Best SaaS Directories List - Free Full Database with DR Ratings

TL;DR: This is a free database of 236 SaaS, startup and AI tool directories, every one at Domain Rating 30 or above, with its DR, listing price, link type and a one line note on what it actually lists. 157 of them (67%) accept a free or freemium listing and 225 give a followed link. Sort it, filter it, and work it from the top down.

Most SaaS directory lists are a wall of names with no numbers attached, so you cannot tell a DR 91 marketplace from a DR 12 link farm until you have already wasted an afternoon on the form. This one starts from 348 directories we track for our own submissions, drops the 112 that sit below DR 30, and keeps the 236 that are worth a founder’s time. Every row carries the Ahrefs Domain Rating, what a listing costs, whether the link is followed, and what the venue specializes in.

The table is the page. Everything after it explains how to read it.

The Full SaaS Directory Database

Three columns other lists publish are deliberately missing here: monthly traffic, badge requirements and founding year. Traffic estimates on directory domains swing wildly month to month and tempt you into chasing referral numbers that never arrive. What decides the value of a listing is authority, cost, link type and fit, which is what the four columns above give you.

Top Directory Stats and Metrics

The headline number is the spread. Across 236 directories the median Domain Rating is 58, the top of the list is Reddit at DR 95, and 68 sites (29%) sit at DR 70 or above. That top group is where nearly all the value is concentrated.

The distribution is bottom heavy on purpose. DR 30 to 39 is the single largest band with 54 entries, while only 10 directories clear DR 90. If you submit in list order from the top of the table, you capture 25 sites at DR 80 or better before you reach anything average.

What does it cost to get listed?

Most of this list is free. 112 directories (47%) charge nothing, another 45 run freemium with a paid fast track, and 66 (28%) are paid only. 13 publish no public price at all.

The useful cut is free and followed together: 106 directories, or 45% of the list, give you a followed link without asking for money. That is the working list for a pre revenue product.

Money buys queue position, not access. Even above DR 70, 37 of the 68 listings are free, and 29 of the paid venues sit below DR 50, which is where paying stops making sense for most founders.

How many directory links are actually followed?

225 of 236 directories (95%) publish a followed link, and only 11 apply nofollow. That ratio is higher than most SEO advice assumes, because the nofollowed venues on this list tend to be the largest ones, including community platforms where the listing is a post rather than a profile.

A nofollowed listing is still worth having when the venue sends real traffic or gets quoted by AI assistants. Treat the link column as a tiebreaker between two otherwise equal options, not as a filter that removes half the list.

Startup directories, AI tool directories and SaaS directories: what is the difference?

They differ by what triggers a listing. Startup directories index the company and usually want funding stage, team and founding details. AI tool directories index the product and sort it by task, so the same company can appear once per tool. SaaS directories index the software as a purchase, which is why they lean on reviews, pricing tiers and feature grids.

The split across this database is lopsided. 136 of the 236 entries carry an AI label of some kind, 29 describe themselves as SaaS, software or B2B venues, and 19 are launch platforms or startup directories. The rest are general web directories and category specific indexes spread across 33 labels in total.

Startup and launch submission sites are time boxed and company shaped. Product Hunt (DR 91) and Wellfound (DR 87) are the anchors, and a placement is an event rather than an evergreen page.

AI tool directories are the largest and fastest moving group here. SourceForge (DR 93), G2 (DR 91) and Crunchbase (DR 91) sit at the top, and the long tail below DR 50 is almost entirely made up of AI indexes launched in the last two years.

SaaS and software directories are the ones buyers actually search inside. GetApp (DR 85), SaasHub (DR 80) and StackShare (DR 79) are the high DR directories worth prioritizing if your product sells to businesses rather than to makers.

If you only have time for one group, pick the one your buyer would search in, not the one with the most entries.

Where should you launch first?

Launch where your buyer already is, then work the evergreen indexes afterwards. Launch platforms are one-shot events with a fixed date and a leaderboard; directories are permanent pages that keep working. Confusing the two is the most common reason a launch feels like it failed.

The routing is straightforward once you separate them by product type:

• B2B SaaS. Software marketplaces first, because that is where purchase intent lives. GetApp (DR 85), TrustRadius (DR 84) and Software Advice (DR 87) reach buyers who are already comparing vendors, not browsing for fun.
• AI tools. The AI indexes, led by There’s An AI For That (DR 77) and Futurepedia (DR 72), plus a Product Hunt launch if you have an audience to mobilize.
• Developer tools. Developer communities beat directories here. Dev.to (DR 91), Hacker News (DR 91) and StackShare (DR 79) reach people who evaluate by reading code, not screenshots.
• Lifetime deals. Deal marketplaces are their own world. AppSumo (DR 83), StackSocial (DR 73), SaaSPirate (DR 68) and Dealify (DR 59) all run on revenue share rather than a listing fee.

Two venues punish unprepared founders in particular, and both are worth understanding before you spend your one shot.

Reddit gives no patience to marketers. Posting a promo link into a community where you have no history gets you downvoted into invisibility or banned outright. It rewards genuine participation and account history, and most of its links are nofollowed, so treat it as a feedback channel that occasionally produces customers rather than as an SEO play.

Product Hunt rewards preparation, not product quality. The listings that finish near the top are the ones with supporters lined up before launch day, a 12:01 a.m. Pacific start to capture a full 24 hours of voting, and a founder answering every comment as it lands. Turning up cold wastes a shot you only get once.

“The cheapest launch is still expensive if nobody who matters is watching.” Alston Antony, founder of zplatform.ai and SaaS SEO consultant

Core Benefits and Growth Impacts

Directory submission does four separate jobs, and conflating them is why founders get disappointed by it.

Referral traffic, concentrated in the first week. Launch platforms are time boxed. A top finish on a daily leaderboard sends most of its traffic within 48 hours and then decays. The evergreen indexes in this table behave the opposite way, trickling visitors for years.

Link equity toward your commercial pages. 225 followed links from 33 different category contexts is a genuinely diversified profile for a new domain, which is harder to build any other way at this price.

Brand entity consistency. Search engines and AI assistants build confidence in what your product is by seeing the same name, description and category repeated across independent sites. Consistent listings are one of the cheapest ways to make that consensus exist.

AI answer visibility. Assistants that browse the web lean on structured, frequently updated indexes when asked “what is the best tool for X”. Being present in the large indexes puts your product inside the pool those answers are drawn from.

The honest caveat: none of this substitutes for a product page that deserves to rank. Directories accelerate a good page and do very little for a bad one.

“Founders ask me for the list because they think the list is the hard part. It isn’t. The hard part is stopping. I have watched teams burn three weeks submitting to two hundred directories when the first thirty carried almost all the authority, and the remaining hundred and seventy produced nothing except a full inbox and a lot of copy pasted descriptions.” Alston Antony, founder of zplatform.ai and SaaS SEO consultant

How do you decide which directories are worth it?

Work from Domain Rating down, take every free listing before any paid one, and stop when the DR drops below the level where a link still moves anything for you. For most SaaS products that floor is somewhere around DR 50, which is 43 plus 36 plus 68 sites of real work and nothing beyond it.

Tier one is the whole game: the 37 free listings at DR 70 or above. They cost nothing but the time to fill in a form, and they carry more weight than the entire bottom half of the table combined. Finish that tier completely before you consider spending anything.

Tier two is paid placement at DR 70 and above. Worth it when you have budget and the venue matches your category, pointless when you are buying a slot on a general index that has no audience for your product.

Tiers three and four are volume. Useful for entity consistency and for a brand new domain that needs a baseline, but the returns per hour fall off a cliff. If you are choosing between the last fifty submissions and one good comparison page, write the page.

If you would rather not do any of it by hand, our directory submission service runs the same list for you, and the SaaS SEO hub covers where submissions sit in a wider search program.

Do directory links still count in 2026?

Yes, when the directory is a real editorial venue with an audience. Google’s spam policies target links whose only purpose is manipulating rankings, which describes automated bulk submission to empty directories, not a listing on G2, Product Hunt or an established niche index that people genuinely browse.

The practical test is whether the directory would still exist if search engines did not. Capterra, AlternativeTo and SourceForge pass that test easily. A general web directory whose entire homepage is a list of categories nobody clicks does not, which is why the DR 30 floor on this list matters more than the raw count.

What does Domain Rating actually measure?

Domain Rating is Ahrefs’ 0 to 100 score for the strength of a domain’s backlink profile, calculated on a logarithmic scale. It measures link authority only. It says nothing about traffic, editorial quality or whether the site will approve your submission.

Because the scale is logarithmic, the gap between DR 80 and DR 90 is far larger than the gap between DR 30 and DR 40. That is the single most useful thing to understand when reading the table: the 25 entries at DR 80 and above are not marginally better than the rest, they are in a different category. You can check your own score with our free domain rating checker, and Ahrefs documents the DR metric in full.

The numbers worth quoting

Pulled from this dataset, checked August 7, 2026. Cite freely.

Metric	Value
Directories tracked at DR 30 and above	236
Reviewed and cut for falling below DR 30	112 of 348
Median Domain Rating	58
Directories at DR 70 or above	68 (29%)
Directories at DR 90 or above	10
Free listings	112 (47%)
Free or freemium listings	157 (67%)
Free listings that give a followed link	106
Followed links	225 (95%)
Nofollowed links	11
Paid venues below DR 50	29
Distinct categories represented	33

Frequently asked questions

How many SaaS directories should I actually submit to?

Between 30 and 50 for most products. That covers every free listing at DR 70 and above plus the strongest mid tier venues in your category. Past that point each additional submission costs the same 10 minutes and returns a fraction of the authority, so the time is better spent elsewhere.

Are paid directory listings worth the money?

Sometimes, and only above DR 70 where the venue matches your category. 66 directories on this list are paid only, but 29 of those sit below DR 50, where the same money buys more as content or ads. Exhaust the 37 free high authority listings first, then decide.

What is a good Domain Rating for a directory?

DR 50 is a reasonable floor and DR 70 is where links start carrying real weight. This database cuts off at DR 30 because below that the authority is negligible and the approval quality gets unpredictable. The median here is DR 58.

How long before directory submissions affect rankings?

Expect 4 to 12 weeks for the links to be discovered, indexed and reflected. Referral traffic from launch platforms arrives immediately and disappears within days, which is why the two benefits should be measured separately rather than judged together.

Can I submit the same description to every directory?

You can, and most founders do, but rewriting the first sentence per venue measurably improves approval rates on the editorial ones. The large indexes accept boilerplate. The curated venues in tier one are the ones that reject it.

Start at the top of the list

The 236 entries above are ordered so that the first hour of work is the most valuable hour. Take the free DR 70 and above listings first, add the paid venues only where the category genuinely matches, and treat everything under DR 50 as optional coverage rather than a growth channel. That is the whole method, and this SaaS directories list is built to be worked in exactly that order.

The dataset is refreshed as Domain Ratings move, most recently on August 7, 2026. If you want the submissions handled for you, start with the directory submission service. If you want to go deeper on the strategy behind it, read our guide to the best sites for directory submission or submit your own tool to be considered for the ZPlatform listing.