Gartner Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) Applications 2023

Unpack the Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players in the CPQ space

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Gartner Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) Applications 2023
CRMInsights

Published: December 20, 2023

Charlie Mitchell

Providing quick, accurate sales quotes to customers is a significant part of a successful sales process for many businesses.

Yet, it’s not easy for businesses that sell configurable products, with many rules and calculations applied across various offerings.

That is where CPQ applications can save the day, lowering complexity and giving salespeople the foundation to do their jobs well.

Many businesses now recognize this, with the CPQ market growing by 13.1 percent in 2022 to an estimated $1.72BN – as per Gartner.

Yet, many vendors cram inside the crowded space, making it tricky for these businesses to select the best-suited CPQ offering.

That’s where the Gartner Magic Quadrant comes in, evaluating 16 of the most prominent CPQ providers and helping companies see through the weeds.

The Definition of Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) Applications

According to Gartner, CPQ applications allow sales teams to “automate and optimize” the development of customer quotes and capture of orders.

Moreover, they provide the space for salespeople to input customer requirements and design custom configurations in real-time.

With this, sellers can present customers with relevant options at an accurate price while reducing costs and helping sales teams close deals faster.

Gartner suggests that there are several must-have capabilities for this market. These are:

  • Integrations with prominent sales force automation solutions
  • The ability to search and select products and services to sell
  • The ability to configure product options and features
  • Automatic pricing of the selected products and services
  • Proposal generation and terms negotiation features
  • Order placement tools
  • An extensible framework that allows a business to flex the CPQ around its processes, products, and services

Yet, the analyst also proposes a host of standard capabilities. These include support for digital commerce channels (via pre-built UIs and/or APIs), integrations with fulfillment apps (like an ERP), approvals workflows, and subscription selling and management.

Having established all these fundamentals, Gartner split the 16 CPQ providers into four categories: Leaders, Challenges, Visionaries, and Niche Players. Here, we review them all.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) Applications 2023
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) Applications 2023

Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders

Leaders in the Magic Quadrant demonstrate “solid” business results – via earnings – which allow them to execute on an astute vision through product innovation and adept services. Moreover, they have above-average CX scores across all deployments, including large-scale implementations, becoming the providers that competitors often measure themselves against. This year’s leaders are:

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

Tacton

Tacton CPQ excels in complex manufacturing environments, especially for modeling complex configure-to-order and engineer-to-order products. It also features a robust constraint-solving rule engine, supports 3D/AR visual configuration, and seamlessly integrates with SAP R/3 and SAP S4/HANA. Moreover, it offers significant extensibility through a state workflow engine and dynamic attribute calculations. Gartner highlights these core strengths alongside Tacton’s innovation, as evidenced by unique features like its quote comparison tool and real-time model updates.

SAP

SAP CPQ stands out in product selection, offering powerful search, a “robust” sales catalog, and features like product comparison and rapid order entry. Meanwhile, its configurator has a flexible UI that supports advanced requirements and features a cutting-edge condition/action rule engine. Alongside these features, Gartner pinpoints the extensive integrations with various SAP products as a major plus point, including seamless connections to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP ECC, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP BRIM, and SAP Subscription Billing.

Oracle

According to Gartner, Oracle CPQ offers top-notch selling services that cover renewals, amendments, suspensions, terminations, order stacking, and service billing. Its integration with Oracle Subscription Management Cloud is critical here. Moreover, the analyst notes Oracle’s track record in large deployments, with over ten implementations serving 10,000 users or more – highlighting its capacity to support enterprise-scale operations. Lastly, Oracle boasts a huge global base of sellers and services, supporting 22 languages, which Gartner commends.

Bit2win

Bit2win is often the CPQ application of choice across utilities, thanks largely to its sector-specific functionality, needs-based product recommendations, and subscription management capabilities. Moreover, the product integrates tightly with SAP IS-U. In addition, Bit2win is known for large-scale deployments, with many implementations crossing 10,000 sales users. Finally, Gartner picks out Bit2win’s pricing functionality as a significant strength. That includes various pricing models, volume-based discounting, bundling, and much more – all presented as a user-friendly, headless service.

Infor

Infor CPQ specializes in selling “complex tangible goods” – according to Gartner, To do so, it offers “one of the best” rule administration tools, complemented by high-quality 3D visualization, bill of and computer-aided design (CAD) drawing generation for configured products. Like Oracle, it can also offer examples of over ten implementations serving 1,000 users or more – highlighting its large deployment expertise. The analyst doubles down on this while tipping its cap to the rapid development of the platform over the past 18 months and its “ambitious” product roadmap.

Salesforce CPQ

Salesforce leads the CRM market and is often a top choice in competitive deals. Built on the Salesforce Platform, it offers excellent extensibility, workflow-building tools, analytics, and integrations. Moreover, Salesforce ensures customers receive the latest software version by automatically retaining customizations. That is a significant strength that Gartner acknowledges, alongside Salesforce CPQ’s broad ecosystem, with many third-party add-on options for tax calculation, price optimization, sales compensation, and e-signatures.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Challengers

Challengers in the Magic Quadrant have the size and cornerstone product capabilities to compete globally. Also, their customer satisfaction scores are often high across various sectors and business sizes. However, they may lag leaders in the strength of their functional vision and/or product enhancements over the past couple of years. This year’s challengers are:

  • PROS
  • Conga

PROS

PROS Smart CPQ impresses with its “usability and performance”, boasting “one of the best product catalogs” in the evaluation. Meanwhile, its extensive AI-driven guided selling capabilities, rule engine that automatically pinpoints compatible options, and ML-driven price optimization engine for contextual deal recommendations all underline PROS’s strength in intelligence. However, Gartner cites limitations in its out-of-the-box support for selling and managing services – alongside its lack of easy-to-implement order management tools – as potential concerns.

Conga

Conga CPQ shines in pricing functionality, supporting list pricing, cost-plus pricing, volume discounts, attribute-based pricing, sales agreements, promotions, and bundles. In addition, Gartner picks out its solution selling and new composable architecture as plus points. Yet, while early demos of that architecture show promise, the analyst notes that there is significant work ahead to complete its development, stabilize the platform, and shift existing customers across. As Conga does this, its pipeline of new, innovative product capabilities has – unfortunately – stalled.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Visionaries

Visionaries in the Magic Quadrant can demonstrate a remarkable eye for anticipating emerging customer needs, evolving product plans, and moving the market in new directions. In addition, they may also put forward a compelling roadmap. Nevertheless, they often trail market leaders in their execution and/or implementation track record. This year’s visionaries are:

  • Salesforce Industries CPQ
  • servicePath

Salesforce Industries CPQ

Salesforce Industries CPQ ranks best in its completeness of vision. That fuels unique innovations, with Gartner highlighting features such as its multi-language product search, fast ordering from the customer account screen, and bulk updates to service attributes. There is also a deep well of sector-specific capabilities for customers to drink from, as Salesforce makes industry specificity a core platform differentiator. Meanwhile, the solution attracts significant business from telecoms, media, energy, healthcare, and insurance firms. Yet, Gartner cautions that it has heard repeated complaints regarding end-user response times.

servicePath

servicePath CPQ+ often addresses the needs of technical service providers selling complex solutions involving hardware, software, and professional services, with support for these product types out-of-the-box. In addition, the product excels in selling and managing services, ranking among the best in Gartner’s evaluation. It also offers unique features like its financial dashboard and cash flow modeling tool. However, the vendor does lag behind leaders in its market presence and extensibility features to build upon the standard UI, scripted logic, and state workflow.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Niche Players

Niche players in the Magic Quadrant often meet and exceed customer expectations with complete solutions for specific industries. Yet, delivering cross-sector requirements may prove a little trickier. Moreover, they can fall behind in their capacity for deployments that cross multiple geographies, consistency of their track record, and/or large enterprise support. This year’s niche players are:

  • Epicor
  • Vendavo
  • CSG
  • Yagna iQ
  • Apparound
  • ScaleFluidly

Epicor

Epicor CPQ offers “excellent” native support for 2D, 3D, and augmented reality visual configurations – according to Gartner. The analyst also commends Epicor’s usability and rule engine – Epicor CPQ Snap – that features an innovative drag-and-drop UI for customization, making it user-friendly for administrators. However, it lacks out-of-the-box support for selling services, and its pricing capabilities rank among the weakest in Gartner’s evaluation, requiring businesses to implement pricing logic within the Snap rule engine.

Vendavo

Vendavo Intelligent CPQ uses machine learning for deal price guidance, suggesting the best prices and discounts for specific deals. Gartner notes this as a core strength, alongside its marketplace and mobile UI, which is responsive, speedy, and user-friendly. Yet, the product lacks compossibility and key out-of-the-box capabilities for complex manufacturing deployments. Moreover, the analyst suggests Vendavo has limited support for selling and managing services.

CSG

Many telecoms choose to implement CSG Quote & Order, as it supports TM Forum (TMF) API standards and has a reputation for managing complex service contracts. Moreover, the vendor excels in its composability, providing “the best” support for orchestrating custom and self-service apps via its library of well-documented APIs. The product suite also includes robust order management capabilities. Nevertheless, its low extensibility is a caution, and Gartner pinpoints potential problems with customers using multiple software versions, which CSG may struggle to sustain.

Yagna iQ

Several electronics and high-tech firms implement Yagna iQ, including Cisco and VMware product resellers – as the vendor offers connectors with Cisco Commerce Workspace and VMware Partner Connect. The platform also has several features that are ideal for resellers. These facilitate partner management, support reseller agreements, and enable payment collection. However, Gartner notes that Yagna iQ has “one of the weakest overall out-of-the-box capabilities” and casts doubt on its capability to quickly handle large transactions and proposals.

Apparound

Apparound Power CPQ offers a responsive UI for Microsoft Windows and native mobile apps for Android and iOS. That is a critical differentiator, as these apps even work when disconnected from the network. Additional features include barcode scanning, signature capture, and deposit capture. The platform is also generally fast – handling large transactions efficiently – and Gartner highlights its strength across utilities and telecom use cases. Yet, Apparound Power CPQ has a small market presence beyond Europe, and its configuration rule engine has comparatively limited capabilities.

ScaleFluidly

ScaleFluidly envisions a composable product architecture that is deployable across various sales channels. Gartner seemingly admires this vision alongside its rapid growth – with approximately 10,000 users since its launch in 2022 – and response times for its UI and APIs. However, Gartner added that it can struggle to handle “very large” transactions. Moreover, the analyst cautions that its product functionality lacks depth and extensibility, with limited flexibility for customization.

Check out some of our other Magic Quadrant report rundowns below:

 

CRMMagic QuadrantWorkforce Optimization

Brands mentioned in this article.

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