SaaS Directory Submission: Where to List Your SaaS

SaaS directories vs startup directories

These two lists overlap by maybe 20%, and mixing them up wastes a lot of time.

A startup directory lists companies. BetaList, F6S, Product Hunt. What they want is a new thing. Your listing is basically a launch announcement. Being three years old works against you on most of them.

A SaaS directory lists software people buy. G2, Capterra, GetApp. What they want is a product with real customers, a pricing page, and reviews. Being three years old works for you here. Being brand new with zero customers is the thing that hurts.

So the honest test is: can five paying customers write you a review this month? If yes, this list is for you. If no, go do the startup directories first and come back in six months. Submitting to G2 with no reviews gets you a page nobody will ever see.

One more difference that matters. Startup directory traffic is founders and other builders. SaaS directory traffic is people with a budget looking to replace a tool. That second group converts a lot better, which is why these sites can charge what they charge.

Are they still worth doing

Depends on who you sell to.

B2B, sold to a team, $50/month or more: yes, and it's not close. Somebody at the buying company will search "best [your category] software" and land on a Capterra or G2 comparison page. If you're not on it, you're not in the shortlist. Doesn't matter how good the product is.

B2B, self-serve, cheap: worth it, but treat it as SEO. You won't get much direct traffic from a category page you sit 14th on. What you get is a handful of high-DR pages pointing at your domain, plus a real-looking presence when someone googles your name.

B2C or consumer app: mostly skip this list. These sites are built around business buyers. Do the two or three free dofollow ones for the link and spend the rest of your time elsewhere.

Dev tools with no business buyer: StackShare and SourceForge are your two. Non-technical products get rejected from StackShare almost every time, and the reverse is also true — a dev tool on a general SaaS directory ends up in a category nobody browses.

Here's the thing people get wrong. They submit to 30 SaaS directories in an afternoon and think they're done. Almost none of those pages will ever rank, because ranking on these sites is driven by reviews, not by how well you filled the form out. Five sites done properly beats 30 done fast.

What these sites actually rank on

Every one of them has a score, and the score decides where you sit in the category list. The names differ, the inputs are mostly the same:

• Review count and recency. The big one everywhere. G2, Capterra and SoftwareSuggest all weight recent reviews much higher than old ones. Ten reviews from last quarter beat forty from two years ago.
• Profile completeness. Screenshots, feature list, pricing, integrations, support options. GetApp and Software Advice both push complete profiles up. This part is free and most vendors don't bother.
• Category fit. Pick the category you can be top-10 in, not the biggest one. Third in a narrow category gets you more clicks than 40th in "Project Management".
• Their own metric. SaasWorthy has an "SW Score" built from reviews, social presence and traffic. Crozdesk has a "Crozscore". Both are partly out of your control, so don't chase them.
• Paid placement. On most of these the top slots are ads. You can't out-optimise a paid slot, so aim for the best organic position instead.

The foot-gun: incentivised reviews. G2 and Capterra both have review teams that check for this. Getting caught means your reviews get deleted and your profile can get flagged. More on doing it properly below.

Get this ready before you open any form

The forms are long. Much longer than a startup directory form. Do this once and every submission after it takes ten minutes instead of an hour.

Company info that matches everywhere. Legal company name, founded year, HQ city, employee count band, and a work email on your product's domain. Several of these sites cross-check each other and LinkedIn. Mismatched founding years get profiles held for review.

Three descriptions. A 60-character tagline. A 150-word summary. A 400-word "about" for the sites that want detail. Write the 400-word one first and cut down.

Pricing, written out properly. Tier names, prices, what's in each one, trial length, whether there's a free plan. Half these sites have a filterable pricing field, and leaving it blank drops you out of every "under $50/month" filter people use.

Feature list mapped to their taxonomy. Each site has its own checkbox list of features. Don't skim it. Every box you can honestly tick is a filter you show up in.

Screenshots at 1280px or wider. Product UI, not marketing graphics. Four to six of them. The sites that show a screenshot carousel get much better click-through, and yours will be the blurry one if you upload straight from a phone.

A short list of competitors. Several sites ask, and AlternativeTo and SaaSHub are built entirely around it. Pick two or three well-known ones you really compete with.

The Gartner trio: one submission, three listings

This is the single highest-value hour on this page, so it gets its own section.

Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice are all owned by Gartner and run off shared vendor data. You create one vendor account, fill in one product profile, and it propagates. Three listings at DR 86, 87 and 88, all free.

What to know going in:

• Software Advice and GetApp give dofollow links. Capterra's outbound rel is inconsistent enough that we don't mark it as dofollow. So don't do this for Capterra's link. Do it for Capterra's traffic, and for the two dofollow siblings that come with it.
• You need a work email on your product's domain. Gmail submissions get rejected. This trips up more solo founders than anything else on this list.
• Approval takes days, not minutes. A human looks at it. Real product, real pricing page, real company info, or it bounces.
• Reviews carry across the three sites too. So does a bad one. That's the trade.

The full walkthrough with the actual form fields is in the Capterra submission guide, so there's no point repeating it here.

Do G2 in the same session. Separate company, separate account, but the assets are identical and you're already in the mode. G2 is DR 91 with 3.2M monthly visits. The link is nofollow, which people use as a reason to skip it, and that's a mistake — G2 comparison pages are where B2B shortlists get made. The G2 submission guide covers claiming and the review flow.

The free ones worth doing

Tier 1 — high DR, free, dofollow, submit and forget

Clean links. Low traffic on some, but the form is short and the link is real.

• SourceForge — DR 92, 2.5M monthly visits, free, dofollow. The highest-DR free dofollow link on this page. You need a vendor account before you can submit, and it has to be clearly software. Selling a service? Skip it. The form is longer than most, and the SourceForge submission guide walks it.
• Software Advice — DR 88, free, dofollow. Comes with the Gartner submission above. Has to be real B2B software with a complete profile.
• TheSaaSDirectory — DR 88, free, dofollow. Plain form, fast approval, clean link. Traffic is low. Do it for the link and move on. Five minutes.
• GetApp — DR 87, free, dofollow. Also part of the Gartner set. A more complete profile ranks higher.
• FinancesOnline — DR 87, 1.5M monthly visits, free. Strongest domain in this tier after SourceForge. Submit at /add-product/. The free listing is real, but their business is selling leads, so expect sales follow-up. Editor reviews and their "Rising Star" badge are a separate, slow request.
• CompareCamp — DR 72, free, dofollow. Same network as FinancesOnline. You request an editor review and wait. Slow, but free and dofollow, and the badge is usable on your own site.

Tier 2 — the ones buyers actually read

Traffic and buying intent, not just DR.

• G2 — DR 91, 3.2M monthly visits, nofollow. Covered above. Do it first.
• AlternativeTo — DR 80, 1.3M monthly visits, dofollow. You list yourself as an alternative to existing tools. A fresh entry with no likes sits at the bottom forever. Pick two or three well-known competitors, fill the page out fully, and get a few users to like it. That's the whole game there.
• StackShare — DR 79, 1.6M monthly visits, free. Dev tools only. Non-technical products get rejected almost every time.
• SoftwareSuggest — DR 77, 561K monthly visits. India-based, and the sales team is pushy. A free listing is possible. Expect calls and emails pitching a paid plan — just say no. Ranking is review-driven, so a few real customer reviews do more than paying does.
• SoftwareWorld — DR 75, 65K monthly visits, free. Built around "Top 10 X software" lists, and nearly all the referral traffic comes from those. Getting into your category's list is the goal. Reviews move you up.
• Crozdesk — DR 74, 200K monthly visits. Free vendor listing plus paid lead-gen. The free tier is enough for the link. Only pay if you actually want to buy leads.
• SaasWorthy — DR 72, 172K monthly visits, free. Claim the profile, fill it out, then collect reviews to push the SW Score.
• SaaSHub — DR 68, 1.6M monthly visits, nofollow. You name competitors and verify with an email on your product's domain. Free. The SaaSHub submission guide covers the verification step, which is where people get stuck.
• SpotSaaS — DR 67, free, dofollow. Your page may already exist, auto-scraped, possibly with wrong data. So this is a claim, not a submit. Sign up as a vendor, approval takes about a day. If you're not in their index there's no public add-product form.
• Business Software — DR 55, 100K monthly visits, dofollow. The form just starts a conversation. An editor emails you within two business days and builds the listing by hand, so the timing isn't yours. Plant it and forget it.
• Tech.co — DR 80, dofollow. Not a directory. There's no submit form. You pitch an editor for a review, or aim to get into one of their comparison articles. Their business-software comparison pages are where the links live. Cold email with a real angle or don't bother.

Tier 3 — small SaaS directories, do them in one batch

Individually these are worth very little. As a batch on one afternoon, with your assets already prepared, they're fine. Most are free and dofollow.

• ProductWing — DR 56, free, dofollow. Google login only. The Visit button is a clean dofollow link, consistent across the pages we checked. No paid tier.
• ToolFio — DR 55, free, dofollow.
• Shipybara — DR 55, free, dofollow.
• New SaaSly — DR 52, free, dofollow.
• Ramen.Tools — DR 52, free, dofollow.
• SubmitMySaaS — DR 51, free, dofollow.
• AppaList — DR 50, free. Google login to submit. Watch the rel: we checked two listing pages, one dofollow and one nofollow. Free, so no loss, but don't count on link equity.
• Cuspera — DR 45, free, dofollow. Marketing and sales software. It builds an AI profile of your product out of reviews and case studies. Search your name there first — you may already have an auto-built page to claim instead of submitting again.
• BusinessHunt — DR 43, free, dofollow. 2,500+ real listings. Catch: it's client-rendered Next.js, so your link only exists after JS runs. Google login to submit.
• AlphaDigits — DR 32, free, dofollow.
• Acid Tools — DR 64, free. Dashboard submission after Google login. Some visit buttons are dofollow and others nofollow on the same template, so it looks conditional. Free means it costs you nothing but time.
• Versily — DR 71, free, dofollow. Small launch community. The whole site is client-side JavaScript and the raw HTML is empty, so the link only counts if Google renders it. Traffic is tiny. Keep expectations low.
• SaaS AI Tools — DR 33, 73K monthly visits, free. Low DR but real traffic, which is unusual in this tier.
• IndieHustles — DR 66, dofollow. A directory of indie alternatives to big SaaS, so the form makes you say which tools you replace. No clean "replaces X" story means a bad fit. Free queue is 8-10 weeks; $9 gets you reviewed in 48 hours.
• Saas Po — DR 29, 69K monthly visits, free. It's a landing-page design gallery, not a product directory. It lists page screenshots and even splits them into sections for other people to copy. Only submit if your landing page actually looks good.

The paid ones, and the two that are traps

Paying isn't automatically wrong. Paying without checking what you get is.

Do this before you pay anything: open a listing page that already exists, view source, and search for that vendor's domain. If their URL only shows up inside JSON-LD, or on a button marked rel="nofollow", you're buying a page and not a link. That's fine if you want the page. It's not fine if you thought you were buying a link.

Two that fail that check:

• Serchen — DR 71, $9.99. Company pages have no crawlable link to your site. Your URL sits in structured data, and the visible outbound links are sponsored slots marked nofollow. Skip it unless you specifically want a review-page placeholder.
• ToolsFine — DR 65, $10 via PayPal before review, three business days, approval not guaranteed. The button is dofollow, the in-text link is nofollow. You're paying ten bucks for something fuzzy.

Two where paying is the honest option:

• Similarlabs — DR 66. The free tier takes a 7-day review, demands their badge on your homepage, and still hands you a nofollow link. You'd trade a real link for a worse one. $9.99 goes live in minutes, no badge, dofollow. If you submit at all, pay.
• ufind.best — DR 58. They spell the policy out on the pricing page, which is rare and worth respecting: free entries need the badge, queue for months, and only the week's top 3 get dofollow. $19 one-time buys a permanent dofollow and a next-Monday launch.

The rest:

• Tekpon — DR 54, 134K monthly visits, paid. Get listed at /get-listed/. Decent traffic for the tier.
• Indie.Deals — DR 58, dofollow. The free tier wants a link back on your site first, takes about 96 hours of manual review, and promises neither placement nor a permanent link. That's what the $49 Pro tier is for. Only makes sense if you have a real discount to offer.
• SaaS Surf — DR 24, 31K monthly visits, paid. Low DR, real traffic.
• AppSumo — DR 82, 3.3M monthly visits. Not a directory at all. It's a deals marketplace, and you're giving up most of the revenue on a lifetime deal. That's a business decision, not a link-building one. Don't let it end up on your directory checklist by accident.

How to get reviews without getting your listing pulled

Reviews are what makes any of this work, and it's the part where people break rules without realising.

What's allowed on G2 and Capterra:

• Emailing your customers and asking for an honest review. Link them straight to the review form.
• Using the review-collection link these sites give you. Both have one.
• Offering the gift card the site itself runs as a promotion. G2 and Capterra both do this, and the incentive comes from them, not from you.

What gets reviews deleted:

• Paying for reviews, or offering your own discount in exchange for one.
• Only asking customers you already know are happy, in a way that can be shown as filtered. Ask a broad group.
• Asking employees, friends, or anyone at your own company. They check IP and email domain.
• Writing them yourself. Obviously. It still happens and it still gets caught.

Timing that works: ask right after a support win or a renewal. Not after a bug report, and not in an onboarding email to someone who's used the product for four days.

How many you need: most of these sites want somewhere between 5 and 10 before you show up in a category. Getting to 5 is the hard part. After that it's steady.

After you submit: check the listing is real

Do this two to three weeks later. Five minutes, and it's the only way to know if any of this did anything.

1. Search site:directorysite.com "Your Product Name" in Google. No result means the page isn't indexed. An unindexed page passes nothing.
2. Open your listing and view source. Search for your domain. Look at the rel on the link that contains it. Sites change their link policy quietly and nobody announces it.
3. Check the link isn't a redirect through their tracker. A /go/yourproduct link that 302s is usually fine. A JS-only click handler isn't a link at all.
4. Check whether the page is client-rendered. curl it and see if your link is in the HTML. BusinessHunt and Versily both fail this. Google usually renders it eventually, but "usually" and "eventually" are doing a lot of work in that sentence.

If a listing fails all four, write it down and don't submit to that site again. Keep the note. In a year you'll have forgotten which ones were duds.

Side by side

Common mistakes

• Submitting before you have customers. No reviews means no category placement, and the page just sits there. Go do startup directories first.
• Using a Gmail address. The Gartner sites and SaaSHub both want a work email on your product's domain. This is the most common rejection reason on the whole list.
• Picking the biggest category. 40th in "CRM" gets nothing. Third in "CRM for real estate teams" gets clicks.
• Leaving pricing blank because you want them to contact you instead. You just removed yourself from every price filter on the site.
• Treating a nofollow site as worthless. G2 is nofollow and it's still the most valuable page on this list for a B2B product.
• Paying before checking the source. Two sites here charge for a page with no usable link. There are more like them.
• Submitting the same product twice to a site that already auto-scraped you. Search your product name first. SpotSaaS and Cuspera both build pages you didn't ask for.
• Doing all 40 in one day and never coming back. The listing is 20% of the work. Reviews are the other 80%.

FAQ

Are SaaS directory backlinks still worth anything for SEO?

The individual link, not much. What's worth something is the page ranking for "best X software" and sending you a buyer. A DR 88 link is a bonus on top of that. If you're picking sites purely by DR you're optimising the wrong thing.

What's the difference between G2 and Capterra?

Both are B2B software review sites and they overlap a lot. G2 skews a bit more towards tech buyers and has more reviews per product. Capterra comes with GetApp and Software Advice attached, so one submission gives you three listings. Do both. Details are in the G2 guide and the Capterra guide.

Do I need reviews before I submit?

No, you can list with zero. But the listing does almost nothing until you have about five. Plan the submission and the review push as one project, not two.

Is it worth paying for a listing?

Sometimes. Similarlabs at $9.99 and ufind.best at $19 both give you a permanent dofollow the free tier doesn't. That's a fair trade. Paying $9.99 for a page with no crawlable link isn't. Check the source before you pay, every time.

How long does approval take?

The Gartner sites take a few days with a human reviewer. Small directories run from minutes to a week. Business Software has an editor build it by hand within two business days. IndieHustles' free queue is 8-10 weeks.

My product is a dev tool, not business software. Same list?

Mostly no. StackShare and SourceForge are your two from this page. After that you're better off with developer communities and content sites — see the dev.to guide and the HackMD guide.

Other things to do in the same push

Your assets are ready and you're already in the flow, so:

• Product Hunt — DR 75, 6M monthly visits, nofollow. A different kind of day entirely. The Product Hunt launch playbook covers it, and if the timing's wrong there are 15 alternatives with real numbers.
• AlternativeTo — if you skipped it above, don't. "Alternative to X" is a buying query and your competitors are already there.
• TheSaaSDirectory — five minutes, DR 88, dofollow. Best minutes-to-DR ratio on this page.
• Your own site. Once you have badges from Capterra, FinancesOnline or CompareCamp, put them on your pricing page. It's free trust, and it links back, which is how these sites want it to work.

Browsing rather than working through a list? The full SaaS category has every site here with pricing and link type, directory sites covers the wider set, and business directories is where the local and general-business ones live.