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](https://images.ctfassets.net/eolgt3xbz2ko/105D7Si0oaZu3UBLqcGI1I/fe579213bfb70d01dcfbe7fd82bce439/Zluri.jpg?w=1600&h=1065&fl=progressive&q=50&fm=jpg)
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 boasts the industry's largest app library with over 225,000 applications. Using advanced 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.
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.Zluri’s 9 robust discovery methods
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.
As per Kuppingercole's research and analysis report, 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
2. LeanIX
![LeanIX](https://images.ctfassets.net/eolgt3xbz2ko/3NnHw2HwNvirP0Rli8zeEP/642b0fbe37699142a408b8d37c062002/LeanIX.jpg?w=1600&h=1065&fl=progressive&q=50&fm=jpg)
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](https://images.ctfassets.net/eolgt3xbz2ko/2Mymkqudz5uKa4NhLtGqr6/54db165a6745c4134b91ea074f07ebdf/ServiceNow.jpg?w=1600&h=1065&fl=progressive&q=50&fm=jpg)
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](https://images.ctfassets.net/eolgt3xbz2ko/3sNA15U1zI94UR0GxYFmX1/54df64c0fbb0d6a9da01e117eb710963/Flexera.jpg?w=1600&h=1065&fl=progressive&q=50&fm=jpg)
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](https://images.ctfassets.net/eolgt3xbz2ko/6WfBHoRDKqLf0KQU2w1Wz1/7818c103c3c9b39f6964b0f0777cfb2f/Torii.jpg?w=1600&h=1065&fl=progressive&q=50&fm=jpg)
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](https://images.ctfassets.net/eolgt3xbz2ko/wjcbLEizJ4mQSaXTV406z/d00d1393418bc0d67ec0d446e1d7a1cd/ManageEngine_Application_Manager.jpg?w=1600&h=1065&fl=progressive&q=50&fm=jpg)
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](https://images.ctfassets.net/eolgt3xbz2ko/21o7YdT38Rl40yvLdnW5ay/a59c4f331b13340b41d9128e0dde13c6/Ardoq.jpg?w=1600&h=1065&fl=progressive&q=50&fm=jpg)
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](https://images.ctfassets.net/eolgt3xbz2ko/60kGEM32hi5ceYxZXLKEmw/a388396bc6044e11f40e4ab381ebf855/ZYLO.jpg?w=1600&h=1065&fl=progressive&q=50&fm=jpg)
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](https://images.ctfassets.net/eolgt3xbz2ko/4T7EzsiFAQvWosN42bqVd/d66a4f32dd4c8ed719163262b7e542c8/Productiv.jpg?w=1600&h=1065&fl=progressive&q=50&fm=jpg)
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](https://images.ctfassets.net/eolgt3xbz2ko/4UvQWJlXVoacH430cOmAgN/af755bded8a2a95c2afba78a8e94e102/BetterCloud.jpg?w=1600&h=1065&fl=progressive&q=50&fm=jpg)
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