Report:

Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price and Quote Applications

Top Vendor Products for Configure, Price and Quote Applications in 2023

• Bit2win
• Infor
• Oracle
• Salesforce CPQ
• SAP
• Tacton

Configure, Price and Quote Applications Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

• Bit2win - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Utilities industry: Bit2win has multiple deployments at large utility companies. The product includes robust support for selling and managing subscriptions, industry-specific functionality for needs-based product recommendations, and estimating the cost of service over time. It integrates with SAP IS-U.
  • Large-scale deployments: Several deployments of Bit2win have over 10,000 sales users.
  • Pricing functionality: Bit2win's out-of-the-box pricing functionality is among the best evaluated for this Magic Quadrant. List pricing, cost-plus pricing, attribute-based pricing, promotion, sales agreements, volume-based discounting and bundling features are complete and easy to use. This capability is also exposed as a headless service.

  Cons:

  • Market presence: Bit2win has limited market presence and few customers in North America.
  • Upgrades: Although there are relatively few deployments of Bit2win, the companies running it were using seven different versions of the software at the time of our research.
  • Visual configuration: The product does not support visual configuration (either natively or via a productized integration).


• Infor - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Selling complex tangible goods: The Infor CPQ configurator supports selling and manufacturing complex goods with one of the best rule administration tools we evaluated. The product also supports high-quality 3D visualization of the configured products, bill of materials (BOM) generation and CAD drawing generation.
  • Large deployments: With more than 10 deployments having 1,000 users or more, Infor CPQ is proven to work at enterprise scale.
  • Development velocity: The Infor CPQ product has improved rapidly over the last 18 months. The vendor has an ambitious and innovative product roadmap.

  Cons:

  • Selling services: Infor CPQ's support for selling and managing services is among the weakest evaluated for this Magic Quadrant. Gartner does not recommend the product for selling or managing services.
  • Deal negotiation: Infor CPQ's out-of-the-box deal negotiation capabilities are among the weakest evaluated for this Magic Quadrant.
  • Large transactions: Infor CPQ was not able to handle very large transactions with more than 1,000 lines in the demo shown to Gartner. Gartner clients should verify that the application can handle their most complex transactions with acceptable end-user response times.


• Oracle - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Selling services: Oracle CPQ has robust support for service ordering, including renewals, amendments, suspensions, terminations, order stacking and service billing via an integration with Oracle Subscription Management cloud.
  • Large deployments: With more than 10 deployments of 10,000 users or more, Oracle CPQ is proven to work at enterprise scale.
  • Geographic reach: Oracle CPQ is sold and supported around the world and is translated into 22 languages.

  Cons:

  • Administration: Gartner clients report that Oracle CPQ is difficult to implement and maintain over time. Although the pricing administration UI received a refresh in the last year, other parts of the administration UI are dated. Oracle CPQ has a steep learning curve compared with competitors' products.
  • Product selection: The Oracle CPQ sales catalog is basic, with no subcategories, faceted search nor product comparison. It is not recommended for selling a large number of products.
  • Demo versus actual product: The demonstration shown to Gartner was feature-rich and attractive, but it required a lot of customization to set up. Potential clients should verify whether what they are shown by the Oracle sales team is part of the out-of-the-box product or an example of what can be customized with additional effort and cost.


• Salesforce CPQ - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Market presence: Salesforce is the leading CRM vendor and has a large, global sales organization. Other vendors see Salesforce in more competitive deals than any other vendor.
  • Extensibility: Salesforce CPQ is built on the Salesforce Platform, which has good support for schema extension, logic extension, workflow, analytics and integration. Salesforce is one of only a few vendors in this report that pushes the latest version of its software to all customers, ensuring that everyone benefits from the latest release while automatically retaining any customizations.
  • Ecosystem: Salesforce CPQ has an ecosystem of add-on software products from third-party vendors. They include Threekit and Epicor for visual configuration; Logik.io for high-performance and advanced configuration; enosix for embedding SAP Variant Configuration; Avalara and Vertex for tax calculation; Zilliant for price optimization; Xactly for sales compensation; and DocuSign, Adobe, Sertifi and Conga for e-signature.

  Cons:

  • Core product capabilities: We evaluated the core Salesforce CPQ product plus its productized software partner integrations. The core product alone would not rate as highly. In particular, its standard configurator is not as robust as those of other leading products.
  • Cost and complexity: The base Salesforce CPQ product is one of the more highly priced CPQ offerings evaluated in this Magic Quadrant. If partner ecosystem products are added to meet a company's requirements, the solution is expensive compared with its peers' products. Additionally, purchasing and integrating software from multiple vendors is more complex than buying everything from one company.
  • Usability: Salesforce CPQ has significant issues with poor ergonomics and UX design.


• SAP - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product selection: Product selection is a strength of SAP CPQ. It provides a rich sales catalog, powerful search, product comparison, rapid order entry, eligibility checking, saved favorite configurations, prepick pricing and guided product recommendations that can be driven by attribute filtering rules or its own machine learning algorithms.
  • Configuration: The configurator has a flexible UI and supports most advanced requirements, including attributes and reusable subassemblies. The condition/action rule engine is one of the most powerful and flexible that we evaluated.
  • Integration with other SAP products: SAP CPQ offers extensive, productized integrations with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP ECC, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management (BRIM) and SAP Subscription Billing. It is also possible to use existing SAP Variant Configuration and SAP Advanced Variant Configuration models from SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP ECC in real time with good response times.

  Cons:

  • Service management: Management of services remains a weakness of SAP CPQ. The UI flow for renewals is unintuitive compared with other products in this report. There is minimal support for amendments and cancellations.
  • 3D visual configuration: SAP CPQ lacks native support for 3D visual configuration as offered by several of its closest competitors. During the demo to Gartner, SAP showed an integration with Expivi that took about two minutes to launch from a cold start, with every selection taking about four seconds to render, making the combined offering unusable.
  • Demo versus actual product: Several features had been customized for the demo shown to Gartner. Prospective customers should check which features shown during a sales demo are out-of-the-box product features, and inquire about the depth of productized integrations with other products.


• Tacton - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Complex manufacturing industry: Tacton CPQ is the best solution for complex manufacturers evaluated for this Magic Quadrant. Its constraint-solving configuration rule engine is suited to modeling complex configure-to-order and engineer-to-order (ETO) products. 3D and AR visual configuration are natively supported, as is CAD automation. There is an out-of-the-box integration with SAP R/3 and SAP S4/HANA. The ETO workflow and support for complex systems configuration are the best we evaluated for this report.
  • Extensibility: The application architecture and extensibility features of Tacton's offering are the best evaluated for this report. The platform includes a powerful state workflow engine that controls every object in the system. A formula can be used to calculate the value of an attribute or be triggered by an event in the state model. Integrations can be defined and then attached to events in a state model. Logic can be extended with a JavaScript-like language called TPEX.
  • Innovation: Tacton CPQ is the most innovative product evaluated for this Magic Quadrant. Some of its unique features include comparison of two quotes; alternate quote lines, synchronizing updates to a model definition to in-progress transactions; and the ability to mount an external catalog within the Tacton CPQ UI.

  Cons:

  • Microsoft Dynamics integration: The integration of Tacton CPQ with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is not as seamless or easy to use as the Salesforce Sales Cloud integration.
  • Pricing: Tacton CPQ has limited out-of-the-box pricing capability compared with competing products. Price lists, cost-plus pricing, volume discounts and attribute-based pricing are supported, but all other pricing logic must be implemented using formulas and custom objects in the flexible admin UI.
  • Managing services: Tacton CPQ has good out-of-the-box support for selling services, including the best support for subscription ramps of any vendor we evaluated for this Magic Quadrant. However, it is not possible to amend or terminate services after they are sold.


• Apparound - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Mobile UI: Apparound Power CPQ has a responsive UI for Microsoft Windows, plus native apps for Android and iOS that work when disconnected from the network. The mobile apps support bar code scanning and signature capture. It is also possible to capture one-time payments and deposits, and to plan installment payments. These features make the product suitable for use in stores or when selling door to door.
  • Utilities and telecom industries: Apparound has a significant number of deployments at utilities and telecom companies. Its product is well-suited to selling simple subscriptions.
  • Performance: Apparound Power CPQ's end-user UI is generally fast, and the product can handle very large transactions.

  Cons:

  • Market presence: Apparound Power CPQ has limited market presence. Although the vendor has a sales office in North America, almost all of its employees and customers are in Europe.
  • Configurator: The configuration rule engine has limited capability compared with products from other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Apparound Power CPQ is not suited to selling complex goods and services.
  • Service management: While it is possible to sell simple subscriptions, Apparound Power CPQ does not support managing service contracts or the amendment or termination of services after they are sold.


• Conga - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Solution selling: Conga CPQ supports the selling of bundles of configured tangible goods and complex subscriptions.
  • Pricing functionality: Conga CPQ's out-of-the-box pricing functionality is among the best evaluated for this Magic Quadrant, with robust support for list pricing, cost-plus pricing, volume discounts, attribute-based pricing, sales agreements, promotions and bundles.
  • New architecture: Conga is in the process of rebuilding its products on a modern, composable, high-performance architecture. Early demos appear promising, but a lot of work remains to complete the development, test and stabilize the platform, and migrate existing customers.

  Cons:

  • Performance: Slow performance is widely reported by Conga customers, particularly if they have complex products or business logic. The new platform is intended to address these issues, but customers had not reported improvements at the time of this research.
  • Innovation: While it focuses on rearchitecting and fixing its product, Conga has not been able to deliver new or innovative product capabilities.
  • Customer dissatisfaction: Conga CPQ customers reported dissatisfaction with the vendor in discussions with Gartner between August 2022 and September 2023. Recurring themes were slow performance, lack of support for complex requirements and excessive renewal price uplifts.


• CSG - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Telecom industry: CSG offers a full suite of CPQ, order management and billing solutions for the telecommunications industry. Quote & Order is the best solution evaluated in this report for the complex requirements of B2B telecommunications providers. The product supports TM Forum (TMF) API standards, and has excellent support for selling and managing complex service contracts.
  • Composability: Quote & Order has the best support for composing custom and self-service applications of any of the products evaluated for this report. It is built on an extensive library of fast, well-documented web service APIs. Customers are successfully selling complex telecommunications products on websites built over those APIs today.
  • Order management: The CSG product suite includes one of the most comprehensive order decomposition and orchestration engines evaluated for this report. It is possible to place, track and make changes to in-flight orders.

  Cons:

  • Extensibility: Quote & Order has powerful state workflow and process workflow engines, and allows the addition of custom attributes to some key entities. However, it lacks support for custom entities.
  • Upgrades: At the time of this research, Quote & Order customers were running seven different versions of the software. This raises questions about why customers are not upgrading to the latest version. Having many versions in production will be difficult for the vendor to sustain as the product is more widely deployed.
  • Geographic strategy: Quote & Order has few deployments outside of the Asia/Pacific region. Gartner clients in Europe and North America should verify the vendor's ability to support their implementation with local resources.


• Epicor - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Visual configuration: Epicor CPQ offers excellent native support for 2D, 3D and augmented reality (AR) visual configuration, as well as productized integration with computer-aided design (CAD) generation systems. The new 3D rendering engine is one of the first to leverage the photorealistic capabilities of WebGPU.
  • Rule engine: Most logic, rules and customization features use the Epicor CPQ Snap rule engine, which has an innovative drag-and-drop UI that supports logical conditions, state workflow and visual programming. This makes Epicor's product relatively easy for administrators to learn.
  • Usability: Epicor CPQ is one of the fastest and easiest-to-use CPQ applications evaluated for this report.

  Cons:

  • Selling services: Epicor CPQ has no out-of-the-box support for selling services.
  • Pricing: Epicor CPQ's out-of-the-box pricing capabilities are among the weakest of the vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant. Most pricing logic must be implemented using the Snap rule engine.
  • Propose and negotiate: While Epicor CPQ supports basic capabilities such as manual price adjustments, approvals and proposal generation, it lacks more advanced capabilities such as line grouping, goal-seeking price adjustments, price recommendations, redlining and electronic signature.


• PROS - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Usability and performance: PROS Smart CPQ has a fast, intuitive end-user interface and one of the best product catalogs evaluated for this Magic Quadrant. The product easily handled a 10,000-line quote during the demo shown to Gartner.
  • Intelligence: PROS Smart CPQ delivers more AI-driven guided selling capabilities than any other product evaluated for this Magic Quadrant. After completing a needs analysis questionnaire, the product recommends the best product for the customer, based on rules or machine learning. When configuring product options and features, the powerful solving rule engine automatically selects compatible options. Helpers advise on those options. The best price for the customer in the context of the current deal is recommended by the machine-learning-driven price optimization engine.
  • Propose and negotiate: PROS has comprehensive support for deal negotiation, including line grouping, mass updates, manual price adjustments, goal-seeking price adjustments, expected sales compensation, intelligent price recommendations, approvals, proposal generation and electronic signature.

  Cons:

  • Selling services: PROS Smart CPQ's out-of-the-box support for selling and managing services is limited. The product is not recommended for selling services.
  • Order management: PROS Smart CPQ has no out-of-the-box capabilities for order decomposition, order tracking nor changing booked orders.
  • Visual configuration: PROS lacks native support for 3D visual configuration.


• Salesforce Industries CPQ - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Innovation: Salesforce Industries CPQ has many unique and innovative features, such as quick order from the customer account screen, product search in multiple languages, bulk updates to service attributes and a library of installable industry-specific capabilities.
  • Industry specificity: More than 200 telecom, media and energy customers, and more than 150 health and insurance customers, are using Salesforce Industries CPQ's capabilities. Many of those customers have more than 1,000 sales users.
  • Extensibility: Salesforce Industries CPQ's functionality builds on and extends standard Salesforce objects. Salesforce Industries applications leverage all the powerful extensibility, workflow, analytics and collaboration capabilities of the Salesforce Platform. In addition, Salesforce Industries provides unique capabilities for declarative, guided process flows (OmniScripts); flexible UIs (Cards); interface implementations; and a library of plug-and-play, industry-specific features.

  Cons:

  • Performance: Prospective customers should pay close attention to the end-user response times of the Salesforce Industries CPQ application. Gartner regularly hears complaints about response times during client inquiry calls. In the demo shown to Gartner, common actions such as launching the configurator, processing rules during a configuration, amending or renewing a subscription, and repricing were slow.
  • Composability: Although Salesforce Industries CPQ has APIs to support most user actions, Gartner believes that the performance of those APIs is too slow to underpin a usable self-service commerce experience. The APIs rely on the transaction being stored in Salesforce and thus do not support true composability.
  • Usability: Salesforce Industries CPQ suffers from poor ergonomics and UX design in some administrative areas of the product.


• ScaleFluidly - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Product vision: ScaleFluidly has a vision for a composable product architecture that can be deployed quickly to many different sales channels.
  • Performance: Application UI response times and API response times were generally good in the demo shown to Gartner, although the product struggled to handle a very large transaction.
  • Growth: The vendor has rapidly deployed the product to about 10,000 users since its launch in 2022.

  Cons:

  • Product functionality: ScaleFluidly CPQ is a new entrant into the CPQ market. It lacks the depth of functionality offered by other vendors in this report.
  • Extensibility: The product lacks standard extensibility capabilities such as custom entities, scripted logic and state workflow.
  • Composable configuration: Although composable product configuration is marketed as a key selling point, the configuration rules only work if using the ScaleFluidly cart, and the product configuration engine is one of the least capable evaluated for this report.


• servicePath - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Technical service providers: servicePath CPQ+ is designed specifically for technical service providers that sell complex solutions, including hardware, software, network access and professional services. These product types are supported out of the box.
  • Selling services: The product is among the best we reviewed for selling and managing services. It is possible to sell complex services and solutions. However, amendments to existing contracts are limited to simple products. The financial dashboard and cash flow modeling tool are unique among the products in this Magic Quadrant.
  • Fast and usable: servicePath CPQ+ is fast and easy to use.

  Cons:

  • Extensibility: servicePath CPQ+ lacks basic productized extensibility features such as extending the standard UIs, scripted logic, state workflow and tooling to move artifacts between environments.
  • Market presence: Although growing quickly, servicePath's market presence is small relative to the Leaders in this report.
  • Selling complex tangible goods: servicePath CPQ+ is not recommended for selling complex tangible goods. There is no out-of-the-box support for shipping, visual configuration nor integration with ERP.


• Vendavo - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Price optimization: Vendavo Intelligent CPQ integrates Vendavo's deal price guidance capabilities that leverage machine learning to suggest the best price or discount for a particular deal.
  • Mobile UI: Vendavo Intelligent CPQ offers a mobile UI that is responsive, fast and easy to use.
  • Marketplaces: Vendavo Intelligent CPQ enables distributors to sell products from multiple manufacturers. Manufacturers upload their products and pricing to Vendavo, then publish products and pricing to a selected group of distributors, which can sell those products through Vendavo Intelligent CPQ. Vendavo Intelligent CPQ then brokers purchase orders back to the manufacturers.

  Cons:

  • Complex manufacturing: Vendavo Intelligent CPQ has an integration with Threekit for visual configuration, but otherwise lacks the key out-of-the-box capabilities necessary to support complex manufacturing requirements such as BOM generation, routing rules, reusable subassemblies and systems configuration.
  • Composability: Vendavo Intelligent CPQ has headless APIs to support a self-service digital commerce UI. However, Vendavo was only able to show live production customers using its pricing API in its demonstration to Gartner.
  • Selling services: Vendavo Intelligent CPQ's support for selling and managing services is limited. Gartner does not recommend it for selling services or solutions that include services.


• Yagna iQ - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Electronics and high tech: Yagna iQ supports resellers of Cisco and VMware products with connectors to Cisco Commerce Workspace and VMware Partner Connect.
  • Reseller sales: Yagna iQ is designed for resellers of high-tech products. The product includes a robust process for signing up and managing partners, as well as support for reseller agreements. It is possible to collect payments and distribute funds to resellers. The product lacks a punch-out ordering UI that can be embedded within the reseller's website or intranet.
  • Mobile support: Mobile users can run Yagna iQ in an iOS or Android app.

  Cons:

  • Product capabilities: Yagna iQ had one of the weakest overall out-of-the-box capabilities of all the solutions evaluated for this Magic Quadrant. The product scored in the bottom three of the vendors evaluated for the following critical capabilities: Direct Sales Channel, Composable, Sell Tangible Goods, Pricing, ERP Integration, Manage Order and Extensibility.
  • Large transactions and proposals: In the demo shown to Gartner, it took about 30 seconds to recalculate pricing every time a change was made to a 1,000-line quote. It took about 90 seconds to generate a 100-page proposal. Gartner clients should verify that Yagna iQ can handle their largest and most complex transactions.
  • Extensibility: Yagna iQ lacks productized extensibility features. Instead, the vendor is willing to enhance its application based on requests from individual customers. This approach will not be sustainable as its customer base grows, and customers might experience long lead times to make even simple changes.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price and Quote Applications, 11 December 2023, ID G00782160

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