Software is used extensively for businesses and by businesses. From solopreneurs to large enterprises, organizations need to meet, create, track, sell, and report on activities.
B2B software tends to be more complex and difficult to use than consumer software. Improving the B2B user experience starts with understanding what’s average, poor, or best-in-class using common metrics.
Third-party benchmarks complement internal benchmarking programs by providing more context to organizations measuring and managing their product user experiences.
From January through February of 2025, we collected data from 980 participants to learn about their attitudes toward the functionality and usability of 23 common business-related software products. This was an update to data we’ve collected for the last 10+ years using a similar methodology (and have also conducted with consumer software products). The 23 business products included a mix of productivity and communications software (both web and desktop):
- AutoCAD
- Basecamp
- Blackboard
- Box
- Canvas
- GitHub
- GoToMeeting
- Jira
- MailChimp
- Microsoft Teams
- Monday
- QuickBooks
- Salesforce
- Shopify
- Slack
- Squarespace
- SurveyMonkey
- Tableau
- WebEx
- WordPress
- Zendesk
- ZipRecruiter
- Zoom
We selected these 23 products to represent various business functions, focusing on those that have a large user base and appear in our historical data sets. Where possible, we tried to collect at least two products with similar functions. Several products have strong consumer usage as well (e.g., Zoom and ZipRecruiter). While the list is far from exhaustive, it provides a reasonable picture of the B2B software experience.
Participants were asked to reflect on their most recent experiences with the software and answer a number of items, including the System Usability Scale (SUS), the UX-Lite®, the standard likelihood-to-recommend (LTR) question used to compute the Net Promoter Score (NPS), and the Technical Activities Checklist (TAC-10™). The full details are available in the report. Here are some highlights.
Methodological Note: Some products included in our analysis contain a large amount of disparate functionality and users. Our analysis asked participants only about their overall experience with each product and included a mix of users across functional areas. For applicable products, it’s likely many functional areas will have substantially different scores (e.g., sales versus HR).
The most popular method to measure loyalty is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). It’s calculated using an eleven-point (0 to 10) likelihood-to-recommend question, with the NPS computed by subtracting the percentage of detractors (0–6) from the percentage of promoters (9–10).
Across the 23 products, the average Net Promoter Score was −5%, ranging from −38% to 24%. This average is reasonably consistent with the previous averages of the business NPS from 2020 (−3%) and 2022 (−12%).
We have collected data from five business software products for multiple years (QuickBooks, AutoCAD, Salesforce, GoToMeeting, and WebEx). NPS for GoToMeeting and WebEx have shown some recovery from their historic lows in 2022. QuickBooks has remained positive and steady since 2014, while Salesforce has declined since 2020.
Positive comments about QuickBooks include:
- “QuickBooks has a flexible user interface and easy to navigate and use.”
- “The main thing is that it is able to track my expenses and sales and present it in a way that is very easy to understand, allowing me to make the best decisions for my business.”
- “It pushes everything over at tax time and makes filing easier.”
Some of the negative comments about Salesforce were:
- “One thing I dislike about using Salesforce is how overwhelming it can be, especially with too many clicks and complex navigation.”
- “Occasionally has technical issues (Ex. adding information and it not saving).”
- “I hear it’s expensive to buy and our company is looking into transitioning away from it.”
Figure 1 shows the longitudinal NPS profiles for QuickBooks and Salesforce.
Figure 1: Previous and current NPS scores for QuickBooks and Salesforce.
We used the popular System Usability Scale (SUS) to compute the perceived ease of use of the 23 products. The SUS is a ten-item questionnaire with possible scores ranging from 0 to 100. The average SUS score from over 500 products (including websites and business software) is 68 (the 50th percentile of the distribution). The average SUS score from this group was 70.5 (58th percentile), with a low score of 61.3 (GitHub, 31.6th percentile) and a high score of 81.5 (Slack, 91.6th percentile).
The SUS scores for the five products we’ve tracked for over a decade were reasonably stable, with one product dropping two points from 2022 to 2025 and four improving from two to four points, all changes within the margin of error.
In the report, we also present findings for the UX-Lite. It’s becoming an important benchmark for many organizations as part of using a single (succinct) score to quantify software acceptance and satisfaction. It’s related to earlier research that produced the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), but it has only one item each for ease (how easy is the software to use) and usefulness (how well do the features meet users’ needs). In aggregate, it provides a quick measure of technology acceptance (a mini-TAM).
The Impact of Ease and Usefulness on Intentions to Reuse and Recommend
In our 2025 consumer and business surveys, we collected additional metrics to enable the development of structural equation models to estimate the strength of statistical connections of Ease and Usefulness (from the UX-Lite) with behavioral intentions to continue using and to recommend products to others, mediated through Overall Experience (“How would you rate your overall experience with {product}?”; 0: Terrible, 10: Excellent) and Brand Attitude (“How would you describe your attitude toward {product}?”; 1: Very Unfavorable, 7: Very Favorable), shown in Figure 2. Using a completely independent set of respondents and products, the resulting model for business software was virtually identical to the model created with the 2025 consumer software data.
Figure 2: Structural equation model demonstrating the impact of perceived ease and usefulness on intentions to reuse and recommend.
The model has excellent fit statistics (𝜒2(3) = 0.9, p = .82; CFI = 1.0; RMSEA = .00; BIC = 124.9), and the link (beta) weights are all statistically significant (p
- The combination of Ease and Usefulness accounts for over half (54%) of the variation in respondents’ ratings of Overall Experience.
- The combination of Ease, Usefulness, and Overall Experience accounts for 61% of the variation in respondents’ ratings of Brand Attitude.
- The combination of Ease, Usefulness, Overall Experience, and Brand Attitude accounts for 58% of the variation in respondents’ ratings of Likelihood to Reuse products.
- Finally, the combination of the other five variables accounts for 72% of the variation in respondents’ ratings of Likelihood to Recommend.
In summary, the model demonstrates the significant impact of perceived ease and usefulness on intentions to continue using and to recommend consumer software products, mediated by overall experience and brand attitude. This is why it is so important for companies to focus on making their products useful and easy to use.
Ease by Usefulness Scatterplot
Figure 3 shows a scatterplot of the two components of the UX-Lite scores. The dotted red lines indicate the component means from this study (72 for ease; 73 for usefulness). Slack and Zendesk received the highest ease ratings, while Slack and QuickBooks received the highest usefulness ratings.
Figure 3: Scatterplot of UX-Lite subscales.
The best products landed in the upper-right quadrant, with Slack, Monday, and Zendesk receiving the highest UX-Lite scores. Some examples of notable positive quotes from users are:
Slack
- “I like that it has different channels for different concepts. Like at my job we group channels by our roles.”
- “Community—it can serve as a workplace community.”
Monday
- “I love being able to customize all my boards with the columns that are most helpful to me and my team.”
- “I like the color coding and the little animations. It’s a small thing that makes it just a little more fun to use for honestly really boring work.”
Zendesk
- “It’s easy to ‘claim’ a ticket so that other agents don’t work on it at the same time! It makes for a cohesive workspace, even if the entire team is remote!”
- “Easy to figure out, especially with the guides. I especially like that there is an agent guide that I can just send to my agents instead of having to do a full-on training for using Zendesk.”
The lower left quadrant hosts the products with the lowest relative ease and usefulness scores, with GitHub, ZipRecruiter, and Jira receiving the lowest UX-Lite scores. Examples of notable negative quotes from users are:
GitHub
- “One thing I particularly dislike about using GitHub is how overwhelming it can feel at first.”
- “The UI is very annoying to navigate and it is hard to find the download button of the thing I am looking for.”
ZipRecruiter (Job Seekers)
- “Most of the jobs are fake and when I set certain settings such as willing to travel or where I am located, it shows the opposite results.”
- “The search results aren’t usually up to date when I use it so I have to do digging to find valid ones.”
Jira
- “The steep learning curve and occasional complexity of the interface. For beginners, it can be overwhelming, and navigating through all the features might take time to get used to.”
- “Sometimes it can be difficult to easily find other tickets within the lookup when trying to link two tickets together.”
Figure 4 shows the SUS scores for detractors, passives, and promoters (computed at the individual level for all responses; all differences significant with p
Figure 4: SUS scores for each NPS category.
This figure shows that, on average, promoters had SUS scores of 83.5 (an A on the Sauro-Lewis curved grading scale). This pattern is consistent with previous research we conducted that found that SUS scores above 80 have a good chance of indicating promoters. The mean SUS for passives was 73.7 (a B−), and for detractors, it was 56.3 (a D).
Benchmarking is an important step in improving the user experience of software and should include measures of usability and loyalty. Third-party retrospective benchmarks, such as the ones described here, complement internal benchmarking programs by providing more context. With this information, UX researchers have estimates of how different products are doing relative to their competitors and some high-level diagnostic information that can guide additional research to understand the “why” behind the numbers.
The complete list of benchmarks and analysis of verbatim responses are available for purchase in the 2025 Net Promoter & UX Benchmark Report for Business Software.
