Rob leads and manages the business software research and advisory team at ISG Software Research, focusing on the intersection of information technology and applications across the front- and back-office areas of enterprises. Rob leads the Office of Finance practice and the AI for Business efforts and is a book author and thought leader on integrated business planning (IBP). Prior to ISG and two decades at Ventana Research, he was an equity research analyst at several firms including Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and Drexel Burnham, and a consultant with McKinsey and Company. Rob was an Institutional Investor All-American Team member and on the Wall Street Journal All-Star list. Rob earned his BA in Economics/Finance at Hampshire College, an MBA in Finance/Accounting at Columbia University and is a CFA charter holder.
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Executive Summary
Buyers Guide Overview
ISG Research has conducted market research for over two decades across vertical industries, business applications, AI and IT. We have designed the ISG Buyers Guide™ to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business and IT requirements. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research provide a comprehensive approach to rating software providers and rank their ability to meet specific product and customer experience requirements.
ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business and IT requirements.
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guides™ for Sustainability, covering Sustainability Management, Sustainability Insights and Sustainability Compliance, are the distillation of continuous market and product research. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for sustainability software. The Value Index methodology is structured to support a request for information (RFI) for a request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. The ISG Buyers Guide evaluates customer experience and the product experience in its capability and platform.
The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. It can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of sustainability software can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on opinions or historical biases.
ISG Research believes that an objective review of existing and potential new software providers and products is a critical strategy for the adoption and implementation of sustainability software. An enterprise’s review should include an analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating sustainability software and offer these Buyers Guides as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.
How To Use This Buyers Guide
Evaluating Software Providers: The Process
We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to assess existing approaches and software providers or establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes in the most efficient manner.
- Define the business case and goals.
Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technological efforts.
- Specify the business and IT needs.
Defining the business and IT requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
- Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the enterprise from executives to frontline workers and determine the needs of each.
- Outline the project’s critical path.
What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan.
- Ascertain the technology approach.
Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your enterprise’s requirements.
- Establish software provider evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: capability and platform with support for adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation.
- Evaluate and select the software provider and products properly.
Apply a weighting the evaluation categories in the evaluation criteria to reflect your enterprise’s priorities to determine the short list of software providers and products.
- Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources.
Using the ISG Buyers Guide and process provides enterprises a clear, structured approach to making smarter software and business investment decisions. It ensures alignment between strategy, people, processes and technology while reducing risk, saving time, and improving outcomes. The ISG approach promotes data-driven decision-making and collaboration, helping choose the right software providers for maximum value and return on investment.
Sustainability Management
Environmental sustainability has become a major business priority following decades of concern over environmental health and the recognition that enterprises impose external costs on society through the use of shared resources such as air and water. Stakeholders increasingly expect organizations to measure and disclose environmental impacts, driving demand for software that helps enterprises collect, analyze and report sustainability data. Sustainability reporting software has emerged as a specialized category to support these requirements and enable organizations to provide transparent, auditable disclosures.
ISG Research defines sustainability, in the context of enterprise software, as the legally required disclosure of defined environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions, resource use and waste by enterprises operating in jurisdictions where such disclosures are mandated. These disclosures are governed by regulations that ensure data is reported consistently, transparently and in ways that are comparable and auditable. Sustainability extends beyond environmental impacts to include management of environmental risks, their potential impact on the enterprise and strategies designed to mitigate those risks. Double materiality is a foundational concept in these disclosures, referring to both how environmental factors affect the enterprise and how the enterprise affects the environment.
By the 2000s, some enterprises were voluntarily reporting sustainability information, though reporting quality varied and lacked standardized measurement methods. To address this inconsistency, non-governmental organizations created frameworks to improve accuracy and comparability. Over time, governments began mandating the use of established standards developed by independent groups, including the Global Reporting Initiative, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and the International Sustainability Standards Board. These frameworks aim to create uniformity across disclosures and ensure data can be used for regulatory and investment decisions.
This ISG Buyers Guide focuses exclusively on environmental sustainability rather than the broader set of environmental, social and governance topics. Environmental reporting remains the most complex of the three areas. Enterprises often struggle with ambiguous definitions, inconsistent measurement methods and limited visibility into environmental data sources. ISG Research asserts that by 2027, one-half of enterprises will have insufficient data and software to adequately measure their environmental, social and governance metrics to inform governance strategy, risk management and performance targets.
Compliance requirements are a major driver of sustainability reporting, but there are also commercial incentives. Consumers increasingly consider environmental stewardship in their purchasing decisions, and this expectation also influences enterprise procurement. Organizations that demonstrate responsible environmental practices are often viewed more favorably by customers and partners.
Explicit measurement and monitoring of carbon emissions, water consumption and waste management can also uncover operational inefficiencies and opportunities to reduce costs. Environmental data provides a lens into how resources are used across the business, highlighting opportunities for conservation and improved profitability. Because economy and ecology share common principles of resource efficiency, sustainability metrics can reveal insights that financial data alone may not capture.
Demand for sustainability reporting varies across demographics and regions. Interest in environmental impacts has been stronger in Europe than in North America for more than a decade, and younger generations tend to express greater concern about environmental issues than older demographics. These differences influence how enterprises position sustainability strategies, and how providers design software to meet market expectations.
Regulatory requirements for sustainability reporting continue to evolve across global jurisdictions. The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive is currently the most consequential mandate, but other countries, including the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Mexico, also require environmental disclosures. In the United States, a proposed Securities and Exchange Commission reporting requirement was withdrawn, though California has enacted its own laws that remain under legal review. This fragmented landscape creates complexity for multinational enterprises.
A major challenge for enterprises is the divergence of measurement and reporting standards across regulatory environments.
A major challenge for enterprises is the divergence of measurement and reporting standards across regulatory environments. Organizations operating in multiple jurisdictions must harmonize reporting processes while ensuring compliance with local laws. This complexity increases costs and can hinder transparency if environmental data is collected or interpreted inconsistently across regions.
To address these challenges, enterprises are increasingly investing in sustainability software that automates data collection, enhances reporting accuracy and reduces compliance risk. This category of software helps organizations meet evolving regulations by enabling real-time tracking, supporting audit-ready disclosures and managing emissions across Scopes 1, 2 and 3. Advanced capabilities include sustainability risk analysis, AI-driven forecasting, benchmarking and predictive analytics. When evaluating these platforms, buyers should consider integration with enterprise systems, adaptability to regulatory change and long-term scalability.
Precision in environmental reporting remains a significant operational challenge. Sustainability measurement often requires estimation and modeling rather than standardized accounting practices, such as double-entry bookkeeping. As a result, environmental data may not reconcile in the same way as financial data. Reporting systems that do not incorporate materiality assessments risk generating unnecessary costs and weakening strategic performance. Achieving targeted sustainability outcomes requires careful coordination between operational teams responsible for environmental initiatives and finance functions responsible for reporting accuracy.
Investments in sustainability software should reduce compliance costs and risks while supporting strategic decision-making and long-term performance targets.
ISG Research strongly recommends that enterprises adopt sustainability software to address rising disclosure requirements. This is particularly important for large enterprises, publicly listed companies and multinational organizations subject to mandatory reporting. Many companies will find current systems inadequate. Investments in sustainability software should reduce compliance costs and risks while supporting strategic decision-making and long-term performance targets.
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Management highlights features that support comprehensive sustainability management. These include streamlined data collection, automated reporting across multiple frameworks and real-time audit readiness. Integration capabilities are essential to connect with enterprise applications that serve as systems of record for environmental data. The framework supports full Scopes 1–3 emissions tracking and alignment with global standards while adapting to regulatory change. It also prioritizes supplier data acquisition, sustainability in sourcing and advanced analytics that forecast performance and balance sustainability goals with profitability. Features for double materiality assessments and machine-readable reporting, including inline extensible business reporting language, support transparency and auditability. Artificial intelligence capabilities, including generative AI and agentic AI, further enhance forecasting, analysis and reporting.
This research evaluated the following 20 software providers: AMCS, AuditBoard, Benchmark Gensuite, Cority, Diligent, IBM, Microsoft, Nasdaq, Oracle, Persefoni, Position Green, Sage, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Sievo, Sphera, Tango, Wolters Kluwer and Workiva.
Key Takeaways
Environmental sustainability reporting has become a core enterprise requirement as organizations navigate expanding disclosure mandates and inconsistent data sources. Sustainability management software addresses these challenges by automating data collection and improving the accuracy of environmental reporting. These tools also strengthen audit readiness and enhance visibility into resource efficiency and operational risk.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Management evaluates 20 software providers that offer products to support environmental sustainability reporting, emissions tracking and audit-ready disclosures. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as Workiva, Salesforce and Oracle. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Benchmark Gensuite, Diligent, Oracle, Position Green, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Workiva were rated as Exemplary, with IBM and Microsoft rated as Innovative. Sievo, Sphera and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Assurance; and AMCS, AuditBoard, Cority, Nasdaq, Persefoni, Sage and Tango were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (55%) and Platform (25%), including adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Workiva, Oracle and Salesforce achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by strong breadth and depth across sustainability management capabilities and robust platform performance, with adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability emphasized throughout the evaluation. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. Workiva, Salesforce and ServiceNow were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should adopt sustainability management software to strengthen reporting precision, reduce compliance risk and support transparent, audit-ready disclosures. Effective platforms should automate data collection, integrate with systems of record and adapt to evolving regulatory mandates while providing scalability for multinational operations. Buyers should prioritize systems that offer comprehensive Scopes 1–3 tracking, support double materiality requirements and incorporate advanced analytics to inform strategic decision-making. Selecting platforms with strong alignment between operational measurement and financial reporting will help organizations improve performance management and long-term sustainability outcomes.
The Findings – Sustainability Management
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds Workiva atop the list, followed by Salesforce and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Oracle, Salesforce and Workiva have done so in four categories, ServiceNow in two and IBM in one category.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Benchmark Gensuite, Diligent, Oracle, Position Green, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Workiva.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: IBM and Microsoft.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Sievo, Sphera and Wolters Kluwer.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: AMCS, AuditBoard, Cority, Nasdaq, Persefoni, Sage and Tango.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (55%) and Platform (25%). Workiva, Oracle and Salesforce were designated Product Experience Leaders.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are Workiva, Salesforce and ServiceNow. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.
Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion – Sustainability Management
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Management, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $35 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 25 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months. The software must support sustainability related data collection, data management, Scope 3 data acquisition and management, support for supply chains, support for analytics and planning, internal reporting as well as disclosure documentation and reporting.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| AMCS | AMCS ESG | N/A | November 2025 |
| AuditBoard | ESG | N/A | April 2024 |
| Benchmark Gensuite | Environmental Sustainability Reporting | N/A | November 2025 |
| Cority | Sustainability Cloud | N/A | November 2025 |
| Diligent | Modern ESG | N/A | March 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Envizi ESG Suite | N/A | June 2025 |
| Microsoft | Microsoft Sustainability Manager | 2.30 | May 2025 |
| Nasdaq | Nasdaq Metrio | 25.6 | May 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability | 25B | May 2025 |
| Persefoni | Persefoni AI | N/A | October 2024 |
| Position Green | Sustainability Suite | N/A | March 2025 |
| Sage | Sage Earth | N/A | May 2025 |
| Salesforce | Net Zero Cloud | Summer ‘25 | June 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Sustainability Control Tower | 1.7.0 | June 2025 |
| ServiceNow | ESG Management | 20.1.0 | May 2025 |
| Sievo | Sievo Sustainability Analytics | N/A | November 2025 |
| Sphera | Corporate Sustainability Software | 6.5 | January 2025 |
| Tango | Energy and Sustainability | N/A- | November 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | Enablon ESG Excellence | 12 | May 2025 |
| Workiva | The Workiva Platform | N/A | June 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clarity AI | Clarity AI Platform | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Minimum | Minimum Platform | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tracera | Tracera Platform | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Sustainability Insights
Environmental sustainability has become a central business priority as enterprises face rising expectations to measure and understand the company’s environmental impacts. While some organizations must meet formal disclosure requirements, others seek to improve visibility into environmental performance without producing mandated reports. This has increased demand for software that helps organizations collect and analyze sustainability data to guide decisions.
ISG Research defines sustainability, in the context of enterprise software, as the legally required disclosure of defined environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions, resource use and waste by enterprises operating in jurisdictions where such disclosures are mandated. The Sustainability Insights Buyers Guide focuses on environmental data analysis rather than disclosure reporting, supporting organizations that want to track performance and understand environmental impacts without engaging in formal reporting processes.
Enterprises have shifted from informal environmental tracking to structured approaches shaped by frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and the International Sustainability Standards Board. Even when reporting is not required, these frameworks influence how organizations define and measure environmental metrics. Software plays an increasing role in consolidating data, improving accuracy and supporting analysis, visibility and long-term sustainability planning across business units.
Environmental intelligence helps organizations assess emissions, resource consumption and environmental risks.
The offerings evaluated emphasize environmental intelligence to help organizations assess emissions, resource consumption and environmental risks, and support planning and goal setting. Capabilities typically include data aggregation, forecasting, benchmarking and trend identification. To be effective, platforms must integrate with enterprise systems that serve as records for environmental data and provide consistent modeling methods. Many also support analysis of Scopes 1 and 2 emissions and comparisons against internal targets or industry benchmarks. These insights inform operational decisions and help leaders evaluate progress toward environmental objectives.
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Insights evaluates 20 software providers that support sustainability insights through streamlined data collection, performance tracking and analytical features that guide decision-making. Integration capabilities remain essential to ensure connectivity with enterprise systems. Artificial intelligence capabilities, including GenAI and agentic AI, strengthen forecasting, analysis and reporting. This research assessed the following providers: AMCS, AuditBoard, Benchmark Gensuite, Cority, Diligent, IBM, Microsoft, Nasdaq, Oracle, Persefoni, Position Green, Sage, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Sievo, Sphera, Tango, Wolters Kluwer and Workiva.
Key Takeaways
Environmental sustainability has become a priority for enterprises seeking visibility into emissions, resource use and environmental risks, even when formal disclosure reporting is not required. Organizations increasingly rely on software to consolidate fragmented data, strengthen analytical accuracy and support planning and performance tracking. These tools help enterprises assess environmental impacts, benchmark progress and inform operational decisions across business units.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Insights evaluates 20 software providers offering products that support environmental data aggregation, performance tracking and analytical insights. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as Salesforce, Workiva and Oracle. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Benchmark Gensuite, Position Green, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Workiva were rated as Exemplary, with Cority, IBM and Microsoft rated as Innovative. AMCS, Diligent, Sievo, Sphera and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Assurance, and AuditBoard, Nasdaq, Persefoni, Sage and Tango were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (55%) and Platform (25%), including adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. IBM, Salesforce and Oracle achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by breadth and depth across sustainability insights capabilities and strong platform robustness emphasizing adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. Workiva, Salesforce and ServiceNow were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should adopt sustainability insights platforms to improve data quality, strengthen environmental performance visibility and support strategic planning. Buyers should prioritize software that integrates with enterprise systems, offers consistent modeling methods and provides flexible analytics for emissions and resource use. Platforms that support forecasting, benchmarking and AI-driven insights will help organizations track progress against objectives and inform operational decisions. Selecting capabilities that align with business-unit needs and long-term sustainability goals will improve measurement consistency and decision-making maturity.
The Findings – Sustainability Insights
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds Salesforce atop the list, followed by Workiva and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Salesforce has done so in five categories, Oracle in four, Workiva in three and IBM and ServiceNow in two categories.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Benchmark Gensuite, Oracle, Position Green, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Workiva.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Cority, IBM and Microsoft.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: AMCS, Diligent, Sievo, Sphera and Wolters Kluwer.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: AuditBoard, Nasdaq, Persefoni, Sage and Tango.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (55%) and Platform (25%). IBM, Salesforce and Oracle were designated Product Experience Leaders.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are Workiva, Salesforce and ServiceNow. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion – Sustainability Insights
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Insights, a software provider must have a standalone application, be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $35 million in annual or projected revenue, more than 50 employees, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 25 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months. The software must support sustainability related data collection, data management, Scope 3 data acquisition and management, support for supply chains, support for analytics and planning, internal reporting as well as disclosure documentation and reporting.
To qualify for evaluation in Sustainability, the product should include the following capabilities: sustainability data collection and management, Scope 3 data collection and supply chain support, sustainability analytics, planning, and reporting as well as disclosure documentation and reporting.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| AMCS | AMCS ESG | N/A | November 2025 |
| AuditBoard | ESG | N/A | April 2024 |
| Benchmark Gensuite | Environmental Sustainability Reporting | N/A | November 2025 |
| Cority | Sustainability Cloud | N/A | November 2025 |
| Diligent | Modern ESG | N/A | March 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Envizi ESG Suite | N/A | June 2025 |
| Microsoft | Microsoft Sustainability Manager | 2.30 | May 2025 |
| Nasdaq | Nasdaq Metrio | 25.6 | May 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability | 25B | May 2025 |
| Persefoni | Persefoni AI | N/A | October 2024 |
| Position Green | Pulsora | N/A | July 2025 |
| Sage | Sage Earth | 2025 R2 | May 2025 |
| Salesforce | Net Zero Cloud | Summer ‘25 | June 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Sustainability Control Tower | 1.7.0 | June 2025 |
| ServiceNow | ESG Management | 20.1.0 | May 2025 |
| Sievo | Sievo Sustainability Analytics | N/A | November 2025 |
| Sphera | Corporate Sustainability Software | 6.5 | January 2025 |
| Tango | Energy and Sustainability | N/A | November 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | Enablon ESG Excellence | 12 | May 2025 |
| Workiva | The Workiva Platform | N/A | June 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clarity AI | Clarity AI Platform | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Minimum | Minimum Platform | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tracera | Tracera Platform | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Sustainability Compliance
Environmental sustainability has become a central business priority as enterprises face rising expectations to measure and disclose environmental impacts. As regulations expand, sustainability compliance has become a critical requirement, and software is essential for collecting environmental data and producing transparent, auditable reports.
As regulations expand, sustainability compliance has become a critical requirement.
ISG Research defines sustainability, in the context of enterprise software, as the legally required disclosure of defined environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions, resource use and waste by enterprises operating in jurisdictions where such disclosures are mandated. These requirements ensure consistent, comparable reporting and include management of environmental risks and double materiality.
Enterprises have shifted from voluntary reporting to compliance, driven by frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and the International Sustainability Standards Board. As mandates become more complex, organizations must adopt disciplined reporting practices supported by software built for compliance accuracy and audit readiness.
Sustainability compliance differs from broader sustainability management by focusing on documentation and reporting rather than Scope 3 tracking or advanced sustainability planning. Enterprises must produce defensible disclosures supported by reliable data collection, strong integration with enterprise systems and outputs aligned with regulatory standards. Software must maintain audit readiness and adapt to evolving requirements without increasing operational burden.
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Compliance evaluates software that streamlines data collection, automates reporting across multiple frameworks and supports digital assurance features. Integration capabilities ensure connectivity with enterprise systems that serve as records for environmental data. The framework supports Scopes 1 and 2 emissions tracking and alignment with global standards. Specialized reporting includes double materiality assessments and machine-readable outputs, such as inline extensible business reporting language. Artificial intelligence capabilities, including GenAI and agentic AI, strengthen forecasting, analysis and reporting.
This research evaluated the following 20 software providers: AMCS, AuditBoard, Benchmark Gensuite, Cority, Diligent, IBM, Microsoft, Nasdaq, Oracle, Persefoni, Position Green, Sage, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Sievo, Sphera, Tango, Wolters Kluwer and Workiva.
Key Takeaways
Environmental sustainability has become a core enterprise obligation as organizations face expanding regulatory mandates requiring transparent, auditable disclosures of environmental impacts. Compliance now depends on disciplined reporting practices supported by software that standardizes data collection and aligns outputs with evolving regulatory frameworks. These tools improve accuracy, reduce compliance risk and strengthen audit readiness while supporting consistent documentation of environmental performance.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Compliance evaluates 20 software providers that offer products to support environmental data collection, regulatory reporting and audit-ready disclosures. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as Workiva, Oracle and Salesforce. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Benchmark Gensuite, Diligent, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Sphera and Workiva were rated as Exemplary, with IBM and Microsoft rated as Innovative. Position Green, Sievo and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Assurance, and AMCS, AuditBoard, Cority, Nasdaq, Persefoni, Sage and Tango were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (55%) and Platform (25%), including adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Workiva, Oracle and Salesforce achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by breadth and depth across sustainability compliance capabilities and strong platform resilience emphasizing adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. Workiva, Salesforce and ServiceNow were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should adopt sustainability compliance software to improve disclosure accuracy, reduce regulatory risk and maintain audit readiness across evolving mandates. Buyers should prioritize platforms that automate reporting, integrate with enterprise systems and support standardized modeling required for global compliance frameworks. Software offering advanced analytics, AI-driven insights and machine-readable outputs will enhance reporting precision and operational efficiency. Aligning platform capabilities with organizational governance needs will strengthen compliance consistency and long-term performance management.
The Findings – Sustainability Compliance
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds Workiva atop the list, followed by Oracle and Salesforce. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Oracle, Salesforce and Workiva have done so in four categories, ServiceNow in two and Diligent in one category.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Benchmark Gensuite, Diligent, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Sphera and Workiva.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: IBM and Microsoft.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Position Green, Sievo and Wolters Kluwer.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: AMCS, AuditBoard, Cority, Nasdaq, Persefoni, Sage and Tango.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (55%) and Platform (25%). Workiva, Oracle and Salesforce were designated Product Experience Leaders. While not a Leader, SAP was also found to meet a broad range of enterprise product experience requirements.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are Workiva, Salesforce and ServiceNow. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.
Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion – Sustainability Compliance
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Compliance, a software provider must have a standalone application, be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $35 million in annual or projected revenue, more than 50 employees, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 25 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months. The product must be capable of accessing data from a variety of sources as well as guiding and managing either Sustainability Insights, Sustainability Companies or both in an enterprise. These include the following requirements:
To qualify for evaluation in Sustainability Insights, the product should include the following capabilities: sustainability data collection and management, Scope 3 data collection and supply chain support, AI/GenAI capabilities, sustainability analytics and planning, and sustainability reporting.
To qualify for evaluation in Sustainability Compliance, the product should include the following capabilities: sustainability data collection and management, sustainability analytics and planning and reporting as well as disclosure documentation and reporting.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| AMCS | AMCS ESG | N/A | November 2025 |
| AuditBoard | ESG | N/A | November 2025 |
| Benchmark Gensuite | Environmental Sustainability Reporting | N/A | November 2025 |
| Cority | Sustainability Cloud | N/A | November 2025 |
| Diligent | Modern ESG | N/A | March 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Envizi ESG Suite | N/A | June 2025 |
| Microsoft | Microsoft Sustainability Manager | 2.30 | May 2025 |
| Nasdaq | Nasdaq Metrio | 25.6 | May 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability | 25B | May 2025 |
| Persefoni | Persefoni AI | N/A | October 2024 |
| Position Green | Sustainability Suite | N/A | March 2025 |
| Sage | Sage Earth | 2025 R2 | May 2025 |
| Salesforce | Net Zero Cloud | Summer’25 | June 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Sustainability Control Tower | 1.7.0 | June 2025 |
| ServiceNow | ESG Management | 20.1.0 | May 2025 |
| Sievo | Sievo Sustainability Analytics | N/A | November 2025 |
| Sphera | Corporate Sustainability Software | 6.5 | January 2025 |
| Tango | Energy and Sustainability | N/A | November 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | Enablon ESG Excellence | 12 | May 2025 |
| Workiva | The Workiva Platform | N/A | June 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clarity AI | Clarity AI Platform | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Minimum | Minimum Platform | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tracera | Tracera Platform | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Executive Summary
Buyers Guide Overview
ISG Research has conducted market research for over two decades across vertical industries, business applications, AI and IT. We have designed the ISG Buyers Guide™ to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business and IT requirements. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research provide a comprehensive approach to rating software providers and rank their ability to meet specific product and customer experience requirements.
ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business and IT requirements.
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guides™ for Sustainability, covering Sustainability Management, Sustainability Insights and Sustainability Compliance, are the distillation of continuous market and product research. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for sustainability software. The Value Index methodology is structured to support a request for information (RFI) for a request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. The ISG Buyers Guide evaluates customer experience and the product experience in its capability and platform.
The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. It can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of sustainability software can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on opinions or historical biases.
ISG Research believes that an objective review of existing and potential new software providers and products is a critical strategy for the adoption and implementation of sustainability software. An enterprise’s review should include an analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating sustainability software and offer these Buyers Guides as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.
How To Use This Buyers Guide
Evaluating Software Providers: The Process
We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to assess existing approaches and software providers or establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes in the most efficient manner.
- Define the business case and goals.
Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technological efforts.
- Specify the business and IT needs.
Defining the business and IT requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
- Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the enterprise from executives to frontline workers and determine the needs of each.
- Outline the project’s critical path.
What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan.
- Ascertain the technology approach.
Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your enterprise’s requirements.
- Establish software provider evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: capability and platform with support for adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation.
- Evaluate and select the software provider and products properly.
Apply a weighting the evaluation categories in the evaluation criteria to reflect your enterprise’s priorities to determine the short list of software providers and products.
- Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources.
Using the ISG Buyers Guide and process provides enterprises a clear, structured approach to making smarter software and business investment decisions. It ensures alignment between strategy, people, processes and technology while reducing risk, saving time, and improving outcomes. The ISG approach promotes data-driven decision-making and collaboration, helping choose the right software providers for maximum value and return on investment.
Sustainability Management
Environmental sustainability has become a major business priority following decades of concern over environmental health and the recognition that enterprises impose external costs on society through the use of shared resources such as air and water. Stakeholders increasingly expect organizations to measure and disclose environmental impacts, driving demand for software that helps enterprises collect, analyze and report sustainability data. Sustainability reporting software has emerged as a specialized category to support these requirements and enable organizations to provide transparent, auditable disclosures.
ISG Research defines sustainability, in the context of enterprise software, as the legally required disclosure of defined environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions, resource use and waste by enterprises operating in jurisdictions where such disclosures are mandated. These disclosures are governed by regulations that ensure data is reported consistently, transparently and in ways that are comparable and auditable. Sustainability extends beyond environmental impacts to include management of environmental risks, their potential impact on the enterprise and strategies designed to mitigate those risks. Double materiality is a foundational concept in these disclosures, referring to both how environmental factors affect the enterprise and how the enterprise affects the environment.
By the 2000s, some enterprises were voluntarily reporting sustainability information, though reporting quality varied and lacked standardized measurement methods. To address this inconsistency, non-governmental organizations created frameworks to improve accuracy and comparability. Over time, governments began mandating the use of established standards developed by independent groups, including the Global Reporting Initiative, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and the International Sustainability Standards Board. These frameworks aim to create uniformity across disclosures and ensure data can be used for regulatory and investment decisions.
This ISG Buyers Guide focuses exclusively on environmental sustainability rather than the broader set of environmental, social and governance topics. Environmental reporting remains the most complex of the three areas. Enterprises often struggle with ambiguous definitions, inconsistent measurement methods and limited visibility into environmental data sources. ISG Research asserts that by 2027, one-half of enterprises will have insufficient data and software to adequately measure their environmental, social and governance metrics to inform governance strategy, risk management and performance targets.
Compliance requirements are a major driver of sustainability reporting, but there are also commercial incentives. Consumers increasingly consider environmental stewardship in their purchasing decisions, and this expectation also influences enterprise procurement. Organizations that demonstrate responsible environmental practices are often viewed more favorably by customers and partners.
Explicit measurement and monitoring of carbon emissions, water consumption and waste management can also uncover operational inefficiencies and opportunities to reduce costs. Environmental data provides a lens into how resources are used across the business, highlighting opportunities for conservation and improved profitability. Because economy and ecology share common principles of resource efficiency, sustainability metrics can reveal insights that financial data alone may not capture.
Demand for sustainability reporting varies across demographics and regions. Interest in environmental impacts has been stronger in Europe than in North America for more than a decade, and younger generations tend to express greater concern about environmental issues than older demographics. These differences influence how enterprises position sustainability strategies, and how providers design software to meet market expectations.
Regulatory requirements for sustainability reporting continue to evolve across global jurisdictions. The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive is currently the most consequential mandate, but other countries, including the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Mexico, also require environmental disclosures. In the United States, a proposed Securities and Exchange Commission reporting requirement was withdrawn, though California has enacted its own laws that remain under legal review. This fragmented landscape creates complexity for multinational enterprises.
A major challenge for enterprises is the divergence of measurement and reporting standards across regulatory environments.
A major challenge for enterprises is the divergence of measurement and reporting standards across regulatory environments. Organizations operating in multiple jurisdictions must harmonize reporting processes while ensuring compliance with local laws. This complexity increases costs and can hinder transparency if environmental data is collected or interpreted inconsistently across regions.
To address these challenges, enterprises are increasingly investing in sustainability software that automates data collection, enhances reporting accuracy and reduces compliance risk. This category of software helps organizations meet evolving regulations by enabling real-time tracking, supporting audit-ready disclosures and managing emissions across Scopes 1, 2 and 3. Advanced capabilities include sustainability risk analysis, AI-driven forecasting, benchmarking and predictive analytics. When evaluating these platforms, buyers should consider integration with enterprise systems, adaptability to regulatory change and long-term scalability.
Precision in environmental reporting remains a significant operational challenge. Sustainability measurement often requires estimation and modeling rather than standardized accounting practices, such as double-entry bookkeeping. As a result, environmental data may not reconcile in the same way as financial data. Reporting systems that do not incorporate materiality assessments risk generating unnecessary costs and weakening strategic performance. Achieving targeted sustainability outcomes requires careful coordination between operational teams responsible for environmental initiatives and finance functions responsible for reporting accuracy.
Investments in sustainability software should reduce compliance costs and risks while supporting strategic decision-making and long-term performance targets.
ISG Research strongly recommends that enterprises adopt sustainability software to address rising disclosure requirements. This is particularly important for large enterprises, publicly listed companies and multinational organizations subject to mandatory reporting. Many companies will find current systems inadequate. Investments in sustainability software should reduce compliance costs and risks while supporting strategic decision-making and long-term performance targets.
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Management highlights features that support comprehensive sustainability management. These include streamlined data collection, automated reporting across multiple frameworks and real-time audit readiness. Integration capabilities are essential to connect with enterprise applications that serve as systems of record for environmental data. The framework supports full Scopes 1–3 emissions tracking and alignment with global standards while adapting to regulatory change. It also prioritizes supplier data acquisition, sustainability in sourcing and advanced analytics that forecast performance and balance sustainability goals with profitability. Features for double materiality assessments and machine-readable reporting, including inline extensible business reporting language, support transparency and auditability. Artificial intelligence capabilities, including generative AI and agentic AI, further enhance forecasting, analysis and reporting.
This research evaluated the following 20 software providers: AMCS, AuditBoard, Benchmark Gensuite, Cority, Diligent, IBM, Microsoft, Nasdaq, Oracle, Persefoni, Position Green, Sage, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Sievo, Sphera, Tango, Wolters Kluwer and Workiva.
Key Takeaways
Environmental sustainability reporting has become a core enterprise requirement as organizations navigate expanding disclosure mandates and inconsistent data sources. Sustainability management software addresses these challenges by automating data collection and improving the accuracy of environmental reporting. These tools also strengthen audit readiness and enhance visibility into resource efficiency and operational risk.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Management evaluates 20 software providers that offer products to support environmental sustainability reporting, emissions tracking and audit-ready disclosures. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as Workiva, Salesforce and Oracle. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Benchmark Gensuite, Diligent, Oracle, Position Green, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Workiva were rated as Exemplary, with IBM and Microsoft rated as Innovative. Sievo, Sphera and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Assurance; and AMCS, AuditBoard, Cority, Nasdaq, Persefoni, Sage and Tango were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (55%) and Platform (25%), including adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Workiva, Oracle and Salesforce achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by strong breadth and depth across sustainability management capabilities and robust platform performance, with adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability emphasized throughout the evaluation. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. Workiva, Salesforce and ServiceNow were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should adopt sustainability management software to strengthen reporting precision, reduce compliance risk and support transparent, audit-ready disclosures. Effective platforms should automate data collection, integrate with systems of record and adapt to evolving regulatory mandates while providing scalability for multinational operations. Buyers should prioritize systems that offer comprehensive Scopes 1–3 tracking, support double materiality requirements and incorporate advanced analytics to inform strategic decision-making. Selecting platforms with strong alignment between operational measurement and financial reporting will help organizations improve performance management and long-term sustainability outcomes.
The Findings – Sustainability Management
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds Workiva atop the list, followed by Salesforce and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Oracle, Salesforce and Workiva have done so in four categories, ServiceNow in two and IBM in one category.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Benchmark Gensuite, Diligent, Oracle, Position Green, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Workiva.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: IBM and Microsoft.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Sievo, Sphera and Wolters Kluwer.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: AMCS, AuditBoard, Cority, Nasdaq, Persefoni, Sage and Tango.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (55%) and Platform (25%). Workiva, Oracle and Salesforce were designated Product Experience Leaders.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are Workiva, Salesforce and ServiceNow. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.
Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion – Sustainability Management
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Management, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $35 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 25 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months. The software must support sustainability related data collection, data management, Scope 3 data acquisition and management, support for supply chains, support for analytics and planning, internal reporting as well as disclosure documentation and reporting.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| AMCS | AMCS ESG | N/A | November 2025 |
| AuditBoard | ESG | N/A | April 2024 |
| Benchmark Gensuite | Environmental Sustainability Reporting | N/A | November 2025 |
| Cority | Sustainability Cloud | N/A | November 2025 |
| Diligent | Modern ESG | N/A | March 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Envizi ESG Suite | N/A | June 2025 |
| Microsoft | Microsoft Sustainability Manager | 2.30 | May 2025 |
| Nasdaq | Nasdaq Metrio | 25.6 | May 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability | 25B | May 2025 |
| Persefoni | Persefoni AI | N/A | October 2024 |
| Position Green | Sustainability Suite | N/A | March 2025 |
| Sage | Sage Earth | N/A | May 2025 |
| Salesforce | Net Zero Cloud | Summer ‘25 | June 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Sustainability Control Tower | 1.7.0 | June 2025 |
| ServiceNow | ESG Management | 20.1.0 | May 2025 |
| Sievo | Sievo Sustainability Analytics | N/A | November 2025 |
| Sphera | Corporate Sustainability Software | 6.5 | January 2025 |
| Tango | Energy and Sustainability | N/A- | November 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | Enablon ESG Excellence | 12 | May 2025 |
| Workiva | The Workiva Platform | N/A | June 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clarity AI | Clarity AI Platform | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Minimum | Minimum Platform | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tracera | Tracera Platform | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Sustainability Insights
Environmental sustainability has become a central business priority as enterprises face rising expectations to measure and understand the company’s environmental impacts. While some organizations must meet formal disclosure requirements, others seek to improve visibility into environmental performance without producing mandated reports. This has increased demand for software that helps organizations collect and analyze sustainability data to guide decisions.
ISG Research defines sustainability, in the context of enterprise software, as the legally required disclosure of defined environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions, resource use and waste by enterprises operating in jurisdictions where such disclosures are mandated. The Sustainability Insights Buyers Guide focuses on environmental data analysis rather than disclosure reporting, supporting organizations that want to track performance and understand environmental impacts without engaging in formal reporting processes.
Enterprises have shifted from informal environmental tracking to structured approaches shaped by frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and the International Sustainability Standards Board. Even when reporting is not required, these frameworks influence how organizations define and measure environmental metrics. Software plays an increasing role in consolidating data, improving accuracy and supporting analysis, visibility and long-term sustainability planning across business units.
Environmental intelligence helps organizations assess emissions, resource consumption and environmental risks.
The offerings evaluated emphasize environmental intelligence to help organizations assess emissions, resource consumption and environmental risks, and support planning and goal setting. Capabilities typically include data aggregation, forecasting, benchmarking and trend identification. To be effective, platforms must integrate with enterprise systems that serve as records for environmental data and provide consistent modeling methods. Many also support analysis of Scopes 1 and 2 emissions and comparisons against internal targets or industry benchmarks. These insights inform operational decisions and help leaders evaluate progress toward environmental objectives.
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Insights evaluates 20 software providers that support sustainability insights through streamlined data collection, performance tracking and analytical features that guide decision-making. Integration capabilities remain essential to ensure connectivity with enterprise systems. Artificial intelligence capabilities, including GenAI and agentic AI, strengthen forecasting, analysis and reporting. This research assessed the following providers: AMCS, AuditBoard, Benchmark Gensuite, Cority, Diligent, IBM, Microsoft, Nasdaq, Oracle, Persefoni, Position Green, Sage, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Sievo, Sphera, Tango, Wolters Kluwer and Workiva.
Key Takeaways
Environmental sustainability has become a priority for enterprises seeking visibility into emissions, resource use and environmental risks, even when formal disclosure reporting is not required. Organizations increasingly rely on software to consolidate fragmented data, strengthen analytical accuracy and support planning and performance tracking. These tools help enterprises assess environmental impacts, benchmark progress and inform operational decisions across business units.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Insights evaluates 20 software providers offering products that support environmental data aggregation, performance tracking and analytical insights. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as Salesforce, Workiva and Oracle. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Benchmark Gensuite, Position Green, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Workiva were rated as Exemplary, with Cority, IBM and Microsoft rated as Innovative. AMCS, Diligent, Sievo, Sphera and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Assurance, and AuditBoard, Nasdaq, Persefoni, Sage and Tango were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (55%) and Platform (25%), including adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. IBM, Salesforce and Oracle achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by breadth and depth across sustainability insights capabilities and strong platform robustness emphasizing adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. Workiva, Salesforce and ServiceNow were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should adopt sustainability insights platforms to improve data quality, strengthen environmental performance visibility and support strategic planning. Buyers should prioritize software that integrates with enterprise systems, offers consistent modeling methods and provides flexible analytics for emissions and resource use. Platforms that support forecasting, benchmarking and AI-driven insights will help organizations track progress against objectives and inform operational decisions. Selecting capabilities that align with business-unit needs and long-term sustainability goals will improve measurement consistency and decision-making maturity.
The Findings – Sustainability Insights
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds Salesforce atop the list, followed by Workiva and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Salesforce has done so in five categories, Oracle in four, Workiva in three and IBM and ServiceNow in two categories.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Benchmark Gensuite, Oracle, Position Green, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Workiva.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Cority, IBM and Microsoft.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: AMCS, Diligent, Sievo, Sphera and Wolters Kluwer.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: AuditBoard, Nasdaq, Persefoni, Sage and Tango.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (55%) and Platform (25%). IBM, Salesforce and Oracle were designated Product Experience Leaders.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are Workiva, Salesforce and ServiceNow. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion – Sustainability Insights
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Insights, a software provider must have a standalone application, be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $35 million in annual or projected revenue, more than 50 employees, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 25 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months. The software must support sustainability related data collection, data management, Scope 3 data acquisition and management, support for supply chains, support for analytics and planning, internal reporting as well as disclosure documentation and reporting.
To qualify for evaluation in Sustainability, the product should include the following capabilities: sustainability data collection and management, Scope 3 data collection and supply chain support, sustainability analytics, planning, and reporting as well as disclosure documentation and reporting.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| AMCS | AMCS ESG | N/A | November 2025 |
| AuditBoard | ESG | N/A | April 2024 |
| Benchmark Gensuite | Environmental Sustainability Reporting | N/A | November 2025 |
| Cority | Sustainability Cloud | N/A | November 2025 |
| Diligent | Modern ESG | N/A | March 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Envizi ESG Suite | N/A | June 2025 |
| Microsoft | Microsoft Sustainability Manager | 2.30 | May 2025 |
| Nasdaq | Nasdaq Metrio | 25.6 | May 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability | 25B | May 2025 |
| Persefoni | Persefoni AI | N/A | October 2024 |
| Position Green | Pulsora | N/A | July 2025 |
| Sage | Sage Earth | 2025 R2 | May 2025 |
| Salesforce | Net Zero Cloud | Summer ‘25 | June 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Sustainability Control Tower | 1.7.0 | June 2025 |
| ServiceNow | ESG Management | 20.1.0 | May 2025 |
| Sievo | Sievo Sustainability Analytics | N/A | November 2025 |
| Sphera | Corporate Sustainability Software | 6.5 | January 2025 |
| Tango | Energy and Sustainability | N/A | November 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | Enablon ESG Excellence | 12 | May 2025 |
| Workiva | The Workiva Platform | N/A | June 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clarity AI | Clarity AI Platform | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Minimum | Minimum Platform | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tracera | Tracera Platform | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Sustainability Compliance
Environmental sustainability has become a central business priority as enterprises face rising expectations to measure and disclose environmental impacts. As regulations expand, sustainability compliance has become a critical requirement, and software is essential for collecting environmental data and producing transparent, auditable reports.
As regulations expand, sustainability compliance has become a critical requirement.
ISG Research defines sustainability, in the context of enterprise software, as the legally required disclosure of defined environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions, resource use and waste by enterprises operating in jurisdictions where such disclosures are mandated. These requirements ensure consistent, comparable reporting and include management of environmental risks and double materiality.
Enterprises have shifted from voluntary reporting to compliance, driven by frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and the International Sustainability Standards Board. As mandates become more complex, organizations must adopt disciplined reporting practices supported by software built for compliance accuracy and audit readiness.
Sustainability compliance differs from broader sustainability management by focusing on documentation and reporting rather than Scope 3 tracking or advanced sustainability planning. Enterprises must produce defensible disclosures supported by reliable data collection, strong integration with enterprise systems and outputs aligned with regulatory standards. Software must maintain audit readiness and adapt to evolving requirements without increasing operational burden.
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Compliance evaluates software that streamlines data collection, automates reporting across multiple frameworks and supports digital assurance features. Integration capabilities ensure connectivity with enterprise systems that serve as records for environmental data. The framework supports Scopes 1 and 2 emissions tracking and alignment with global standards. Specialized reporting includes double materiality assessments and machine-readable outputs, such as inline extensible business reporting language. Artificial intelligence capabilities, including GenAI and agentic AI, strengthen forecasting, analysis and reporting.
This research evaluated the following 20 software providers: AMCS, AuditBoard, Benchmark Gensuite, Cority, Diligent, IBM, Microsoft, Nasdaq, Oracle, Persefoni, Position Green, Sage, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Sievo, Sphera, Tango, Wolters Kluwer and Workiva.
Key Takeaways
Environmental sustainability has become a core enterprise obligation as organizations face expanding regulatory mandates requiring transparent, auditable disclosures of environmental impacts. Compliance now depends on disciplined reporting practices supported by software that standardizes data collection and aligns outputs with evolving regulatory frameworks. These tools improve accuracy, reduce compliance risk and strengthen audit readiness while supporting consistent documentation of environmental performance.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Compliance evaluates 20 software providers that offer products to support environmental data collection, regulatory reporting and audit-ready disclosures. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as Workiva, Oracle and Salesforce. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Benchmark Gensuite, Diligent, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Sphera and Workiva were rated as Exemplary, with IBM and Microsoft rated as Innovative. Position Green, Sievo and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Assurance, and AMCS, AuditBoard, Cority, Nasdaq, Persefoni, Sage and Tango were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (55%) and Platform (25%), including adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Workiva, Oracle and Salesforce achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by breadth and depth across sustainability compliance capabilities and strong platform resilience emphasizing adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. Workiva, Salesforce and ServiceNow were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should adopt sustainability compliance software to improve disclosure accuracy, reduce regulatory risk and maintain audit readiness across evolving mandates. Buyers should prioritize platforms that automate reporting, integrate with enterprise systems and support standardized modeling required for global compliance frameworks. Software offering advanced analytics, AI-driven insights and machine-readable outputs will enhance reporting precision and operational efficiency. Aligning platform capabilities with organizational governance needs will strengthen compliance consistency and long-term performance management.
The Findings – Sustainability Compliance
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds Workiva atop the list, followed by Oracle and Salesforce. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Oracle, Salesforce and Workiva have done so in four categories, ServiceNow in two and Diligent in one category.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Benchmark Gensuite, Diligent, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Sphera and Workiva.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: IBM and Microsoft.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Position Green, Sievo and Wolters Kluwer.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: AMCS, AuditBoard, Cority, Nasdaq, Persefoni, Sage and Tango.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (55%) and Platform (25%). Workiva, Oracle and Salesforce were designated Product Experience Leaders. While not a Leader, SAP was also found to meet a broad range of enterprise product experience requirements.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are Workiva, Salesforce and ServiceNow. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.
Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion – Sustainability Compliance
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Compliance, a software provider must have a standalone application, be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $35 million in annual or projected revenue, more than 50 employees, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 25 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months. The product must be capable of accessing data from a variety of sources as well as guiding and managing either Sustainability Insights, Sustainability Companies or both in an enterprise. These include the following requirements:
To qualify for evaluation in Sustainability Insights, the product should include the following capabilities: sustainability data collection and management, Scope 3 data collection and supply chain support, AI/GenAI capabilities, sustainability analytics and planning, and sustainability reporting.
To qualify for evaluation in Sustainability Compliance, the product should include the following capabilities: sustainability data collection and management, sustainability analytics and planning and reporting as well as disclosure documentation and reporting.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| AMCS | AMCS ESG | N/A | November 2025 |
| AuditBoard | ESG | N/A | November 2025 |
| Benchmark Gensuite | Environmental Sustainability Reporting | N/A | November 2025 |
| Cority | Sustainability Cloud | N/A | November 2025 |
| Diligent | Modern ESG | N/A | March 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Envizi ESG Suite | N/A | June 2025 |
| Microsoft | Microsoft Sustainability Manager | 2.30 | May 2025 |
| Nasdaq | Nasdaq Metrio | 25.6 | May 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability | 25B | May 2025 |
| Persefoni | Persefoni AI | N/A | October 2024 |
| Position Green | Sustainability Suite | N/A | March 2025 |
| Sage | Sage Earth | 2025 R2 | May 2025 |
| Salesforce | Net Zero Cloud | Summer’25 | June 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Sustainability Control Tower | 1.7.0 | June 2025 |
| ServiceNow | ESG Management | 20.1.0 | May 2025 |
| Sievo | Sievo Sustainability Analytics | N/A | November 2025 |
| Sphera | Corporate Sustainability Software | 6.5 | January 2025 |
| Tango | Energy and Sustainability | N/A | November 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | Enablon ESG Excellence | 12 | May 2025 |
| Workiva | The Workiva Platform | N/A | June 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clarity AI | Clarity AI Platform | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Minimum | Minimum Platform | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tracera | Tracera Platform | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
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