What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

Things that we pay for.

SQL Server: it's not cheap, but it's genuinely good. Live query plans, clustered columnstore indices, linked servers, rich SQL features.

Tableau: more than a dashboarding tool, it's actually a really good multivariate exploratory data analysis (EDA) tool. You can use it to visualize multidimensional data easily. I do use Jupyter (seaborn, plotly) and R (ggplot2) which are good, but Tableau lets you touch your data and move stuff around in a more fluid fashion. The UI lets you really interact deeply with your data. I find that on a new dataset, I can get usable results out of Tableau faster than if were to muck around with ggplot2's syntax, even though I'm familiar with the latter. There is a learning curve for Tableau though, especially around how to structure your data for visualization (you have to think in SQL-like operations). It's not just dragging-and-dropping -- a certain mindset is required.

Active Directory: it's just there. It's pretty decent.

Visual Studio: I don't use this every day, but I do maintain a complex C# codebase from time to time (among other things), and Visual Studio (not VS Code! though I like VS Code too) is genuinely a pleasant IDE. I'm a big fan of the C# language and the integration with dev tooling is unparalleled e.g. solid refactoring, peeks, referencing, Intellisense, etc. The IDE supplies a ton of guards to help avoid human errors.

Splunk: it's good. Not the cheapest though.

Surprised by the answers given here. If I hear 'enterprise', I'm thinking SAP, IBM, Oracle. SAS etc., not some dev environments or niche tools.

Datadog - the amount of observability we have in our infrastructure is insane.

I can find out what’s wrong within a few seconds.

I've tried not to be impressed by airtable, but their on the fly API documentation generators for how you configure things still feels like black magic.

Every time I want to be dismissive of the product, it's exceeded what I believed to be an extremely unlikely to meet set of expectations.

They've clearly got some pretty competent people. I'd love to draft them somehow

Beyond that, the services of namecheap Ava digital ocean. They clearly have developers who rely on the product. All the elements are there and they work well.

Azure's python libraries I find way easier than AWS's boto3, which for some reason always reminds me of dbus programming. I keep meaning to try Google's bud I haven't yet.

I also have been meaning to write one that somehow transparently uses things like rsync/scp with some partitioning strategy so you can migrate say a personal project costing you $50/month, generating you $0 and used by only a few dozen people to potentially a lot less.

(I've got numerous large scale efforts that almost nobody uses...)

Cisco's Duo Security MFA product.

It Just Works™. Which you'd just take for granted with something as simple as MFA, but we had two previous enterprise products that were garbage. Duo just does its thing, gets out of the way, and I can keep working.

It is one of those things you appreciate because you never think about it.

1) Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 2) SnagIt 3) SSMS 4) Microsoft Azure Services 5) Microsoft Azure DevOps 6) Postman

there a bunch of other tools I use/love but I'm not sure they would qualify as 'enterprise', but here they are just in case:

VScode, notepad++, Agent Ransack, code compare, Dark reader chrome extension, Fork (git-client tool for MacOS),linqPad

LanSweeper. It's the primary asset tracker/scanner we use for our local network of over 3000 network devices. It can read switch data to even provide a means of finding what port a device is connected to on a switch. Combine with ArcGIS to physically trace thousands of network cables and hundreds of fiber trunks and runs, we're able to have immediate access/knowledge of where any asset is located virtually and physically as well as the entire physical path between each point. These two tools have allowed us to migrate from knowledge only being saved in the memory of a few individuals to being preserved via documentation.

I love using Tableau. It has completely changed the way I analyze data -- things that would have taken me a minute or two in Excel takes literally seconds in Tableau.

1) nimbletext. when clients send me excel sheets with tons of data to import i would generate insert statements in the sheets themselves. this is a painful experience. Then i found out about nimbletext. its pure joy to use.

2) jailer. I'm a visual kind of guy. so this makes database analysis very easy.

3) onenote. if only it had Linux app i would use it for personal use.

4) visual studio 2019. customized to the bone to be uber productive

5) Autohotkey. got a ms 4000 ergonomic keyboard and binding all keys a journey in itself

I'll stop right here but i have tons of other tools i really enjoy using.

https://datastudio.google.com/

When you've maxed out on what you can do with spreadsheets.

For me, I have to say it, it's MS Outlook. I do e-mail all day every day and I use VBA macros and all sorts of shortcuts to make it very useful. Love it.

I've been enamored by Pipedream (https://pipedream.com) because as a Product Manager with engineering background, I can quickly hack together prototypes and get good feedback from customers :) . Pretty sure there are other nocode software but this is great for me.

Two:

- UltraEdit. What Photoshop is to images, UltraEdit is to text. The weird thing is, it’s not a super flashy or even immediately intuitive tool. But once you get the hang of it, it never fails to deliver.

- Excel. It’s insane the breadth of stuff you can do with it. And as a tool, it’s equally handy and “oh my God this will save me so much work” for a school teacher as it is for a data analyst and stock broker. It sort of scales infinitely, there is always one more level of complexity/usefulness to unlock.

* Looker (most usable BI tool I’ve come across so far)

* DataDog (distributed tracing is a dream)

* IntelliJ (idea, goland, pycharm, clion, datagrip)

* MindNode (macOS-only mind-mapping software)

Recently started using smart sheets, but on the fence about this one so far.

GrabCAD. It's free, simple cloud-based version control for CAD files. I don't think they actually offer an enterprise (on-prem) version anymore but I would still consider it enterprise software.

The only alternatives are network shares filled with v1_v2_final_edited filenames and very expensive, SAP-level of complexity and JIRA-style approval workflows.

Unfortunately they are owned by Stratasys, the Oracle of 3D printing and the product is barely maintained. When it was acquired they made it free. It was meant to become the github (in terms of de facto standard for public repositories) of 3D CAD, and be an inroad to 3D printer / 3D printing service sales. But that aspect never took off, Stratasys is bleeding marketshare and an at any time I expect to login and see that the service is discontinued.

Getting off-topic but I'm interested to see if there are any replies:

For all software engineers reading this, I can't state how behind other engineering disciplines are compared to software. The equivalent to git or SVN or even CVS never appeared as standard practice and there is barely any middle ground between no version control whatsoever and formal change control boards (which is no version control whatsoever except at a few milestones and if you're lucky you can verify a change to the milestone by checking a paper or dvd).

Outside of software, academic spin-offs tend to start with good practices, such as markdown or latex files for documentation, which work well with version control, but never seem to make it more than 5 years before they reach a state of no control / word documents.

Electrical CAD is becoming better, with more software-background hobbyist and more open source tools arriving. It helps that design files and manufacturing files started to converge in the 80s due to early automation and thus tend to be text-based and diffable. Mechanical CAD on the other hand tends to be somewhat incompatible between vendors and binary in nature. The open source alternatives (FreeCAD and OpenSCAD) are a decade away from providing 1990s features and hobbyists have free licenses to proprietary software (eg Fusion 360) so there is very little pressure to make a good tools in the open source world.

JIRA. It's powerful, customizable, flexible and drives workflows and productivity across millions of companies around the world. It's the SAP of issue tracking. Despite all the baggage, they still try continuously to improve the UX of the software so it stays relevant and relatively usable.

There's definitely problems with it (its performance can be awful and require dedicated server clusters to keep it up at larger orgs), but come on let's be honest, it's a huge success story and lets orgs do things "their way" with project management and software development.

Trace32 & the Lauterbach JTAG. Expensive, but intuitive, scriptable, and performant.

I think Slack is the only enterprise software that I use every day and don't hate.

Any Jetbrains IDE - take my money

Okta - Just works, good UI

Workday - I seem to be in the minority but the clean UI + generally decent tooling allows for a decent deal to be in there

Splunk is an incredible tool. It is powerful, fast, and just a joy to use. The skill floor is low and the ceiling is high. Only minor complaint is the APIs have essentially no documentation if you want to interact with it programmatically (yes, there is some documentation, but it only covered like 10-20% of the interface last time I looked).

Everything I've used from Hashicorp has been good once you learn it. Vault is better than anything that came before it. Terraform is better than anything that came before it. Packer is excellent. Gonna try using consul connect for my next project. The learning curve is pretty steep on these things, but they are definitely force multipliers.

I'm also gonna say Eclipse. It seems to get a lot of hate, but I've used it so much for so long that it feels very natural. I've mostly switched to VSCode, but that is more a function of moving on to new languages that are better supported in VSCode.

Excel, Box, and Zoom. Would vote for Cloudability as well, but that's not something that I use anywhere near every day.

Weird but i like Outlook Web, very good replacement for GMail with it's endless "ui improvements".

Clubhouse for managing the software development. It’s really snappy which I love. Sentry.io for handling all exceptions from applications and mobile devices in one place.

PagerDuty is generally pretty good, but I haven't used VictorOps or OpsGenie so I can't compare.

Confluence. It's so easy to organise information and documentation now for technical projects. Of course its free form so people can be messy with it, but done right, and with the good plugins, like draw.io it's really powerful. Integrates very well with JIRA also.

Odoo ERP. Select the apps (Sales, CRM, Newsletter etc.) you need and profit from great integrations. Gets rid of all those data back and forth between independent applications. You can also create your own apps.

Autodesk Revit 2020. Although it does have it's quirks, it is a very powerful modeling program.

Matlab: Great for prototyping and tinkering.

Lotus Notes. You can build your whole application in it, isn't that just great?

Absolutely loved SumoLogic for the six years or so we used it. Threw terabytes of logs at them a month and searches were always fast. Being able to do joins on logs was a godsend. I tried to work there but it seemed like they stopped hiring for a while.

Now I use Loggly... It's okay.

IDEA's IDEs as others have mentioned.

I've built enterprise software I enjoyed using (reputation.com), does that count? :)

Jira. My only pet-peeves are:

* it breaks native keyboard shortcuts. After disabling the shortcut overrides in settings, "/" is a NOP (which is weird, since disabling the overrides worked in Confluence)

* the markup is non-standard (but I can live with it)

* sometimes it will log me out when I want to post a comment and all of what I wrote in the comment box gets lost

Superhuman. It's the only software I use at work that I pay for myself because it makes dealing with email so much less painful. To the point that it's actually almost enjoyable clearing out my inbox. The ability to do absolutely everything from the keyboard and being so responsive really makes a huge difference.

Vivado. It's for FPGA design, and I while do ASIC design, but I use vivado to visualise my RTL structure. I find it better than any of the major EDA vendors RTL schematic viewers (except perhaps starvision). I know people rag on Vivado for other reasons, but it's visualisation is fantastic!

- TortoiseSVN/TortoiseGit make everything a snap when it comes to repository work. I can’t recommend these enough.

- Agent Ransack is a GUI for findstr. Much nicer to use than the one in Notepad++.

- VS 2019 is incredible. I weep for the parallel universe where we’re all stuck using Eclipse for everything.

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, I'll throw in Nagios. Having had to roll and maintain an in-house solution with similar functionality before, Nagios is a huge breath of fresh air.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is also awesome. I wish we could have 8, but that's not quite in the pipeline yet. The distro is crazy stable. With the Extras, Optionals, EPEL, etc. repositories enabled you get access to almost all of the best software in the Linux ecosystem.

Ansible, particularly Red Hat Ansible Engine, is also amazing for managing all of my Red Hat servers. I couldn't imagine doing half of my job by hand, as nothing would ever really get done. With Ansible you just fire off a playbook and relax.

I'm not sure it counts as enterprise software, but Fiberstore is one of the best websites I've ever interacted with. It's clearly laid out, gives recommendations, and is quick and simple. I make weekly purchases and it's always easy.

Microsoft Outlook. Seriously.

I can list gripes for days, and I wish thunderbird would integrate with all the features of exchange better, but I don't know how anyone gets by work with webmail. I feel such a lack of control in my personal gmail box.

Would be helpful to clarify what you mean by enterprise software (certainly the answers name software that I don't consider fitting that category).

Do you mean Enterprise Resources Planning systems like SAP R/3 v. Oracle Applications?

Basecamp. Incredibly thoughtful design, radically reduces stress and confusion.

Google CloudSearch against our GSuite data. It’s impressive how much better it is at searching our Drive and Docs content compared to those tools’ own search. Burrowing into Gmail for results is also handy.

Although I don't use it anymore since I've changed jobs, for me it would be Appian. For people not familiar with it checkout my description in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583081

Beyond it's shortcomings it's something I'd gladly pay for (if I needed it of course) because it can't really be replaced by something free / opensource.

imho.

dynatrace - expensive as hell, but really really useful for large organisations if you are operating your own software and depend on its functionality - read: financial biz etc.

- Burp Suite Pro: MitmProxy, Postman, ZAP just don't compare. The extensions API and library are top notch and the community is really thriving atm. The only downside that I can think of is that occasionally a release will suffer from what seems like a memory leak. Projects can consume upwards of 15G ram and 100% allcore CPU spikes are not uncommon. Something, something, Java.

Algolia - search as a service

A few great security-related products we use:

- Hashicorp Vault (secret management)

- Duo Security (2FA)

- StrongDM (Database authentication and auditing)

IntelliJ, PyCharm, and the git to docker deployment service that I built myself for my companies.

RStudio, server and connect are such a treat to interact with compared to anaconda entreprise.

I love Wavefront for metrics and Sumologic for log queries. They make troubleshooting and monitoring thousands of servers a pleasure.

Both have excellent UIs and they are truly powerful.

Avoid any Graffana based solutions, the only good thing I can say about them is that they are free.

I have fond memories of SecureCRT as an ssh terminal on windows and Mac. It works on Linux too however.

It was just better than the regular ssh client.

Really worth it's price, if anything because you can create a set of sessions and share them with all your colleagues.

Linux. Man I love Linux, but I don't just use it in my enterprise environment. Linux also powers my smartphone, my home server, my HTPC and apparently also my EdgeRouter X so probably even more of my life I don't even know about.

There are two tools nobody mentioned yet.

DbVisualizer -> best GUI for databases, you learn it well and use for all databases

Editpad -> fastest text editor I’ve ever seen with bunch of useful features and terrific regex (see regexbuddy from the same author)

Outlook? I'd say Excel but these days I don't use it every day.

Excel

I had to dig deep for this since I'm a FOSS specialist and advocate. But if you're going to count softwares that I depend on then Active Directory and vCenter come to mind.

These days we are mostly collaborating on Microsoft Teams.

Only GitHub

Burp Suite https://portswigger.net/burp

Workplace by Facebook. Not kidding, I like it.

https://about.sourcegraph.com/

Not Jira. Hahahahaha.

Splunk! If only it didn't cost an arm and a leg. No other solution, open or closed comes close.

Second best: Office 365

MS Office, of course (no pun intended).

JetBrains CLion. It's by far the best C/C++/Rust IDE I've found. Much nicer than Visual Studio (refactorings especially), very capable out of the box, good plugin ecosystem, surprisingly fast (obviously slower to start than vim/sublime/etc but plenty fast once running), and way nicer than the afterthoughts most chip vendors provide.

Visual Studio Professional, ActiveDirectory, PrimeKey EJBCA and OpenLimit CC Sign.

They work really well

Phabricator

ITRS Geneos for environment monitoring. I just wish they built *BSD binaries.

gitlab, metabase, graylog, TICK (telegraf, influxdb, chronograf, kapacitor)

Gramerlie

We use Dremio for queries on S3. Years ahead of Athena.

Fastmail and Trello.

BigQuery, Snowflake and Splunk for data analysis.

Roadmunk - fantastic, simple roadmapping tool

asana, looker, google sheets, vscode

Sisense (formerly Periscope)

Node.js

Windows 10

Probably gitlab on premise

TL;DR developers like developer tools.

Everything pivotal

hubspot, zendesk.

gramerlie

Jetbrains IntelliJ. I use it for html, JS, CSS, Vue, node.js, Python, Java, SQL, etc. I’ve tried visual studio and some other IDEs, but find intellij to be superior in every way.

Beyond Compare.

I find this tool very very useful when you have lots of integration job. If you have an enterprise version, then you can do stuff like compare and merge files across two servers, compare PDFs, ZIPs, JAR, and obviously plain text files. This is a tool for which I definitely ask for an Enterprise Version license whenever I join a new organization.

I don't know if it counts as enterprise software but I use Jetbrains' products everyday. Goland, IntelliJ and PyCharm are great tools.

Does VSCode count? That's the first IDE to make me switch from Vim. I was reluctant at first, but now I feel lost without it.

For saas, probably Workday. I really enjoy it compared to what we had used prior.

I mostly use Sage Business Cloud X3 software which is one of the best enterprise software.

Salesforce

None, pretty much everything that has enterprise in its name is a nuisance to me.