Best Shadow IT Discovery Tools for Startups

AssetSonar empowers IT teams to uncover and control Shadow IT before it becomes a security or budget liability. With browser-based discovery and SaaS usage tracking, it detects unsanctioned apps employees adopt outside official IT channels. Every app is tied back to users and devices, giving visibility into spend, risk, and duplication. Automated alerts flag unauthorized tools, while policy enforcement and deprovisioning workflows help IT regain control quickly. Combined with license management and audit trails, AssetSonar turns Shadow IT discovery into a proactive practice—helping organizations cut hidden costs, reduce risk exposure, and strengthen license compliance without slowing down innovation.

NinjaOne aids in shadow IT discovery by monitoring software installations across endpoints. Unauthorized applications trigger alerts for IT teams to investigate. Detailed software inventories give visibility into potential security risks. Policies can be enforced to block or uninstall unauthorized programs. This reduces the risk of data breaches from unapproved tools. Reports provide insights into usage trends and compliance gaps. NinjaOne ensures organizations maintain control over shadow IT.

Atera, the first and only Agentic AI platform for IT management, offers IT teams and MSPs a digital workforce of AI agents to preemptively and autonomously manage their entire IT operations. Its all-in-one platform combines RMM, helpdesk, ticketing, and automation to reduce downtime, improve SLAs, and free IT teams to focus on strategic work over mundane tasks. At the core of Atera’s platform are two powerful AI agents built to enhance every layer of IT operations. AI Copilot helps technicians troubleshoot devices, run diagnostics, and generate actionable solutions in real time. IT Autopilot delivers 24/7/365, autonomously resolving Tier-1 issues and reducing IT workload by up to 40%. It acts like a personal AI technician for every employee, freeing your team to focus on what really matters. Trusted by 13K+ customers in over 120 countries, Atera scales with your needs while maintaining the highest security and compliance standards.

JDisc Discovery is a comprehensive network inventory and IT asset management solution designed to help organizations gain clear, up-to-date visibility into their IT environment. It automatically scans and maps devices across the network, including servers, workstations, virtual machines, and network hardware, to create a detailed inventory of all connected assets. This includes critical information such as hardware configurations, software installations, patch levels, and relationshipots between devices. One of the standout features of JDisc Discovery is its agentless discovery process, meaning it does not require the installation of any software on individual devices, reducing deployment time and minimizing network impact. It supports a wide range of protocols (e.g., SNMP, SSH, WMI) to gather data, making it compatible with diverse IT environments, whether they are Windows, Linux, or Unix-based.

Uncover and manage unauthorized apps and devices with Auvik’s Shadow IT discovery. Protect your network by identifying unvetted tools, ensuring compliance, and preventing data breaches. Auvik’s real-time insights give you control and visibility across your entire infrastructure.

ManageEngine Applications Manager is an enterprise-ready platform designed to monitor an entire application ecosystem of a business organization. Our platform helps IT and DevOps teams get visibility into all the dependent components within their application stack. With Applications Manager, it becomes easier to monitor the performance of mission-critical web applications, web servers, databases, cloud services, middleware, ERP systems, messaging components, and more. It has tons of features that fast-track the troubleshooting process and help reduce MTTR. This way, issues are fixed before application end-users are affected. Applications Manager has a fully functional dashboard that can be customized to get performance insights at a glance. By configuring alerts, it constantly keeps a lookout for performance issues within the application stack. Combining this with intelligent machine learning, Applications Manager helps turn performance data into actionable insights.

BetterCloud is the category creator and market leader for SaaS Management. We provide IT, security and procurement professionals the only unified SaaS Lifecycle Management platform to track your applications, manage spend and expenses, automate user permissions and access, monitor compliance and mitigate risk by securing your cloud files. With hundreds of integrations, BetterCloud provides complete visibility across your entire SaaS ecosystem. Our no-code automation enables zero-touch workflows that are critical for streamlining IT processes and eliminating manual work. Thousands of forward-thinking organizations like Oscar Health, Blue Apron, Seismic and BuzzFeed trust BetterCloud to manage their SaaS environment. Our BetterCloud Guarantee provides the industry’s only platform guarantee — 3x ROI in 90 days.

CloudEagle.ai is a leader in SaaS management and governance with AI-powered capabilities that enables enterprises to optimize, govern, and renew all SaaS and AI appsfrom one place. With 500+ direct integrations, CloudEagle.ai provides complete visibility into applications, licenses, spend, and vendors while leveraging no-code Slack workflows to automate employee onboarding, offboarding, and access reviews. The platform delivers comprehensive SaaS security and governance through AI-driven usage insights, license rationalization, automated access governance, and intelligent application management that eliminates redundant and shadow IT applications, all managed from a centralized dashboard that serves as the single source of truth for SaaS operations and security posture.

The Attaxion EASM Platform is designed to provide businesses with full visibility over their external attack surfaces. It offers features like asset discovery, risk prioritization, and continuous monitoring to detect security vulnerabilities and potential threats in real-time. By using advanced analytics, the platform helps organizations address risks across shadow IT assets and internet-facing systems. Attaxion emphasizes scalability, accuracy, and ease of integration into existing security workflows, ensuring a proactive approach to minimizing security gaps.

Efficient holistic SaaS Security Management. Scale your ability to control all applications with our flexible, automated workflow engine: usage justification, access requests, access reviews, security alerts,... they all become easier, faster with Zygon. Ditch the spreadsheet, Welcome collaborative SaaS Security Management. Zygon shows you every app every person in your organization is using and how they access it, at the granularity of individual accounts. Make access requests and reviews, onboarding and offboarding, simple, fast, and easy—without piling more responsibilities on IT. From Shadow IT to clear inventory: detecting each and every account in your organization. Zygon automatically builds a complete list of every app employees are using—whether they authenticate with email or SSO. Never get surprised by shadow IT again, and stop spending time maintaining a manual list of used apps.

Armis Centrix™ is a comprehensive cyber exposure management platform that provides continuous, real-time visibility and protection across IT, OT, IoT, and IoMT environments. Powered by the Armis AI-driven Asset Intelligence Engine, it identifies every connected device, assesses cyber risk, and monitors vulnerabilities across an organization’s entire digital attack surface. The platform automates risk scoring, streamlines compliance reporting, and supports rapid incident response through deep asset intelligence. With capabilities that span asset management, OT/IoT security, medical device protection, and early warning threat detection, Armis Centrix™ enhances operational resilience for modern enterprises. VIPR Pro adds advanced prioritization and remediation to connect findings directly to actionable fixes. Designed as a cloud-native, frictionless platform, Armis Centrix™ empowers organizations to reduce exposure, strengthen security posture, and maintain continuity at scale.

We have brought together software asset management, cloud management and SaaS management so you can fully optimize all of your technology in one platform that seamlessly integrates with your enterprise ecosystem. Clearly see, understand and manage your entire technology landscape, both on-prem and in the cloud. Maximize the value of your technology investments with deep insights into usage, spend and vulnerabilities. Get the perspective and automation you need to anticipate and align with the rapidly evolving needs of your business. Fast implementation and intuitive design means you are saving money in weeks, not months. Break down your data silos to see on-prem, hybrid and cloud technologies together. Get clean and augmented data, updated daily and powered by the world's largest discovery catalog. Recommendations and self-service drive value, save time and increase productivity.