We pointed Ladder at the backbone of enterprise software: the three products that collectively touch hundreds of millions of knowledge workers every day. Ladder ingested over 114,000 data points across 3,000+ online sources, including public reviews, forums, and community discussions.
The results:
- Jira: Ladder Top 100 score 2.1 (Usable), 15,000+ data points
- Salesforce: Ladder Top 100 score 2.2 (Usable), 94,000+ data points
- Workday: Ladder Top 100 score 1.4 (Functional), 5,000+ data points
These aren't obscure tools. They're the products that define enterprise software. And Ladder scored them lower than almost everything else in the Top 100. See all three scores on the Ladder Top 100.
What Ladder reveals: the buying problem
Ladder doesn't just score sentiment. It identifies why the experience is what it is. Across all three products, Ladder surfaced the same structural pattern: enterprise software isn't chosen by the people who use it.
It's chosen by procurement teams evaluating feature checklists, IT departments evaluating security requirements, and executives evaluating vendor relationships. The person who submits their time off in Workday every Friday had no say in the decision.
Ladder can measure the cost of that disconnect. Here's what it found.
Jira: Ladder Top 100 score 2.1
Ladder analyzed 15,000+ data points across professional review platforms, community forums, and developer discussions. The intelligence was clear: Jira's 4.3/5 on traditional review platforms reflects buyer satisfaction. Ladder's 2.1 reflects user experience.
The dominant signal: every simple action (creating an issue, checking a sprint, finding a dashboard) requires more steps and more cognitive load than it should. Ladder detected overwhelming negative sentiment around the 2025 navigation redesign, which users described as making an already complex product worse. See Jira's full Top 100 analysis on the Top 100.
For context: Linear does much less and Ladder scores it at 4.2. The features Jira has that Linear doesn't? Ladder found that most users don't need them.
Salesforce: Ladder Top 100 score 2.2
Ladder processed 94,000+ data points, the largest dataset of any product in the Top 100. Public reviews, professional platforms, community forums, and independent analysis all fed into the Ladder engine.
What Ladder found: a massive gap between capability and experience. Salesforce can do almost anything. But Ladder identified that end users (the sales reps and support agents who click through it 8 hours a day) generate overwhelmingly negative experience signals. The Lightning redesign improved surface aesthetics but didn't address the labyrinthine navigation and inconsistent patterns across modules that Ladder flagged as structural issues.
The most common sentiment Ladder extracted: "It's the industry standard, so we use it." That's not a product endorsement. It's a resignation. Explore Salesforce's full score.
Workday: Ladder Top 100 score 1.4
Ladder scored Workday the lowest of any product in the entire Top 100. Across 5,000+ data points from public reviews, forums, and employee sentiment platforms, Ladder identified a product in the Functional tier, meaning users fight it to complete basic tasks.
The most striking signal: Ladder found that even simple actions like submitting time off, checking a pay stub, or updating personal information generate measurably negative sentiment. The interface feels dated. Navigation requires memorizing paths rather than following intuition. And the job applicant experience, which touches millions of people, is what Ladder classifies as a UX crisis. See Workday's full score.
What Ladder proves about enterprise software
This is exactly the problem Ladder was built to solve. Traditional review platforms aggregate buyer satisfaction, which is why Jira, Salesforce, and Workday all score 4.0+ on professional review platforms. Ladder measures something different: the quality of the lived experience, from the perspective of the person who has to use the product every day.
The enterprise UX crisis isn't about technology. It's about incentives. When the buyer isn't the user, the user's experience becomes secondary. Ladder makes that gap visible. And measurable. And impossible to ignore.
But the pressure is building. Ladder Top 100 scores prove that tools like Linear (4.2), Mercury (3.2), and Figma (3.8) deliver business-class capability at Comfortable-or-better experience levels. As the generation that grew up with consumer-grade software moves into decision-making roles, the tolerance for 1.4-level experiences will evaporate.
The scores won't lie. Ladder will make sure of it. Explore the full Ladder Top 100 and see where every product stands.
If your organization relies on enterprise tools and wants to measure the real experience your people have (not what the vendor says, but what your users feel), Ladder can do for your internal tools what we just did for these 36 products. Request a Pulse demo.