Ultimate Guide: Acumatica vs NetSuite: Which is best?

Finding a suitable ERP solution is an important choice for emerging businesses—you’ll likely be married to the solution of your choice for a long time. There’s no going back without incurring high costs and time-consuming tasks of re-creating workflows, system integrations, training, and more. In other words, choose wisely the first time around,

When choosing an ERP system, you need to figure out where your business is now and where you envision it in the next five to ten years. Going through this mental exercise will help you decide whether to invest for the long term or simply go with the most affordable choice that passes your minimum requirements today.

Here we compare NetSuite vs Acumatica. These two ERP solutions have both been well received by their respective customer bases, but each has its own advantages and disadvantages. The objective of this article is to help you figure out which works best for your business.

A Brief History:

NetSuite

NetSuite was founded in 1998 by Evan Goldberg. The company started out as a web-hosted accounting management software but quickly evolved into an end-to-end cloud-based solution for ERP, financial planning, and omnichannel commerce.

In 2016, NetSuite was acquired by Oracle for an estimated $9.3 billion. Today, the company serves over 16,000 customers in more than 200 countries and territories and is widely considered a pioneer in the cloud-based software space.

Acumatica

Acumatica is one of the fastest-growing ERP providers as of late. The company was founded in 2003, and, just a year after, released its very first on-premise and SaaS solution. It has been steadily expanding its customer base, serving roughly 5,200 small- to mid-sized companies as of this writing.

The company is now run by a handful of former Microsoft executives at the top, and it’s looking to expand its capabilities to include machine learning and artificial intelligence as part of its product offerings.

Head-to-Head Comparison:

Features & Functions:

Customer Support & Training:

Acumatica vs. NetSuite Functional Comparison

The NetSuite vs. Acumatica debate centers on two things: NetSuite’s advantage when it comes to scaling and capabilities and Acumatica’s unlimited user pricing model.

By and large, NetSuite is the more proven option, with a significant track record across many different industries at scale. However, for small businesses looking to deploy an ERP system at a low price point, Acumatica could be an affordable contender, even though it lacks many of the features and functionalities found in NetSuite.

Implementation

Acumatica offers solutions both on-premise and in the cloud. The solution is built on .NET and Microsoft’s server stack and integrates with Microsoft Office 365, and Power BI. Acumatica's biggest criticisms have to do with product maturity and lack of expired VARs, according to online reviews.  Net, net Acumatica is still not a proven platform to help growth companies scale.

NetSuite implements its solutions exclusively on the cloud, which is great for companies looking to get into the cloud but not for companies looking for an on-premise solution. That said, NetSuite’s performance in the cloud is second to none, especially when it comes to reliability and scalability, providing users with a 99.99% average uptime.

User Experience

Both NetSuite and Acumatica are built to support all browsers and mobile devices, and both provide the ability to customize reports and dashboards. That said, the difference is that the former provides deep functionality while the latter provides decent functionality for a reasonable cost.

NetSuite’s accounting system is built with a unified database, whereas Acumatica’s is highly dependent on batch processing, which may affect accuracy, productivity, and timeliness. Acumatica's dependence on batch processing also means that reports are updated on a point-in-time basis, instead of a real-time basis, like NetSuite.

Moreover, NetSuite supports automatic, real-time subsidiary consolidation, while Acumatica only supports manual consolidation unless you implement an intercompany accounting middleware engine.

Analyst Reviews

Leading industry analyst Gartner named NetSuite a "leader" as one of only three ERP solutions listed in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises, whereas Acumatica was not even featured.  

In closing

Acumatica’s primary value proposition against NetSuite is that it offers an ERP solution with a lower total cost of ownership and a choice of deployment options (on-prem vs. cloud).  That being said, for companies looking to scale their business with a proven, cloud-based ERP system, NetSuite will be the ideal choice for most organizations.