Average NPS Scores by SaaS Category: 2026 Benchmarks

The short answer: A good NPS score for B2B SaaS in 2026 sits somewhere between +30 and +40, depending on which benchmark you trust. Retently's 2026 data puts B2B Software & SaaS at +41, while Survicate's 2025 study puts the broader Software median at just +30. The honest truth is that no single number is "right" -- NPS varies enormously by category, audience, sample size, and survey method, so the only comparison that matters is against your own category and your own past scores.

If you landed here typing "is my NPS good?", you already know the frustrating part: every article quotes a different benchmark, and most of them lump enterprise developer tools in with consumer apps. This guide does the opposite. It breaks NPS down by SaaS category and cites every number to a named public research firm (Retently, Survicate, CustomerGauge, QuestionPro, and others) -- and where the public data genuinely does not exist, it says so instead of inventing a figure. These benchmarks are directional, not absolute.

TL;DR: What Counts as a Good NPS by SaaS Category

SaaS Category	"Below Average"	"Average"	"Good"	"Excellent"
B2B SaaS (overall)	Below +20	+30 to +40	+40 to +50	+50+
B2C SaaS / consumer apps	Below +30	+40 to +50	+50 to +60	+60+
Developer tools	Below +30	+40 to +55	+55 to +70	+70+
Project management	Below +20	+25 to +40	+40 to +55	+55+
CRM tools	Below +10	+15 to +30	+30 to +45	+45+
Communication tools	Below +25	+30 to +45	+45 to +60	+60+
Marketing / MarTech tools	Below +15	+20 to +35	+35 to +50	+50+
HR / People tools (eNPS context)	Below +10	+10 to +30	+30 to +50	+50+
Fintech / Payments	Below +25	+35 to +46	+46 to +60	+60+
E-commerce platforms	Below +25	+30 to +45	+45 to +60	+60+

These ranges blend surveyed category medians where they exist (B2B SaaS, Software, Fintech) with clusters of published company-level scores where category-level surveys do not. Treat the per-category rows as informed estimates, not surveyed averages. The full methodology, with every source, is at the bottom of this post.

If you only remember one thing: a +35 in CRM and a +35 in developer tools tell completely different stories. Read on for why.

Why Is It So Hard to Find a Reliable NPS Benchmark?

Finding a reliable NPS benchmark is hard because there is no central authority, no standardized survey method, and no agreement on whether to report the mean or the median. Three reputable firms can survey "SaaS" and publish +30, +36, and +41 -- all technically correct, all measuring slightly different samples with slightly different questions. This is the single most important thing to understand before you compare your score to anything.

Consider the spread across published 2025-2026 data for the same broad category:

Source	Category Surveyed	Reported NPS	Metric	Sample
Retently (2026)	B2B Software & SaaS	+41	Average	10,000+ surveys per industry
CustomerGauge	SaaS	+36	Average	38 tracked SaaS companies
Survicate (2025)	Software	+30	Median	599 companies, 5.4M responses
QuestionPro (2025)	Software	+30	Median	Q1 2025 CX study

That is an 11-point spread -- the difference between "we are doing fine" and "we have a problem." None of these firms is wrong; they are measuring different companies, weighting B2B and B2C differently, and choosing mean versus median. Survicate explicitly uses the median because it resists outliers -- a single furious enterprise account or one delighted whale can drag an average around.

The team at Retently makes the point bluntly in their 2026 benchmark report: because "the score alone is nothing but vanity," they argue it is impossible to name a single number that defines a universally "good" NPS. So when an article (including this one) hands you a benchmark, your first question should always be: measured how, on whom, and when? For a deeper primer on what NPS measures versus CSAT and CES, our guide to NPS vs CSAT vs CES covers the mechanics before you start benchmarking.

What Is the Average NPS Score for SaaS Overall?

The average NPS score for SaaS overall sits between +30 and +41 in 2026, with most evidence clustering around the mid-30s. Retently's 2026 benchmark reports +41 for B2B Software & SaaS, CustomerGauge reports +36 for SaaS, and Survicate's 2025 median for Software is +30. A reasonable working number for "B2B SaaS average" is therefore roughly +35.

So why does SaaS land lower than flashier consumer categories? QuestionPro's 2025 data puts Software at a median of +30 -- and Survicate's 2025 study identifies Software as sitting among the lowest-scoring industries it tracks, well below categories like Hotel & Hospitality (+44) or Banking (+41). Userpilot's analysis offers a believable explanation: software products often carry high switching costs, so customers stay even without loving the product. A customer who would never recommend your tool may still renew because migrating off it is painful -- and that gap between loyalty and inertia suppresses SaaS NPS.

The B2B versus B2C split inside SaaS is the next critical layer. The numbers are consistent across sources:

Segment	NPS (median)	Source
B2C companies (all)	+49	QuestionPro 2025
B2B companies (all)	+38	QuestionPro 2025
B2C (Survicate)	+49	Survicate 2025
B2B (Survicate)	+38	Survicate 2025
B2C Software	+47	QuestionPro 2025
B2B Software	+29	QuestionPro 2025

That last pair is striking: within software alone, B2C scores roughly 18 points higher than B2B. Multi-stakeholder buying, complex integrations, and the fact that the survey respondent is often not the person who chose the tool all drag B2B SaaS down. If you run a B2B product, benchmarking against a B2C average sets you up to feel like a failure for no reason.

One more useful pattern, from ChurnWard's aggregation of multiple 2025 reports: NPS tends to rise with company maturity. Their compiled figures show startups under 50 employees around +28, growth-stage companies around +33, and enterprises around +35. This is loosely sourced aggregation, not a single rigorous survey -- but the trend that younger companies score lower is worth keeping in mind if you are pre-Series A.

What Is a Good NPS Score for Each SaaS Category?

A good NPS score depends heavily on which SaaS category you are in. Here is the uncomfortable reality: no major benchmark firm publishes a clean, surveyed NPS median for every SaaS sub-category like "project management" or "CRM," so this section builds category pictures from published company-level scores instead.

A Warning Before the Table

The category benchmarks below are not surveyed category averages. They are clusters of individual company NPS scores that vendors and research firms have published, grouped by category. Company-published NPS skews high because companies publicize good scores and bury bad ones. Read these as "what visible players in this category report," not "the true category mean."

Developer Tools

Developer tools tend to post the highest NPS scores in SaaS. Published figures include GitHub at +73, Stripe at +67, and Vercel at +68, with Notion frequently cited around +71. Developers are a self-selecting, highly engaged audience who chose the tool themselves, which structurally lifts scores. A good NPS for a dev tool is therefore higher than the SaaS average: aim for +55 or above, and treat +40 as a warning sign.

Communication Tools

Communication tools cluster in the upper-middle of SaaS. Slack is commonly cited around +58, and Zoom has been reported as high as +72 in CustomerGauge's tracked SaaS benchmarks. These are network-effect products people use daily, and a good score here is roughly +45 or above.

Project Management Tools

Project management is genuinely hard to benchmark -- there is no clean public category survey, and published company scores range from beloved tools to functional-but-resented ones. Based on the broader B2B SaaS picture, treat +25 to +40 as average and +40+ as good, and weight your own internal trend far more heavily than any external number.

CRM Tools

CRM is the category most likely to make founders panic, and unfairly so. Salesforce's NPS has been reported as low as +20 in CustomerGauge's SaaS tracking. CRMs are sticky, central, and often imposed on end users by management -- a structural setup that suppresses scores. A "good" CRM NPS may legitimately be +30 to +45. If your CRM scores +25, you are not necessarily failing; you may simply be in a hard category.

Marketing / MarTech Tools

For marketing technology, ChurnWard's compiled figures put MarTech around +41 and "marketing/sales tools" around +31. MarTech buyers are demanding and switch often, which keeps scores moderate. Treat +20 to +35 as average and +35+ as good.

HR / People Tools

HR software is a special case because it intersects with employee NPS (eNPS) -- a related but distinct metric. The average eNPS across industries was around +32 in 2025 per QuestionPro, though Perceptyx's much larger 20-million-employee database reports a more conservative global average closer to +14. For an HR SaaS product's own customer NPS, expect the broad B2B SaaS range; for eNPS the tool measures, +10 to +30 is "good" and +30 to +50 is "strong."

Fintech / Payments

Fintech is one of the few categories with a defensible surveyed number. Survicate's 2025 study puts Fintech at a median of +46 -- noticeably above the Software median of +30. Payments tools benefit from being mission-critical and, when they work, invisible. A good fintech NPS is +46 or above; below +35 suggests friction worth investigating.

E-commerce Platforms

E-commerce platforms (the SaaS tools merchants use, like store builders and checkout software) blur into the broader retail category. Retently's 2026 data puts Ecommerce & Retail at +61 and Survicate puts Retail & Ecommerce at +55 -- but that measures consumer-facing retail, not the B2B platform underneath. For an e-commerce platform sold to merchants, the B2B SaaS range (+30 to +50) is the safer comparison.

The Honest Summary

For four of these eight categories -- project management, CRM, communication, developer tools -- there is no rigorous, named, surveyed NPS median in public benchmark reports; those rows use published company scores as the best available proxy. Only fintech and e-commerce have genuine surveyed category data. Anyone who hands you a precise "the average NPS for project management software is +X" is almost certainly guessing. We would rather tell you that than join them.

Why Is Comparing NPS Across Categories Misleading?

Comparing NPS across categories is misleading because the score is shaped as much by category structure as by product quality. A +35 developer tool is underperforming its peers; a +35 CRM is doing well. The number is identical, but the verdict is opposite. Compare across categories and you will systematically misjudge your own performance.

Several structural forces pull categories apart, independent of how good any individual product is.

Who completes the survey. In developer tools, the user picked the product and is often emotionally invested. In a CRM or HR system, the tool was chosen by management and imposed on daily users -- and imposed tools score lower no matter how well built they are.

Switching costs. As Userpilot notes, products with high switching costs retain customers even without high satisfaction. A CRM with deep integrations keeps users who would never recommend it -- inertia that depresses NPS without depressing revenue, which is exactly why NPS and churn correlate so weakly (more below).

Frequency and visibility. A communication tool used 40 times a day generates a stronger emotional response -- positive or negative -- than a billing tool touched once a month. High-frequency products tend toward more extreme scores.

Cultural mix. Research from Nielsen Norman Group shows rating tendencies vary by country: customers in some regions consistently rate lower than U.S. customers for an identical experience. A product with a European or Asian customer base will post a structurally lower NPS than an otherwise identical U.S.-focused competitor.

As April Dunford argues in Obviously Awesome, context frames the product: the exact same product, positioned in two different markets, reads completely differently to the same customer. The same logic applies to NPS -- the exact same score, read against two different category contexts, means two different things.

The practical rule: benchmark against your category and against your own history. Never against "SaaS" as a monolith, and never against a category you are not actually in.

Getting the comparison right still leaves the harder question of what you do with the result. A correctly benchmarked score that never changes the roadmap is still just a number on a board slide -- which is the case we make in NPS is theater.

How Should You Interpret Your NPS Relative to Your Category?

To interpret your NPS correctly, run it through four filters in order: your category, your business model (B2B vs B2C), your sample size, and your own trend line. A raw number in isolation -- "+38" -- tells you almost nothing; the same number, contextualized, can tell you a lot.

Step 1: Place yourself in the right category. Use the category section above. If you sell developer tools, your bar is roughly +55; if you sell CRM, it may be +35. Pick the right finish line before you judge the race.

Step 2: Adjust for B2B vs B2C. B2B SaaS runs roughly 15-18 points below B2C SaaS. If you are B2B, mentally shift any "SaaS average" you read downward before comparing.

Step 3: Check your sample size. This is the most ignored filter. With fewer than ~100 responses, your NPS is statistically noisy and can swing 10-15 points on a handful of replies. Survicate required a minimum of 100 responses annually before including a company in its benchmark for exactly this reason. If you surveyed 30 people, do not over-read a 12-point quarter-over-quarter move.

Step 4: Compare to yourself. Your own trend, measured identically each quarter, is the single most reliable signal you have. A company that moves from +20 to +30 is winning, even if +30 is "below the SaaS average." A company sliding from +50 to +42 has a problem, even though +42 still looks healthy. Direction beats absolute value every time. One practical wrinkle: if a tool shutdown forces you to switch NPS platforms mid-stream -- as happened to every Delighted customer when Qualtrics terminated it in June 2026 -- annotate the changeover date in your reporting, because tool and channel changes move the score even when nothing else changed. Our guide to Delighted alternatives for NPS surveys includes a migration checklist built around exactly that problem.

A quick interpretation cheat sheet, assuming a B2B SaaS product with a healthy sample:

Your NPS	Reading	First action
Below 0	More detractors than promoters -- urgent	Read every detractor verbatim this week
0 to +20	Below average for most SaaS categories	Find the top 2 themes dragging the score
+20 to +40	Roughly average for B2B SaaS	Segment by plan and cohort to find weak spots
+40 to +50	Good -- top half of B2B SaaS	Protect it; watch for slippage in new cohorts
+50+	Excellent	Study your promoters; turn them into referrals

What Should You Do If Your NPS Is Below Average?

If your NPS is below your category average, do not panic and do not start gaming the score -- start reading the verbatim comments. The number tells you that something is wrong; only the open-text responses tell you what. A below-average NPS is a diagnostic prompt, not a verdict. Here is a practical sequence that works.

1. Read the "why" before touching anything. NPS without its follow-up comment is, in the words of our NPS vs CSAT vs CES guide, "just a number on a dashboard." The standard follow-up question -- "What is the main reason for your score?" -- is where the actual information lives. Read detractor and passive comments first; they contain your roadmap.

2. Cluster the comments into themes. Ten detractors complaining about onboarding is one problem, not ten. Group verbatim feedback into themes and count them; the biggest theme by volume is usually where to start. Doing this by hand across hundreds of responses is slow -- our pillar guide on feedback analysis walks through turning raw comments into prioritized themes.

3. Fix the biggest theme, then close the loop. Pick the top one or two themes and actually ship a fix. Then tell the customers who raised it. Closing the loop is not optional politeness -- companies that follow up with detractors within 48 hours can convert a meaningful share of them into promoters. Our guide on how to close the feedback loop covers the mechanics.

4. Re-measure, then check the trend. Re-run the survey next quarter using the consistency rules from Step 3 of the interpretation framework above. Improvement validates your fix; no movement means you fixed the wrong theme -- go back to step 2.

What not to do: never coach customers toward a 9 or 10 ("we'd really appreciate a 10!"). It corrupts the data and teaches you nothing. As Fred Reichheld, the Bain & Company partner who created the metric, wrote in the original 2003 Harvard Business Review article The One Number You Need to Grow: "The best predictor of top-line growth can usually be captured in a single survey question: Would you recommend this company to a friend?" The point was always the customer relationship behind the question, not the digit -- and the moment teams optimize the digit instead of the relationship, the signal is gone. A gamed +50 is worth less than an honest +25.

If your real problem is that almost nobody responds -- so your "score" is built on a dozen replies -- that is a different fix. Our guide on how to get user feedback when nobody responds covers timing, channel, and incentive tactics to lift response rates to a level where the score actually means something. Before you decide your rate is broken, check it against the feedback response rate benchmarks by channel and industry -- a SaaS NPS pulse at 12% is healthy; the same number for an in-app prompt is not.

How Does NPS Relate to Churn and Retention?

NPS relates to churn far more weakly than most founders assume. The widely repeated claim that NPS reliably predicts churn does not hold up in the research. NPS can flag individual at-risk customers, but as a company-level predictor of your churn rate, it is unreliable for roughly three-quarters of businesses -- worth knowing, because a lot of money gets spent chasing an NPS number on the belief that it will move retention.

ProfitWell's research, summarized by Gainsight, found the correlation is real only at the extremes: companies in the top 25% of NPS relative to their vertical saw roughly a 5-10% bump in renewals. For everyone else -- below average or even moderately above average -- there was no reliable retention correlation. Their blunt conclusion: about 75% of companies cannot use NPS as an accurate churn predictor. Independent analysis backs this up, finding NPS shows only a weak correlation with actual revenue growth, far below the predictive power originally claimed for it.

So where is NPS useful for retention? At the individual customer level. A detractor is a concrete signal that a specific account is unhappy, and unhappy accounts churn. Commonly cited (though vendor-sourced, so directional) figures suggest detractors churn at materially higher rates than promoters, with a large share leaving within 90 days. Treating each detractor response as a save-this-account trigger is a sound use of NPS; treating your company-wide NPS as a churn forecast is not.

Use of NPS for churn	Does it work?	Why
Predicting your overall churn rate from your NPS	Unreliable for ~75% of companies	Only top-quartile NPS shows a renewal lift
Flagging individual detractors as at-risk accounts	Works well	A detractor is a direct unhappiness signal
Forecasting expansion / net revenue retention	Weak but present	Bottom-quartile NPS firms earn measurably less expansion revenue
Using NPS alone as your retention KPI	No	Pair it with usage data and qualitative feedback

The takeaway: use NPS as one input into a churn-prevention system, not as the system itself. For the full playbook on turning feedback into retention, see our guide on using feedback to reduce SaaS churn, which covers churn signals, early-warning systems, and exit interviews in depth.

How Was the Benchmark Data in This Post Sourced?

The benchmark data in this post is aggregated entirely from publicly published, named third-party research. There is no proprietary dataset behind these numbers, and no figure here is presented as FeedSense's own data, because FeedSense does not publish an NPS benchmark dataset. Transparency about method is the whole point of this section.

Primary sources used:

Retently (2026 NPS benchmark report) -- industry-level NPS averages; included only industries with 10+ clients and 10,000+ surveys each.
Survicate (2025 NPS benchmarks) -- median NPS by industry from 599 companies, 2,187 surveys, and 5.4 million responses collected January-October 2025; minimum 100 responses per company.
CustomerGauge (SaaS NPS benchmarks) -- 38 tracked SaaS company scores plus B2B averages, drawn from company reports, filings, and third-party research.
QuestionPro (2025 CX benchmarking study) -- industry and B2B-vs-B2C median NPS from a Q1 2025 study.
NPSpack and ChurnWard -- aggregations of multiple 2025 reports, used for company-level scores and for trend patterns (used cautiously and labeled as aggregated).
Net Promoter Score itself originated with Fred Reichheld and Bain & Company in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article, "The One Number You Need To Grow."

Honest limitations you should know:

Mean vs median. Retently and CustomerGauge report averages; Survicate and QuestionPro report medians. Medians are more outlier-resistant. Mixing them is unavoidable when synthesizing public data, but it widens the apparent ranges.
No clean per-SaaS-category surveys. For project management, CRM, communication, and developer tools, no major firm publishes a rigorously surveyed NPS median. Those category rows use published company scores as a proxy and are labeled as estimates.
Company-published scores skew high. Firms publicize good NPS and hide bad NPS, so company-level figures over-represent the winners.
Sample and method differ. Survey wording, timing, channel, and customer geography all move NPS. Two firms surveying "SaaS" are not surveying the same thing.
Benchmarks age. NPS benchmarks shift year to year. Every figure here is tagged with its source year; we will revisit this post annually.

In short: these numbers are a useful directional map, not a precise instrument. Use them to orient, then trust your own consistently measured trend over any external figure.

If you are choosing a tool to collect and analyze NPS responses, our roundup of the best feedback tools for startups compares options across price and analysis depth. FeedSense is one of them: it collects NPS responses across channels and automatically clusters the open-text comments into themes, so you spend your time on the "why" rather than the spreadsheet. Public pricing runs Free, then Collect at $49/month, Analyze at $149/month, and Act at $399/month.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good NPS score for a SaaS company in 2026?

A good NPS for B2B SaaS in 2026 is roughly +40 to +50, with +30 to +40 being average. Benchmarks vary by source: Retently's 2026 data puts B2B Software & SaaS at +41, while Survicate's 2025 median for Software is +30. B2C SaaS runs higher, around +50. Always compare within your own category.

What is the average NPS score for SaaS?

The average NPS for SaaS sits between +30 and +41 depending on the source and method. CustomerGauge reports +36 for SaaS, Retently reports +41 for B2B Software & SaaS (2026), and both Survicate and QuestionPro report a Software median of +30 for 2025. A reasonable working figure for B2B SaaS is about +35.

Why is the SaaS NPS average lower than other industries?

SaaS NPS is lower partly because high switching costs keep customers who would not actively recommend the product. Many B2B SaaS tools are also chosen by management and imposed on daily users, who never wanted them. QuestionPro's 2025 data puts Software at a median NPS of +30, and Survicate's 2025 study places Software among the lowest-scoring industries it tracks.

Is a higher NPS always better than a lower one?

Not when comparing across categories. A +35 in developer tools is below par, while a +35 in CRM is solid, because category structure shapes the score. A higher number in an easy category can reflect worse relative performance than a lower number in a hard one. Compare only within your own category and against your own history.

What is a good NPS score for developer tools specifically?

Developer tools post some of the highest NPS in SaaS, so the bar is higher: aim for +55 or above. Published company figures include GitHub around +73, Stripe around +67, and Notion around +71. Developers self-select their tools and are highly engaged, which structurally lifts scores. For a dev tool, +40 should be treated as a warning sign.

Does NPS predict customer churn?

NPS predicts churn weakly at the company level. ProfitWell research found a 5-10% renewal lift only for companies in the top 25% of NPS in their vertical; for the other ~75%, there is no reliable correlation. NPS is far more useful for flagging individual at-risk detractors than for forecasting your overall churn rate.

How many responses do I need for a reliable NPS?

Aim for at least 100 responses before reading your NPS as stable. Below that, the score is statistically noisy and can swing 10-15 points on a few replies. Survicate required a 100-response annual minimum before including any company in its benchmark, which is a reasonable bar to hold yourself to.

What is the difference between NPS and eNPS for HR software?

NPS measures whether customers would recommend your product; eNPS (employee NPS) measures whether employees would recommend their workplace. HR software touches both. The cross-industry eNPS average was around +32 in 2025 per QuestionPro, though Perceptyx's larger database reports a more conservative ~+14. They are related metrics but should never be compared directly.

Should I compare my NPS to a global "SaaS average"?

No. A global SaaS average blends B2B and B2C, easy and hard categories, and different survey methods, so it is too coarse to judge your performance. Compare instead to your specific category, adjust for B2B versus B2C, check your sample size, and weight your own quarter-over-quarter trend most heavily.

What should I do if my NPS is below my category benchmark?

Read the verbatim follow-up comments before changing anything -- the number says something is wrong, the comments say what. Cluster detractor and passive comments into themes, fix the largest theme, close the loop with the customers who raised it, then re-measure with the identical survey next quarter. Never coach customers toward higher scores.

The Bottom Line

NPS benchmarks are a map, not a verdict. The average B2B SaaS NPS sits somewhere in the mid-30s, B2C SaaS runs higher, developer tools higher still, and CRM lower -- but every one of those numbers comes with a methodology asterisk and a category caveat.

The three rules that actually matter:

Compare within your category. A +35 means different things for a dev tool and a CRM.
Trust your own trend most. Same survey, same timing, every quarter. Direction beats absolute value.
The score is the start, not the answer. NPS is a thermometer -- it tells you that you have a fever, not the diagnosis. The verbatim "why" is where improvement lives.

Want to collect NPS and actually understand the comments behind the score? FeedSense gathers NPS responses across channels and automatically clusters open-text feedback into themes, so a below-average score becomes a clear, prioritized to-do list instead of a mystery. Explore our features, or try it free. And if you are still deciding which metric to track in the first place, start with our guide to building a Voice of Customer program.