beams vs. Zylo: The Best Zylo Alternative

Choosing the Best SaaS Management Platform

SaaS management is an essential aspect of modern business operations, ensuring cost efficiency, security compliance, and streamlined workflows. Two major players in this space are Zylo and beams. While both platforms aim to provide SaaS visibility and spend optimization, beams stands out with deeper usage insights and a more proactive approach to cost savings.

Overview of Zylo

Zylo is a SaaS management platform that focuses on helping IT and finance teams monitor software spend, optimize license usage, and track compliance. Key features include:

SaaS Spend Analysis – Tracks SaaS expenses and provides insights into software spending trends.

License Utilization Monitoring – Ensures that purchased SaaS licenses are being used effectively.

Renewal Management – Helps businesses stay on top of contract renewals to avoid surprises.

SaaS Discovery – Identifies all SaaS applications in use within an organization.

Vendor Negotiation Support – Offers insights to help businesses negotiate better SaaS contracts.

While Zylo is strong in spend tracking and vendor management, it lacks real-time usage intelligence and proactive cost reduction strategies that beams delivers.

How beams Outperforms Zylo

beams provides a more holistic approach to SaaS management, focusing not just on IT and finance teams but on company-wide engagement and workflow intelligence. Here’s how beams stands out:

1. Real SaaS Usage Insights, Not Just Spend Data

Zylo primarily focuses on spend optimization, but beams provides granular insights into how SaaS tools are actually being used.

beams collects real-time data at the OS and browser level through its Mac app and browser extension, ensuring accurate usage tracking.

Unlike Zylo, which relies heavily on contract and expense data, beams analyzes actual user interactions to measure adoption and engagement.

2. Superior Cost Savings Through Workflow-Level Analysis

While Zylo helps optimize spending, beams goes further by identifying actual tool usage patterns to drive cost reductions.

beams can detect underutilized licenses, helping businesses reallocate or cancel them.

It identifies duplicate tools and redundant subscriptions, preventing double payments and wasted spend.

By analyzing overlapping functionalities across different tools, beams helps companies streamline their SaaS stack for greater efficiency.

3. AI-Powered Recommendations and Automated Insights

beams incorporates AI-driven insights that go beyond standard spend tracking.

SaaS-GPT: beams uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and a RAG system to suggest the best SaaS tools based on company size, industry, and usage trends.

Automated invoice tracking via Gmail integration ensures seamless expense tracking.

Trend alerts notify businesses when similar companies start using new SaaS tools, ensuring they stay ahead of emerging industry trends.

4. Designed for Company-Wide Adoption

Unlike Zylo, which is primarily focused on IT and finance teams, beams enables multi-team collaboration.

beams integrates feedback loops and tool request workflows, ensuring employees across different departments are engaged in SaaS decision-making.

This internal network effect drives better SaaS adoption, helping organizations make more informed software investment decisions.

5. Enhanced Security and Compliance

Both Zylo and beams offer security and compliance tracking, but beams provides a more granular level of oversight.

beams integrates directly with SSO providers and network-level data to ensure stronger security governance.

By tracking actual tool access and usage, beams helps IT teams detect security risks based on real-world behavior, not just permission levels.

Which One Should You Choose?

Choose Zylo if your primary focus is SaaS spend tracking, license management, and vendor negotiation.

Choose beams if you need a company-wide SaaS intelligence platform that offers real-time usage insights, proactive cost savings, AI-powered recommendations, and workflow-driven SaaS management.

While Zylo is a strong tool for financial oversight, beams provides a deeper, more proactive approach to SaaS management—ensuring businesses optimize their software investments with real-time intelligence and company-wide collaboration.

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