BetterCloud is a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SaaS Management Platforms

At BetterCloud, we’re obviously big believers in SaaS. 

For employees, we love their ease of adoption, ability to meet exact needs, exceptional user experience, and their tenfold improvement on employee collaboration. For IT, we love that the days of managing hardware and installing software updates and patches are long gone.

But these SaaS benefits bring new headaches. The biggest is Shadow IT. 

Users can subscribe to a new app within minutes without IT involvement. These apps introduce security risks with inappropriate data read/write permissions or integrating with apps that store sensitive data. On the financial side, this app could be the third Trello account, or the sixth project management app. It could also be much more expensive than IT allocates. 

The result is an unknown and unmanageable SaaS environment. To get control, at BetterCloud, we think SaaS management currently breaks down into 5 fundamental capabilities:

Let’s take them one at a time.

1. Visibility

Eliminating blindspots in the SaaS environment depends on a few tasks. An SMP needs to:

• Find all apps (e.g., Discovery)
• Categorize apps (e.g., determine what kind of apps it finds as business-related or not),
• Determine if it’s IT-sanctioned 

This is no easy feat. The discovery process detects apps in a few different ways. IT can do this by using API access to finance and accounting systems, single sign-on apps, and identity providers. 

A tool can also use browser extensions. At BetterCloud, this is not our preferred approach. We find agentless app discovery superior because of browser extension disadvantages. 

Nothing is immune from risk, including extensions. Even trusted vendors can make mistakes.  Hijacked extensions can replace good ones with malicious extensions that steal credentials or confidential information. Second, there may be a performance tax. They’re known to slow browser performance and your employees’ productivity. 

Finally, there’s compliance. It’s impossible to get 100% extension deployment across all of today’s common browsers for all your employees on all devices all of the time.

When evaluating SaaS management platforms, we think it’s important to:

• Determine if a browser extension is a risk you’re willing to accept 
• Look at how many SaaS apps a platform tracks and how they’re identified

It’s not enough to discover apps, you need them to be automatically and accurately categorized and described. At BetterCloud, we track and categorize more than 90,000 SaaS vendors using the world’s most comprehensive SaaS app taxonomy from G2.

2. Automation to efficiently manage users, including onboarding and offboarding

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for SMPs report finds automation a crucial feature, and so do we. Manual user lifecycle management wastes time and doesn’t scale. Ultimately, you can’t efficiently manage common SaaS operations without bulk user management. To get the job done, a low or no-code workflow builder to help quickly build and maintain custom automated workflows is the best way to go.

Using BetterCloud User Automation you can: 

• Use our drag and drop Workflow Builder to automate the entire user lifecycle, from onboarding to offboarding. This includes mid-cycle changes, like department changes, and common help desk tasks, like password resets or app access requests.

• Build workflows with IF/THEN branching, enabling you to run fewer, but more complex workflow orchestrations as policies dictate.

• Schedule workflows allowing you to run it at a preset date and time, enabling offboarding outside normal IT business hours – without the long hours.

• Trigger workflows based on events that occur in SaaS apps with no native support in BetterCloud. This means you can start a workflow when a ticket is created or when an employee record is changed in an HRIS.

• View executed workflows and prove compliance in audit logs with action timestamps that never expire.

To sum up BetterCloud User Automation, in a single comprehensive, integrated platform, you can operate and secure your entire SaaS environment. Unlike using point solutions for each function, you get unified visibility and control for significantly better efficiency with less error and security risk.  

3. SaaS cost control to optimize SaaS budgets

Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for SMPs report and BetterCloud both find spend management capabilities essential. SMPs must enable organizations to:

• Manage vendors and contracts
• Assign app business owners
• Optimize license usage by user and department
• Eliminate underutilized apps and licenses
• Increase SaaS app adoption
• Report and optimize SaaS spending
• Identify overlapping products and accounts for savings opportunities
• Forecast usage and budgets
• Track risk and compliance certification 
• Ease renewals with key date alerting and price benchmarking
• Provide a self-service catalog or store of IT-sanctioned SaaS apps 

BetterCloud Spend Optimization provides all these features and more. Thanks to our large customer base, we have more than $35 billion worth of SaaS vendor contracts within our platform. This gives us the ability to benchmark pricing for nearly 70 market-leading apps to know what organizations like yours might pay. Important pricing and contract insights from our BetterRenewal enable you to effectively negotiate and confidently renew.

4. File governance for secure and confident file sharing

At BetterCloud, we believe IT must have governance over file sharing permissions. Our BetterCloud File Governance is a key SaaS lifecycle management function that provides IT administrators and data security teams with a powerful tool to:

• Maintain compliance
• Protect data and 
• Automate safeguards of externally shared files

Using this capability, IT can finally control their file sharing environments with proactive and reactive threat remediation, all without impacting team collaboration.

Using BetterCloud File Governance, organizations can:

• Audit their current file environment and sharing permissions
• Automatically enforce DLP policies in Google, Slack, Dropbox, Box, and Microsoft
• Secure Google MyDrives and Shared drives
• Automate threat remediation to safeguard sensitive data

If an employee inadvertently or maliciously shares a confidential file, BetterCloud File Governance allows you to instantly revoke cloud file permissions and lock files from unauthorized users.

5. Extensibility and integrations to maximize automation 

Lastly, BetterCloud allows you to integrate our unified SaaS user lifecycle management platform with the common IT infrastructure apps your organization uses. This includes Okta and JumpCloud for single sign-on, as well as IT Service Management tool and help or service desk applications like ServiceNow or Jira. 

It also includes HRIS tools, like Workday and BambooHR. This way, you can extend zero touch workflows directly to HR to make the user status changes that kick off workflows.

SMP market leader BetterCloud delivers consistent value to customers

At BetterCloud, when it comes to delivering value, we believe actions speak louder than words. Here’s what our customers experience:

These are just a handful out of thousands of customers who rely on BetterCloud. Read more BetterCloud customer stories to understand the benefits we consistently deliver.

BetterCloud: The Gartner SaaS management platform Magic Quadrant Leader that is innovating the future 

As BetterCloud, we look forward to keeping our customers a step ahead of looming SaaS lifecycle management challenges. 

Customers will get the improvements and the release cadence they’ve come to expect from BetterCloud. We’re working hard to add more integrations and SaaS app pricing benchmarks. We’re improving contracts ingestion, automated license reclamation, and tighter integration of acquisitions. As we enter the AI-driven era, we’re adding and adapting there too – all to offer higher IT operational efficiencies at lower financial and security risk than ever before.

We believe our recognition as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SaaS Management Platforms (SMP) report—from the leading IT analyst firm—reinforces BetterCloud as the pioneering SaaS management platform built to tackle tomorrow’s challenges. 

Ready to see what BetterCloud can do for you? Take an interactive tour or request a demo today.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for SaaS Management Platforms, 30 July 2025 by Tom Cipolla, Dan Wilson, and Lina Al Dana

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