I've been assembling a list of these lately for a book that I'm working on. (http://startingandsustaining.com) Some of the categories are fairly loose as some apps don't fit nicely into categorical buckets, but hopefully this is a helpful list.
For people looking to use apps, please consider the likelihood and impact of one of these companies disappearing overnight. Some of them are tech startups without a sustainable critical mass and they could shut down at any time.
If your landing page provider stops providing service, it's probably easy to recover if you have copies of all the email address collected. If your planning and project management tool disappears with all your data, there could be a significant cost.
I'd bet that half the services on this page will not exist in a few years time. If the success of your business relies on them trading, pick carefully.
If you look at the list above you'll notice that there are plenty of well-funded companies as well as bootstrapped companies. Zendesk has raised $85M. On the other end of the spectrum, you have Tender and Lighthouse from ENTP, which are not funded at all.
Unlike consumer internet startups, I think there's only one criterion for whether or not a SaaS product will be around in 5 years: Does the product work well?
Most of these companies don't/can't rely on network effects to grow, so there's very little winner-takes-all action. That's why you'll see plenty of breathing room for big players and small players alike in any given category.
Disclaimer: I'm the founder of a bootstrapped, profitable company, so I'm probably biased toward bootstrappers.
Revenue is the important metric. Funding can only delay the inevitable if they do not have revenue. Being funded does not mean you won't have to look for a new vendor in 6 months. Only the runway is a bit longer if the revenue isn't there.
I like that it's not a completely biased list, but more of a curated 'these are options you should check out and make your own informed opinion on' list.
Awesome, great to see Instrumental (https://instrumentalapp.com/) in your list. I'm one of the folks working on it, would love to hear your thoughts on us.
Some quick reviews of some of the products listed:
* Lighthouse (http://lighthouseapp.com) - Bug Tracker - good for keeping track of simple stuff last I used it (~2 years ago), but Github Issues obviated its use for me.
* Pivotal (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/) - Project Management - great tool, not trivial to keep well managed tho. Easy to let your project get out of hand with tons of tickets, requires some discipline in its use.
* Trello (https://trello.com/) - Project Management - simple, fast. Really great for keeping tasks focused on a small team, I'm not sure how it would suit a larger team though.
* Airbrake (http://airbrake.io/) - Error Handling - You didn't have this in your list, but it deserved a mention. It's okay for server side error handling, its client side stuff leaves something to be desired though. More often than not their hosted JS lags on load, causes your page load times to go up as well. Doesn't currently offer a supported hosted version.
* Stripe - (https://stripe.com/) - Billing & Payment Processing - Does just about everything right imo. Great documentation, great interface, website is well engineered. Analytics / reporting would be awesome tho.
* Intercom - (http://intercom.io/) - Support/Help Desks - I seriously love Intercom. For managing a team of people doing outreach to users, it is awesome. I view it as a fantastic tool for triaging retention.
* Uservoice - (http://uservoice.com/) - Support/Help Desks - You didn't mention them either, but I thought I'd add. They are pretty great, even for small companies. I think their sweet spot is a larger support team tho. Great interface.
Pivotal: Horrible, abysmal tool. Hate it with a passion. No clear overview at all, UI is full of shiny colors but is messy as hell. I'm really glad we've switched to Jira[1] after fighting with pivotal for a couple of months. YMMV ofcourse :)
Pivotal is an agile planning tool; JIRA is an issue tracking and classical project management tool. While each can be coerced to the other's function, it's really comparing apples and oranges. I'll admit that JIRA and Pivotal continue to muddy the differentiation with afterthought additions like JIRA's Greenhopper and Pivotal's time tracking. But JIRA is a good tool for issue tracking and Pivotal is a good tool for agile planning. If you're trying to use either tool for the other's purpose, you'll hate it.
I still can't read "tool for agile planning" without crying inside my head. We really need "tools" to "implement" "processes" in the spirit of a 6-line manifesto, do we? Sigh.
Aww. Don't cry. It's not a process tool. It's a prioritized to-do list that can track your velocity. Despite being opinionated, it doesn't enforce a process. Though you'll find that if you don't embrace those 6 lines, you'll quickly make a mess inside Pivotal and it will happily let you do so.
I definitely agree with the YMMV bit; I have found this category of tools to be incredibly divisive. I know a lot of folks who thought that going in the opposite direction of yours, Jira to Pivotal, was one of the best decisions they've made for a project.
I've only ever casually used Jira, however, so am ill qualified to speak to its strengths.
I'm in the category you're describing. (Switched from Jira/Greenhopper to Pivotal and happy about it).
I think the divisive bit may, in part, be that Pivotal is a strongly opinionated tool while Jira is a fairly customizable and open ended tool.
For projects & teams committed to the process Pivotal champions, it's highly optimized. For teams using a different process, or who need to customize views for different people etc, Jira can provide more options, and be a better fit.
For me personally... at the moment, I really appreciate Pivotal's relative simplicity and the way it encourages folks to focus on the somewhat nearer term.
I love Pivotal. While I haven't used Jira, I've gotten the feeling that other members of my team have used it in the past, and don't like it at all. On another note, Siebel time tracking is a pit of hell.
Percentiles is a feature we're planning on adding at some point in the future, though we have customers calculating it themselves right now using things like metriks-instrumental ( https://github.com/netshade/metriks-instrumental ).
Alerts is actually in beta right now :) - we're testing it out with a few customers. It's based on our query language, and alerts you with a graph of the problem when the event occurs. ( or updates an HTTP endpoint you control, if you wish )
edit: I forgot to mention, my apologies you encountered an error. We've been living on the edge of browser support land for the time being, and could do a better job letting you know that you're not meeting the minimum reqs.
Our agent (for in process collection) is Ruby only right now. That said, we've got a large number of customers who really like our graphs and query language, and so send us metrics using a Statsd backend[1] written by one of our other customers. (edit: which is to say that we really support anything that has a Statsd client)
* BeesWithMachineGuns (https://github.com/newsapps/beeswithmachineguns) You can set this up with EC2 and DDOS your own server with it as well. This gives you a bit more control than blitz, but it requires a little work to get it up and running.
You're missing a pretty important category tools used to communicate automatically with users. Mixpanel and KISS have some features like this, but there's others more focused on it. Customer.io, Intercom.io, etc.
Yup, totally agreed. Automated customer communication is crucial to improve conversion rates. I built an open source tool called UserBee that helps setting up automated emails to users based on some conditions being met. For example, using UserBee you can track users' last login time and send out an automated email when a user doesn't login for X days.
Thanks for mentioning it. Intercom is in there, kind of crammed into the "support" category. I'll definitely add Customer.io and create a dedicated category.
Ultimately, this wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list. It's just a quick list from some very superficial collecting of URLs. There's still a lot of work to do for the book before the list is complete.
This is a great idea for a book. I would love to see this as a site with a Q&A type search for on the fly suggestions. It's a major timesaver instead of scavenging through Google with "the best of" type of searches.
I try to avoid any specific recommendations of services because everybody's needs and priorities are so wildly different. I'm very much of the belief that it's best for people to take a look themselves rather than rely on others' preferences.
In terms of not mentioning other services, it's probably more a matter of the book being in progress. I've done quite a bit of research, but the vendors list is rather incomplete because I'll be including it in the appendix of the book. So in most cases it's simply a matter of the fact that I haven't actually finished it yet. These are mainly just from my notes that I've jotted down.
--Browser/Email Testing
BrowserStack (http://www.browserstack.com)
Litmus (http://litmus.com)
--Bug/Issue Tracking
BugHerd (http://bugherd.com)
Lighthouse (http://lighthouseapp.com)
Sifter (http://sifterapp.com) (Disclaimer: I built this.)
--Planning & Project Management
Sprintly (http://sprint.ly)
Podio (https://podio.com)
Flow (http://www.getflow.com)
Interstate (http://interstateapp.com)
Basecamp (http://basecamp.com)
Apollo (http://www.apollohq.com)
Pivotal (http://www.pivotaltracker.com)
Asana (http://www.asana.com)
Trello (https://trello.com)
Blossom (https://www.blossom.io)
Trajectory (https://www.apptrajectory.com)
--Business & Traffic Analytics
KissMetrics (http://kissmetrics.com)
MixPanel (http://mixpanel.com)
DigMyData (http://digmydata.com)
--Continuous Integration / Code Quality
Travis (https://travis-ci.org)
Circle (http://circleci.com)
CodeClimate (http://codeclimate.com)
Sempaphore (https://semaphoreapp.com)
--Dashboards
Ducksboard (http://ducksboard.com)
Geckoboard (http://www.geckoboard.com)
Instrumental (https://instrumentalapp.com)
--Error/Exception Handling
Sentry (https://getsentry.com)
Coalmine (https://www.getcoalmine.com)
HoneyBadger (https://www.honeybadger.io)
BugSnag (https://bugsnag.com)
Raygun (http://raygun.io)
--Log Monitoring
Loggly (http://loggly.com)
Papertrail (https://papertrailapp.com)
LogEntries (https://logentries.com)
--Billing & Payment Processing
Braintree (https://www.braintreepayments.com)
Stripe (http://stripe.com)
Pin (http://pin.net.au)
PayMill (http://paymill.com)
Recurly (http://recurly.com)
Chargify (http://chargify.com)
Spreedly (http://spreedly.com)
Spreedly Core (https://core.spreedly.com)
--Support/Help Desks
Desk (http://desk.com)
HelpScout (http://helpscout.net)
ZenDesk (http://zendesk.com)
Groove (http://groovehq.com)
Intercom (http://intercom.io)
Tender (http://tenderapp.com)
--Transactional Email
Postmark (https://postmarkapp.com)
Mandril (http://mandrill.com)
MailGun (http://www.mailgun.com)
SendGrid (http://sendgrid.com)
CloudSMTP (http://www.cloudsmtp.com)
CritSend (http://www.critsend.com)
Postage (http://postageapp.com)
--Email Collection/Landing Page Apps
Launchrock (http://launchrock.com)
Unbounce (http://unbounce.com)
KickoffLabs (http://www.kickofflabs.com)
Launch Effect (http://launcheffectapp.com)
Prefinery (https://www.prefinery.com)
LaunchGator (http://launch.deskgator.com)