Announcing Productiv Essentials, our Free SaaS Management Offering

I’m very excited to officially announce Productiv Essentials, our new free offering on the Productiv SaaS Management Platform.   As of today we’re opening up early access, and we will soon make it generally available to companies everywhere.

Why provide a free SaaS Management alternative?

In a few short years, Productiv has come to lead the SaaS Management category for those seeking a data-driven approach to understanding how employees are actually using applications. Companies like Zoom, Box, Okta, Robinhood, Uber and more all rely on Productiv. 

We’ve only begun to solve the SaaS Management problem for businesses at large. Our recent survey shows that organizations typically have 100 applications or more, yet 88% of executives admit they have low to no visibility on how those applications are being consumed. There’s still a massive amount of pain and frustration out there in managing a sprawling set of SaaS applications. 

The current state for millions of businesses is a mix of poorly maintained spreadsheets, some employee surveys, and a whole lot of good intentions. Many organizations have to dedicate a full-time employee to the task of chasing down SaaS owners, licenses, and contracts! Is this really as good as it gets?

We don’t think so.  Many organizations know they need a better way to manage their SaaS application spend, but haven’t yet figured out how to create a SaaS management layer. Teams are mostly reactive to SaaS renewals, and have limited insight into employees’ usage of applications. Very few organizations realize yet that this isn’t even just about license management – this is about building the central system of record where your C-suite and team leaders can collaborate on the application strategy of your organization.

Examining the scope and scale of this problem, we asked, “What if we gave every IT leader the foundation to start their SaaS Management journey now? How would that help companies more effectively using SaaS?”  

That’s why we’re announcing Productiv Essentials, our free SaaS Management offering.

A first look at Productiv Essentials

Productiv Essentials gives everyone a chance to build a strong SaaS Management foundation for their business.

We have detailed out the packages on our pricing page, but let’s talk about the philosophy behind what we’re doing. Our goal was to create a free product that would provide significant value to users out of the box. You can set it up yourself, easily find what you need, and get value quickly. 

So to better understand what we are launching, let’s start by talking about what Productiv Essentials is NOT:

• It’s not a time-bound trial. You can use it for as long as you like.
• It’s not limited by users. You can invite your entire IT team, Finance, Procurement, and C-Suite into the product to collaborate – just like our paid customers do.
• It’s not limited by the number of applications. We will show you all of your applications in one place.

With 360-degree visibility of your application portfolio and the ability to track renewal data, Productiv Essentials will eliminate your need for a SaaS Management Spreadsheet.

So what is Productiv Essentials? Here it is, in three pieces:

1. The core of SaaS management is around visibility. Getting to a 360-degree view of your applications is the critical first step to strategic SaaS management. To give you that core capability, key visibility features are entirely free. That includes connecting your Single Sign-On system to see your managed applications, as well as connecting to common expense systems to see shadow IT and expensed applications.
2. Everyone needs renewal management. Productiv Essentials allows you to track critical renewal data so that you can proactively manage and prioritize your renewals, instead of chasing down vendors and contracts at the last minute.
3. Deep insights on engagement. Customers like Amplitude, PagerDuty, Blue Diamond Growers, and many others chose Productiv because they know the best way to manage SaaS applications is to have a complete understanding of how those applications are being consumed by individuals and teams. Productiv Essentials also provides a taste of this capability, with the ability to report engagement analytics for the videoconferencing system of your choice (Zoom, Google Meet, and WebEx are a few of these options).

Depending on where you are in your SaaS management journey, the capabilities of Productiv Essentials may be all that you need right now. If that’s the case, that’s great. We are happy to provide this to your company at no cost.

Getting started with Productiv Essentials

We’ve had a great time working with our initial users on Essentials, and now we’re ready to open it up to even more companies. Want to join in?  Come sign up for early access!  We’re actively welcoming new users to the platform every day. Please head on over and add yourself to the list. Once you sign up, we’d also love for you to share this among your community and colleagues, and will reward you by moving you up in line. We will work to get everyone into the product as quickly as possible!

Once you’re in, you’ll find that our engineering and design teams have done an amazing job. It’s going to be just a matter of a few steps for you to finally say goodbye to your SaaS Management spreadsheet and get on with your life!