In 2021, the top 10 CRM software vendors accounted for nearly 59.4% of the global CRM applications market which grew 15.7% to approach nearly $52.8 billion in license, maintenance and subscription revenues.
Last year Salesforce led the pack with a 31.3% market share riding on a 12.6% jump in CRM revenues. Adobe was #2, followed by Oracle, SAP and Microsoft.
We ask the simple question: Who’s buying CRM applications from whom and why? And we provide the answers – supported by decades of research – to our clients around the world. (Sample from our Apps Database)
Through our forecast period, the CRM applications market size is expected to reach $58.8 billion by 2026, compared with $52.8 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate of 2.1%.
| Exhibit 2: Worldwide CRM Software Market 2021-2026 Forecast, $M | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Year | 2021 | 2026 | 2021-2026 CAGR, % |
| Total | 52856 | 58755 | 2.1% |
Source: Apps Run The World, September 2022
Top 10 CRM Software Vendors
Customer Relationship Management includes applications for sales force automation, marketing automation, customer service and support management such as email automation. Social Media Management, Customer Experience Management, Activity and Participant Management are among some of the newly available CRM applications available via Cloud delivery.
As Salesforce aims to expand with price hikes, enlarged ecosystem and recommitment to its SFA roots, seismic shifts are driving a wedge among key vendors within customer service and marketing automation segments as restructuring moves dim outlook of incumbents.
Here are the rankings of the top 10 CRM software vendors in 2021 and their market shares.
| Rank | Vendor | 2020 CRM Apps Revenues, $M | 2021 CRM Apps Revenues, $M | YoY Growth | 2021 CRM Market Share, % | Recent Developments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Salesforce.com | Subscribe | Subscribe | 12.6% | Subscribe | In 2021, much of the companie’s focus was on Slack’s integration into Salesforce Customer 360, making its way across the Salesforce stack. Most notably was the Slack Connect feature that allows salespeople running Sales Cloud to generate conversations with colleagues on Slack for best practices. |
| 2 | Adobe | Subscribe | Subscribe | 10.5% | Subscribe | Adobe continues to flourish thanks to its burgeoning cloud subscription services, especially those from Marketo for marketing automation, which it acquired in 2018. Recurring revenue from subscriptions represented 90% of the company’s total revenue in 2020 of $11.6 billion. |
| 3 | Oracle | Subscribe | Subscribe | -2.1% | Subscribe | In FY21, Oracle Data Cloud and Oracle Cloud CX recently joined forces as Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) with a goal of connecting all business data across advertising, marketing, sales, commerce, and service. Furthermore, Oracle double down on its CX applications by marrying digital advertising, lead-generation, and lead-qualification into a fully integrated online selling system named Fusion Marketing. Oracle has about 8,000 Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience Cloud (CX) customers, including 3,500 that it picked up from acquisitions of Eloqua (1,000), Responsys (500), RightNow (2,000) and a string of smaller ones like Bluekai, Vitrue and Grapeshot since 2012. |
| 4 | Microsoft | Subscribe | Subscribe | 11.6% | Subscribe | More than 3,000 companies worldwide have already automated their business and attracted millions of customers thanks to Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM systems. On the on-premise side, Microsoft Dynamics CRM currently has over 40,000 customers and 4.4 million users. Dynamics products and cloud services revenue increased 25% driven by Dynamics 365 growth of 39% |
| 5 | SAP | Subscribe | Subscribe | -2.3% | Subscribe | The 2021 acquisition of Emarsys will enhance the SAP Customer Experience portfolio by creating a new paradigm for how commerce is managed digitally as it will deliver hyper-personalized, omnichannel engagements in real-time, helping organizations ensure every engagement is relevant and impactful. More than 10,000 customers are using either the entire SAP CX suite or key modules for customer experience management, and Emarsys will be adding 1,500 customers worldwide to SAP install base. |
| 6 | Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories | Subscribe | Subscribe | 9.4% | Subscribe | In fiscal year 2022, Genesys also vastly expanded its capabilities in digital, AI and experience orchestration, with the acquisitions of Bold360, Exceed.ai and Pointillist. Through these acquisitions, the company expanded its industry leadership with journey analytics and conversational AI for marketing and sales — unifying the customer experience across all touchpoints. |
| 7 | HubSpot | Subscribe | Subscribe | 56.8% | Subscribe | HubSpot, the customer relationship management (CRM) platform for scaling companies, has surpassed 135,442 paying customers and has reached $1 billion in annual recurring revenue, marking two important milestones in the company’s nearly 15-year history. |
| 8 | Zendesk | Subscribe | Subscribe | 30.2% | Subscribe | Over the past 15 years, Zendesk has revolutionized how companies serve their customers and has become a leading platform within the customer experience ecosystem. Its intuitive powerful offering serves over 100,000 companies, ranging from the smallest businesses to the largest enterprises. In 2022, Zendesk is acquired by an investor group led by leading global investment firms Permira and Hellman & Friedman LLC. |
| 9 | Nice Systems | Subscribe | Subscribe | 23.8% | Subscribe | NICE serves over 25,000 organizations in the enterprise, financial and security sectors. With over 2,000 call center deployments, inContact is used by 155,000 agents globally. It manages 6 billion interactions per year. |
| 10 | Qualtrics | Subscribe | Subscribe | 32.1% | Subscribe | As of December 31, 2021, the Qualtrics XM Platform is trusted by more than 16,750 customers of all sizes, including 89% of the Fortune 100. The broad adoption of the Qualtrics platform is facilitated by a multi-pronged go-to-market model comprised of highly productive inside and field sales teams, joint solution selling with SAP, and its growing Qualtrics Partner Network (“QPN”) of over 300 global member companies. |
| Subtotal | Subscribe | Subscribe | 12.6% | Subscribe | ||
| Other | Subscribe | Subscribe | 20.7% | Subscribe | ||
| Total | 45671 | 52856 | 15.7% | 100% |
Source: Apps Run The World, December 2021
Other CRM software providers included in the report are: 8×8, Act-On Software, AdRoll, Amdocs, Ameyo, Aurea, Avaya, Backbase, Bazaarvoice, Blackbaud, BounceX, Capillary Technologies, CAS Software AG, CDK Global, Cision, Clarabridge, Conga, Constant Contact, Constellation Software Inc., Cox Automotive, Creatio (formerly bpm’online), CSG Systems International, DealerSocket, Deluxe Corporation, eGain Corporation, Enghouse Interactive Inc., Fiserv, Five9, Freshworks (formerly Freshdesk), Hansen Technologies, Hootsuite, Infor, InMoment, InsideSales.com, Intense Technologies, IQVIA, Keap, Khoros, Knowlarity Communications Pvt. Ltd., Listrak, LiveChat Inc., LivePerson Inc., LogMeIn, Marin Software, Maropost, Maximizer Software Inc., Medallia, Meltwater Group, Mitel, NCR Corporation, Nuance Communications Inc., Operative, Puzzel, Quadient, Reynolds and Reynolds Company, RingCentral, Sage, SAS Institute, Selligent Marketing Cloud, ServiceSource, Sprinklr, SugarCRM, Talkdesk, Thunderhead, TTEC, Twilio, Veeva Systems Inc., Vocalcom, Vonage, Zoho Corp., and many others.
Custom data cuts related to the CRM Applications market are available:
- Top 400+ CRM Applications Vendors and Market Forecast 2021-2026
- 2021 CRM Applications Market By Industry (21 Verticals)
- 2021 CRM Applications Market By CRM Segments and Categories
- 2021 CRM Applications Market By Country (USA + 45 countries)
- 2021 CRM Applications Market By Region (Americas, EMEA, APAC)
- 2021 CRM Applications Market By Revenue Type (License, Services, Hardware, Support and Maintenance, Cloud)
- 2021 CRM Applications Market By Customer Size (revenue, employee count, asset)
- 2021 CRM Applications Market By Channel (Direct vs Direct)
- 2021 CRM Applications Market By Product
Exhibit 4 shows the enterprise applications market by functional area. The highest growth functional markets revolve around smaller segments like eCommerce, Enterprise Performance Management, Sales Performance Management and Treasury and Risk, where first movers remain less established than those that for decades have been entrenched in functional areas like ERP, CRM and PLM.
CRM Win/Loss Analysis As Part Of Enterprise Applications Buyer Insight Customer Database
On the buyer side, customers are investing in CRM systems based on new features and capabilities that are expected to replace their existing legacy systems. In many cases, competitive upgrades and replacements that could have a profound impact on future market-share changes will become more widespread.
Since 2010, our global team of researchers have been studying the patterns of the latest CRM software purchases by customers around the world, aggregating massive amounts of data points that form the basis of our forecast assumptions and perhaps the rise and fall of certain vendors and their products on a quarterly basis.
Updated continuously, our database features extensive CRM win/loss analysis. Each year our research team identifies tens of thousands of these customer wins and losses from public and proprietary sources.
The research results are being incorporated into regular updates in our Enterprise Applications Buyer Insight Customer Database. You can access the Quarterly Win/Loss Analysis Scoreboard and our Enterprise Applications Buyer Insight Customer Database by becoming a subscriber.
Source: Apps Run The World, September 2022
Further Readings
An expanded version of this report covers the top 400+ CRM Software vendors, offering in-depth analysis of the market dynamics, vendors’ Strengths, Customers, Opportunities, Risks and Ecosystems as well as their ability to gain Shares (SCORES) within their respective space. We also offer win-loss analysis of the quarterly wins of these top vendors and whether incumbents and upstarts pose any real threat to their standing amid shifting market requirements and user preferences.
More Enterprise Applications Research Findings
Based on the latest annual survey of 3,000+ enterprise software vendors, Apps Run The World is releasing a number of dedicated reports, which profile the world’s 500 largest Enterprise Applications Vendors (Apps Top 500) and the world’s 500 largest Cloud Applications Vendors (Cloud Top 500) ranked by their 2015-2021 product revenues.
Their 2021 results are being broken down, sorted and ranked across 16 functional areas (from Analytics to Treasury and Risk Management) and by 21 vertical industries(from Aerospace to Utility), as shown in our Taxonomy. Further breakdowns by subvertical, country, company size, etc. are available as custom data cuts per special request.
Research Methodology
Each year our global team of researchers conduct an annual survey of thousands of enterprise software vendors by contacting them directly on their latest quarterly and annual revenues by country, functional area, and vertical market. We supplement their written responses with our own primary research to determine quarterly and yearly growth rates, In addition to customer wins to ascertain whether these are net new purchases or expansions of existing implementations.
Another dimension of our proactive research process is through continuous improvement of our customer database, which stores more than one million records on the enterprise software landscape of over 100,000 organizations around the world. The database provides customer insight and contextual information on what types of enterprise software systems and other relevant technologies are they running and their propensity to invest further with their current or new suppliers as part of their overall IT transformation projects to stay competitive, fend off threats from disruptive forces, or comply with internal mandates to improve overall enterprise efficiency.
The result is a combination of supply-side data and demand-generation customer insight that allows our clients to better position themselves in anticipation of the next wave that will reshape the enterprise software marketplace for years to come.
