Enterprise Software Adoption in the European Union
Written by Mateus Rocha ·
Edited by Sebastiaan Smits ·
Fact-checked by Priya Nandakumar ·
Published September 14, 2026
Across the EU27, 11.34% of enterprises with 10 or more employees now pay for CRM software as a cloud service, up from 6.65% in 2018. ERP adoption followed a similar path, from 9.65% to 11.73%. The gap between the fastest- and slowest-adopting countries tracked here, however, has not closed.
Netherlands leads this comparison at 30.64% CRM adoption, more than four times France's 7.42%. That spread says more about each country's enterprise structure — the mix of small and large businesses, and how far cloud procurement has displaced on-premise software — than about any single vendor's reach.
Share of enterprises (10+ employees) using CRM or ERP as a paid cloud service
| Country | CRM 2023 | CRM 2018 | ERP 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Netherlands | 30.64% | 21.6% | 24.98% |
| Denmark | 30.42% | 22.75% | 33.02% |
| Sweden | 22.99% | 17.66% | 15.12% |
| Belgium | 21.15% | 16.0% | 23.87% |
| Ireland | 17.17% | 15.51% | 13.91% |
| Poland | 16.99% | 2.64% | 17.58% |
| Germany | 10.26% | 4.31% | 9.84% |
| Spain | 10.02% | 7.15% | 11.18% |
| Italy | 7.84% | 5.54% | 10.91% |
| France | 7.42% | 6.85% | 8.79% |
Reading the gap
The Netherlands and Denmark sit well ahead of Germany, France and Italy on both measures, despite the latter three having far larger enterprise populations overall. That is consistent with smaller, digitally mature economies moving core business software to the cloud faster than economies with a larger base of older, on-premise installations still amortising. See our CRM software rankings and ERP software rankings for the vendors behind these categories.