For countless companies large and small, 2020 changed the way we do business. 

Businesses the world over suddenly needed to start or accelerate digitization efforts to survive. Technology such as remote collaborative tools and eCommerce platforms helped many businesses stay operational when they otherwise might not have. Regardless of what the new year brings for the pandemic, the role of technology will remain critical to business success in 2021. 

This report identifies 16 products that stood out among 1,000+ tools across over 100 software categories to deliver excellent value—according to feedback from thousands of real users.

How we chose these products

We focused on over 100 types of software designed to support key business workflows across industries: accounting, analytics, collaboration, customer service, human resources, IT management, marketing, project management, and sales.

From there, we turned to our Category Leaders reports—yearly software rankings based on verified reviews from software users. We identified the products that appeared in the most Category Leaders reports throughout 2020—in other words, the best of the best.

Here are the 16 software products that users found to be the most valuable in 2020 (presented in alphabetical order).

Alloy Navigator is an IT service and asset management system that centers on a workflow automation engine. The tool's intelligent interface automatically identifies and analyzes critical data. Alloy Navigator helps users in a variety of disciplines, from help desk to inventory and knowledge base management, as well as change and configuration management.

Reviews summary for Alloy Navigator

Avaza is an all-in-one project management solution with features ranging from resource scheduling to online timesheets, expense management, online invoicing, recurring invoicing, and more. Avaza users also enjoy plenty of third party integrations to help streamline workflows.

Reviews summary for Avaza

ChaseData’s cloud-based call center management solution helps small and midsize businesses run more efficient call centers with features including predictive dialing, managed preview dialing, and queued progressive dialing. It also offers a customizable campaign management tool that enables businesses to run multiple campaigns at the same time.

Reviews summary for ChaseData

ClicData is a business intelligence dashboard that offers intuitive, dynamic reports as well as a variety of visualization options to give users the power to make better data-driven business decisions. 

Reviews summary for ClicData

ClickUp is a single app designed to replace multiple systems with project management, task tracking, and professional goal management tools. Common features include client management, collaboration, data import/export, document management, file sharing, and workflow automation. 

Reviews summary for ClickUp

EngageBay is an integrated sales and marketing platform that combines lead generation, email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and social media engagement to help businesses engage customers through the entire sales process. With built-in CRM features, users can collect leads and nurture them into returning customers.

Reviews summary for EngageBay

Freshservice is a cloud-based service desk and IT service management system with an intuitive user interface, highly configurable features, and simple integrations with other business and IT systems that, combined, provides users with a full-fledged ITSM solution so they can focus on other business processes.

Reviews summary for Freshservice

HoneyBook is a cloud-based CRM system designed for small businesses and freelancers. It helps users manage business processes such as consultation and billing, and lets them manage projects, book customers, send invoices, sign online contracts, and manage payments. 

Reviews summary for HoneyBook

Klipfolio uses data analysis to create dashboards and automated reports that help businesses understand key metrics. Users can also automate the monitoring of key metrics against set goals using BI tools. Klipfolio integrates with hundreds of data sources, including Salesforce, Quickbooks, and Google Analytics.

Reviews summary for Klipfolio

LiveAgent is a help desk solution that utilizes over 175 support features and operates in more than 35 languages to provide real-time, multi-platform customer support. LiveAgent integrates with the most widely used channels to collect input and connect with customers via email, Facebook, Twitter, contact forms, live chat, and phone calls.

Reviews summary for LiveAgent

Cloud-based project management platform monday.com uses features such as customizable workflow templates, time tracking, workflow automation, and dashboards to help users collaborate, track projects, and complete tasks faster.

Reviews summary for monday.com

Phocas is a cloud-based data analytics company focused on the manufacturing, distribution, and retail markets. This platform consolidates business data from ERP, CRM, and AP/AR systems to identify trends and produce insights through historical and predictive data analysis.

Reviews summary for Phocas

Qlik Sense is an end-to-end data analytics platform that works to enable users to make the best decisions for their businesses through detailed data analysis. Qlik Sense uses artificial intelligence to prepare data and come up with insightful suggestions, and users have secure access to data through online and offline mobility.

Reviews summary for Qlik Sense

Sisense is a business intelligence data and analytics platform that helps businesses take a broad view of their data in order to understand larger trends. Users can take advantage of features such as data visualization and interactive browser-based dashboards to get the most out of the tool.

Reviews summary for Sisense

Tableau is a business intelligence and analytics platform that uses data to serve businesses of all sizes. Using features including data visualization, interactive dashboards, and real-time analytics, Tableau provides user-friendly, intuitive BI tools to help companies grow and improve.

Reviews summary for Tableau

Wrike offers cloud-based collaboration and project management tools to help users track and control projects throughout the entire process with full visibility. It covers everything from identifying project requirements, creating project plans, and visualizing schedules with Gantt charts, all the way through making adjustments to project plans, notifying involved teams of updates, and presenting project data to management.

Reviews summary for Wrike

Find more helpful software with Category Leaders

GetApp’s Category Leaders reports have been a valuable resource for software buyers for five years. To create each of these reports, we collect reviews data for hundreds of software products around five key areas:

1. Ease of use

2. Value for money

3. Functionality

4. Customer support

5. Likelihood to recommend

We then rank products using this reviews data to create a list of the top products in a given category, according to users. 

To learn more about our Category Leaders methodology, read our full explanation here.