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As audiences for “The Last Jedi” die down, the U.S. prepares for another epic showdown, with far realer stakes than any lightsaber duel. After months and months of intercity tension, 2018 will bring the finale of Amazon: The Battle for HQ2.

For evidence of Amazon’s supremacy, look no further than its own Death Stars — three long-in-the-making “biospheres” smack dab in downtown Seattle. These extravagant, ultra-modern structures will serve as work and play centers for Amazon employees, a can’t-miss photo op for tourists and a punctuation mark on the company’s (and city’s) unprecedented rise. Amazon cleared the way for thousands of innovators and startups to settle in the Northwest, and the Emerald City has quickly become a tech mecca to rival Silicon Valley and its ilk.

Amazon now boasts more office space than Seattle’s next 40 biggest employers … combined. It’s brought 40,000 jobs to the area and tens of thousands more are projected in the next few years. As industries like coal fade into obscurity and tech marches forward, it’s easy to see why other big American markets are offering arms and legs for the chance to house Amazon’s upcoming second headquarters.

While we munch popcorn and watch the bidding war come to a head, Seattle takes a victory lap as Amazon’s main squeeze. There must be something in the Puget Sound water; the Seattle area’s business resume includes Microsoft, Nintendo, Starbucks and the “I Can Has Cheezburger” empire. The city landed at No. 5 on Cushman & Wakefield’s recent list of Top Tech Cities in the U.S and No. 2 on a similar list by CBRE. And, according to LinkedIn, the largest source of new workers to the city is the Bay Area. Research from Hired and Zillow, respectively, shows that expat software engineers from San Francisco on average make an extra $50,000 in Seattle and pay less than half the price to live there. In other words, tech workers can has way more cheezburger in Seattle, which helps explain the caliber of recent output — and the expectation that the best is yet to come.

“Seattle is a thriving hub for people who love new ideas, exchanging views and collaborating on innovation,” Jake Braly, vice president of marketing for Highspot, wrote in an email exchange. Highspot is currently the highest-rated Seattle-based software product, according to G2 Crowd users. “Over the past decade, the region’s identity has shifted away from a Microsoft-centric ecosystem to a vibrant tech hub and innovation center for cloud computing. This has spawned a throng of startups that are taking the cloud and SaaS (Software as a Service) to new areas and solving B2B challenges like security and digital transformation.”

Seattle’s recent contributions to B2B tech extend far beyond Amazon Web Services and lunchtime animal memes. Hundreds of software vendors take advantage of the city’s mild climate, lush surroundings and vast bounty of gourmet coffee to produce business products of all shapes and sizes. In addition to fortifying the more established B2B software spaces with exceptional products, Braly expects the region to play a big role in bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning further into the mainstream.

“We’ve seen a number of both startups and large enterprises that are going deep on AI and truly revolutionizing their industries,” Braly said. “We’ve only scratched the surface on what AI and machine learning can do. I expect we’ll see continued innovation in AI, developing more ‘real world’ applications across verticals and horizontals that will break new ground in enhancing productivity and competitive advantage.”

Tableau Software, a business intelligence developer, saw the appeals of Seattle at the beginning of the 2000s when opening its doors. The company now employs several thousand in the area and went public in 2013.

“Our founders decided to build Tableau in Seattle for a few reasons, but the primary reason was personal — Seattle is an excellent place to live, with a great outdoor culture and a vibrant startup and engineering community,” said Elissa Fink, the company’s chief marketing officer. “Since then, the region has seen incredible growth from homegrown companies like Apptio and Redfin, and from Silicon Valley companies like Oracle, Google, and Salesforce opening offices in the area. As these companies — and the talent they bring with them – continue to flock to Seattle, I expect to see an increase in tech investments coming out of the area in 2018, particularly in the cloud computing market.”

Safe money says we’ll continue to see success stories like Highspot and Tableau (and the Jeff Bezos crew) sprout from Seattle’s fertile soil. And as the city prepares for another exciting year of growth and invention, we’d like to provide a snapshot of the current landscape and acknowledge the city’s best B2B software exports, as judged by reviewers on G2 Crowd.

The list below is ordered by user satisfaction, and to qualify, a product was required to have at least 10 verified user reviews. For each product, we created a profile to give a snapshot of what it is and what it does, and to give some insight into the company behind it. All the data comes from G2 Crowd.com (and our 300,000-plus B2B software and services reviews), or from publicly available sources such as LinkedIn and Crunchbase. These 25 Seattle B2B companies are represented by 3,710 verified reviews from real users across a variety of categories, from Diagramming to SEO to Employee Engagement. Read more below about some of the companies playing a major role in the Seattle’s bustling tech environment.

Top B2B Seattle Tech in 2018

1. Highspot
2. Tableau Software
3. Amazon
4. Bizible
5. Zillow
6. PayScale
7. Hostwinds
8. PipelineDeals
9. Moz
10. Daminion
11. Outreach
12. Siftrock
13. Trakstar
14. Rhinoceros
15. Shiftboard
16. Slope
17. Panopto
18. Rival IQ
19. PicMonkey
20. Shippable
21. TINYpulse
22. The Omni Group
23. Marchex
24. Redfin
25. Tango Card

1. Highspot
Product: Highspot
Category: Sales Enablement
City: Seattle
Founded: 2012
Employees: 83

Since the last Grid^® Report for Sales Enablement, Highspot has jumped from a High Performer to a Leader, and is the most positively reviewed software in the category as of press time. As described on the vendor website, Highspot can help connect sales teams to effective content, optimize content and sales pitches, and present to customers while tracking engagement. The platform also integrates with major marketing and sales tools to leverage existing investments. Customers of Highspot include Sisense, Falcon.io and PayScale — another Seattle-bred software featured on this list.

2. Tableau Software
Product: Tableau Desktop
Category: Self-Service Business Intelligence
City: Seattle
Founded: 2003
Employees: 3,677

Tableau doesn’t mess around, with two offerings near the top of this list. As the No. 1 Leader on the Self-Service Business Intelligence Grid^®, and more than twice as many reviews as the next most-reviewed software in the category, Tableau Desktop has a hard-fought stature in its tech space. Intuitive drag-and-drop features help users around the world gain insights from their data without the need for technical assistance. Regarding this user-friendly component, user Jake D. wrote in their Tableau Desktop review, “Sure, there are other tools out there that have the same feature, but the implementation is superb. The Tableau team really hit the mark for overall business impact.”

3. Amazon.com
Product: Amazon EC2
Category: Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS)
City: Seattle
Founded: 1994
Employees: 218,077

The most popular offering on Amazon Web Services is a handy compliment to Amazon S3’s storage abilities and some other AWS products, which we’ll cover a little later. Amazon EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, is a “true virtual computing environment,” with a resizable capacity for launching web application instances and performing a wide range of tasks within the secure servers. EC2 is built to integrate with S3 and other AWS solutions to help businesses scale and streamline their operations. For help deploying the EC2 environment and connecting it with other cloud systems, you can reach out to Amazon EC2 consultants, which are also listed on G2 Crowd.

4. Bizible
Product: Bizible
Category: Attribution
City: Coventry
Founded: 2011
Employees: 118

Used by the likes of ADP, Act-On and Kaplan, Bizible is a robust marketing tool for revenue attribution and planning. The product website describes use cases for CMOs, demand gen, marketing ops, paid media and agencies, along with the laundry list of integrations (e.g., Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics, Eloqua) that helps simplify adoption for new users. As of press time, Bizible is a Leader in the Attribution, Marketing Analytics and Marketing Resource Management categories, with a stellar 4.8 out of 5 stars overall based on review scores.

5. Zillow
Product: Zillow
Category: Multiple Listing Service (MLS) Listing
City: Seattle
Founded: 2006
Employees: 1,285

Zillow is a go-to resource for families and businesses in the market for new property, and on the other end of the screen, real estate brokers and development companies (not to mention independent sellers) leverage the platform for creating listings and generating leads. It’s the far-and-away Leader of the MLS Listings category, and integrates with Trulia: a similar software product from the same developers and the only other Leader on the MLS Grid.

6. PayScale
Product: PayScale
Category: Compensation Management
City: Seattle
Founded: 2002
Employees: 452

PayScale helps crunch the numbers and construct salary plans for all current and incoming employees within an organization, including bonuses and wage adjustment ranges. It’s currently the best-reviewed product in G2 Crowd’s Compensation Management category. In addition to its professional features, PayScale offers a Pay Report tool that allows individuals to determine their own value as a employee, along with a helpful Salary Negotiation Guide. Managers can also take advantage of the website’s Compensation Research offerings, which includes gender pay gap studies and compensation best practices.

7. Hostwinds
Product: Hostwinds
Category: Website Hosting
City: Seattle
Founded: 2010
Employees: 18 [/cs_text][/cs_column][/cs_row][cs_row inner_container="true" marginless_columns="false" style="margin: 0px auto;padding: 0px;"][cs_column fade="false" fade_animation="in" fade_animation_offset="45px" fade_duration="750" type="1/1" style="padding: 0px;"][cs_text style="margin-top: 30px;"]Toward the bottom of the Hostwinds homepage you can see the vendor’s many merits on display, from review sites and tech publications alike. The company specializes in web hosting with “enterprise solutions, small business prices,” and considering that all 43 of its current reviews are from small business users, it seems to be attracting and satisfying the intended audience. Jana K. wrote in their Hostwinds review, “My friend has advised me to try them and I was pleasantly surprised with the level of their services. Their plans contain many useful resources which help me much in running my website smoothly and flawlessly. There are a lot of useful resources which I need for running my website and their tech staff is online any time I put a question, even at night hours. All in all they provide quality services which are worth every cent you pay for them.”

8. PipelineDeals
Product: PipelineDeals
Category: CRM
City: Seattle
Founded: 2006
Employees: 35

The Grid^® for CRM is perhaps the most crowded and contentious on G2 Crowd, and PipelineDeals has impressively garnered one of the highest Satisfaction scores in the bunch. The software’s product profile describes it as “the first sales productivity platform to combine sales engagement and CRM in one simple app,” while the company website declares the platform is “built by sales people, for sales people.” Glowing reviews are backed up by a 14-day free trial and 30-day, 100 percent satisfaction guarantee for a full refund, as detailed on the PipelineDeals website.

9. Moz
Product: Moz Local
Category: SEO
City: Seattle
Founded: 2004
Employees: 278

After its beginnings as an SEO consulting company in 2004, Moz now is now a standard-bearer in delivering impactful SEO software for businesses. Moz Local is designed for boosting local web presence and promoting one’s product or services in area-based searches. Features of the software include location data management, local SEO analytics and reputation management that monitors mentions across various review sites. For growing awareness in one’s community, Moz Local is a proven asset for thousands of diverse organizations. Moz Pro picks up where Moz Local leaves off, with an all-in-one SEO toolkit for boosting traffic and rankings on the grand scale.

10. Daminion
Product: Daminion
Category: Digital Asset Management
City: Seattle
Founded: 1994
Employees: 11

Izenda is a self-service, embedded BI tool built for software product teams. The product, which has 45 reviews on G2 Crowd, is modular (the portal can standalone or integrate, depending on your need), scalable, open with exposed REST API endpoints, and secure. Izenda received a High Performer badge in the Winter 2018 Embedded BI Grid^® Report and the Winter 2018 Self-Service BI Grid^® Report.

11. Outreach
Product: Outreach
Category: Email Tracking
City: Seattle
Founded: 2014
Employees: 253

For success-driven sales teams, Outreach provides the insights and functional assistance to help chase the always-shifting goalposts. Though only a few years old, this platform has quickly become a Leader in three different categories on G2 Crowd and claims the best overall Satisfaction score of any Seattle-born software. The main features of the sales engagement platform include sales sequences, sales rep workflows, and sales email templates and interaction tracking. To further assist sales individuals, the Outreach website offers a bevy of sales engagement resources including webinars and blogs.

12. Siftrock
Product: Siftrock
Category: Data Quality
City: Seattle
Founded: 2014
Employees: 4

Though it only has 15 reviews to begin 2018, Siftrock is off to a near-flawless start with 4.8 out of 5 stars overall. The platform offers email reply management tools, and can streamline your team’s email game with features like automatic detection of job changes, invalidation of out-of-date contacts, and pulling of contact information from email signatures. Marketing and demand gen leaders such as RingCentral, SurveyMonkey and HubSpot use Siftrock software to improve their data quality and the platform is currently a High Performer in the Data Quality category.