Business software intelligence marketplace, G2, has announced its sixth annual product ranking award lists, revealing the best performing software products across myriad metrics and verticals.

G2 — previously known as G2 Crowd — is like a Yelp for business software, displaying crowdsourced insights, feedback, and reviews spanning thousands of applications. It’s all about helping businesses research and compare competing products before reaching a buying decision.

It goes without saying that G2 has a lot of data — data it uses each year to highlight the most well-received software across CRMs, accounting and finance, HR, and more. For the first time, G2 has this year broken out “IT infrastructure products” as its own dedicated category, revealing Dynatrace, LogicMonitor, Progress, AppDynamics, and Microsoft (Microsoft SQL Server) as the top five entities.

So, why would IT infrastructure qualify for its own category this year? Well, according to Preethica Furtado Serao, G2’s team lead and senior market research analyst for cloud infrastructure, it simply comes down to market demand as companies have pursued digital transformation to remain agile and competitive.

“The emergence of cloud infrastructure allowed enterprises to move from a traditional IT hardware space and focus on modernizing infrastructure,” Furtado Serao told VentureBeat. “In order for a company to undertake digital transformation, reliable and resilient IT infrastructure has become a must. The demand for hybrid cloud and multicloud environments has increased exponentially, and customers need to identify the best possible IT Infrastructure strategy that not only manages their data-intensive workloads and applications, but at the same time ensures business continuity.”

It’s also somewhat revealing that cloud monitoring and management companies such as Dynatrace, LogicMonitor, and AppDynamics not only came out on top in the IT Infrastructure segment, but also emerged in the top 100 overall best software products, charting at 46, 87, and 42 respectively.

Simply the best

The Best Software Products category was topped by Gong, a collaborative AI-powered sales enablement platform, followed by Chorus.ai; Amplitude Analytics; Salesloft; and Sendoso. Gong also topped the “Highest Satisfaction Products” list, a category that included Zoominfo, SalesLoft, MindTickle, and Seismic in the top five.

And another new breakout category focused on software development tools also emerged in this year’s report, with Microsoft’s GitHub topping the list, followed by GitLab; Microsoft’s Visual Studio; Apple’s Xcode; and Postman. It’s worth noting that GitHub, GitLab, and Visual Studio also featured in the top 100 Best Software Products category.

In truth, there is a lot of data to parse and takeaways to garner from G2’s rankings, but there are some overarching broad trends worth highlighting. With remote or hybrid working now the norm for millions of people globally, this has created demand for products that help teams work cohesively from disparate locations. Gong is perhaps a good example of this, as it enables revenue teams to make decisions collaboratively, while the likes of Zoom, Asana, and Monday.com all featured in the top 10 “Best Global Sellers” list.

“The majority of the top-ranked tools facilitate collaboration in hybrid, remote-first environments,” said Patrick Szakiel, a market research manager and senior research analyst at G2.

Gong: Sales enablement smarts with collaboration built-in

Moreover, there was some overlap between software in the small business, mid-market, and enterprise products categories, including Gong (again!) which ranked fourth, first, and first respectively.

“High-quality products are high-quality products, and the best solutions are nimble enough to make an impact no matter the business size,” Szakiel added.

And then there is what is arguably the biggest elephant in the room here — just about every one of the top-ranked software products is cloud-based, reflecting a broader industrial transition in terms of where companies are spending their infrastructure money.

G2’s rankings are based on reviews from its marketplace, with some 600 companies qualifying for inclusion. More specifically, the top 100 products are ranked based on reviews across all categories that they exist in (e.g., “HR” and “Small Business Products”), and a software seller or product must have received at least 50 approved and published reviews during 2021. The top 100 software sellers are ranked using a combination of satisfaction and “market presence” scores.

Other new product categories in this year’s awards lists include CAD (computer-aided design) and PLM (product lifecycle management); collaboration and productivity; commerce; content management; design; office; and security. This takes the total number of category ranking lists to 26.

“As we’ve seen buyer attitudes and behaviors change over the past year, these awards further validate the power and necessity of trusted peer reviews in software buying decisions,” G2’s chief marketing officer Amanda Malko added.