilitating better negotiation or exploring alternatives.

Zluri's renewal calendar

4. Usage Monitoring & Cost Optimization: Zluri equips IT teams with valuable SaaS usage data to optimize application efficiency and reduce licensing costs. Actionable insights through a comprehensive dashboard help identify overspending and rightsizing subscriptions. For example, Zluri identifies areas of overspending on Adobe Creative Cloud licenses, prompting adjustments to subscription tiers.

Zluri license usage & Cost Optimization

5. Security & Compliance Assurance: Zluri ensures security and compliance by identifying high-risk applications and offering real-time alerts to prevent cyber threats. It supports compliance with standards like ISO 27001, SOC 2, and GDPR, ensuring audit readiness. For instance, Zluri alerts you to high-risk applications with known vulnerabilities, enabling immediate risk mitigation.

6. Efficiency through Automation: Zluri automates the lifecycle of license requisition, approval, and revocation, enhancing efficiency during employee onboarding and offboarding. Custom workflows streamline access provisioning for new hires and license termination for departing employees. The built-in ROI calculator quantifies time savings achieved through automation.

Schedule a demo today to experience firsthand how Zluri can transform your SaaS operations and enhance efficiency across your organization.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.9/5
• Capterra: 4.9/5

2. LeanIX

LeanIX is an enterprise architecture management tool designed to oversee and mitigate the risks of IT landscape transformation. It supports enterprise architecture by leveraging technology, facilitating decision-making, and managing change effectively.

Key Features

• Integration Capabilities: LeanIX integrates with financial, contract management, and single sign-on systems, providing comprehensive visibility into your organization's applications.
• Insight Generation: The platform helps generate actionable insights through configurable reports and data visualizers, enabling you to effectively demonstrate the return on investment (ROI).
• SaaS Application Discovery: LeanIX automatically discovers SaaS applications, providing a clear overview of your software ecosystem and helping you manage it efficiently.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.6/5

3. ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management

ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management software offers a comprehensive understanding of your organization's software applications. It helps identify redundancies, reduce costs, and create strategic plans for managing end-of-life applications, ensuring business continuity and alignment with future strategies.

Key Features

• Data-Driven Decision Making: This enables informed decisions about investing in, sustaining, or replacing business applications based on comprehensive data analysis.
• Technology Alignment: Aligns technology investments and services with business value, ensuring that IT resources are effectively utilized to support organizational goals.
• Lifecycle Management: This process automates software application inventory and manages vendor and internal lifecycles to maintain up-to-date and efficient systems.
• Risk Management: Monitors the versions and lifecycles of business applications, helping to manage and mitigate technology risks.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.3/5

4. Flexera

Flexera One is an application portfolio management IT asset management solution designed for organizations with complex hybrid environments. It provides a comprehensive view of IT assets, enabling data-driven decisions across on-premises, SaaS, and cloud environments.

Key Features

• Hybrid Infrastructure Analysis: This process analyzes usage and spending across business services, business units, cost centers, and users, providing insights to align technology investments with business needs.
• Comprehensive IT Asset Visualization: Offers a single view of all software, SaaS, and cloud product usage, aiding in negotiations and renewals with vendors like Microsoft and Oracle.
• Resource Optimization: Identifies and reduces software waste and underutilized resources across desktops, data centers, and SaaS, ensuring efficient utilization of IT assets.

Customer Rating

• G2: 3.9/5

5. Torii

Torii is an automated SaaS management platform that helps organizations automate the discovery of their software applications. It provides:

• Visibility of what SaaS tools are being used
• The usage of each tool
• The total SaaS spend for the organization

Torii ensures accurate data as it integrates directly with 100+ applications, including Expense management, HR systems, ERPs, Collaboration platforms, and internet browser extensions. Using this information, Torii can automatically optimize your spending.

Key Features

• Eliminates Shadow IT: Detects and manages unauthorized or unmonitored applications, improving overall IT security.
• Optimizes SaaS Spending: Analyzes usage patterns to reduce unnecessary expenses and maximize resource efficiency.
• Automates Onboarding and Offboarding: Streamlines the process of adding and removing users from applications, ensuring smooth transitions and compliance.
• Prevents Unwanted Auto-Renewals: Monitors subscription renewals to avoid unnecessary costs and supports better vendor management.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.7/5

6. ManageEngine Application Manager

ManageEngine Application Manager is an application portfolio management Software that enables you to monitor the entire complex distributed IT infrastructure. It enables IT administrators to gain visibility of the heterogeneous business environments and helps them detect problems. It tracks resource availability and performance, so end-users are unaffected by poor service quality.

Key Features

• Application Discovery and Relationship Mapping: the platform discovers all your applications and maps their relationships, providing comprehensive insights into your IT infrastructure.
• Business Service and Geography-based Grouping: It categorizes applications based on business services or geographical locations, tracks service conditions, and identifies root causes of issues.
• Alert Management: The tool includes an alert management module that notifies users of any anomalies detected within the applications.
• Comprehensive Reporting: It generates performance reports, trend analysis reports, capacity planning reports, and other analytical insights to support informed decision-making.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.3/5

7. Ardoq

Ardoq is a data-driven enterprise architecture platform that helps manage low-value systems from your IT portfolio. It provides an overview of all your applications and their costs, thus helping with application portfolio management. It understands the organization's operational needs and identifies the application that will fulfill them efficiently. It helps the IT teams decide where to invest and which applications can be removed, saving the organization money.

Key Features

• Alignment with Business Outcomes: The platform supports achieving business outcomes by adapting its architecture alongside your organization's evolution.
• Graphical Insights from Detailed Analysis: It conducts thorough analysis and transforms reports into clear, graphical insights for easy understanding and decision-making.
• Comprehensive Understanding of Complexity, Cost, and Risk: Zylo enables a deep understanding of complexity, cost implications, and risk associated with every connection within your organization.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.8/5

8. Zylo

Zylo is a comprehensive SaaS management platform that provides organizations with complete visibility into their SaaS application landscape. Central to its capabilities is the efficient management of SaaS resources and detecting shadow IT within enterprises. By leveraging Zylo, businesses can eliminate unauthorized software usage, optimize SaaS licensing costs, and streamline application management processes.

The platform enables deep insights into application values by analyzing usage across various dimensions, such as license types, feature sets, and permissions. Additionally, Zylo delivers detailed analytics on user engagement, application usage trends, and expenditure, empowering organizations to make informed decisions and maximize operational efficiency in their SaaS environments.

Key Features

• Comprehensive SaaS Discovery and Monitoring: Zylo identifies all your organization's SaaS applications, monitors their usage patterns, and tracks spending in real-time.
• Cost Reduction and Purchase Efficiency: It helps reduce SaaS spending by optimizing purchases and identifying opportunities for cost savings.
• Insights for Rationalizing Applications: Zylo provides data-driven insights to identify and eliminate redundant or overlapping SaaS applications, streamlining functionality and reducing complexity.
• Renewal Management and Negotiation Support: It alerts organizations about upcoming application renewals, leveraging usage data to optimize negotiations and ensure favorable contract terms.
• Continuous Discovery and Approval Workflow: Zylo continuously discovers new SaaS applications being used within the organization, facilitating an approval workflow to maintain control and compliance with approved software.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.8/5

9. Productiv

Productiv offers organizations application engagement analytics to analyze, optimize, and enhance their application portfolios based on usage patterns. It provides detailed insights into metrics such as application usage and expenditure across various dimensions like teams, locations, and features. The platform aids in eliminating redundant applications, identifying shadow IT, and optimizing app functionalities. Moreover, it supports informed decision-making by providing data on upcoming renewals and license allocations.

Key Features

• Cost efficiency across your app portfolio: It reduces operational costs by identifying and eliminating redundant or underutilized applications.
• Faster operations through intelligent automation: Streamlines processes and workflows, saving time and resources while increasing productivity.
• Better decisions via deep insights and benchmarks: Provides actionable data insights and benchmarks to support strategic decision-making and optimize resource allocation and application management strategies.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.8/5

Choosing the Best APM Software for Your Organization

Selecting the right Application Portfolio Management (APM) software is essential for organizations looking to streamline their IT operations, optimize costs, and drive innovation. Each of the top 10 APM tools we've discussed offers unique features tailored to different business needs, from application rationalization and lifecycle management to integration management and real-time reporting.

By investing in the right APM solution, your organization can gain a comprehensive overview of its software landscape, make informed decisions, and ensure that IT resources are aligned with strategic business goals. In short, a robust APM solution is a strategic step toward maintaining a competitive edge in today's technology-driven world.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Who is responsible for managing Application Portfolio Management Software in an organization?

The IT department's responsibility for managing APM software typically falls to roles such as CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, and enterprise architects. These professionals ensure that the software effectively aligns IT assets with business goals.

How does APM software support digital transformation?

Application portfolio management software supports digital transformation by providing a clear overview of the current IT landscape, identifying improvement areas, and helping plan and implement new technologies. It ensures that the application portfolio aligns with the organization's strategic objectives and supports innovation.

Can APM software help with compliance and risk management?

APM software helps organizations comply with industry standards and regulations by tracking application versions, licensing, and usage. It also identifies potential risks associated with outdated or unsupported software, enabling proactive IT security and compliance management.

How does Application Portfolio Management Software improve decision-making?

APM software provides detailed analytics and reporting on application performance, costs, and usage. This data-driven insight allows IT leaders to make informed decisions about investing in, maintaining, or retiring applications, ensuring that the IT portfolio supports overall business objectives.