Top 10 Application Portfolio Management Software (In-Depth Comparison)

Application portfolio management software helps in implementing the framework for identifying applications within the company and managing these applications.

Application Portfolio Management, often known as APM, refers to the process of managing and optimizing inventories of software applications in order to accomplish particular business goals.

In order to achieve this goal, there should be a system in place to calculate IT expenses and standardize software use across all business units.

Application portfolio management is about knowing where to invest in your application landscape. It enables IT teams to make decisions on applications, like which apps to invest in, which apps to eliminate/terminate, which apps to keep, or which applications to migrate.

Application Portfolio Management Software provides you with complete visibility of your application landscape, both on-premise, and cloud, and helps you with effective utilization of each application.

APM lets you do a lot with your software stack than just simple discovery. By automating the discovery of enterprise-wide software stack, they also help with bringing shadow IT, risks, and unused licenses to the surface. 

Using such insights, you can make smart decisions about which app licenses to keep and which to let go of. Ultimately, by providing you direction for spending money on appropriate software and licenses, APM software helps with maximizing your ROI.

In this article, we will discuss different application portfolio management software for managing SaaS applications. But before that, let’s see some of the benefits of APM software.

• It establishes, collects, and tracks metrics to provide a rational and data-driven basis for evaluating and comparing applications.

• It provides an informed inventory of the application landscape that speaks to business capability, the total cost of applications, application support, and application lifecycle management.

• It offers evidence to the IT teams, stakeholders, and management about the relative value, utility, and costs of the applications and services used in the organization.

• It helps the IT teams to illustrate business needs or risks within specific departments.

• It helps to eliminate shadow IT and improve the company's application stack.

Now, we discuss the various Application Portfolio Management Software starting with ours (Zluri).

Top Application Portfolio Management (APM) Software

1. Zluri

Zluri is a SaaS management tool that helps you discover, manage, secure, and optimize your SaaS applications in a single platform. It helps to eliminate SaaS wastage like duplicate apps, auto-renewals, unused licenses, abandoned apps, etc.

It automates  IT tasks like procurement, onboarding, off-boarding, and more. By bringing complete visibility into your SaaS ecosystem, Zlurit helps you discover apps that are purchased without the approval of IT, remove apps with security issues, and eliminate apps that are non-compliant.

Zluri enables your business to explore and manage third-party SaaS applications and their security and compliance from their command center. It provides IT teams with greater visibility and control over the SaaS stack.

Features

• Zluri provides you insights and pre-build reports on your SaaS stack, which allows you to make better purchase and renewal decisions.

  

  

  Zluri All Reports include App usage and spend report, and organizational data report. It helps to monitor, measure, and control application spending while simplifying and eliminating shadow IT.

• Zluri, with over 2,25,000 SaaS apps, has the largest app library in the world. It uses five discovery methods to find 100% of SaaS apps in your organization: SSO, finance, and expense management systems, direct integration through APIs, desktop agent (optional), and browser agent (optional). 

  

  

  Zluri Application Discovery Methods
  
  Note that the discovery engine is the foundation of any software that you will use to manage your app portfolio. Unless you identify the apps in your portfolio, you cannot manage them. Hence, Zluri has a significant advantage over other app management portfolio software apps.
  Learn more on how Zluri discovers applications.

• It helps you to manage all your software application contracts and renewals.

  

  

  Renewal calendar
  Zluri provides you with timely alerts for app renewal. The calendar helps you pay for your subscriptions on time—so that the employees have all the apps to perform their job. With timely alerts, you also get sufficient time to decide on whether to renew or not. Otherwise, there are many apps that get auto-renewed even if you don't know them.
  
  For contracts, the default reminders are sent 30, 15, and 1 day in advance and for payment, you get alerts 7 and 1 day in advance. Of course, you can set up a custom alerts window as well.
  

  

  

  This helps you prioritize high-value contracts.

• You can also create an approval process to reduce SaaS spending. With the app store, you can create workflows for license requisition, approval, provisioning, and revoking access. This is done via App Store. The employees can see all the apps you have in the company and place a request for licenses. Based on the rules set by you, they get access to the licenses.
  
  The automation saves time for IT teams. On the other hand, it provides a good experience for employees, who do not need to wait for days or weeks to access the required apps.

• The usage monitoring feature of Zluri helps optimize your SaaS stacks’ efficiency and licensing costs.
  
  According to a Gartner report, one-third of the app spend gets wasted in the form of redundant apps: apps with overlapping functionality, and unused or underused licenses. With Zluri, you can rightsize your application licenses and optimize the tiers as well.
  

  

  

  App usage data in Zluri

Pros

• Easy to use

• Simple renewal management

• Discover and eliminate shadow IT

• SaaS governance: security and compliance benefits

• Complete visibility of app usage

• Great customer support

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.9/5

• Capterra: 4.9/5

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2. LeanIX

LeanIX is an enterprise architecture management software that manages the transformation and risk of the IT landscape. It backs your enterprise architecture to leverage technology, make decisions and manage change.

It integrates with financial, contract management, and single sign-on systems that help you to discover applications and provide visibility into your organization's applications.  

Features

• It helps to generate insights, configurable reports, and data visualizers to demonstrate the ROI.

• Discovers SaaS application

Pros

• Good user experience

• Good customer support

Cons

• Lacks in reporting feature as not very clear or easy to understand

• Missing standard interfaces for imports

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.6/5

3. ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management

ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management tool is used to gain a comprehensive understanding of the software applications used in your organization. It helps you to identify redundancies and decrease budgetary costs. 

It creates plans to address end-of-life applications and protect your business. It helps you create roadmaps to anticipate and support future business strategies. 

It automates the inventory of software applications and manages their vendor and internal lifecycles. 

Features

• It helps to make data-driven decisions on whether to invest, sustain, or replace your business applications.

• It aligns technology investments and services to business value.

• It helps to manage technology risk by monitoring the versions and life cycles that run business applications.

Pros

• Provides a simple unified solution

• Very clean user interface and is easy to use

• Good visibility and control over applications

Cons

• Difficult to calculate and estimate the licenses on the end-user side

• Need improvement in reports and dashboards

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.3/5

4. Flexera

Flexera One is an IT asset management solution for organizations with complex hybrid environments. It helps you to visualize your entire IT assets and make data-driven decisions from on-premises to SaaS to the cloud.

Features

• Flexera One analyzes the usage of hybrid infrastructures and spend by business services, business units, cost centers, and users. It provides IT investment insights to help you to align technology with your business needs.

• It provides a single view of all software, SaaS, and cloud-product usage to enable you to negotiate agreements and renewals with the vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, etc.

• It helps to reduce software waste and underutilized resources across desktops, data centers, and SaaS.

Pros

• The user interface is intuitive 

• Easy to learn and good customer support

Cons

• Expensive as compared to many other products

• Lack in the documentation makes it difficult to explore the APIs

Customer Rating

• G2: 3.9/5

• Capterra: No review available

5. Torii

Torii is an automated SaaS management platform that helps organizations automate the discovery of their software applications. It provides visibility on what SaaS tools are being used, each SaaS tool usage, and the total SaaS spend for the organization.

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

Features

• Torii helps to eliminate shadow IT by finding and acting on the apps that you are not aware of.

• It helps you to optimize SaaS spending.

• It automates the onboarding and off-boarding process.

• It eliminates the auto-renewals and helps you in better vendor management.

Pros

• Good customer support

• Feature overview in the licenses is useful and good

Cons

• Steep learning curve

• Lack of integrations as more integrations required

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.7/5

• Capterra: 5/5 

6. ManageEngine Application Manager

ManageEngine Application Manager is an application portfolio management tool 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 keeps track of resource availability and performance so that end-users are not affected due to the poor quality of service.

Features

• It helps to discover your applications and map their relationships to gain comprehensive insights into your IT infrastructure.

• It groups the applications based on business services or geographies, tracks the condition of business services and finds the root cause of the problems.

• It offers an alert management module that sends alerts if any abnormalities are detected.

• It provides performance reports, trend analysis reports, capacity planning reports, and more.

Pros

• User friendly with a good end-user experience

• Easy network monitoring and management

Cons

• Expensive as compared to other similar products

• Limited agents for APM

• Poor customer support for lower plans

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.3/5

• Capterra: 4.5/5

7. Ardoq

Ardoq is a data-driven enterprise architecture platform that helps manage low-value systems out of your IT portfolio. It provides an overview of all your applications and their costs. 

It understands the organization's needs and identifies the application that will fulfill the need and the owner of them. It helps the IT teams decide where to invest and which applications can be removed and save the cost for the organization.

Features

• It helps to deliver on business outcomes with architecture that evolves with your organization.

• It provides in-depth analysis and turns reports into graphical insights.

• It helps you to understand complexity, cost, and risk across every connection in your organization. 

Pros

• Good customer service

• Easy to maintain as all changes are updated in one place

Cons

• Steep learning curve

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.8/5

• Capterra: 4/5

8. Zylo

Zylo is a SaaS management platform that gives complete visibility of the SaaS applications of your organization. Zylo’s primary focus is SaaS management and discovering shadow IT. 

It helps to eliminate shadow IT, save cost, optimize SaaS licensing, and more.

It provides you the ability to understand the value of the applications used in your organization. It helps understanding the utilization across license types, feature types, permission types, etc. 

It gives you insights into app users, app usage, and how much is being spent on each app.

Features

• Zylo discovers all your SaaS applications, usage, and spending with ongoing monitoring.

• It reduces SaaS spending and increases purchase efficiencies.

• It provides data-driven insights to eliminate applications with overlapping functionality.

• It offers information regarding your application's upcoming renewals and leverages usage and data to better the negotiations.

• It continuously discovers new applications and enables your organization with a list of approved applications.

Pros

• Excellent at keeping track of upcoming renewals

• Good tracking and mitigating shadow IT

• User friendly

Cons

• Lack of integrations and workflow

• Limitations in reporting

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.8/5

• Capterra: 4.5/5 

9. Productiv

Productiv provides application engagement analytics for organizations to help analyze, drive, and improve their application portfolios based on how they are used.

It gives you a clear picture of the metrics like app usage and spending. It provides visibility of different dimensions of app engagement at the team, location, and feature levels.

It helps to eliminate redundant applications, apps with overlapping functionality, shadow IT, etc. In addition, it helps in decision-making through more data on upcoming renewals and license allocations. 

Features

• Higher cost efficiency across your app portfolio.

• Faster operations through intelligent automation.

• Help make better decisions via deep insights and benchmarks.

Pros

• Good visibility to shadow IT with the feature Shadow IT Discovery

• Provides complete visibility to all SaaS applications

• Simple charts on usage over time

• User friendly and provides integrations

Cons 

• Needs improvement in customer support

• Lack in email configuration on the platform

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.8/5

10. BetterCloud

BetterCloud centralizes the administration of your SaaS app portfolio, increases your visibility into the SaaS data in your organization, and is equipped with policies to protect it against internal and external threats.

It provides an automated workflow that helps with user onboarding, off-boarding, and other admin tasks.

Features

• BetterCloud discovers the SaaS apps across your organization to eliminate the redundancies, shadow IT and improve the overall efficiency.

• It manages SaaS applications while improving the user experience by implementing user lifecycle management workflows.

• It protects your organization’s data and maintains regulatory compliance with sensitive content discovery and automated threat remediation.

Pros

• Good customer support

• Easy to use and user friendly

Cons

• Lack of customizing alerts

• Does not integrate with all the software apps

• Expensive 

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.4/5

• Capterra: 3.6/5