In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive world, building a strong brand identity has become more crucial than ever — particularly SaaS companies, where consumers are inundated with options. A well-crafted brand coupled with an efficient offering makes SaaS brands stand out in a crowded market, establish a loyal customer base, and create a lasting impression on consumers.
However, creating a brand like this that truly resonates with your target audience is no easy feat, which is why seeking out branding inspiration can help businesses craft a coherent and recognizable brand identity.
But what exactly is SaaS? Software as a service (SaaS) is basically when software is made accessible via web browsers, providing applications for specific business or personal use such as customer relationship management, human resource management or productivity tools. Many of the popular tools you employ on a day-to-day basis are actually SaaS — such as Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, Adobe, Google Workspace, Salesforce, MailChimp and even Microsoft Office.
In this article, we’re going to take an in-depth look at ten different SaaS brands and their brand strategies to gain branding inspiration for creating a successful SaaS brand. We’ll take a look at each brand’s messaging, tone of voice, personality traits, archetype and use of imagery to further understand what popular SaaS brands use to communicate their essence.
Let’s get started.
Miro
Miro is a visual collaboration platform that allows teams to brainstorm, plan, and organize projects from different locations using a digital whiteboard. From the outset, the Miro landing page clarifies exactly what its service is with a visual representation of the whiteboard offering. Apart from the explanatory visuals, Miro also makes use of the color blue, one that carries connotations of clarity and wisdom, in contrast with the cleanliness of white to convey a simple yet reliable identity. This uncomplicated use of visuals is coupled with brand attributes that encourage the consumer with feelings of support and enthusiasm — mainly through the use of phrases like ‘better to best’ and ‘together’ that employ creative yet practical tones of voice to convey a brand archetype of the caregiver or sage with an idealistic personality.
Attio
One of the most straightforward brand identities on this list, Attio is all about clarity. As a customer relationship management (CRM) software that can be molded to suit specific needs, Attio puts all the focus on what it can do for the customer instead of what they look like as a brand. The website uses a grayscale color scheme with mainly black and white tones that uses clean lines and simplicity to highlight the ‘data-driven’ side of the brand, and to emphasize the ‘blank slate’ element of the SaaS. While the brand does feature explanatory visuals that demonstrate their offering, they don’t use any ornamental or decorative visuals apart from their logo. Interestingly, despite keeping their visuals as simple as possible, Attio has relied on words to convey its brand personality. With phrases like ‘customer relationship magic’ and ‘the fastest & most flexible CRM you’ll ever use’, Attio uses a motivational and tough yet playful tone of voice to position itself as a hero/creator archetype.
Formcarry.
Formcarry is another SaaS brand with a simple, direct style that highlights the technical elements of the software upon first glance. However, as you advance further down the landing page you see that the brand actually uses helpful, cartoon-like graphics to demonstrate the practical uses of their software. Formcarry is a web-based form handling service that allows users to create and manage forms, and collect and store form submissions in a centralized database. Because the offering is not so simple to understand, Formcarry makes use of clean, illustrative styles and trustworthy, calming colors like blue and pastel purple to guide the user. This helpful approach is further demonstrated in the use of a candid, caring tone of voice — such as in phrases like ‘setup, easy peasy!’ and ‘Better, together’ — that communicate a pragmatic yet friendly brand personality and a caregiver archetype.
Overflow.io
One of the few brands on this list that uses color as a dominant feature, Overflow.io puts strong stylistic focus on the ‘flow’ between creativity and practicality as their brand is centered around the design tool that helps companies build flow diagrams and presentations. Overflow has essentially turned their visuals into a demonstration for the product they offer, using kinetic features to show off the product in motion. The landing page uses style characteristics such as a saturated blue and purple (colors typically associated with power and wisdom) gradient and a stark contrast of color and white to create an eye-catching identity. Alongside the strong visual components, Overflow has adopted a creative yet practical tone of voice that demonstrates the dedicated and resourceful personality of the brand, with words like ‘all-in-one’, ‘clarity’, ‘done right’, ‘save time’ showing their archetype as a caregiver that offers support.
Fiber Plane
Fiberplane, a software that allows you to debug your infrastructure in collaborative web-based notebooks, has a similar brand identity to Overflow.io, where color and kinetic features are used to demonstrate the potential of a product. While Overflow utilized gradients of blue and purple hues, Fiberplane has used the same gradient style in pinks, purples and oranges, bright colors that are healthy, energizing and playful. These colors are starkly contrasted by the use of bold black and white for important copy, bringing in elements of sophistication. Fiberplane quickly positions itself as a brand with a dynamic, fast-moving personality thanks to the use of rapid kinetic features — however, although this highlights the technical ability of the software, it also makes it hard to understand for the everyday customer. This ultimately narrows the target market and positions the brand as the creator archetype that is inventive but also impractical.
WorkOS
WorkOS is a brand that uses bold, futuristic style characteristics to demonstrate the advanced technologhical ability of its software. With its glowing purple diamond that sits atop grid lines, and a diamon shaped logo, WorkOs is taking the simplicity of geometric features to the next level — much like how its software takes app building to the next level. Purple, a colour often associated with royalty, creativity and luxury, positions the brand one that is simultaneously innovative and stylish. When color is not being used, the brand takes a generally minimalist approach to the rest of its features, including shorter, simple sentences in a candid tone of voice and easy-to-understand visual keys. Overall, WorkOS positions itself as a sage in the field, offer guidance and knowledge to users.
Oku.Club
While Oku.Club has the same clean and sophisticated visual identity with a greyscale style as many of the SaaS brands on this list, it differs quite substantially from other software offerings due to its use of hand-drawn illustrations. Hand drawn illustrations are an interesting choice for a company offering software, however, it makes sense when you understand what Oku is promoting. An app that tracks your reading progress, Oku positions itself as a ‘companion’ to the individual reading journey — which is why the sense of comfort and relatability expressed by the illustrations perfectly reflects their brand archetype as an innocent caregiver. When it comes to copy, Oku keeps it as minimal as possible, using a gentle, casual and caring tone of voice to encourage the reader to embark on their own journey with words like ‘companion’, ‘habit’, ‘favorite’ and ‘easy’.
Cliphire
What stands out the most for you when you look at this page? For us, it is undoubtedly the video of the woman talking. As a service that offers jobseekers a platform to create and share short video clips with prospective employers, ClipHire is putting its product at the center of its brand offering. This illustrative use of visuals is coupled with bursts of bright color that complement the video instead of distracting from it. ClipHire lets the visuals do the talking, adopting collaged, kinetic style characteristics that express a dynamic and friendly brand personality. In terms of tone of voice, ClipHire has chosen once again to let the visuals speak for themselves, using short, motivational phrases in bold black typography, like ‘Be Seen, Get Hired’ and ‘Getting hired has never been easier’.
Amie
If you had any doubt about what Amie is offering, their website quickly clears that up with bold illustrative visuals. The productivity app is all about bringing personality to the chaos of the work day, which is why they focus heavily on the use of charming and agreeable pastel colors like blue, pink, purple and green. Similarly to other brands on this list, Amie contrasts the somewhat overwhelming visuals with bold, black typography that quickly draws your attention. This attention-grabbing technique is also found in the enthusiastic and conversational tone of voice used by the brand — words like ‘joyful’, ‘familiar’, ‘super fast’, ‘easily’, ‘not kidding’ — which encourages the user to try the product. By using illustrative and colorful visuals alongside a friendly and relaxed personality, Amie is positioning itself as the regular guy/gal archetype that is there to help the customer.
Homebase.io
What you may immediately notice about Homebase.io is its departure from color combinations used by the other brands on this list. Instead of focusing on blue hues, Homebase highlights colors such as yellow and green, colors that evoke happiness, optimism, positivity and can be particularly attention grabbing. The brand offers a browser-based Application Programming Interface, so their target market is focused on developers. This niche target explains the use of contrasted, abstract graphics that express a brand personality that is intellectual yet flexible for individual use. Homebase utilizes many industry-specific acronyms and terms in a candid, academic tone of voice that emphasize its position as a serious sage-type brand.
Using SaaS brands for inspiration
As you can see, many of the SaaS brands we’ve looked at in this article take a similar approach — highlighting simplicity, using minimal imagery and utilizing calming colors like blue and purple. This type of branding is successful for these particular companies because it highlights the tech on offer and puts the customer at the forefront of the interaction.
By taking the time to understand what features from these different brands inspire you and why — or why not — you can create your own brand identity that not only looks great, but also feels authentic and meaningful.
Which of these brands stood out the most to you?
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