Almost every modern business relies on software tools to optimize business operations and provide a smooth customer experience.
But while early-stage startups can get by with a piecemeal tech stack, enterprise-level organizations need software tools that can be used by hundreds or thousands of employees across multiple departments.
Enterprise software companies offer software as a service (SaaS) solutions to meet these needs, but it can be hard to figure out which of these robust ecosystems make sense for your company or department.
In this article, we’ll spotlight seven of the best enterprise software companies that can help your business thrive in 2022 and beyond.
Let’s hop in.
How we’ve chosen the best enterprise software companies
We understand how important it is for businesses to have integrated, feature-rich tech stacks.
At PandaDoc, we combine years of tech and development experience with a precise and ever-evolving understanding of the needs of enterprises and large companies.
When putting together this article, we worked through several review stages in order to build a complete understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the major software providers.
Here is a quick rundown of our methodology:
- A thorough analysis of the market to account for new enterprise software providers. We were keen to avoid a review that focused exclusively on a handful of well-known names.
- Personal testing and analysis of individual platforms and software suites, particularly to the most common enterprise-level pain points and requirements.
- Comparative analysis of feature sets, pricing, and support packages.
- Overview of existing customer feedback and reviews on sites like G2, Gartner, Capterra, LinkedIn, and TrustPilot.
- Consultation and data collection from the PandaDoc user base (where appropriate).
It’s not uncommon for enterprise software companies to offer markedly different apps, support packages, and individual features.
What’s more: large businesses often opt for solutions that are specifically designed for small and medium organizations.
As such, enterprise customers need to have access to expert information about the suitability of providers. A small business app would be unsuitable for a large business that requires a feature-rich software suite, and vice versa.
At PandaDoc, we aim to provide this information concisely and understandably. When we were reviewing different companies we drew particular attention to their intended target market, usability, technical requirements, and core software packages.
01. Salesforce
Category: Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Location: San Francisco, CA
Key benefits:
- Offers modules for most business workflows
- Modules can be used separately or together
- Platform integrates easily with existing tech stack
- Scalable software for businesses of all sizes
While Salesforce is most widely known for its flagship CRM, the company offers a wide selection of products that can be used to greatly enhance the customer experience.
This suite of CRM-based productivity tools can be used piecemeal, in conjunction with the rest of our tech stack, or as a single ERP system that connects all aspects of your business — from supply chain management to customer service — through a single platform.
This means that each module functions separately and platform adoption can be scaled up or down as you see fit.
That kind of flexibility is powerful for enterprise teams, especially if your company uses proprietary internal software or only one department is interested in switching for your existing software tools.
However you choose to work with the Salesforce platform, all of the tools the company provides also connect via Salesforce CRM, which remains at the core of any product the company sells.
That’s a major advantage for your tech stack because Salesforce CRM integrates with most other major software applications on the market, making automation simple!
For example, PandaDoc users can integrate with Salesforce CRM to pull customer and product data directly into their proposal document or stay within Saleforce and generate documents directly from the platform.
2. Atlassian
Category: Project Management
Location: Sydney, Australia
Key benefits:
- Offers flexible and scalable project management tools
- Compatible with Agile frameworks and methodologies
- Collaboration and dev tools are easy and intuitive to use
- Streamlining business processes happens naturally
Atlassian is a market leader in collaboration tools. The platform is designed to help teams work together and stay on track through every stage of development.
The suite of tools the company provides includes:
- Jira, a project-tracking tool
- Jira Align, an Agile planning system for enterprises
- Confluence, a mobile- and desktop-optimized teamwork tool
- Trello, a popular project management app
- BitBucket, a code-sharing program
- HipChat, an internal chat client
Atlassian also heavily favors the Agile methodology and builds its products with that operational philosophy in mind. Jira Software practically runs on Agile, and every software associated with it supports Agile frameworks.
It’s also important to note that the majority of Atlassian’s tools aren’t designed as customer-facing elements.
These are strictly back-office toolkits designed to help teams manage workflows and move projects through production pipelines more effectively.
Atlassian’s products are also mostly focused on product management and development, meaning that they won’t serve as great solutions for storing customer information or parsing and handling raw data (although Confluence can help with this in some capacity).
If you need a suite of tools to help manage your internal workflows — and if you like Agile frameworks — then Atlassian is definitely one company to consider adopting into your daily business operations.
3. PandaDoc
Category: Document Workflow & Automation
Location: San Francisco, CA
Key benefits:
- All-in-one document generation improves close rates
- Template and content libraries accelerate document send
- Approval workflows and processes minimize contracting risk
- Industry-agnostic; can be used in all business operations
Most document management solutions only focus on a single aspect of the production process.
Electronic signature tools can help you sign a document, but they won’t help you create it.
Word processors and design platforms can help you build great documents, but they won’t help you send them or track who interacted with them.
PandaDoc stands apart because it provides a suite of tools that helps enterprise companies create, manage, and automate documents throughout every stage of production and deployment.
This includes tools to assist with full document creation, electronic signature capture, payment capture, and file storage.
And these tools can be used for any type of document, from quotes and sales proposals to invoices, hiring contracts, and more.
This allows PandaDoc document creation tools to span multiple departments and use cases, which is critical for enterprise companies churning out huge amounts of paperwork.
In fact, our software tools are regularly used by human resources, financial services teams, and sales teams to document production.
PandaDoc automation tools can also help your team take steps to drastically increase ROI by boosting worker efficiency and streamlining process workflows.
Our template tools and content library transform content creation from a manual task to a plug-and-play solution that is simple to use and easy for anyone to understand.
By consolidating all elements of the document lifecycle into a single platform and coupling it with a streamlined user experience, PandaDoc helps companies close deals more quickly and manage documents with greater efficiency.
It’s one enterprise-level solution that you won’t want to miss.
4. Dropbox
Category: File Hosting
Location: San Francisco, CA
Key benefits:
- Fast, simple, digital storage solution
- Enterprise-level controls for team and file management
- API access and comprehensive integration options
Even before COVID-19, the idea of physical file storage was already becoming a thing of the past, especially at the enterprise level.
In recent years, the ability to store and access essential files from anywhere has become even more important, and Dropbox is one of the best ways to handle that access in a safe and secure way.
The Dropbox platform is a world-class, cloud-based file hosting service that allows employees to access files whenever and wherever they may need them.
Most importantly, Dropbox works with any type of file, including multimedia, software files, computer backups, documents, data, and anything else that you want to add.
This is different from specialized software tools like PandaDoc, which is designed to manage and store proposals and contracts. That’s why we offer a Dropbox integration for fast and easy storage and e-signing!
But Dropbox doesn’t stop at file storage. The platform also provides additional features like file recovery and versioning, as well as the ability to remotely clear files from lost or stolen devices.
For enterprise companies, Dropbox also offers a suite of team management and API tools to help organizations integrate more effectively with the platform.
Plus, many companies and tools also integrate with Dropbox, including Adobe, Microsoft, and Oracle.
That, on top of its flexible pricing and scalability, makes it a platform worth considering when you’re looking to bring in a new software solution to fit your business needs.
5. Okta
Category: Identity Management
Location: San Francisco, CA
Key benefits:
- Comprehensive identity management
- Businesswide single sign-on solutions
- Better customer data management
Any modern company focused on the digital transformation relies on good data and solid business intelligence. Enterprise-level businesses need to manage profiles for hundreds or thousands of individual employees and contractors in order to operate effectively.
That includes handling IT credentials, authenticating users, and creating guided workflows that make sense for the organization.
Plus, for companies that leverage data for lead research and sales acquisition, keeping track of thousands or millions of customer profiles exponentially increases the amount of data that needs to be gathered and maintained!
Software companies like Okta provide a number of services that assist companies with this monumental task while mitigating the security risks associated with data acquisition.
Using Okta, you can keep track of users across multiple platforms and devices, provide single sign-on tools and enhance your collaboration capabilities with partners outside of your organization.
The company even integrates directly with other software tools (like PandaDoc!) and cloud services to keep your workflows smooth and straightforward.
In the wake of the COIVD-19 pandemic, data management has become increasingly more important as we’ve seen remote work come to the fore as a viable means of employee management.
The ability to create a seamless IT infrastructure that works for your employees from anywhere can be critical to creating a collaborative and modernized work environment where teams can continue to thrive.
6. Gong
Category: Sales Intelligence
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Key benefits:
- Help teams consolidate and analyze sales data
- Spot customer patterns and create a searchable database
- Find actional insights for new deals and opportunities
With all the different sales tools and platforms on the market today, it’s easier than ever for deals and opportunities within your go-to-market strategy to slip completely through the cracks.
This problem is most likely to occur when your sales teams gather a ton of information but lack the tools necessary to piece that intelligence together into recognizable and actionable patterns.
Gong helps you capture, parse, and analyze your customer interactions at scale across your entire organization so that you can see the real-time opportunities that are developing all around you.
For example, imagine that leads are talking more and more about one primary competitor in your market. Without the right tools, it might be impossible to discover that trend because every rep is disconnected from other reps.
Gong uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to combine all of your information into a single, searchable database so that you can spot those trends and take action.
For PandaDoc users, that might mean quickly updating proposal templates and the product catalog to address these market changes.
The level of detail and analysis can help enterprise organizations, evolve product messaging at critical times and help teams stay ahead of the game when talking with customers.
7. Sprout Social
Category: Social Media Management
Location: Chicago, IL
Key benefits:
- Streamline social media management
- Quickly gather social trends to guide decision-making
- Leverage robust approval processes for social teams
There are a ton of great social media management platforms out there, but Sprout Social is an all-in-one solution that empowers enterprise-level social media teams to consolidate all metrics into one easy-to-analyze dashboard.
The core of Sprout’s business model is to quantify social data so that it’s easier to utilize platforms and leverage ROI. This drive is what makes Sprout more than a publishing and scheduling platform.
Teams using Sprout can uncover trends and actionable insights, streamline social engagement through a unified inbox, and use the data gathered on social to guide strategic decisions made by the company.
This is a sea change from how most companies handle social outreach, where mismanagement can lead to a bad customer experience or a lackluster brand image.
With Sprout, companies have the opportunity to overcome these hurdles and build stronger customer relationships through every stage of the sales process.
Plus, just like PandaDoc, Sprout offers a variety of approval workflows and scheduling tools (plus mobile apps) so that your team can adopt a workflow with the appropriate guardrails to protect your brand image.
8. Talent LMS
Category: Training & Compliance
Location: San Francisco, CA
Key benefits:
- Fast and easy training for employees and customers
- Full course library offered alongside content creation tools
- Advanced monitoring and reporting capabilities
No matter your industry, training and compliance quickly become a constant challenge once you grow past a certain headcount.
Employees need to be updated on new product launches, trained in best practices, kept in the loop in industry changes mandated by regulatory authorities, and much more.
For thriving businesses, continually developing training plans and keeping track of employees as they work through that training can be a job in itself.
In fact, many enterprise-level organizations have program directors for their training programs to develop new courses and take people through the relevant content.
With Talent LMS, your training team will be able to develop courses and upload them to the training database, alongside lists of course candidates so that staying on top of training is fast and easy
But just having a dedicated team isn’t enough. Even with a dedicated training team, you’ll still need the tools to monitor progress and supplement any in-person training you want to provide.
This becomes even more tedious if your team is spread across multiple locations or is working remotely.
Talent LMS is a great tool to help you get over those hurdles.
The platform offers an out-of-the-box setup that’s fast and easy so that you can get up and running with training in record time.
Plus, at the enterprise level, you’ll find a ton of tools to help you subdivide your organization by location, department, or team so that training can be more targeted to specific employees.
9. Greenhouse
Category: Hiring & Applicant Tracking
Location: New York, NY
Key benefits:
- Collaborative interviewing plans and scoring systems
- Analytics and reporting tools for hiring and onboarding
- Faster onboarding and better structure for new hires
It can be tough to execute a hiring strategy well. Mistakes made throughout this process can create long-term detriment for your company.
Poor hiring decisions can lead to underqualified employees and team members who become dissatisfied with their roles. Plus, when team members involved in the hiring process aren’t kept on the same page, it’s easy for everything to fly off the rails.
Greenhouse offers an applicant tracking system designed to make new talent acquisitions faster and easier to scale. Their tools allow you to create a data-driven hiring experience and reduce unconscious bias that might impact decision quality while fostering a collaborative decision-making process.
For companies looking to deliver a unique hiring experience that produces the best candidate for the role, the Greenhouse recruitment process is hard to ignore.
But what happens after you’re ready to pull the trigger? Greenhouse has a solution for that, too.
You can create a consistent framework for your onboarding process that applies to every single new employee, then automate all of the tedious, administrative processes to help move things along.
You can even create resource hubs and provide training materials to bring new hires in the loop even faster.
The company also takes all of the work done through the ATS and delivers metrics and reports that you can use to track hiring workflows and success over time.
You can improve this process by soliciting feedback from candidates as part of the application process, then tweak your workflows to create an even better experience.
10. BirdEye
Category: Reputation Management & Customer Feedback
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Key benefits:
- Create a feedback loop designed to build online reputation
- Consolidate customer omnichannel into a streamlined toolkit
- Solicit customer reviews and automates online feedback
Managing your online presence can be huge, no matter how big your company might become.
Between dozens of social profiles, directory listings, and the multitude of ways that customers can get in touch, it’s more difficult now than ever to stay on top of everything if you’re missing the right tools.
And it gets even worse as soon as your business has more than one location.
BirdEye is one tool to consider when it comes to managing your online presence and routing all inbound customer contact to one place.
The software keeps track of all your business information, automatically solicits reviews from customers, and consolidated all inbound customer correspondence to a single platform.
You can even create surveys, video chat with customers, and analyze user activity for insights and performance!
So, why does all of this matter?
The digital transformation and the push to an omnichannel experience have been difficult for every business to manage.
With so many points of contact, even the best companies have been forced to rely on inadequate chatbots and delayed response times on certain engagement platforms while trying to meet customers on their level.
BirdEye makes it easier to manage all of this through a combination of automation and process consolidation.
The monitoring capabilities of the software help you maintain your online reputation and response to customer feedback while the consolidated inbox allows you to work as a team to answer customer questions without worrying about the specifics of the platform where the customer made contact.
Plus, thanks to Zapier, BirdEye can connect to your entire tech stack and customer workflow.
If you’re using PandaDoc and BirdEye, you can create customer profiles in BirdEye as soon as documents as sent through the PandaDoc platform.
11. Brandlive
Category: Premium Event Production & Management
Location: Portland, OR
Key benefits:
- Create memorable events, broadcasts, and meetings
- Admin and moderation tools to keep meetings on track
- Deep analytics to track engagement
Nobody likes boring meetings but, unfortunately, most meetings look the same. Everyone hops on a video chat, one person talks, and nobody is engaged. It’s not a great experience, but it’s standard fare for many businesses.
But there are definitely some meetings and events that you’ll want people to remember:
So how do you switch it up? Brandlive has the answer.
The company offers a set of broadcast tools designed to give your office meetings a facelift and elevate them from boring video chats to full-blown productions with the branded look and feel that’s impossible to get anywhere else.
With Brandlive, you’ll have the power to add graphics and animated GIFs to your video backboard, build multi-window displays with multiple presenters, set up and produce shows, manage presenters, and more.
The Brandlive approach to events is already a massive success, too.
The company has partnered with enterprise organizations already, including massive companies and major political parties, to help users create imaginative events that resonate.
If you’re looking to take your meetings to the next level, Brandlive is a great way to level up your production quality and communicate the value of your brand.
Originally published May 25, 2021, updated December 23, 2021
Frequently asked questions
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When it comes to enterprise applications, software solutions are often constructed with greater scalability in mind.
While software solutions that cater to small- and medium-sized businesses may be great for entrepreneurs and startups, they may break down under the heavy load that accompanies hundreds or thousands of users interacting with a single software account simultaneously.
Often, as software companies move to break into the enterprise space, their software products and related infrastructure will change. Cloud computing resources may become more abundant, and software development may begin to supplement features with automation tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence to help expedite tedious processes.
Top enterprise software companies already have the infrastructure in place to support tens of thousands of users. When you buy into an established software giant, rather than a Silicon Valley startup, you’re also buying into their infrastructure and stability.
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Software capacity is the amount of traffic that a given application and environment can handle. Software providers who coordinate with large enterprises need to test software capacity to ensure that their product can handle the amount of work it will need to perform for its customers.
Many companies test enterprise software capacity by using automated test tools to simulate end-users.
However, this can cause problems if the test tools are not set up to properly emulate normal business activities. Practical capacity tests need to include careful documentation to make sure that they actually test the software in the way that it will be used during both standard and heavy load times.
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Many top-level software companies offer robust feature sets that can completely change the way your company or department does business.
How an enterprise platform like SAP will handle ERP versus a competitor like Oracle will be completely different, and new system adoption can lead down a very rocky path as your team members adjust to new software and processes.
Most companies rely on a complex tech stack that works to service all portions of their business operations. When you’re considering a new software adoption, it’s worth taking the time to understand how that new platform will impact your existing tech stack and what the true cost of adoption might be.
It’s also possible to purchase enterprise platforms that create more problems than they’re worth by forcing widespread adoption in order to be effective.
Considering how many people and departments will be using the software, what internal changes you would need to make in order to adopt it, and if that changeover is good for the long-term health of your business operations.
