The 5 best Zylo alternatives for SaaS management

First things first: 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. This article simply captures a point in time. So if you’re shortlisting vendors, this isn’t intended to replace your own deep due diligence.

Next, it’s crucial to understand how the SMP market is evolving and what you should know as you consider buying one.

The evolving SMP market has many options

There are multiple—dozens on G2.com right now—SaaS management platforms available today. Sometimes referred to as SaaS Operations, SMP products largely fall into one of three groups:

1. Automation-oriented: used by IT and security teams
2. Spend management-oriented: used by finance, procurement, IT asset management, and operations
3. Unified SaaS management-oriented: used by all business stakeholders listed above.

There is no neat division between the first two SMP groups, as they frequently overlap. For instance, products primarily focused on automation may still provide contract, spend, and vendor management capabilities. Likewise, products that prioritize contract and spend functionality also often incorporate some automation.

As the market evolves and products change, the third group blurs these lines further by combining features from both approaches to serve all business stakeholders. And the only way to choose an SMP like Zylo—or one of their best alternatives—means you must know what you need.

Define your SMP requirements

To determine the group your needs fall in, your path to the right SMP—whether it’s Zylo or one of their best alternatives—starts by conducting a thorough internal review. You should include a range of stakeholders to get a thorough understanding of pain points, needs, new value you expect, and use cases your SMP should address.

Bear in mind, there are 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. IT operational efficiency

• Shadow IT discovery: Find sanctioned and rogue “Shadow IT” apps, including AI apps
• Centralized admin dashboard: Get a single pane of glass to see all apps, integrations, compliance certifications, key contract renewal/cancellation dates, 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 less common apps to maximize manageability in a SaaS management platform
• User lifecycle 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

2. Data protection & compliance

• Access control: Monitor user access across all SaaS apps, enforce least privilege access to limit excess admin permissions, prevent unauthorized access
• Automated policy enforcement: Implement and enforce consistent security policies across all SaaS apps for compliance with regulations and industry standards
• Content scanning: Scan to locate sensitive data 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

3. SaaS spend optimization and vendor management

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

Once you develop your full list of requirements, you’ll be best able to judge if Zylo will work or if there’s another great Zylo alternative that will better meet all organizational needs.

6 tips for evaluating SMPs

When you’re ready to discuss your needs with Zylo, or with any of their best alternatives, it’s important to know a few things. In a sea of relative feature parity, the details often come down to “the how” something works because many of these tools do the same thing. Here is what you should know about SaaS management tools.

1. Learn how an SMP’s discovery process works

Eliminating SaaS stack blind spots depends on a few tasks an SMP needs to do:

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

Many SMPs work the same way when it comes to discovery

They’ll all integrate into your OAuth provider, and most will connect via APIs to your finance and accounting systems. This means, you need to know which finance and accounting system you use, because not all SMPs will connect to that financial app the same way.

You’ll also need to figure out whether your organization and IT team wants a discovery process that relies on a desktop agent or a browser extension. Not all SMPs offer this approach, and it might not be appropriate for your organization, either.

Consider 3 disadvantages of browser extensions

1. Extensions aren’t risk-free: Vendors make mistakes and extension hijacks happen. Valid extensions can be replaced with malicious extensions that expose confidential information and steal your login credentials.
2. Performance tax slows productivity: Extensions can bog down browser performance and when that happens, it impedes your employees’ work efficiency.
3. Getting usage across your entire organization is impossible: It’s impossible to get 100% extension deployment across all of today’s common browsers for all your employees on all devices all the time. Without 100% extension deployment, Shadow IT can still pop up.

When evaluating SaaS management platform discovery capabilities, it’s important to determine if you’re willing to accept browser extension risks and costs. Finally, it’s not enough to discover apps—you need them to be automatically and accurately categorized and described.

2. Understand how integrations differ among SMPs

Another key consideration is whether you want breadth or depth when it comes to integrations. It’s important to remember that not all integrations are the same. Therefore, in your requirements definition, know how you want to balance depth vs. breadth of integrations, and where you need feature-level engagement metrics.

A good example is a direct connector or usage integration to Zoom. Instead of insights that are limited to logins, these direct connectors give 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 company relies heavily on 1–2 very specific, non-mainstream apps, and needs ultra-granular usage data or automated actions from those specific apps, then this needs to be part of your decision-making criteria.

Beware of shiny promises of hundreds and hundreds of integrations

And no matter which SMP you choose, there won’t be enough of your required integrations. With any SMP vendor you approach, ask the right questions to investigate the nature of their pre-built, native integrations, custom API, and make sure your potential SMP supports your key business applications.

3. Examine features for making smarter SaaS budgeting and renewal decisions

For creating a true picture of cost attribution, some SMPs are better than others. Make sure you ask how it attributes license costs over time, as opposed to identifying a one-time cost. For example, a solution that uses accrual-based accounting allocations is better for forecasting and budgeting.

When you start using any SMP with strong spend optimization capabilities, you will uncover duplicate apps and accounts. You’ll also find two competing apps that solve the same use case. Usage insights help to quickly figure out which one to keep. However, user feedback collected within your SMP can help shortcut the lengthy process of creating enterprise standard apps, too.

4. Consider automation now

Because changing tools is not easy, think beyond current visibility and spend management needs to consider how IT automation could improve overall IT efficiency.

5. Review data protection features

The right data protection for your SaaS management platform depends on your existing IT stack. To build a robust strategy, you need to address specific risks, such as uncontrolled external file sharing, the lack of alerts for publicly exposed confidential data, an overabundance of super administrators, and unchecked misconfigurations or lingering ghost links.

6. Know that deployment is a commitment, regardless of SMP vendor

Every SMP will claim that their solution is the easiest to deploy. The truth is, to take great advantage of all their great features and functions, you’ll need to spend the time to integrate your apps, ingest SaaS contracts, add your security policy, and build your user lifecycle 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.

Thus, no matter which vendor you choose, it’s a commitment to get started. However, some SMP vendors do make it easier than others.

Now that you know more about evaluating an SMP, let’s look at Zylo’s strengths and weaknesses. In addition, we’ll go over the pros and cons of the best Zylo alternatives you may want to consider.

What is the Zylo SaaS management platform?

Aimed at primarily large, enterprise-sized companies, Zylo considers itself a SaaS management and optimization platform. Its goals are to:

• Discover all SaaS
• Control and optimize licenses
• Manage spend and renewals

It excels at providing comprehensive visibility into all SaaS applications, whether sanctioned or part of shadow IT, by integrating with:

• Financial systems
• SSO providers
• HRIS
• API integrations

Like many SMP vendors, Zylo’s core strength lies in its ability to centralize SaaS spend data, track license utilization, and offer insights to reduce costs, streamline renewals, and improve overall operational efficiency.

With a strong focus on data accuracy and actionable intelligence, keep in mind that actionable insights are different from automated remediation. For example, you might find you have 50 unused licenses for this app, while 50 others might need it.

Whereas some SMP vendors might allow you to automate reclamation and redeployment, Zylo may require manual processes to reclaim and redeploy licenses.