Shopping for ERP software is an overwhelming task for any decision-maker.
You’ve got hundreds of options. And you often have to painstakingly read through dozens of guides, thumb through hundreds of pricing pages, and run dozens of comparison checklists to find one perfect for your business needs.
Throw in the fact that investing in ERP software is a big-money investment, and there’s even greater pressure from your stakeholders to make the best decision and get it right the first time.
Perhaps you’ve whittled down your options to Acumatica and NetSuite — two of the topmost ERP software options — but still can’t decide which software is best for you.
In this post, we’ll provide a detailed analysis of Acumatica vs. NetSuite to decide for yourself which software is perfect for your needs.
Acumatica vs. NetSuite: Quick Summary
The NetSuite ERP
NetSuite is a cloud-based, all-in-one business management solution. With NetSuite, you can manage inventory, operations, accounting, and perform several essential business functions from one online platform.
Beyond housing your core business processes under one roof, NetSuite also (a) enables you to automate those processes and (b) provides you with real-time data that you can use to make timely and cost-saving decisions.
Consequently, your productivity increases and overall operating costs decrease.
From small businesses to Fortune 1000 companies, over 29,000 companies in 200+ countries (across various industries) use NetSuite to run their business operations.
NetSuite is primarily considered the world’s #1 cloud ERP software. It’s popular partly because it was one of the pioneers of the SaaS (software as a service) solution. However, this ERP software isn’t riding solely on its first-mover advantage.
Over the past two decades, NetSuite has proven to be a robust ERP solution for businesses of any size. It has also proven to be scalable—it can grow with your business, meeting different needs as your organization grows. In addition, NetSuite continues to push its competitive advantage through bi-annual software updates.
Acumatica
Acumatica is a relatively new but fast-growing ERP provider.
Like NetSuite, it’s an all-in-one solution for business management applications. But, unlike NetSuite, Acumatica gets a leg up by offering both on-premise and cloud deployment options for its ERP software.
Whereas NetSuite has a robust, flexible, and scalable factor for catering to businesses of any size, Acumatica works best for small and medium-sized companies, with a particular focus on manufacturing and distribution organization’s
Acumatica has a unique pricing model that naturally makes it more attractive to specific niche markets (more on this in a minute). But price point aside, Acumatica is undoubtedly a functional and good-to-use cloud ERP software. Their growth and sales numbers prove it.
As of 2020, they catered to the ERP needs of 6,500+ clients in 30 countries. And they support 12-15 languages through their partners.
Fun fact: NetSuite customers constitute 63% of technology companies that have IPO’d since 2011.
NetSuite vs. Acumatica: Everything You Need to Know About These ERPs
Pricing
NetSuite customers pay an annual subscription fee to access the NetSuite Platform. However, your annual payment will depend on your company’s needs. So, we’re unable to quote a universal subscription fee. However, we do have some insight into how the annual subscription fees are determined based on information from third-party NetSuite “partners.”
You pay for the core NetSuite platform ($999 monthly). NetSuite also offers optional modules (some of which can reportedly cost anywhere from $199 to $499). And finally, you pay for the number of users you’ll have on the platform ($99 per month to register additional users).
NetSuite also charges a one-time setup fee.
On the other hand, Acumatica operates a unique and flexible pricing model that charges customers based on transaction volumes. Call it the pay-for-only-what-you-use pricing model.
In other words, Acumatica doesn’t charge per user. Instead, it offers “unlimited users” and charges based on the number of resources a company consumes on commercial transactions, ERP transactions, and the amount of storage required.
This flexible pricing structure lowers their entry fee and makes them more appealing to small and mid-market customers.
Because of its per-user pricing model, NetSuite (and several ERP vendors) have come under fire for “punishing their customers for growing.” But how different is Acumatica’s pricing model?
A closer look reveals that you’re paying for additional users in a non-obvious and untraditional way. Think about it: as your business scales and orders increase, you consume more resources, and you’ll pay higher fees.
That is, your cost-to-revenue ratio increases as your business grows. At least, with Acumatica, there’s a chance you can keep cost-to-revenue costs constant for specific periods during your company’s growth journey.
Acumatica’s transactional pricing model is cost-effective and generates high ROI for companies that trade in low-volume, high-margin products. But it may not be the best option for businesses that deal with high-volume and have low-margin type products.
Verdict: Acumatica makes it easier for small to mid-market businesses to adopt cloud ERP solutions because its entry prices are lower. NetSuite’s entry prices are higher. But for upper mid-market companies, the chances are high that, in the long run, you’ll spend less money with NetSuite than you would with Acumatica.
Features
Below is a comparison of Acumatica and NetSuite based on some essential features.
Financial Management
Acumatica’s financial management module includes basic financial and accounting functionalities you need to keep a tight leash on your business’s financial operations.
- The general ledger integrates with the rest of the modules. It allows you to track financial transactions such as fixed assets, inventory, accounts receivable, and accounts payable and generate critical financial statements.
- A cash management system for keeping tabs on all daily cash flow-related operations all in one place, including cash balances, bank account reconciliations, and funds transfers and tracking. Acumatica’s CMS also supports multiple currencies and works hand in hand with the currency management feature to ensure you can track gains and losses from changing currency values, amongst other things.
- A tax accounting software integrates with other financial management modules and allows tax calculations on transactions and tax report generation.
NetSuite’s financial management module is just as extensive. NetSuite’s financial module has you covered from facilitating daily transactions to budgeting operations and streamlining financial accounts with other business operations. Its key features include:
- Accounting tabs feature a general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, fixed assets management, cash management, tax management, and the works.
- Billing functionalities automate invoicing, support diverse subscription and multiple pricing models, and more.
- Budgeting and forecasting feature support budgeting automation for different departments, scenario modeling using factors including location and product.
- Financial report generation includes multi-dimensional analysis that delivers excellent insights, highly configurable reports to meet your unique needs, and more.
While Acumatica and NetSuite share many similarities in finance and accounting features, there are also critical differentiating factors. For one, NetSuite allows multi-book accounting, which helps you run different sets of accounting stipulations on the same set of financial records. However, Acumatica doesn’t offer this.
Also, NetSuite’s structure allows it to compute large transactions at a go. But Acumatica relies on batch processing which can prove tedious during report generation. Plus, NetSuite offers a highly customizable general ledger.
Verdict: while Acumatica rivals NetSuite in terms of general accounting features, NetSuite boasts broader functionalities well suited to fast-growing businesses or large enterprises with extensive operational demands.
Inventory Management
Acumatica’s inventory management module covers the essentials. You can manage inventory across multiple warehouses, including setting locations for specific operations such as receiving inventory, returns, shipping, and dropshipping. Another key feature is you can set parameters for stock replenishment using seasonality, maximum and minimum order quantities, forecasting models, and more.
What’s more, you can specify several vendors for different items while setting a preferred vendor, plus minimum or maximum order requests by item for each vendor. Generally speaking, Acumatica has inventory management on lockdown.
NetSuite isn’t a slacker in this category either. Its inventory management module also supports inventory tracking across multiple warehouses and sales channels. Not to mention that you can fully automate the process.
NetSuite also sets inventory replenishment rules to maintain adequate stock levels using relevant data such as seasonal sales records. It even goes a step further to create stock reorder tasks and alert the purchasing manager when reordering is due.
With NetSuite’s cycle counting feature, you are guaranteed accurate inventory figures at all times, plus scheduled periodic counts to keep records updated.
As with the other categories, NetSuite and Acumatica’s stock management modules share similarities, but some features also separate them. For instance, while both have various depreciation and costing methods tools, including standard costing, average cost, group average cost, and First-In-First-Out, only NetSuite supports the Last-In-First-Out method.
Verdict: Again, NetSuite just edges Acumatica based on sheer features depth.
Customer Relationship Management
Acumatica’s CRM module is a comprehensive solution that empowers you to manage all customer-facing and customer-related assets, including leads, opportunities, contacts, customer accounts, marketing collaterals, customer service systems, etc.
With the sales automation functionality, your sales team will have all it needs to manage leads, shorten the sales cycle by leveraging detailed insights and improve close rates.
The integrated marketing feature syncs sales, customer information, marketing collateral, and campaigns to create a powerful conversion machine. You can track leads from prospecting to up-selling, access tools to create customized landing pages, segment contact lists based on specific criteria, track campaign expenses, etc.
Beyond sales and marketing automation, Acumatica’s CRM module also supports customer self-service portals. You can set up these portals to allow customers access information that connects them to your business, such as contracts and financial statements.
NetSuite’s CRM module also offers traditional CRM functionalities ranging from sales force automation to marketing automation and customer service management.
Your sales team can access an integrated sales process that connects different sales operations such as up-selling, sales forecasting, quote management, etc. For the marketing team, activities like lead qualification become more straightforward with the CRM’s lead qualification automation feature. And the customer service team has an easier job of managing inquiries and cases with NetSuite’s case management automation.
But NetSuite CRM goes one step further to include partner relationship management. This feature enables you to manage sales and marketing processes and other business operations that may consist of business affiliates and partners, such as joint marketing campaigns, lead management, commissions, etc.
Verdict: This round ends in a stalemate between NetSuite and Acumatica.
Reporting and Analytics
When it comes to delivering critical business insights that aren’t just your run-off-the-mill statistics, Acumatica performs well.
It includes reporting tools, dashboards, data analysis toolkit, business intelligence, and analytics. With a reporting database that’s fully integrated with all other modules, you can get all the insights and trends you need to make intelligent business decisions in one place and at a glance.
Additional reporting functionalities on Acumatica include customizable reports, role-specific reporting, data exportation to external analysis tools including Power BI, and various reporting formats including Word, Excel, PDF, and HTML.
NetSuite’s reporting and analytics feature also provides real-time data and insights across all business operations. Like Acumatica, it also includes prebuilt and customizable reports, self-service reporting, and even role-based reporting dashboards.
Although both ERPs are almost evenly matched in this category, financial reporting on Acumatica’s end may be more tedious because of its sub-ledger architecture. This implies that while you can get all the information you need on, say, a particular customer on NetSuite at a glance because it stores data on a single database, you would have to open multiple tabs on Acumatica to get the same range of data on that customer.
Verdict: It all comes down to the underlying database structure and how this impacts reporting. As you’ve seen with NetSuite, its database architecture allows single-view reporting for several data sets, which isn’t the case with Acumatica. So we’ll also give this category to NetSuite.
User Experience
ERPs are supposed to increase efficiency and remove the tedium of managing several operations on different channels, but they should also be simple. Thankfully, Acumatica favors this rule. It’s easy to implement, intuitive, customizable, user-friendly, and supports mobile devices and browsers.
NetSuite also shares all of Acumatica’s excellent user experience drivers. But the former’s reliance on a unified database, as opposed to Acumatica’s batch processing method of computing data, means with NetSuite, you get faster data analysis and reporting, which can improve productivity and reduce monotony.
Verdict: NetSuite is easier to use and offers a better user experience owing to its unified database.
Reviews
We jumped on two reliable third-party review sites to glean insights into unbiased perspectives of real-time Acumatica and NetSuite customers. Here’s what we found.
GetApp
- Acumatica (50 reviews) – General Ratings: 4.4/5 stars.
- NetSuite (809) – General Ratings: 4.1/5 stars.
Software Advice
- Acumatica (50 reviews) – General Rating: 4.42/5 stars, Ease of use: 4.5/5 stars, Value for money: 4.5/5 stars, Customer support: 4/5 stars, Functionality: 4.5/5 stars.
- NetSuite (809 reviews) – General Rating: 4.1/5 stars, Ease of use: 4/5 stars, Value for money: 3.5/5 stars, Customer support: 3.5/5 stars, Functionality: 4/5 stars.
Gartner Peer Insights
- Acumatica (66 reviews) – General rating: 4.3/5 stars
- NetSuite (57 reviews) – General rating: 4.2/5 stars.
N.B: Although Acumatica has a slightly higher Gartner Peer rating, only 83% of reviewers would recommend it to someone else, while that number stands at 88% in NetSuite’s case.
Generally, people fancy Acumatica because it’s perfectly suited to small and midsize businesses, and it offers excellent round-the-clock support and free training. On the flip side, some users believe its dashboard could be better designed and more customizable on the flip side.
NetSuite also gets the nod from users for its extensive features, ability to process large data seamlessly, highly customizable features, and vast integration capabilities. That said, some users believe that its deployment could be faster and smoother.
Integrations
Acumatica is hosted on its xRP Cloud Platform that supports REST and SOAP-powered web services. Apart from its customizable nature, it integrates with popular applications you may already be working with, such as Salesforce, Shopify, Microsoft 365, Dropbox, etc.
On the other hand, NetSuite runs on JavaScript programming language and offers application programming interfaces (APIs) with which you can build more applications for the ERP. Apart from APIs, NetSuite also facilitates integration via its SuiteTalk program, which integrates cloud or on-premises applications directly to NetSuite. To cap it off, NetSuite integrates with several third-party applications such as Salesforce, QuickBooks, Microsoft Office, etc.
Verdict: We’ve hit another stalemate between NetSuite and Acumatica, as both ERPs have impressive integration capabilities and are pretty flexible on that end.
Customer Support
Acumatica and NetSuite are big on customer support.
With the former, you get a three-pronged support system featuring a local Acumatica partner who’s attached to your business, direct 24/7 support from Acumatica via a call, chat, or email, and a ton of online resources and training.
NetSuite is also just as supportive. It has three customer support packages: basic, premium, and advanced customer support.
While the basic offering is available to all customers, you can upgrade to premium or advanced, depending on your business needs. Each support level adopts varying channels, including 24/7 phone support and online case submissions. And just like Acumatica, NetSuite provides a wealth of helpful resources via an online knowledge base.
Acumatica vs. NetSuite—Which is King?
Ultimately your choice will come down to the demands of your situation, budget, and preferences. That said, it wouldn’t hurt to draw a comparison chart featuring Acumatica and NetSuite.
If you did, here’s what you’d find: Acumatica has a slight edge in terms of deployment because it allows cloud on-premises hosting, whereas NetSuite is strictly cloud-based.
Acumatica also starts at a slightly lower price point. But on the other hand, its data processing and reporting capabilities are limited by its batch processing method, and the overall depth and breadth of its features do not match NetSuite’s. This makes NetSuite a more suitable option for rapidly growing enterprises and big businesses that need extensive functionalities to run efficiently.
Your turn!