Acumatica VS. NetSuite: Ali Vs. Frazier?

If you’re currently wondering if Acumatica or NetSuite is a better ERP for your business, you are most definitely not alone. Acumatica VS. NetSuite is a debate that has sprung up in recent years along with Acumatica’s recent rise to notoriety. It seems that for the foreseeable future, these two ERP platforms will be slugging it out for market share as they both have put the rest of the competition in the rearview and are now standing toe-to-toe.

These solutions are in the same category but do have their differences. To best determine if NetSuite or Acumatica is right for your business, this article will compare them on functionality, pricing model, and customer satisfaction.

A Tale of the Tape

Before we get into the heavy-hitting stuff, let’s take a second to compare some metrics about these two platforms to give an overview of what they bring to the ring.

Acumatica

Overview: Cloud-based ERP and business management solution

Years in Business: 17, found in 2004

Customers: Over 6,200

Target Market: Small to medium-sized businesses in the Professional Services, Software, Manufacturing, Distribution, Retail, and Construction industries

NetSuite

Overview: Cloud-based ERP and business management solution

Years in Business: 22, found in 1998

Customers: Over 25,000

Target Market: Medium to Enterprise-sized businesses in the Manufacturing, Distribution, Retail, Advertising, Nonprofit, and Software industries

As the metrics bare out, NetSuite is an older company with a broader focus and more customers. While Acumatica is a smaller, younger company with a more narrow focus and target market.

Functionality

When it comes to functionality, both of the platforms are packed with features. With NetSuite’s enterprise target market, it tends to have more robust functionality for specific industries. However, Acumatica does still provide plenty of utility, and in few circumstances, will it come up short for businesses within its target market.

Acumatica VS NetSuite Financials

Acumatica VS NetSuite Distribution

Acumatica VS NetSuite Ecommerce/Retail

Acumatica VS NetSuite Professional Services

Beyond these broader categories, NetSuite and Acumatica offer a wide range of features that cater to specific industries. Making direct comparisons for these features is not possible so if you are a part of industries such as construction, software, nonprofit, or advertising, I suggest you dig a little deeper into the specific features each platform offers to provide a better picture of how these two compare for you.

Comparing features, in general, can get out of hand pretty quickly as both platforms are bursting with potential. The only way to choose a winner is to have an idea of what your business needs now and will need in the future and see which platform can meet those needs best.

Pricing and Licensing

With features and functionality, the two tend to be pretty even and maybe a slight advantage goes to NetSuite. Pricing and Licensing are a whole different story. Acumatica lands most of its knock-out punches based on its pricing and licensing model. This is not just based on raw numbers alone, even though most of the time, Acumatica is the less expensive platform. It’s also because of the flexibility and the way Acumatica scales with your business.

NetSuite’s pricing model is pretty straightforward; choose the features you like, then choose how many users you’ll have, and then you’ll get a quote.

The problem with this is every time you want to add new users to the system, you’ll have to pay more. However, users are an arbitrary metric related to the actual growth of your company. You may need the same amount of users as a business 1/3 your size in revenue. And in the future, you may need to add more users even though your bottom line has not changed.

Acumatica takes a more thorough approach to scale with your business. Acumatica doesn’t care how many users you create or what roles they fill. In fact, with Acumatica, you can have unlimited users. Acumatica scales with your business based on the number of transactions going through your business.

They refer to it as Commercial Transaction Volume. Commercial Transaction Volume or “CTV” is equal to the single highest volume of transactions within each of these transaction types: sales orders, shipments, AR invoices, customer payments, purchase orders, purchase receipts, AP invoices, and AP payments.

Here is an example of how CTV is measured. Imagine a company has the following transactions over a one-month period: 900 AR invoices, 600 customer payments, 500 AP invoices, 100 vendor payments, and 500 sales orders. The single highest volume for the month was the 900 AR invoices, so for this example company, the CTV for the given month would be 900.

This may seem a little overwhelming and complicated, however, a system like this is much more efficient at providing value and can easily save you thousands per year in software fees.

Another way Acumatica distinguishes itself from NetSuite is its licensing method.

NetSuite, again, offers a straightforward SaaS subscription with an annual subscription

Acumatica does offer a SaaS subscription just like NetSuite with an annual subscription, but they also offer more. With Acumatica, you can choose to have your instance hosted with Acumatica’s cloud provider, a cloud provider of your choice, or even have Acumatica run on-premise. Not only does Acumatica offer flexible hosting but also offers flexibility with their payments, allowing you to pay more upfront but less throughout the year or vice versa. None of this flexibility is offered by NetSuite.

You can click here to learn more about Acumatica’s Pricing Model.

Customer Satisfaction and Reviews

What better way to compare two solutions than with the help of people who have used them? For this, we turn to G2Crowd. For those that are unaware, G2crowd.com is like the Yelp of Enterprise software. It provides vetted reviews from actual customers and then compiles them into easy to digest metrics that they use to rank software.

On the left, we have Acumatica, and on the right, we have NetSuite. And as you can see, the responses are quite telling. There isn’t a single category in that NetSuite beats Acumatica according to actual customers of the platforms. If you want to see a deeper comparison, you can use this link to see that chart and the data that made up those numbers on the G2crowd website itself.

If you want an industry-wide view you can take a look at this chart.

Acumatica leads the way in customer satisfaction according to G2Crowd, while NetSuite sits at number 7. Again, you can use this link to explore this data in more detai, and i strongly recommend you do so.

I think it’s important to state here that customer reviews are not everything and your experience may differ depending on a number of circumstances. However, I encourage you to look through the reviews on G2crowd to get an idea of the pros and cons of each platform and learn from the experiences of others before you make your choice.

Key Takeaways and Closing Thoughts

Each of these platforms has its strengths and weaknesses. What’s important to making your decision is determining what these strengths and weaknesses are and aligning them with your own. You may find robust functionality and a long track record of success attractive, or you may find a lower total cost of ownership and flexibility better suits your needs. Either way, it’s important that you do your due diligence with this decision because it will be impacting your business for years to come.

If you thought I missed a key component of either platform, feel free to tell me where I went wrong in the comments. If you thought this article was helpful, please share.