When it comes to technology in Australia, Sydney often has received the glory.
With software-as-a-service (SaaS) and the cloud becoming more prevalent, other cities threaten Sydney’s place as the capital of Australian technology. And the biggest threat is coming from Melbourne. In the past several years, Melbourne has developed an active and vibrant SaaS scene giving birth to global leaders. Melbourne is also attracting global SaaS leaders like Slack, who earlier might have based their Australian or Asia-Pacific headquarters in Sydney.
So it’s not a surprise SaaS vendors starting in Melbourne have seen success. Melbourne possesses a very educated workforce and has a long history as a design and arts hub. With user experience becoming so important, this provides a competitive advantage in software. It’s also been awarded the “most livable city in the world” multiple times, which before Covid helped attract talent.
The growth of SaaS and the impact of Covid have made location less relevant than it previously was. These trends play to Melbourne's strengths and help vendors go global faster and see success quicker. Record investments by venture capitalists into local ventures ($1.7 billion invested in Australian startups in 2020) are also helping to boost the startup environment.
Some Melbourne-based vendors on our list are global leaders in their categories. Standout vendors include Culture Amp (named a Leader in G2’s employee engagement software category) and PaperCut (named a Leader in our print management software category). True to Melbourne’s background as the design capital of Australia, vendors like Creately (named a Leader in G2’s diagramming software category), BlackMagic Design (a Leader in video editing software), Milanote (note-taking software for creatives), and TRIBE (influencer marketing) all performed well.
10 Best B2B Software Companies in Melbourne
G2 is excited to release our list of the 10 best B2B software companies in Melbourne. We determined our list by identifying over 50 software vendors either based in or who started in Melbourne who have reviews on G2. Next, we evaluated the 963 global reviews for these vendors to determine the 10 best.
Best of City lists include sellers that are headquartered in the specific region and have a product with at least 10 reviews on G2.com. Scores are based on a product’s Satisfaction and Market Presence scores within its respective category.
1. Creately
Creately is a visual workspace for brainstorming, planning, executing, and analyzing around projects. Its infinite canvas, powerful diagramming and drawing capabilities, along with real-time collaboration, enable teams to centralize documents, resources, tasks, and communication, creating a single source of truth for effective decision-making and increased productivity. It facilitates synchronous and asynchronous collaboration through in-app video conferencing, live mouse tracking and synced change previews, and comment discussion threads.
Creately supports over 70 diagram types spanning across all organizational functions from marketing and education to HR. Creately is trusted by over 5 million users and is used by leading organizations including Netflix, Amazon, NASA, Disney, and PayPal.
2. BlackMagic Design
DaVinci Resolve 12 combines professional non-linear video editing with an advanced color corrector so now you can edit, color correct, finish and deliver all from one system.
3. PaperCut
In a nutshell, our print management software inspires earth- and dollar-saving behavior by giving you powerful visibility and control over who prints what (and how much). It’s led to the wider PaperCut family saving over 750 million sheets of paper to date – that’s like 80,000 trees! It also makes your day-to-day a lot easier. After all, what really sets our solutions apart is how simple they are to install and use – no matter your size, your printers, or the devices and operating systems your users bring to the table. Everything just works.
4. Gleam.io
Gleam is a marketing app to help grow the business Email List, E-commerce store SaaS business, and Facebook audience.
5. Culture Amp
Culture Amp is the leading People & Culture platform that helps over 4000 companies across the globe take action to improve employee engagement, retention, and performance. Culture Amp’s quick to deploy platform provides continuous listening, feedback, and development tools throughout the employee lifecycle to quickly deliver the insights needed to confidently make decisions and effectively prioritize resources to maximize individual & organizational performance. We help CEOs connect with their people, CHROs make data-driven decisions, and managers lead their teams.
6. Digital Pigeon
Share your digital media with clients quickly, reliably, and beautifully. Digital Pigeon is a large file delivery service for digital media producers, creative studios, and advertising & marketing agencies. You don't have time for failed or slow downloads. We partner with Amazon Web Services, one of the world's biggest, most trusted cloud service providers, to make sure your work is delivered quickly and securely. Our technology means you'll never compete for bandwidth again when uploading files and your clients won't when downloading your work.
7. Yellowfin
Yellowfin is the only analytics suite that successfully combines action-based dashboards with industry-leading automated analysis and data storytelling. By delivering the best analytical experience, Yellowfin provides your users with unique ways to engage with and act on their data and addresses the needs of data analysts, business users, customers, and developers who want to build, deploy or use amazing analytical experiences.
8. Milanote
Milanote is an easy-to-use tool to organize your ideas and projects into visual boards. Add notes, images, links and files, organize them visually and share them.
9. TRIBE
TRIBE is a marketplace that connects global brands with 60,000+ micro-influencers, to generate world-class branded content at scale, speed and for a fraction of the cost. Submit a brief on TRIBE in minutes, and our pool of influencers submit content upfront, shot to your specifications. Briefs can receive submissions in as quickly as 24 hours, and our app is optimised for quick review on desktop and mobile. Approve the posts you love and influencers post directly to their socials.
10. CentricMinds
CentricMinds is a leading cloud-based Digital Workplace Solution used by small, medium, and large-sized organizations. It’s proven to improve employee engagement and internal communication and enables employees to work from anywhere. The platform offers a native mobile app for iOS and Android devices. For over 15 years, CentricMinds has been providing superior Digital Workplace Solutions and our flagship Digital Experience Platform to over 500 organizations, including publicly listed companies, across all industries and business sizes.
Keep an eye on Melbourne
As the Melbourne SaaS scene continues to grow and mature, it provides a useful counterweight to Sydney, which ultimately increases the health of the overall Australian tech ecosystem. As Melbourne keeps playing to its strengths, it has the potential to not just be an Australian technology hub, but also play on the global stage.
G2’s city-specific lists promote local B2B Software communities and highlight how products from the area score on G2. City-specific lists are released on an ad-hoc basis and are not to be confused with our Top Software / Best of 2021 Methodology annual lists.
