SaaS Company Guide
Our software tool recommendations for your IT/SaaS business
Scale up your SaaS company with these tools
Choosing the right technology tools for your business is a key aspect of building your success. They may be industry specific or hold multiple important functions you can utilise to reduce time spent on processes and boost the free time your staff have to hit their goals. We've put together a host of software tools we recommend for your industry whether you're a year into your business and looking to expand, or you've been running for 10 years and now need to make upgrades to certain processes.
When choosing your next tool we recommend considering the following points:
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Does the tool have the specific features you need?
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Is the tool scalable to suit your growth?
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Is the tool compatible with your other software systems?
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Does it handle multiple functions for your teams?
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Is the price suitable for your budget?
We have not built our resources guides as review articles which compare multiple tools against each other. We have taken one or two tools we would recommend and put them forward to make your life easier as we have either carried out the research or used the tools ourselves through our clients. Of course, we recommend you perform your own research to make sure they will fit your company but our aim is to save you the leg work!
You want to keep in mind how many tools you use in your business. You may be reliant on the free plans of certain tools if you're starting out but as you begin to grow the plans may start stacking up, costing you a pretty penny. We have tried to include tools here which offer multiple functions/features for you to keep costs down. Try to keep your tech stack small if you can! It will make building your systems easier.
To visit the website of the tool we recommend, simply click the logo.
Financial
Xero is one of the largest and most well-known cloud-based accounting software designed for small and medium-sized businesses. It offers a range of features including invoicing, bank reconciliation, expense tracking, financial reporting, and payroll management. It's powerful, has an intuitive user interface and hosts many integrations to sink up your current software tools. For a SaaS company which has subscription payments coming in very often from a tool such as Stripe, Xero will handle this volume wonderfully.
Starting from £15/month, this is suitable option if you need your accounts in one set platform.
CRM Tools
This may seem a rogue choice as ClickUp is primarily a project management tool, but they have a brilliant CRM template to be utilised to hold your sales pipelines and deal information. We've used this feature in the past and it works very well, especially as it doubles up as a task management system. Their pipeline offers a range of different views such as Kanban board, list and calendar views and you can create your customised dashboard widgets to get quick overviews of how your pipeline is running as and when you need it. If you need a CRM for your SaaS company, we'd recommend ClickUp.
ClickUp offer a free plan but we expect the Unlimited or Business plan would be best suited for your consultancy, starting from £6/user per month which is very competitively priced.
Marketing
Lavendar.ai is one of the new generation of AI powered cold outreach focused email marketing tools to hit the market. And, it's a great one. The tool grades your emails so you can improve your score over time with new iterations, they have many ways to personalise emails based on text and segments, and you can track how your performance is looking to make sure you're always improving. If you're into performing cold outreach, this is the platform to use as a coach.
They offer a free plan but this is quite limited and doesn't include the AI editor to help you craft your emails. You can use ChatGPT for this if needed, but we would suggest going for the Starter plan at £23 per month.
Outbound marketing
Mailerlite is a fantastic program we have a lot of experience with to send out newsletters and marketing campaigns. Their campaign builder allows you full customisation of your email design make it look exactly how you need. They have their standard drag and drop editor, an AI editor, a rich-text editor and HTML editor to suit your needs. Send newsletter subscribers into a workflow and get them warmed up with automations too!
Pricing starts from £18/month on their Growing Business plan which allows up to 2,500 subscribers before requiring an upgrade in plan.
Inbound marketing
SocialPilot is a great tool to grow the social media presence of your SaaS company. With its intuitive interface and powerful scheduling features, SocialPilot enables you to plan, schedule, and analyse social media campaigns effortlessly. You have the ability to engage with customers directly from one platform and it has a host of features required by SaaS companies of any size looking to grow a brand. As with a lot of companies now they have also integrated AI into the mix, allowing you to utilise creative writing to cut the time you spend on social media way down.
SocialPilot is a very affordable tool, with the Professional plan starting at £22.10 per month when paid annually. This grants access for 1 user and 10 social media accounts (if you have that many).
Social Media
Project Management
If you opted for a software tool other than ClickUp for your CRM, that means there is a space for a project management system, and this can only be filled by Jira for SaaS. Jira is a PM tool produced by Atlassian and is perfect for a team constantly running sprints and who also need a customer service desk as Atlassian also have Service Desk for Jira. The tool is very in-depth and does take more time to learn than other tools due to its range of functionality such as task management, goal tracking, dependency management and project boards. With the way Jira is designed, they enable you to use custom SQL coding to create your own search filters and tables within their dashboarding views.
As Atlassian have a selection of tools within their suite, Jira would be our recommendation for your SaaS company.
Jira is free for up to 10 users, with the Standard plan costing £6.50 per user per month which offers many more features.
Design
Depending on the type of SaaS company you run, you may need a tool to handle contracts. If you have a lengthy sales cycle and you're selling high-ticket offers to your customers, Dropbox Sign is the contract tool we would recommend, especially as you can also utilise Dropbox for your file management. It has a portal to customise your uploaded contracts with its drag and drop editor to place input boxes and enables you to set up templates to minimise repetitive work if you're sending out multiple set contracts. The templates are the real selling point here as they save so much time, and the process for the customer is seamless once they need to sign.
Pricing starts at £11.67 per month for one user when billed annually. But if you have a team it would pay to opt for the Standard plan at £20 per user per month when billed annually, which offers up to 5 users.
Automations
Your business software stack is never complete without an automation tool, and Zapier is the pick of the bunch! We love Zapier as it allows (most) software tools to communicate with each other, making processes far smoother.
Imagine you have a prospect who signs up for your newsletter, and you want to nurture them. You can use Zapier to send the signup from your webform into your email marketing tool, send them into your CRM, and start a workflow of an email campaign to warm them up. Once they express interest, Zapier can handle your tools to get them onboarded.
It's truly great software which we recommend starting with on the Starter plan of £23.97/month because it offers multi-step automations and 750 "automations" per month.
Additional Tools
We've added some additional tools which aren't necessarily tailored for your industry, but they are widely regarded as the best options for day-to-day business functions such as messaging, security, design and more.
Whether you are working with a virtual or an in-house team, you're going to want a strong password manager which offers a high security rating to protect your passwords. Lastpass offers the ability to store passwords in customisable folders, it will generate highly secure passwords for you, and gives you the ability to share login information with a team member without giving out the password itself.
We recommend this password manager to all of our clients as it's a safe and secure method for keeping your data secure, and many people haven't considered the risks before being introduced to the tool. Starting from £3.40/user per month, it's a small price to pay for peace of mind.
Slack is a supurb messaging app to bring your team together in one application. It's easier to use than MS Teams and certainly operates better than Whatsapp for team use, but the biggest selling point is its ability to integrate with other software tools. One example is connecting it to a project management tool and automating notification messages to team members when changes are made on tickets.
While Slack does have a free plan, for smaller teams we recommend the Pro plan which is £7/user per month. This does make it a more expensive option in the market, but the capabilities more than make up for it.
Your writing is one of the foundational keys of your business, so you want to make sure it's flowing well and without errors. Grammarly is like having a wizen teacher stood behind you with a ruler, constantly peering at your spelling. The tool ensures your writing is free of spelling mistakes and grammar issues, with a surprisingly good AI module now developed with the recent push of AI technology. Grammarly runs in a host of applications meaning you'll always have the ability to check your work.
Grammarly has a great free plan to keep you in check, and for those who would be considered the team novellist, there is a paid plan of £10/month.
Canva will always be at the top of our list for web-based design work for entry and intermediate level design work for social media and documentation requirements. The templates available offer a great basis for bringing your idea to life and the design tools you have at your disposal allow for in-depth customisation.
If you have one person in your business looking after design work, we recommend the Pro subscription at £9/month, and if you have a team each adding their input to the design process you should opt for the Team plan for £100/person per year, which has a minimum of 2 people.
That concludes our list! We recommend your look into the options we've provided and see how they fit into your company based on size, budget and how experienced your team are with adopting new tools.
Should you require help setting up and running these systems, please send an enquiry in and we will set you up with a member of our team to support your business.
Miro is a fantastic visual collaboration tool tailored for innovation and creation. It provides you with a virtual whiteboard to plan, map, discuss and discover new ways of working and building your product or business processes. Whether mapping out product roadmaps, conducting brainstorming sessions, or facilitating remote team collaboration, Miro is the tool to use. You no longer have to print off a process map and hand it out to team members before a meeting, now you can all work on the same board simultaneously. We use it, and we love it!
Miro offers a free plan to get you started and feel how much better collaboration can feel. If you need more than 3 boards and more features, the Starter plan is £6.28 per user per month when billed annually. This is the plan we recommend.
Contracts
For Saas teams who are always iterating their products and wanting to change the UI/UX, we suggest Figma as a design tool. Figma is a collaborative design tool created with UI designers in mind, and is the go-to for creating quick iterations of how you want your product to look and feel and get real-time feedback. You may not be directly involved in the design process if you have an outsourced development team but it's worth knowing how the tool works and the basic functionality to help guide the process.
Figma offers a free plan for up to 3 designs, and their first paid plan Professional is £11 per user per month when billed annually. This also now includes Developer Mode which enables designs to be translated into coding.