The 5 best Zluri alternatives for SaaS management

It’s important to point out that while we do our absolute best to be as accurate as possible, products change fast—as SMP vendors work to close product gaps, solve product weaknesses, and add new features and functions. So if you’re shortlisting vendors, this isn’t intended to replace your own deep due diligence.

Before we go further, it’s crucial to understand the ever-changing SMP market in 2025 and what you should know as you identify and examine product options.

Today’s SMP market: highly competitive and evolving rapidly

You’ll currently find many—dozens on G2.com—SaaS management platforms available today. Sometimes referred to as SaaS Operations, SMP products largely fall into one of three groups:

• Spend management-oriented: used by procurement, finance, operations, and IT asset management
• Automation-oriented: used by security and IT
• Unified SaaS management-oriented: used by the above business stakeholders

Over time, as vendors and features evolve, the lines between the types of SMPs blur. Therefore, there isn’t a complete division between the first two types of SMPs.

For instance, products that prioritize vendor management, contract, license management, and spend functionality also may incorporate some automation. Likewise, products primarily focused on automation may still provide contract, spend, and vendor management capabilities.

The third group blurs these lines further by swallowing up point solutions and combining features from both approaches.

The market is evolving and products are changing faster than ever, so what this means to you is the only way to choose an SMP like Zluri—or one of their best alternatives—is to know and prioritize your needs.

Prioritize your SMP requirements

To determine the group your needs best fall in, your path to the right SMP starts by conducting and documenting thorough internal discussions. You should include all stakeholders to get a complete understanding of your management pain points, needs, new value you expect, and use cases your SMP should address.

Keep in mind the many different use cases within an organization. To get you started, for the checklist below, determine which features are:

• Must-have
• Nice-to-have
• May need in the future
• Not needed

1. SaaS spend optimization and vendor management

• SaaS purchasing governance: Streamline the buying process for new apps, ensuring purchases align with business needs, IT management processes, and integrate with existing tools
• Spend optimization: See your entire SaaS app portfolio, identify overlapping accounts, apps, and use cases to ensure no wasted spend
• Vendor insights: Use insights into vendor performance, contract terms, and pricing to manage vendors, deliver business value, and renegotiate contracts
• Usage monitoring: Use data-driven insights on app usage to prevent account overprovisioning and pay for only what your team uses
• License optimization: Identify, reclaim, and redeploy unused or underutilized software licenses to eliminate unnecessary spending
• Budget forecasting: Receive insights into SaaS usage and spending for SaaS budget planning and better allocation
• Contract renewal monitoring: Track key contract dates to avoid auto-renewals, have time to realign needs and renegotiate with existing vendors, or migrate to a new one

2. IT operational efficiency

• Shadow IT discovery: Find sanctioned and unsanctioned Shadow IT apps, including AI apps
• Centralized admin dashboard: Use a single pane of glass to see all apps, integrations, key contract renewal/cancellation dates, vendor compliance certifications, and usage by user and department
• Integrations and extensibility: Integrate market-leading SaaS apps for every business function, as well as with common HR and IT tech stack tools. Custom API to integrate niche apps to maximize manageability in a SaaS management platform
• User lifecycle management automation: Build automated workflows for user onboarding, mid-lifecycle changes, and offboarding
• IT process automation: Build workflows for license reclamation, help desk ticket resolutions, SaaS contract expiration alerting, and more

3. Data protection & compliance

• Access control: Mitigate security risks by implementing granular access controls, enforcing least privilege access, and continuously auditing user permissions across your SaaS app ecosystem
• Content scanning: Scan to find sensitive data located within SaaS apps and automate granular remediation based on security policies as data safeguards
• File sharing security: Monitor file sharing permissions including files on shared drives, automate revocation of external file sharing to prevent dangerous, lingering ghost links
• Automated policy enforcement: Deploy and enforce consistent security policies across all SaaS apps for compliance with regulations and industry standards

Once you finish your full list of requirements, you’ll be equipped to determine if Zluri will work or if there’s another great Zluri alternative that will better meet all organizational needs.

6 tips for making SMP purchasing easier

Before diving straight into conversations with Zluri or any top alternatives, it’s important to understand what really sets SMPs apart. Since most platforms offer similar core features, the difference often lies in how those features are implemented.

Here’s what you need to know when buying a SaaS management tool:

1. Understand how visibility and discovery work

A core function of any SMP is surfacing all the SaaS apps your employees use, especially that risky Shadow IT. Effective discovery includes:

• Identifying all SaaS apps
• Classifying them (e.g., business vs. non-business)
• Confirming if they are IT-approved

SMPs generally all have the same discovery approach

Many platforms use similar methods, like OAuth integration and API connections to financial tools. However, you need to ensure compatibility with your specific accounting or finance systems from the start.

Browser extensions and desktop agents are risky

Some platforms use browser extensions or desktop agents. Extensions come with drawbacks:

• Security risks: extensions can be compromised
• Performance issues: extensions can slow down browser speed
• Limited coverage: no chance you'll deploy them on anything close to 100% of devices, still leaving blind spots

Discovery is more than simply finding apps. Your SMP also needs to accurately classify and describe them as well. Without it, you’ll still be forced to do manual work to make informed decisions.

Ultimately, assess whether you're willing to accept the risks and limitations of browser extensions for your SMP's discovery process. Remember browser extensions still don’t guarantee you’ll uncover all apps.

If you don’t want the browser extension risks, go with an SMP with agentless discovery.

2. Compare integrations and capabilities

Not all integrations are the same, and no two SMPs have the exact same integrations. Ask yourself:

• Do you need broad integration coverage, or deep insights into specific tools?
• Do you want feature-level usage?

For instance: Zoom. Instead of insights that are limited to logins, some SMPs have integrations that provide feature-level insights to help you understand how often a user uses Zoom features that require a Pro license instead of a free Basic license.

Know your app priorities. If your business depends heavily on some specific or uncommon niche apps, learn how an SMP supports those.

Finally, beware of platforms boasting many hundreds or even thousands of integrations. No SMP will have integrations to all the apps you use. So with any SMP vendor you approach, ask the right questions to investigate the nature of their pre-built, native integrations, and make sure you understand how your potential SMP supports your key business applications.

3. Think about automation now

Switching platforms down the line can be challenging, so consider how an SMP can support IT automation early.

Instead of only focusing completely on just visibility and spend tracking, look at how the SMP can help automate workflows and user lifecycle management. This will yield significant long-term IT efficiency gains.

4. Closely examine SaaS spend and renewal features

To gain an accurate understanding of cost attribution, some SMPs are better than others. Be sure to ask how the platform tracks license costs over time, rather than just reporting a one-time expense. For instance, an SMP using accrual-based accounting allocations is more suitable for forecasting and budgeting.

Most SMPs with spend optimization features will inevitably help uncover duplicate apps and accounts. You'll also discover instances where two apps perform similar functions. Usage insights will allow you to quickly decide which one to keep. Additionally, user feedback surveys within the SMP can fast-track decisions about standardizing apps across the organization.

5. Remember data protection

The level of data protection required for your SMP will depend on your organization’s existing IT and security infrastructure, but it’s crucial that the SMP aligns with your security needs.

Look for capabilities to address:

• External file-sharing risks
• Exposed confidential data
• Excessive admin privileges
• App misconfigurations
• Long-forgotten, orphaned file links

Security features are not optional. Rather, they’re fundamental to protecting your organization.

6. Deployment takes time for all SMP vendors

No matter what vendors promise, implementation takes work. Taking full advantage of all an SMP offers, you’ll need to spend the time to:

• Connect your apps and systems
• Upload contracts
• Set policies
• Build automations

To ease the burden, some vendors will help enter contract details into the SMP for you. Others will leave that task up to you.

Some vendors offer hands-on help during SMP setup, while others offer some paid professional services. Of course, your IT team can always implement it internally. Evaluate the level of onboarding support they provide because maximizing SMP value depends on a successful rollout.

With these tips in mind, you’re now better equipped to assess Zluri or any of their best alternatives. So next, let’s see how Zluri stacks up.

What is the Zluri SaaS management platform?

Zluri is another SMP that falls more into the “all-in-one SaaS management platform” camp. It gives your IT, finance, and security teams a single pane of glass to get a handle on all the SaaS apps used by the organization.

Robust discovery

With its proprietary discovery engine, Zluri uses data from identity apps, financial and expense systems, Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs), Mobile Device Management (MDM) platforms, HRIS apps, directories, desktop agents, and browser extensions. It also gets usage-level data using direct API integrations with over 300 applications.

It excels at delivering a comprehensive, real-time view of the entire SaaS ecosystem, including Shadow AI and some AI app usage. While Zluri does offer some automated user lifecycle management, new app requests, and renewal alerts, it goes a step further by helping you automate user access reviews for compliance.

Next-gen IGA

Moving past standard SaaS management, Zluri is now positioning itself as a “next-gen Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platform.” This highlights its focus on managing user identities and access across the entire SaaS stack, which is critical for security and compliance.

To accomplish this, Zluri provides automated access reviews (also known as user access certifications), allowing organizations to run recurring certification campaigns with multi-level approvals, delegation, and auto-remediation.

Despite these strengths, some users report challenges. Notably, it has a potentially complex setup for advanced automation, occasional UX inconsistencies, and inflexible reporting. It also lacks policy enforcement and data protection via automation. Finally, some organizations may find the platform’s breadth of features overwhelming if their SaaS environment is less complex.