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PROS VS. PRICEFX: CASE CLOSED
It took some digging, but Agents Toni and Ted have finally shut the case on Pricefx. The evidence is clear—when it comes to managing both sides of the margin equation, PROS is unsurpassable in its ability to help businesses optimize profits by balancing price and cost.
The PIA is releasing this evidence to the public in the hopes that it will help them uncover the best-kept secret to profitable growth. Check their findings below to discover what Pricefx was saying―and what’s really true.
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Ease of Use
According to an independent peer-to-peer review site, G2’s User Satisfaction Ratings, Pricefx comes well ahead of PROS in terms of how easy our software is to use. We scored 74% for ease of setup (compared to PROS 42%) and 74% for ease of admin (to PROS 51%). We beat PROS by 13% for ease of use (with a whopping 80%), and our configuration ease of admin did well, too, 23% higher than PROS.
Pricefx has been designed with ease of use and self-sufficiency in mind. It is our goal that, once your solution is up and running, your team can take full ownership. With flexibility at our core, our solution allows you to make changes on the fly and view results by dragging and dropping attributes back and forth. We also provide extensive training that will empower your staff to spend more time working pricing magic and less time on the phone to customer support.
Source: Pricefx blog post.
WHAT THEY SAY
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
WHAT THEY SAY
Pricefx says they are easier than PROS to configure, administer, and use. They make this claim by highlighting their G2 Crowd survey results. Disclaimer: 93% of Pricefx G2 Crowd responses were paid for by Pricefx.
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
“PROS takes pride in putting user experience first. PROS employs a large team of UX professionals that run dozens of usability studies each year reaching thousands of participants. All those learnings make their way back into the product experience to make ease of use a core strength of the PROS Platform.
PROS has received recognition for its strength in usability from leading research firms Gartner and IDC, ranging from easy the PROS Platform is to understand, how quickly users came up to speed, and even the speed and performance of completing mission-critical tasks.
According to the same evaluation conducted by IDC on Pricefx, they found customers to be unanimous in their opinion that Pricefx suffers from usability issues. While the product is flexible, it requires users to be more technical than they preferred just to configure and operate it.”
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Solving Business Problems
“If you’re only looking for a solution that delivers great price optimization tools, then consider PROS, because of its sophisticated segmentation engine and ability to create meaningful predictive segments. PROS also has a CPQ tool to support the sales process.
If you’re in need of a more comprehensive solution that can help you not just manage and optimize prices, but also bring together powerful analytics, CPQ capabilities, strong multi-agent AI-driven price optimization, and excellent rebate and channel management tools, then only Pricefx will deliver. In addition to this, if you need to frequently update your segmentation, or have a dynamic business environment, Pricefx’s superior optimization management tools may be for you.”
Source: Pricefx blog post.
WHAT THEY SAY
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
WHAT THEY SAY
Pricefx positions the PROS Platform as a narrow set of capabilities focused almost exclusively on price optimization.
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
At PROS R&D makes up more than 20% of overall spend and the products organization has more full-time employees than Pricefx has total employees.
It’s one thing to claim product breadth, but breadth is meaningless without depth. PROS offers the widest range of profit optimization capabilities including price management, price optimization, real-time price delivery, forecasting, product configuration, quoting, agreements management, subscription management, sales offer insights, rebates, and more. In addition to the breadth, PROS Platform is the only solution offering leading solutions in both Price Optimization and Management and Configure Price Quote (CPQ), as recognized by IDC and Gartner. Gartner evaluated Pricefx and found them to be a niche player in the CPQ market.
PROS has received recognition for its strength in usability from leading research firms Gartner and IDC, ranging from easy the PROS Platform is to understand, how quickly users came up to speed, and even the speed and performance of completing mission-critical tasks.
According to the same evaluation conducted by IDC on Pricefx, they found customers to be unanimous in their opinion that Pricefx suffers from usability issues. While the product is flexible, it requires users to be more technical than they preferred just to configure and operate it.
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Time to Value
“According to G2, Pricefx comes out on top when it comes to ROI, with customers seeing return on investment on average within 16 months of implementation. That average is 23 months with PROS.
30% of our customers see ROI within just 6 months. That compares to 0% for PROS and just 36% in 12 months (against our 56% inside a year).
Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that we get customers live and kicking on average two months sooner that PROS can. 5% of our customers are live in under a day, and 10% within a month. The earliest you’ll be live with PROS is 1-3 months with an average of 8 months.”
Source: Pricefx blog post.
WHAT THEY SAY
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
WHAT THEY SAY
Pricefx claims that they implement their solution in 16 months compared to 23 months for PROS. Disclaimer: 93% of Pricefx G2 Crowd responses were paid for by Pricefx.
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
The PROS Platform is able to solve for a wide array of business problems. Decades ago, businesses felt compelled to get as much out of their software contracts in a first implementation. PROS in the past worked wi+C4+E4.
PROS has received recognition for its strength in usability from leading research firms Gartner and IDC, ranging from easy the PROS Platform is to understand, how quickly users came up to speed, and even the speed and performance of completing mission-critical tasks.
According to the same evaluation conducted by IDC on Pricefx, they found customers to be unanimous in their opinion that Pricefx suffers from usability issues. While the product is flexible, it requires users to be more technical than they preferred just to configure and operate it.
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Integration
PROS delivers over 100 pre-built connectors for the most common data sources and formats and aggregates data into a consistent format to ensure integration with its solutions. It claims that its customers cut integration costs by 50% and integration timelines by 75%.
Pricefx software is designed to seamlessly integrate with any of your systems, like your ERP, SAP, Oracle, MS Dynamics, IBM AS/400 and more… or any combination of them. So, if you’re leveraging multiple business systems across many markets with diverse customer bases and large product lists, then the integration capabilities of Pricefx are exactly what you need.
Additionally, Pricefx can easily and quickly import widely disparate data sets and incorporate them into your pricing. With a 360° view of your pricing environment (customer, competitor, market) and more data such as such as competitive pricing or customer sentiment data from social media at your disposal, you’re in a better position to make smart pricing decisions.
Source: Pricefx blog post.
WHAT THEY SAY
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
WHAT THEY SAY
Pricefx claims that their solutions are as flexible and easily integrated with existing business applications as the PROS Platform.
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
PROS has invested in a multi-pronged approach to integrations:
– PROS product organization has developed and maintains certified product integrations with leading software platforms like Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and SAP’s ERP solutions
– PROS also offers its own integration product–Integrate–as part of the subscription service. Integrate facilitates that data transfers between PROS and any business application
– PROS offers a comprehensive library of industry standard API (SOAP and REST), that allows DIYers to plug PROS solutions into any experience.
All PROS data and integration capabilities are built for scale and performance, enabling businesses to perform trillions of real-time price requests. This is more transactions that VISA processes in a year!
Pricefx is very flexible solution, but with flexibility comes cost, time, and reliance on their resources. Pricefx does not offer any certified product integrations for Salesforce or Microsoft.
*Source: PROS on Salesforce AppExchange.
*Source: PROS apps on MSFT AppSource.
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Data Science
PROS takes the lead in gen-one science capabilities as they have a more sophisticated segmentation engine (science algorithm). Their gen-one approach enables them to combine attributes and the partitions between those attributes to create very meaningful predictive segments. They also have a better way of calculating guidance values (e.g. stretch, target, and floor).
Our lack of focus at Pricefx on gen-one science has to do with our all-out passion for gen-two science…
Source: Pricefx blog post.
WHAT THEY SAY
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
WHAT THEY SAY
Pricefx claims that PROS is still using a first generation science platform while Pricefx has advancement to a second generation.
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
PROS employs more than two dozen PhD data scientists in its product organization and additional PhD data scientists in its services organization to aid customers with specific science needs. PROS has ben innovating in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) for decades.
PROS applauds Pricefx for advancing to a 2nd generation of pricing science. That puts them squarely halfway in their journey to where PROS is currently: rolling out its 4th generation of pricing science powered by neural networks.
– Gen 0 – Price Management (2005)
– Gen 1 – Cartesian (2009)
– Gen 2 – Branching Tree (2014)
– Gen 3 – Dynamic Pricing (2018)
– Gen 4 – Neural Networks (2023)
PROS has achieved leadership positions in both Price Optimization and Management and CPQ in IDC and Gartner reports on the back of its Data Science capabilities. In a report featuring PROS and Pricefx, Gartner stated that PROS “delivers more AI-driven guided selling capabilities than any other product.
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AI
PROS says they offer AI price recommendation capabilities, with a focus on helping you to assess the magnitude of your price optimization, gain visibility of your attribute and peer groups for each price recommendation and visualize what is going on behind the scenes.
While gen-one data science optimizes each of your elements in isolation, gen-two price optimization is able to bring all of those elements into clear focus at the same time.
Pricefx uses a multi-agent-AI approach to price optimization which takes the entire waterfall into account to make more holistically intelligent recommendations. It can look at all elements of your waterfall (price, discount, promotion, rebate, or a combination) and optimize each of them simultaneously based on your KPIs (revenue, volume, margin, or a combination). It can also recommend nuanced price changes that take customer willingness to pay into account.
Our Bijou 7.0 Market Simulation offering elevates your pricing from the tactical to the strategic with a sandbox inside which you can test out WHAT IF scenarios to truly understand the impact a price or pricing strategy will have on your business (including estimated competitive reaction), without the fallout. So, you can basically use science to guess your customers’ reaction to a price before it ever enters the market.
Pricefx is the only pricing solution on the market with a ready-to go AI price optimization offering, so we sweep the board with this one.
If you’re interested in being able to test your pricing strategies in a sandbox for accurate market, customer, and competitor predictions, you can learn more in our article Pricing in Alignment with Key Business Objectives Using Market Simulation.
Source: Pricefx blog post.
WHAT THEY SAY
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
WHAT THEY SAY
Again, Pricefx claims that PROS is still using a first generation science platform while Pricefx has advancement to a second generation.
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
PROS is the pioneer undisputed leader in AI. You can take our word for it or you can hear it from Gartner. PROS over the years embraced a multitude of different types of machine learning models, neural networks, and more. In fact PROS has advanced as far as it has because we have always been in competition…with ourselves. It’s what has gotten us to roll out our Gen 4 science.
Pricefx’s AI capabilities can best be described as what PROS delivered in its Gen 2 science: segmentation based pricing guidance leveraging decision trees. We realized that was insufficient for the market and rolled out our Gen 3 science in 2018 that applied a layer of understanding around customer segments, applied time series forecasting and aggressiveness toggles to set pricing envelopes. PROS conducted a data study where 130+ customers using PROS AI self-reported their business results and the results were astonishing. PROS customers reported an average 8% revenue uplift and 200 basis points of margin improvement.
But wait it gets better, PROS customers leveraging Gen 4 science see even greater uplifts over what Gen 3 delivered. A large food manufacturer saw 4.5% revenue uplift, a global industrial manufacturer saw 11% margin uplift, and both saw 20%+ improvements in price predictions.
– Source: Gartner Magic Quadrant for CPQ”
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Innovation
Pricefx is a true SaaS next-gen 360° solution comprising a suite of fully integrated tools built as one platform that enables you to price better at every stage of the pricing process.
Our Plan package brings insights into your customer and sales data, increases transparency across the entire price waterfall and accelerates your time to pricing excellence.
The Price package leverages AI-powered price optimization and helps you eliminate margin leakage by gaining oversight of your contract management and promotion campaigns.
And our Profit package helps you quickly create quotes and maximize profitability; to define, calculate and execute rebates with ease; and automate ship & debit processes.
PROS offers a range of tools designed to meet the needs of pricing, sales, and e-commerce teams. As its capabilities were purchased and combined (rather than built as one platform) it is not what we might consider true SaaS, but the integrated solutions it offers include:
Sales Opportunity Insights
Product and Service Configurations
Streamlined Sales Agreements
Robust Product Catalogs
Omnichannel Price Management
Performance Quoting
Customer Specific Price Optimization
Real-time Price Delivery
So, while PROS places its focus on price optimization & management and CPQ, Pricefx offers solutions for every aspect of the pricing process – from analytics and CPQ to rebate and channel management.
Source: Pricefx blog post.
WHAT THEY SAY
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
WHAT THEY SAY
Pricefx claims that their technology is broader, deeper, and better leverages the cloud to scale.
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
Customers choose PROS for its focus, commitment, and delivery on innovation. Innovation is so important to PROS, it is one of our company core values (We Are Innovators). Innovation takes many different forms at PROS and PROS spares no expense on innovation, spending over 20% of its budget on R&D and employing more individuals in its product organization than Pricefx has total employees. It includes: bringing new capabilities to market, pushing the envelope on AI-created customer value, delivering the most performant profit optimization platform in there market, and much more.
The facts don’t lie. PROS rolls out new capabilities to its customers across the entirety of the PROS Platform every quarter. The PROS Platform processes 2+ trillion transactions each year (fun fact: that is twice the volume of VISA and Mastercard combined). PROS has 20 in-house patents and patents-pending and boasts 800 combined person-years of cumulative AI experience.
And the results speak for themselves. PROS commitment to innovation is what has made it a leader in Price Optimization and Management and Configure Price quote by IDC and Gartner, the only vendor to achieve this status. And it is the reason why more customers choose PROS than any other competitor and why PROS remains a leader today.
– Source: PROS Core Values.
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Industry
PROS places a strong focus on the Airline and Travel industry, but also often works with companies in the Automotive, Consumer Goods, Distribution, Energy & Chemicals, Food & Consumables, Insurance, Manufacturing, Medical Devices & Healthcare, Services, Technology Hardware & Software, and Transportation & Logistics industries.
Pricefx places its industry focus on Discrete Manufacturing, Chemical and Process Industry, Distribution, Food and Beverage, and Retail, with Airline soon to be added to the mix. While we produce content that speaks specifically to audiences in these industries, it is our firm belief that our pricing software is industry agnostic. It was designed to be. That’s how we can offer such flexibility and superb configuration.
In fact, our Plasma™ offering (the pricing industry’s first big data insights machine) gives you access to reliable quantitative industry benchmarks against which to compare your performance and to identify market trends, no matter your industry.
Source: Pricefx blog post.
WHAT THEY SAY
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
WHAT THEY SAY
Pricefx, at the same time, claims it is equally suited for industry specialization while acknowledging no product specific investments geared towards making its products more applicable for any one industry.
WHAT’S REALLY TRUE
For many, PROS is known as the company that uses AI to power dynamic pricing for a majority of the passenger airline market, and they are not wrong. PROS built its competencies, customer-focused culture, and track record of performance with airlines, but what they might not know is PROS has been the market leader in B2B and B2B2C price management and optimization for decades. In fact even PROS AI models account for seasonality in automotive distribution, product lifecycles in high tech, and even fluctuating downstream demand in oil and gas.
Book a personalized profit workshop with the PROS Profit Professionals
Learn more about how PROS can drive profitable growth for your business. Contact PROS now to find out how your business could benefit from a PROS Profitability Workshop.
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