Here are the 11 most significant trends in the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry happening right now.

We’ll also cover the key companies and software products leading the way.

In short, this list of SaaS trends will help you get a feel for what’s coming around the corner.

Let’s jump right into the list.

Where will software and tech take us in 2023? Let’s dive right in. Here are the top 11 software development trends.

Increased Demand For Collaboration Software & SaaS Companies Leverage Employer Branding.

A report from Owl Labs found that nearly 70% of all USA full-time employees work from home. And many companies are finding that email isn’t enough to keep everyone on the same page. Enter: a rising number of collaboration software options. Slack, with 12 million+ users, is obviously the king of the mountain when it comes to collaboration tools. But there’s still plenty of room for tools that help remote teams get things done. Especially those that don’t compete directly with Slack. For example, Codepen has quickly gained market share in the growing “SaaS for coders” market.

Martech Becomes More Accessible

Martech is known for old-school practices, like:

Product demos
Pushy salespeople
Sky-high enterprise pricing
Lengthy contracts
But there’s an increasing number of martech startups bucking this trend.

Instead of product demos, they have clear, transparent pricing. And instead of complicated enterprise software with a million features, they do one thing well. Canva is one of the best examples of the growing “accessible martech” trend. Canva makes it easy for non-graphic designers to make images for blog posts, email newsletters and social media.

Unlike a match from back in the day, you don’t need a product demo to see the tool in action. In fact, there’s a free trial. And instead of “contact us for pricing”, Canva has a list of their different plans that anyone can see.

Why is vertical SaaS on the rise?

Well, the great thing about SaaS is it’s dirt cheap compared to building software from scratch. For example, let’s say you want accounting software for your tennis court business. Back in the day, you’d have to pay Oracle $250,000 to make a tool just for you. Today, you can pay $50/month to access a SaaS solution that does basically the same thing.

But that compromise comes with a cost. Do you know that feature that helps you quickly note whether a customer is playing singles or doubles? Well, that feature likely won’t be available in a mainstream SaaS product because only a small fraction of their users would need it. Even though that one feature would save you two hours every week.

Which is leading many people to ditch one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, they’re turning to micro-SaaS products that meet their very specific use cases. And entrepreneurs that create software products specifically for niche markets have the potential to grow super quickly.

AI Integrates Into More Software
Artificial intelligence is getting integrated into the software of all types. Including many that you might now expect. For example, Remove.bg uses AI to automatically remove background from images.That’s not to say that your software needs a machine learning algorithm to get traction. But more and more people are expecting AI as a feature. (Especially in B2B) For example, Flowrite uses AI to automatically create copy for emails and collaboration tool messages.

Low-Code Becomes The Norm
Coding software from scratch is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Instead, a growing number of software developers are building apps and websites with low-code platforms. In fact, Research and Markets report that the low-code industry could be worth $187 billion by 2030. Low code is just like it sounds: it’s developing an application with minimal coding.

Why is low code such an important SaaS trend?

First of all, building with a low-code platform like Ninox can save lots of development time. Instead of manually coding something line-by-line, a low-code platform can help you build applications with “visual programming”. In other words: a drag-and-drop style interface. But for coding.

Low-code (and its cousin, no-code) opens up app development to the millions of non-coders that want to get into the SaaS market. For example, maybe you know a little bit of Ruby on Rails or Javascript. But not enough to create an entire application.

Well, you can use a low-code platform to build a lot of the key features that you want in your software product. And you can manually code the rest. For example, Lattice built and now runs its entire website on a no-code environment (Webflow).

PaaS Platforms Help Startups Scale Faster

Amazon’s AWS has been an absolute game changer for the entire SaaS industry. Before AWS, startups had to build their own server infrastructure. And were required to figure out how to scale up and deploy add-ons as they grew. Today, most SaaS products host everything on Amazon’s cloud platform.

Thanks to PaaS (“platform as a service”) platforms like AWS, startups can focus on what they do best: making awesome software. For example, meal delivery app Deliveroo used AWS’s EC2 to help them scale as they achieved rapid and unexpected growth.

New Tools To Fight Churn

A high churn rate can mean death for a SaaS startup. And there’s no shortage of tactics that software companies use to improve customer retention:

User onboarding email sequences
“Concierge” support
Explainer videos and tutorials
Annual billing
New feature notifications
Improving the overall customer experience
Do these tactics work? Yes.

But for many SaaS businesses, they’re not enough. This is why there’s a growing number of solutions out there specifically designed to combat churn. For example, Bonjoro helps companies create onboarding videos that are personalized to each customer.

SaaS Companies Leverage Employer Branding
37% of SaaS founders worry about “hiring the best talent”. This is why many SaaS businesses are taking a close look at their “employer branding”.

What is employer branding?

Employer branding is branding… for an employer.In other words, it’s the approach that companies take to make themselves look like a great place to work.

And many Silicon Valley SaaS companies are using employer branding to attract the best developers and managers.

Employer branding includes things like:

A company’s core mission
Interesting benefits (like a weekly massage stipend)
Major media mentions
Revenue and user growth metrics
A famous founder
Team activities