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Pricefx vs PROS – 2024 – Choose the Best Pricing Software for You

March 4th, 2022 (Updated 01/15/2024) | 12 min. read

By Doug Fuehne

You already know that you need to streamline and optimize your pricing strategy and require a sophisticated yet easy-to-use pricing platform that will move you forward in your pricing transformation journey. But you’re stuck trying to work out the similarities and differences of Pricefx vs. PROS pricing software. You need an honest comparison of the two solutions to help you work out which one will be a better fit for your company and your specific pricing scenarios. 

Both vendors are considered industry leaders. So, now it’s time to drill down into the specifics to ensure you’re getting a solution that will deliver the pricing and organizational outcomes you’re looking for. 

At Pricefx, we have spent the last decade learning about the pricing software needs of our customers and what is most important to them when choosing a solution. So, we put together a list of the top criteria you’ll want to consider when making your final decision choosing between PROS and Pricefx. 

 However, before going further, please note that:  

  • This comparison article is based upon information available to the general public, including information gathered from publicly available reviews, rankings, and testimonials. 
  • We suggest you also undertake your own research in order in combination with the information supplied below to reach your own decision.  
  • Please also note that the “PROS” trademark is owned by PROS, not Pricefx, and nothing in this article is intended to suggest any affiliation with or endorsement by PROS. Similarly, the “G2” trademark is owned by G2, and references to G2 are not intended to suggest affiliation with or endorsement by G2.  

Ready? Let’s dive in. 

 

Pricefx Competitors – The Top 7 Decision Criteria 

Your pricing software should enable you to easily define and implement pricing strategies that take you toward your pricing goals. And while both PROS and Pricefx both offer an excellent range of tools to upgrade your pricing processes and outcomes, they each have their strengths and weaknesses. What you need to do is work out which of their individual strengths are more important to you. 

To determine which of the two pricing software solutions is a best fit for your business, let’s consider the following key criteria: 

  1. Self-Sufficiency 
  2. Ease of Use 
  3. Shortest Time to Value 
  4. Easiest Integration with Existing Systems  
  5. Most Accessible and User-Friendly AI Capabilities 
  6. Most Comprehensive Coverage of Current and Future Requirements  
  7. Best Solution for My Industry 

So, let’s dig in. 

1. Self-Sufficiency  

Winner – Pricefx 

Pricefx has been designed with self-sufficiency in mind. 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. It is our goal that, once your solution is up and running, your team can take full ownership without too much external assistance; as G2 users put it, our platform offers high flexibility without IT levels and does not require IT support for price changes 

The PROS tech support team is brought up again and again as one of the qualities that customers appreciate most about the platform. Meanwhile, difficulties stemming from the tool’s complexity is often mentioned as a roadblock for users to confidently use it on their own; the need for experts to solve problems and not being a data scientist themselves to understand the logic were among the issues brought up by reviewers around this.   

Both Pricefx and PROS provide an extensive training offering to support user proficiency. Pricefx provides multiple training paths that empower teams to spend more time working pricing magic and less time on the phone with customer support. We even offer a path dedicated entirely to self-sufficiency, which arms companies with the skills to maintain and support Pricefx solutions with their own resources.   

PROS also offers a comprehensive learning program with on-demand and live courses for different levels (100, 200, and 300) that aims to build user proficiency in the tool to eventually customize it according to individual requirements. 

7-benefits-of-pricefx-training 

While both offer great resources and tools to support user independence, due to a tendency for users to need to rely on PROS tech support to use the platform, Pricefx wins the self-sufficiency category. 

 

2. Ease of Use

Winner – PROS

According to the independent peer-to-peer review site, G2’s User Satisfaction Ratings, Pricefx and PROS are comparable when it comes to how easy the software is to get started and administer, with Pricefx tied with PROS in terms of how easy the software is to set up and PROS marginally ahead in ease of use and ease of admin.  

Pricefx tied with PROS for ease of setup at 71%. However, Pricefx lost ease of use at 77%, slightly behind PROS’ 79%, and also lost ease of admin, a percentage point behind PROS’ 76%.  

 

3. Shortest Time to Value

Winner – Pricefx 

According to G2, Pricefx comes out on top when it comes to value, with the largest segment of Pricefx customers experiencing full ROI payback in just 6 months or less. 

In nearly every other aspect of this category, we tied; both Pricefx and PROS saw a 20-month average time to ROI and a 7-month average time to Go Live.  

With respect to average time to ROI, almost half of our customers (46%) see their ROI paid back within the first year, while at PROS, nearly 10 points less (37%) see ROI in the same timeframe. In fact, most PROS customers (32%) see value in 13-24 months.  

With respect to Go Live time, more Pricefx customers (25%) are live within 3-6 months, compared to a 6-12-month Go-Live for most PROS customers (35%). 

 

 

 

4. Easiest Integration with Existing Systems

 Winner – Pricefx/PROS – Tie 

The PROS Integrate offer delivers over 100 pre-built connectors for the most common data sources and formats and aggregates data into a consistent format to support seamless integration with its solutions. It claims that its Integrate customers cut integration costs by 50% and integration timelines by 75%. 

Pricefx software is designed to seamlessly integrate with any of your 3rd party systems, such as ERP, SAP, Oracle, MS Dynamics, IBM AS/400, among others. 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 competitive pricing or customer sentiment data from social media at your disposal, you’re in a better position to make smart pricing decisions. 

Unfortunately, there is not enough data available for PROS in any of the relevant categories in the G2 user ratings score card. So, for not having enough reviews to support a fair comparison, we say it’s a tie here. However, we think it’s a great sign that Pricefx has enough reviews to attest to an easy integration.  

 

5. Most Accessible and User-Friendly AI Capabilities

Winner – Pricefx 

PROS is a known leader in pricing data science, particularly for the sophistication of its AI offering, with their latest offering leveraging only one of the five main machine learning methods, neural networks. Still, PROS claims to offer transparency into what is going on behind the scenes, with accompanying frameworks such as Explainable AI, which should help users understand and trust the AI model’s predictions.  

While black box methods like neural networks can be impressive, their requirement of entire mechanisms to explain their outcomes to gain user trust is not the most user-friendly or accessible. 

Pricefx offers advanced AI technology that is practical and easy to use, without the added complexity of an ultra-sophisticated algorithm. Pricefx AI Optimization is our AI-driven price optimization solution that is transparent to understand from the start, flexible, and above all, focuses on solving business problems first.  

So, with more straightforward and easy-to-use AI technology, Pricefx wins this round. However, if a business is looking for an AI engine on the market that pulls in an impressive array of factors to optimize prices, but at the same time, is comfortable with the uncertainty of a black box AI system, PROS AI is a great choice.   

 

6. Most Comprehensive Coverage of Current and Future Requirements

Winner – Pricefx 

According to G2, Pricefx wins the “meets requirements” category at 83%, compared to PROS’ 81%.  

Pricefx is a true SaaS next-gen 360° solution with 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.  
  • Our Price package leverages AI-powered price optimization and helps you eliminate margin leakage by gaining oversight of your contract management and promotion campaigns. 
  • Our Profit package helps you quickly create quotes and maximize profitability, define, calculate and execute rebates with ease, and automate ship & debit processes. 

In addition to the packages mentioned, we also offer Pricefx AI Optimization, AI-driven price optimization software that is straightforward to use and designed to address the most use cases on the market, and PricefxPlasma®, the pricing software industry’s only tool for easy benchmarking against industry standards. Also, last year we partnered with rebate management platform Enable to bring together both buy and sell sides of the rebate process. 

Meanwhile, PROS offers a range of tools designed to meet the needs of pricing, sales, and e-commerce teams. The PROS Platform is built with synchronized end-to-end workflows and a common data model across all teams.  The integrated solutions offered here 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 

If you’re only looking for a solution that delivers great price optimization tools, then consider PROS because of its sophisticated black box AI engine. 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, practical AI-driven price optimization, and excellent rebate and channel management tools, then only Pricefx will deliver. 

So, while PROS’s focus is price optimization & management and CPQ, Pricefx offers solutions for every aspect of the pricing process – from analytics and CPQ to rebate and channel management. 

 

7. Best Solution for My Industry

Winner – depends on your industry 

PROS places a strong focus on the Airline and Travel industry, but also works with companies in the Automotive, Consumer Goods, Distribution, Energy & Chemicals, Food & Consumables, Manufacturing, Medical Devices & Healthcare, Services, Technology Hardware & Software, and Transportation & Logistics industries. 

Pricefx places its industry focus on the following sectors:  

  • Discrete Manufacturing – Pricefx offers effective price setting and positioning of products to reflect market conditions and new offerings, price and negotiation guidance to optimize quoting and customer agreements, analytics targeting performance and grey market risk, and more.  
  • Chemical and Process IndustryPricefx creates more transparency into rebate performance, streamlines workflows and ensures that agreements align with a company’s business goals and are accurately reflected in payouts.   
  • Distribution – Pricefx supports distributors to optimize their pricing to instantly reflect market conditions and cost changes, curate customer-specific pricing, improve margins, optimize their rebates and agreements setup.  
  • Food and Beverage – Pricefx provides companies in food and beverage with no-fuss analytical tools to get the most profit out of their pricing strategies and adapt quickly to evolving market conditions and new customer segments. 

While Pricefx currently serves these areas, our pricing software is designed to be industry agnostic. That’s how we can offer the level of flexibility and configurability we do. 

In fact, our PricefxPlasma® 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 for all B2B industries.  

 

I Now Know the Difference Between Pricefx & One of Its Alternatives – What’s Next? 

The most important thing to consider when choosing between PROS and Pricefx is: which solution gets you to your specific goals? 

Which solution offers you the right set of tools to achieve your goals? Which helps you solve your top-line problems? How important is ROI? Is integration key to your success? Are you in a position to leverage next-gen data science? How important is self-sufficiency? Your decision should not be based on how many bells and whistles the solution has but should really focus on your specific problems and which solution best helps you solve them. 

To see how we compared Pricefx and PROS in this article, feel free to check out this G2 Pricefx vs PROS head-to-head review snapshot for winter 2024. If you’re interested in comparing Pricefx with other solutions, see how we measure up under “Pricefx Comparisons” on the Pricefx G2 review page 

If you’d like to explore other important factors to consider when choosing pricing software for your business, then check out our article below:

Full disclosure: Please note that this direct Pricefx vs. PROS comparison article is based upon independently collated peer-to-peer reviews and publicly open content published on the Pricefx and PROS websites. We highly recommend that you do your own research to reach a decision about which pricing software is best for your company. 

Doug Fuehne

SVP Impact in Revenue , Pricefx

Doug Fuehne has over two decades of experience consulting with manufacturers, distributors, and retailers on pricing and supply chain strategy, including over a decade working in pricing software. Doug leads Pricefx's Impact team, helping customers understand how they can drive value in their business with pricing software across their entire lifecycle. Before Pricefx, Doug led AWS' Global Supply Chain practice, led Amazon Business' Customer Success and implementation teams, led presales and professional services at a competitor to Pricefx, and built ecommerce businesses at Deloitte and Enron. Doug enjoys playing guitar, coaching youth sports, hiking the Pacific Northwest and traveling.