"SaaS management" covers at least four different jobs, and most of the confusion in this category comes from tools that do one of them well being compared against tools that do a different one well.

Before the list, the four jobs:

• Discovery — finding every application in use, including the ones bought on a card and never mentioned to IT.
• Spend — what each one costs, when it renews, and how much of it is seats nobody uses.
• Access — who can reach what, and closing that down when someone leaves.
• Governance — the evidence an auditor asks for, and the approvals that produce it.

A tool that nails discovery and spend can be useless for access. Work out which two matter most to you before reading any comparison, this one included.

How to read a shortlist

Four questions separate these tools far more reliably than a feature matrix:

1. Where does discovery data come from? Finance feeds (card and AP data) find shadow spend. SSO logs find sanctioned apps. Browser extensions find usage. Each misses what the others catch, and a tool with only one source has a blind spot shaped like the other two.
2. Can it act, or only report? Reporting tools produce a dashboard someone has to work through. Acting tools revoke the access and reclaim the seat. The price difference between the two is usually large and usually justified.
3. What does deprovisioning actually reach? Almost everything integrates with the top 50 apps. The question is what happens to the long tail, and whether "deprovisioned" also means "removed from the bill".
4. Where does the data live? For EU companies under NIS2 or DORA, data residency is not a preference, and it is worth establishing before the evaluation rather than during procurement.

The categories, and who sits in them

Spend-first platforms start from finance data — Vertice, Substly and Productiv are the clearest examples. They are strong at renewal calendars, benchmarking and negotiation support, because that is the problem they were built for. They tend to be weaker on identity: they will tell you a license is unused, and leave the revoking to you.

Access-first platforms start from the identity provider — Lumos and BetterCloud sit here. They are strong on joiner/mover/leaver automation and in-app permissions, and correspondingly weaker on the applications the identity provider has never heard of, which is where shadow spend lives.

Discovery-first platforms — Torii, Zluri and Josys — try to cover both by pulling from several sources at once. This is the fullest picture, and the trade is complexity: more integrations to maintain, and a longer gap between buying the tool and trusting its data.

Where Caspian sits: we start from discovery across all three source types, then act on it rather than reporting it, with a human approving anything destructive. The honest limitation is that we are younger than everyone above, and if your requirement is a decade of procurement benchmarking data, Vertice has it and we do not.

What we would actually do

If you have never inventoried the estate, start with the card statement and the AP ledger for a week before buying anything. It costs nothing, it usually finds 20–40% more applications than anyone expected, and it tells you which of the four jobs above is actually your problem.

Then buy for that job, not for the longest feature list.

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Vendor positioning above is drawn from each company's own public documentation and pricing pages. Categories move; if something here has gone stale, tell us and we will correct it.

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