Salesforce CPQ vs Apttus CPQ
In the quote-to-cash, CPQ world, it is very important that you determine which solution is best for your company and products that you sell. A CPQ solution will be configuring your complex product and pricing offering, and then delivering a branded quote to your customers. Two big players in the CPQ space are Salesforce and Apttus. Both are package-based solutions built on Salesforce.com platform. Below is a point of view for one vs the other, based on our Slalom team with sales and delivery experience of both the solutions:
Ease of Use
Both Salesforce and Apttus CPQ end users are Salespeople and the goal is to provide salespeople with the tool that is easy to use so they spend most of their time selling. With that in mind, both solutions provide similar capabilities in terms of product and pricing configuration, guided selling, quote life cycle, mobile solution, and other tools to deliver quotes to your customers.
If you are already using Salesforce as your CRM, with Salesforce CPQ you will enjoy a more native look and feel. Salesforce CPQ integrates into Sales Cloud and provides a seamless Lightning user experience for the sales users. Salesforce CPQ utilizes more standard objects than Apttus, such as Price Books, Price Book Entries, Orders, Order Products, and Assets. Salesforce CPQ easily maps to standard and custom fields within the opportunity in Salesforce, allowing you to avoid time spent duplicating effort or copying and pasting deal criteria.
Product Offering
Each of these products is an industry leader and hence offers similar product capabilities. There isn’t much each of these products miss.
Apttus has an extended X-Author capability where admins can build Excel-based apps using X-Author, which directly integrates with Apttus CPQ. X-Author for contracts, also called XAC, can be used to generate complex formatted documents and is much easier to use than OOTB Salesforce Quote templates for document generation. When you have complex formatted proposal document generation, the Quote template functionality within Salesforce CPQ quickly hits the limitations on how much you can customize the proposal document templates.
Salesforce has based its quote-to-cash offering off of the same powerful, easy-to-use design language that has made it an industry leader in CRM. Salesforce’s stack of products integrates well with other modules/products within Salesforce. Salesforce CPQ does everything that you need a quote-to-cash platform to do, including guided selling, rule configuration, orders/renewals, automated and subscription billing, among many other tasks.
When it comes to the product offering, both Salesforce and Apttus offer very compelling products to make delivering quotes better.
Implementation Perspective
In our experience, Apttus CPQ, delivering on time and/or budget is always a challenge because product capabilities tend to be exaggerated during the sales cycle. Apttus typically under sells the amount of time it takes to implement, and this puts Professional Services and other System Integrator’s in a compromising position.
Sometimes your business needs or processes require expanding on the base offering provided by Apttus or Salesforce CPQ. In these situations, Salesforce has a more accurate representation of their product capabilities during the sales cycle. This helps set more accurate expectations and ease of implementation, achieved business benefits, which fosters trust with our customers.
It’s in Salesforce’s DNA to encourage their many partners to develop additional solutions that can integrate with all of their products. Many different companies offer extensions for Salesforce CPQ, which means the platform has been able to rapidly innovate and do so much more quickly than other solutions.
Apttus does offer integrations with their partners, but at a much smaller scale. More of the onus of development falls to Apttus itself or customer, and base product can’t do what you need it to, it’s less likely that you’ll be able to find an integration or a partner that can bridge that functionality gap.
Apttus’ support model almost requires you to purchase premium support. The Apttus CPQ system is complex, and the level of skilled support available through basic support package requires you to escalate several times before getting to a resource that can address your issue.
Salesforce offers a comprehensive knowledge base and support community. Salesforce regulates updates, and the release upgrade cycle is streamlined.
With Apttus, clients often find that it is difficult to maintain frequent release upgrades, and the release upgrade cycles are less streamlined. Upgrades of certain features and modules within Apttus (for eg: CPQ, CLM) can have interoperability issues with other modules in the Apttus stack.
Partnership
In our experience, Apttus has been challenging to partner with, due to their partner requirements and Master Service Agreement (MSA). Without that agreement, it’s nearly impossible to get support from them as an SI. It may be challenging to find a partner to help implement it in a way that works for your business. It also will not be supported, documented, nor enhanced through release cycles by Apttus.
Salesforce provides clear documentation of features, capabilities, and communicate product roadmap, so you can make informed decisions.
In the end, both Salesforce and Apttus are solid CPQ platforms that deliver a massive amount of value to your organization. Because of its accurate representation of the product, ease of implementation & maintenance achieved business benefits, and customer satisfaction, we recommend Salesforce CPQ over Apttus CPQ for your quoting needs.
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