Sustainability Management Software

The first edition of this category a buyer can check

Every prior version of this page had to work around the same problem. Forrester published a placement for each vendor, and the reasoning behind the placement stayed with the placement. A buyer could learn that a product was a Leader and not learn what it scored on any of the criteria that produced the result.

The Q3 2026 edition closes that gap. Forrester has published the full scorecard alongside the graphic: seventeen criteria, the weight each one carries, and every evaluated vendor's score on each one. A Wave has always been two-dimensional, plotting current offering against strategy. This time the arithmetic underneath the two dimensions is readable, which means the placements can be checked rather than accepted.

Checking them is what follows, and it changes what the three boxes mean.

The Forrester Wave: Sustainability Management Software, Q3 2026, and the eight it scored

Abhijit Sunil led the evaluation, with three contributors. Sunil runs Forrester's sustainability management, climate risk and IT sustainability research.

The report scored eight providers against seventeen criteria: eleven in current offering and six in strategy. Customer feedback is not scored. It appears as a halo on a vendor's marker where reference customers were more positive than average, and a double halo where Forrester considers the vendor a Customer Favorite.

Vendors submitted materials by 19 June 2026 and the placements were public from 17 September 2026.

Watershed, Workiva and Salesforce placed as Leaders. Persefoni AI, Sweep and Sphera placed as Strong Performers. SAP and Microsoft placed as Contenders. A companion Landscape, published in Q1 2026, covers vendors that did not meet the inclusion bar, which requires at least USD 40 million in annual revenue from the product over the trailing four quarters and at least half of revenue from North America and EMEA.

Half the field, and seven fewer criteria

The Q2 2024 edition scored thirteen providers against twenty-four criteria. The Q3 2026 edition scores eight against seventeen.

Two numbers moving in the same direction, in a market whose regulatory driver also narrowed across the same period, describe a category contracting on both sides at once. Part of that is deliberate, since a revenue floor removes vendors by design. Part of it is acquisition, and the consolidation is in the report's own vendor descriptions rather than in a section about consolidation.

Watershed "has acquired or absorbed capabilities and customers from companies such as VitalMetrics and Emitwise." Workiva expanded its carbon management capabilities through its 2024 acquisition of Sustain.Life. Persefoni AI acquired Diligent's carbon accounting and ESG customer business in 2025. Sphera's list includes riskmethods, thinkstep and SupplyShift. Salesforce expanded through Informatica and Momentum.

The 2024 Leader rung is the clearest measure of what two years did. Watershed, FigBytes and Persefoni all placed as Leaders. Watershed now holds the highest score on both axes. Persefoni is a Strong Performer. FigBytes is not in the field at all: AMCS acquired the company in October 2023 and folded the product into its own portfolio. Three Leaders became one, one and none.

One of the three Leaders did not submit to the process

The methodology section carries a sentence that changes how three of the eight placements should be read: Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP declined to participate in the full Forrester Wave evaluation process.

For vendors in that position, Forrester uses primary and secondary research, drawing on public information, briefings and independently sourced customer interviews, and it states that it may also rely on estimates to score them. SAP and Microsoft did not provide reference customers. Salesforce reached the Leaders rung on that basis.

Three things are true at once, and the useful reading holds all three. The disclosure is real, complete and a few clicks into the report. A placement produced without a vendor's participation is not the same artifact as one produced with it. And declining is not concealment, because a Wave costs a product team weeks and discloses roadmap and pricing detail to a firm that will publish its assessment either way.

What follows for a buyer is narrow and practical. The name in the top-right box is a statement about where Forrester placed a vendor given what it could establish. For five of the eight, that includes what the vendor submitted. For Workiva and Watershed, it does. For Salesforce, SAP and Microsoft, it does not.

Where the boxes and the numbers disagree

The scorecard separates two questions the graphic merges: how strong the product is, and how strong the vendor's direction is. Watershed scores 3.98 on current offering and 4.00 on strategy. Workiva scores 3.80 and 3.60. Persefoni AI scores 3.54 and 3.40. Sweep scores 3.44 and 3.00. Sphera scores 3.32 and 3.00. Salesforce scores 3.32 and 3.70. SAP scores 1.66 and 1.90, and Microsoft 1.24 and 1.40.

Salesforce's placement illustrates the mechanic. Its current offering score sits below the Strong Performer Persefoni AI at 3.54 and below Sweep at 3.44. It reaches the Leaders rung because the horizontal axis is strategy, and its strategy score of 3.70 is the second highest in the field behind only Watershed. A buyer reading the box as a product ranking will read it wrong. A buyer reading the two numbers gets the claim the placement is actually making: a mid-field product with a top-tier roadmap.

The weights matter as much as the scores. Audit and compliance carries 15 percent of current offering, tied with ROI calculation. Pricing flexibility and transparency carries 20 percent of strategy, tied with supporting services and offerings. Those four criteria, two about money and one about assurance readiness, account for a large share of where every vendor lands.

On pricing flexibility and transparency, the joint-heaviest strategy criterion, exactly one vendor scored superior: Persefoni AI. SAP scored 1.00 and the other five scored 3.00, which in Forrester's scale means at par with the others evaluated. On audit and compliance, likewise, exactly one vendor scored superior, and it is Workiva.

Customer feedback separates from placement in a way worth noticing. Only two vendors carry a halo, and both are Strong Performers: Persefoni AI and Sweep. No vendor is a Customer Favorite, and none of the three Leaders carries a halo. That is not a contradiction, since the halo is relative to the other seven and reference customers are not a product score. It does mean the vendors whose customers were most positive are not the vendors in the top-right box.

The criterion nobody scores superior on

Environmental risk assessment carries one of the lightest weights in the current offering group, at 5 percent. Across eight vendors, the highest score anyone achieved is 3.00, which is par. Nobody scored above it, and four of the eight scored 1.00, including both of the two highest-scoring products in the evaluation.

Forrester says as much in its own text. For Watershed, "Environmental risk assessment remains a clear portfolio gap." For Workiva, "Relative weaknesses include reliance on specialist consultants for quantitative physical climate environmental risk assessment."

Four vendors reached par: Persefoni AI, Salesforce, Sphera and Sweep. At least one of them reaches par through partners, which the report states plainly for Sweep, noting that it "relies on specialist partners for multicriteria LCA and environmental product declaration simulation capabilities."

A buyer who needs quantitative physical climate risk modeling is therefore not selecting among these eight. They are selecting an adjacent market or a consultancy, and the adjacent market is covered as its own category. This page's companion on Climate Risk Analytics Software is where that requirement belongs.

The estimation problem from the previous version of this page survives into the new scoring. Supplier engagement and Scope 3, weighted 9 percent, is where it shows up. Persefoni AI and Sphera score superior on it. Watershed, the highest-scoring vendor overall, sits at par.

The questions a scorecard cannot settle

Forrester's buying guidance has moved onto ground this page occupied two years ago. The report tells buyers to "design around a durable data foundation, not a single regulation," adding that "reporting mandates and their scope have proven mercurial over time; expect that they will change after you select a platform."

That is the earlier version of this page's conclusion arriving as methodology. The SEC's climate disclosure rules were stayed and then left undefended. California's disclosure laws faced challenge with implementation timing contested. The EU's simplification package cut the number of companies in scope and deferred obligations for others. A purchase justified by a deadline was always a purchase with a date on it.

Two further items of guidance are worth carrying into a conversation. Forrester tells buyers to "make data quality and assurance readiness the buying threshold," and to involve the audit team early, on the reasoning that almost all global reporting regulations require audited data. And it tells them to "evaluate AI as a controlled process, not a standalone feature," requiring that outputs "flow into existing workflows with visible confidence indicators, source traceability, review and approval steps, and auditable records of every AI-generated change."

The report's own line is that AI streamlines reporting while defensible disclosure remains difficult. Four questions follow, and none of them is answered by a placement.

What proportion of the figure you will report comes from supplier-specific data rather than spend-based estimation, and what will the platform do to raise that proportion next year. This is the difference between a number you can defend and a number that moves when prices move.

When an AI system prepares a number, can you show the source document, the reviewer and the approval without leaving the platform.

What is the exit cost. Carbon accounting is converging, which is why Forrester weights pricing flexibility and transparency so heavily. Ask what renewal looks like at your current data volume and entity count.

And which of the seventeen criteria you actually need. A buyer who needs quantitative physical climate risk should be looking at the adjacent category. A buyer who needs assurance-grade disclosure for a controllership or a finance function should weight the two heaviest assurance criteria, audit and compliance and support for materiality and gap assessments, ahead of the composite, where the superior scores are concentrated in a single vendor.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy. Regulatory positions described here change frequently and should be verified against current sources.

Worth reading alongside ESG Data And Analytics Providers: ask two ESG rating providers to score the same company and they can reach opposite conclusions. That single fact explains why Forrester quietly dropped the word ratings from this category's name.