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Perplexity AIOn August 2, Productiv told its customers it was shutting down.
Productiv cut off access three days later, on the fifth.
By the sixth, Productiv had permanently destroyed every production system, data store, and backup. They gave no reason, then or since. By the time customers heard anything, Productiv had already signed its assets over to a liquidator, 38 days earlier, on June 25.
This wasn’t some scrappy startup nobody heard of. Productiv had raised $73 million over three funding rounds and built a team of more than 150 people. Four days isn’t enough time to migrate anything, and barely enough to panic.
If you’re one of those customers, you’re probably deep into researching Productiv alternatives right now. Fair enough. But before you sign anything, there’s one question worth asking that almost nobody’s asking: how should engagement really be measured?
And if you’re not a Productiv customer, don’t tune out yet. Every organization running SaaS today is one bad week away from asking these exact questions. It doesn’t matter which tool they currently trust.
Most of what’s replacing Productiv works exactly like Productiv did
Same connectors, different logo
Scan the list of platforms racing to catch Productiv’s fallout. You’ll find the same architecture wearing a different logo. Discovery built around per-application connectors: APIs, SSO logs, browser extensions, one integration at a time. Coverage exists wherever someone has already built the connection, and nowhere else.
That last part matters more than it sounds like it should.
Productiv went further than raw login data. Its own documentation describes engagement connectors covering over 50 applications, capturing feature-level activity rather than just an SSO timestamp.
The bigger problem: shadow IT
Connector-dependent discovery can only ever see the applications someone already knew to connect. An app nobody asked IT to approve, never entered into procurement, never showed up on anyone’s radar, has no connector waiting for it. That’s no data at all.
Shadow IT doesn’t announce itself. Nobody files a ticket to request the AI tool someone signed up for last week, and nobody builds a connector for something IT doesn’t know exists. Whatever your usage dashboard shows you, it’s only ever showing you the applications that made it onto the list in the first place.
Productiv’s shutdown is the extreme version of a coverage problem. The everyday version is subtler: it’s every application already running in your environment that nobody ever built a connector for.
What holds up under a real usage test
A credible Productiv replacement must satisfy three distinct criteria, not one.
Built for SaaS, evaluated on its own terms
Discovery, spend visibility, and license optimization across your SaaS and AI stack. Evaluate it against the requirements you have this week, not as a precursor to some larger capability down the line. If it can’t earn that title on Productiv’s own turf first, nothing else matters.
Visibility that doesn’t stop at login
Usage should mean active usage, feature use, and session depth, and the platform should measure it the same way whether the application is Salesforce or something only three people on your team have ever heard of. That’s the difference between coverage that depends on a growing connector list and coverage that comes from a lightweight agent that doesn’t care whether an integration exists for a given app.
There’s a second layer to this too, one that matters even for applications that do have tracking in place. Marcus Garman, Digital Infrastructure Programme Manager at Isle of Wight NHS Trust put it plainly: “If Teams were running in the background all day, other platforms would’ve told us that it was being used all day. With Xensam, we can drive significant cost savings by tracking how much applications are being used. We even discovered that some specifically requested applications had only been used for a grand total of 2 minutes.” Coverage gets you data. Only active usage tracking tells you whether that data means anything.
And when your estate eventually expands beyond SaaS, the same system should already cover on-prem and cloud too. Not as a supplementary platform you incorporate next year. As a capability that’s already sitting there, waiting.
Value in days, not quarters
None of this carries weight if realizing it requires six months. Many platforms in this category still come with a long runway before they surface anything useful.
That matters more after a shutdown like Productiv’s. If your replacement takes a quarter to start showing real discovery, usage, and waste, you’re not just buying software. You’re buying more time without answers.
Naviair deployed agents across their entire server and client environment in one week. “Implementation took place very quickly,” says Lars Moth, IT Strategic Planner at Naviair. “It took us 1 week to deploy agents across the environment for both servers and clients.”
Viking Line’s environment is harder to deploy into than most, five vessels, 1,700 managed units, ship-to-shore connectivity they meter like a data plan. Full deployment took under three weeks, with no dedicated implementation project. Alexander Östergård, Head of IT Infrastructure and Security at Viking Line, put it simply: “The setup of the portal itself was very smooth, very fast. When we came back after the holiday, it was a solution we could work with.”
Four days showed how quickly circumstances can change. Your next platform should be able to move faster than that reality demands, with useful data surfacing in days, not quarters.
Before you sign anything, ask this
A few questions, and don’t accept a vague answer to any of them.
On coverage
- Does this hold up as a real SaaS and AI platform on its own, or is it selling you a roadmap? A real answer names actual customers running it in production today. A roadmap slide isn’t an answer.
- Does usage tracking require a connector for every single application, or can it see the shadow IT nobody’s gotten around to connecting yet? Ask how it finds an app nobody’s told it about, not just how it tracks the ones already on the list.
- If your estate grows beyond SaaS and AI tools, does this same platform cover it, or is that another migration waiting to happen? Ask what changes technically when you add on-prem or cloud. If the answer involves a different product or a different contract, that’s your answer.
On value
- How long before this shows you anything? Days, or a quarter of implementation calls first? Ask what day one looks like. A vague answer here is usually a preview of the next six months.
- Does it stop at “is this app being used,” or does it go deeper into which specific modules and tiers people need? The biggest savings rarely come from cutting a license entirely. They come from downgrading a $50 Enterprise seat to a $12 Business seat once you can see they never touched half the advanced features.
- Did the vendor build this platform for where software spend is heading, or only for where it’s been? Seat-based SaaS pricing isn’t the whole picture anymore. AI tools increasingly run on consumption, tokens, API calls, compute, not seats, and a platform that only understands one pricing model is solving today’s problem, not tomorrow’s.
Replacing Productiv is the easy version of this decision. Choosing something that does more than Productiv ever did is the harder, better one.
Where Xensam fits
Xensam exists to close exactly this gap.
A SaaS-native foundation
Xensam is a SaaS-native platform, with discovery and spend optimization strong enough to stand on their own. Xensam discovers every application in your estate automatically, including the shadow IT nobody thought to connect. The database now recognizes over 600,000 applications, it matches entitlements against what’s deployed and breaks down spend by department without anyone building a spreadsheet to make it happen.
Usage that means something
A lightweight agent captures usage data here from real activity, not from a growing list of per-app connectors. That means foreground time and feature depth on any application in your estate, not just the ones someone got around to integrating, along with the difference between a seat someone’s paying for and a seat that’s earning its cost. When a renewal conversation starts, the number on the table reflects your whole estate, not just the part with a connector.
This goes further than most replacements even attempt. Microsoft 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud are two of the biggest line items in almost any software budget, and component-level usage inside them is where the real savings live: whether someone with an E5 license has touched anything an E3 or E1 wouldn’t already cover, and which specific apps inside Creative Cloud people open, not just which seat they’re assigned. A Productiv replacement that stops at “is this app active” solves last year’s problem. Xensam goes further.
Ready for what comes next
The same visibility extends to on-prem and cloud without a second implementation. Your estate today might be SaaS-only, but it probably won’t stay that way, and when it grows, the platform you’re already using covers it, with no need for a new vendor, a second onboarding, or a separate dashboard to reconcile against the first one. None of it takes a quarter to materialize.
Productiv’s shutdown gave four days’ notice. The tools racing to replace it are giving you a lot less warning about the gap they’re bringing with them.
Let us show you what your usage data looks like once connector coverage stops deciding what counts as proof.