Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: November 19, 2025
Zoho introduced a series of enhancements to Zoho One, aimed at delivering a more unified and context-aware user experience across its suite of over 50 applications. The updates center on new “Spaces” that organize apps by individual, organizational, and departmental use cases; an Action Panel and Quick Navigation that consolidate tasks and streamline movement across the platform; and flexible Dashboards and Boards that merge data from native and third-party tools into contextual, analytics-driven views. The new features also include Vani, a visual collaboration environment for brainstorming and planning, as well as an expanded set of native integrations—ranging from unified connection management to multi-step, outcome-based workflows, such as Smart Offboarding—to enhance administrative efficiency and cross-application coordination.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Zoho introduced significant updates to Zoho One focused on delivering a unified, context-aware experience through customizable “Spaces,” centralized task management via the Action Panel, and faster platform navigation.
- New Dashboards and Boards consolidate data from native and third-party apps, enabling users to build context-specific, analytics-driven views directly within their workflows.
- The platform adds Vani, a visual-first collaboration environment for brainstorming, diagramming, whiteboarding, and video communication, creating a fully integrated virtual workspace for team ideation.
- AI capabilities have been expanded with deeper Zia integration, including Zia Hubs for centralized company intelligence and an enhanced Ask Zia experience that provides contextual, cross-app insights to support decision-making.
The News: Zoho announced a variety of new enhancements to Zoho One, the company’s all-in-one business software platform. Zoho One currently includes more than 50 applications, with Zoho noting that customers use an average of more than 22 apps each. The company’s platform enhancements focus on providing a unified experience characterized by seamless integrations, contextual awareness, and a more streamlined collaborative experience.
Zoho’s new user experience centers on a connected, context-aware environment built around “Spaces” that group applications by purpose. Personal Spaces house individual productivity tools, whereas Organizational Spaces support company-wide communication. Similarly, Departmental Spaces organize function-specific apps. These Spaces can be customized, while unified elements such as search and settings ensure consistency across applications.
To streamline daily work, the Action Panel aggregates tasks, approvals, and action items from all Zoho apps into a single view, reducing the need to jump between applications. Quick Navigation further accelerates movement across the platform, allowing users to reach any tool or workflow in just a few clicks.
Dashboards and Boards break down the traditional boundaries between applications by consolidating information from both native and third-party apps. Through customizable widgets and analytics-powered dashboards, users can assemble Boards that surface context-specific views—such as unified personal, group, and project-related task boards—directly within the applications where they work.
The platform also introduces Vani, a new visual-first collaboration environment designed for brainstorming, diagramming, whiteboarding, and video communication. This addition creates an all-in-one virtual space for planning and innovation, enriching teamwork with a tightly integrated, multimodal collaboration layer.
Zoho offers several categories of native integrations tailored to administrative efficiency and cross-application workflows. Unified integrations provide a centralized panel for managing all connections across the Company and third-party apps. Foundational integrations enable a Unified Portal that consolidates individual app portals, while pragmatic integrations—such as centralized domain verification—simplify technical setup. Furthermore, outcome-based integrations support multi-step workflows, illustrated by the new Smart Offboarding tool that orchestrates tasks across departments and applications.
AI Enabled Across the Platform
Zoho’s AI assistant, Zia, is now prominently featured across all of Zoho One, allowing users to benefit from aggregated intelligence.
Zia Hubs, Zoho’s intelligent content management system, is now a dedicated component within Zoho One, serving as a central hub for company intelligence. This integration includes pre-configured, dedicated workflows designed to maximize the utility of business data. For instance, both executed contracts from Zoho Sign and recorded conversations from Zoho Meeting are automatically filed into Zia Hubs folders, making contract specifics and relevant discussion details readily accessible via a Zia Search.
Furthermore, Ask Zia is being made more accessible by placing it in the bottom toolbar. This positioning will enable fast, prompt-based searches. Ask Zia pulls relevant data from across multiple Zoho applications to construct a complete view of a user’s activities, such as their schedule, unfinished tasks, or recent action items from meetings. Due to the deep integration of the wide range of apps within Zoho One, Ask Zia is able to provide highly contextual intelligence, which is designed to support and guide decision-making fueled by all relevant data.
Will Zoho One Enhancements Drive More Confidence Among Enterprise Customers?
Analyst Take: Zoho One has been considered a feature-rich and cost-effective all-in-one platform that can meet the needs of companies within the SMB and mid-market space. The company’s application and technology stack are robust, feature-rich, and, perhaps most notably, priced at a level where ROI is attainable for smaller and growing companies.
However, the perception of Zoho, and, by extension, its Zoho One platform, as a value play undercuts the significant capabilities of the platform. And as such, despite wanting to attract attention and business from large enterprises, the company has largely not been included in the same discussions as other large SaaS vendors, though exceptions do exist.
The enhancements announced this week are further evidence that Zoho is taking the right steps to position its Zoho One platform as being enterprise-grade, without the enterprise-level price tag. The company that even with the new features, pricing for Zoho One remains at $37 per user, per month.
Zoho’s new native integrations and its Dashboards and Boards are the two categories of enhancements that will likely draw the attention of enterprise buyers seeking a more affordable enterprise software platform.
Despite Zoho’s (and really, all SaaS vendors’) hopes that an organization will conduct a complete migration to their platform, the reality is that enterprise application technology stacks will continue to be heterogeneous. The integration of third-party applications, systems, and data are key to enabling seamless workflows and the use of AI and AI agents across an organization. Zoho’s efforts around providing more native integrations should be well-received by customers and prospects alike.
Zoho’s New Dashboards and Boards are also interesting because they are designed to help users view and interact with data in context, which is more intuitive and in line with how modern work is being done. Few workers want to open and switch between multiple applications to view, verify, or work with related data; these tools appear to enable users to surface and interact with relevant information directly within the applications where they work. This is an enterprise-grade capability that will only become even more important as agentic AI workflows are integrated with human workflows.
Zoho’s biggest challenge is with the perception of its offerings as being more focused on SMB or mid-market organizations. While they are leveling up with features, Zoho may need to consider re-segmenting its product offerings into separate tiers that clearly target specific customers to demonstrate its commitment to each customer group’s needs.
What to Watch:
- Pay attention to how quickly Zoho’s new enterprise-grade features—especially Dashboards, Boards, and expanded native integrations—translate into greater traction among large enterprises that have historically viewed Zoho as an SMB-focused vendor.
- Monitor adoption and effectiveness of Zia, Zia Hubs, and Ask Zia as organizations evaluate whether Zoho’s contextual AI capabilities materially improve productivity, decision-making, and cross-app intelligence.
- Track whether Zoho can successfully overcome its “value-play” reputation and reposition Zoho One as a credible, lower-cost alternative to major SaaS platforms; the introduction of potential tiered packaging could be a signal.
- Keep an eye on customer feedback around the usability and efficiency gains of Spaces, the Action Panel, Smart Offboarding, and multi-step integrations—especially in heterogeneous enterprise environments where seamless interoperability is critical.
See the complete release highlighting the Zoho One platform’s new enhancements at the Zoho website.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
