Brightpearl by Sage vs. NetSuite ERP

Brightpearl is very well suited for small-medium companies that are growing quickly and need a way to improve their operational systems and functionality to handle increasing volume of orders. Particularly if you use multiple SKUs, sales channels, and/or warehouses, the features offered by Brightpearl are excellently well suited to handle these types of needs. I don't believe Brightpearl would be very applicable for very small companies with a small number of SKUs, as many of the features offered would be unnecessary and underutilized.

Incentivized

NetSuite suits a mid-sized company best where the organization uses multiple currencies in its day-to-day transactions. NetSuite is ready-to-use for businesses that follow financial standards. The more custom business processes there are, the more implementation is required. I would not recommend NetSuite to a large organization due to its performance issues. Additionally, the in-house bank reconciliation tool is not user-friendly for business purposes.

Incentivized

• Brightpearl tracks order changes and communications very well. It documents all activity in a feed that anyone can see, including status changes, notes made, emails sent, etc.
• Brightpearl makes it incredibly easy to find orders fitting certain criteria through the use of statuses that you can customize. For example, as a multichannel seller, we can easily create statuses for each channel that we sell from, where our orders will (oftentimes automatically) land in. We also deal often with things like back ordered items; we can also create statuses for certain brands, so that when we expect a shipment in from that company, our back order specialist can easily sort through her orders that are waiting on that shipment.
• Brightpearl makes it easy to take orders over the phone. Everything I need is right there on one screen; not often do I find myself needing to deviate to other tabs. The steps I take (from "new order" to finish) are straightforward and understandable, and go in steps that make sense.

Incentivized

• Customizable Reports and Saved Searches allow much more maneuverability
• Elimination Entries that are driven by advanced intercompany journal entries
• Journal Entries can be entered in as basic or advanced intercompany to better represent the type of transaction occurred for reporting purposes
• Training through the LCS module can help shed knowledge on a range of topics at a self paced learning basis
• NetSuite ERP offers to all users a SuiteAnswers platform to pose frequently asked questions with answers generated from a combination of NetSuite ERP experts, users, and more recently AI based.

Incentivized

• We have experienced many errors and have not been satisfied with the product or support.
• There were specific requirements that we had for our inventory solution. We were assured by the salesperson and sale engineer that BrightPearl would meet those requirements, but we found after the fact that it did not.
• The implementation was troubled. The Brightpearl implementer did not complete the implementation, there were many errors, and the implementation closer had to re-do many things in a rush to get us online.
• We've has serious issues with the Shopify integration from flat out service failure to inventory sync. Issues that we were told by sales would work a certain way but they do not.
• Support for picking from specific inventory location or change default inventory location rather than FIFO model.

Incentivized

• Some of the customization options are really complex and can be difficult to figure out without NetSuite ERP direct support.
• The usability is a bit less intuitive than Quickbooks.
• The cost to give someone a license to even just view information in NetSuite ERP is pretty high.

Incentivized

Brightpearl has proved to work out for our company and we have no need or intention to let it go. Rather we intend to build on what we've accomplished and it will no doubt help us scale our business and meet our ambitions.

Incentivized

I am not the decision maker for this but I believe our company will be sticking with NetSuite for the long term. A CRM like this is a big investment and not something you move away from quickly and without a lot of planning. There is a lot of data involved and importing that into a new system is no easy task.

Could be easier to use on smaller screens like iPads and iPhones. The layout is odd, the PC and browser passed part is [easy to] find and very nice layout, would like them to bring out an iPhone app and they would also need Android one but as a company we wouldn't use it as we only use iOS.

Incentivized

It's beneficial if you know what you're doing, but it can be very confusing to find what you're looking for, and many things seem overly complicated or require too many steps to accomplish a simple task - which can be overwhelming for someone accustomed to QuickBooks.

Incentivized

Brightpearl is always easily accessibly anywhere that you can find an internet source. I have checked our stock levels when we have been off site at Ham Rally's at home and on my way home or to work if needs be. That is probably one of the best features of this system.

Incentivized

It has been very reliable. I can only think of 1-2 times in 4.5 years that we have had issues getting in, and in each case were able to get back in within 1 hour. There has not been a major downtime

Brightpearl performs very well and integrates very well with our Metapak packing and despatch system. IT also intergrates very well with Amazon and we have used Ebay although there have been complications with Ebay and stock levels. We use Ebay mostly for second hand items of which we only have one so have skipped using Brighpearl for these products.

Incentivized

Most of the time the performance is very good. Pages load in a few seconds; financial reports take less than 5 seconds; basic searches take a few seconds. But performance can be sporadic throughout the day and cause the run time to triple.

Incentivized

Brightpearl was ALWAYS great at responding to us. Their customer service was quick and responsive. Unfortunately, the responses were often that "engineers were working on it" but nothing seemed to ever come of that. I realize that Brightpearl is a large company that a lot of businesses rely on. But when you can't hit "enter" when trying to search in the front-end POS, that type of behavior should be changed very quickly and it never was. Admittedly, small things, but those annoyances tend to ultimately affect the overall experience.

Incentivized

I would like to give 8 rating for NetSuite support and reason for that is below: Whenever we faced any technical or functional issues we tried to reach out to NEtSuite support but response was not immediate. We told them about the urgency of the issue but still we were not getting response on time. Then, we have to reach out to AE to get things resolved.

Incentivized

No in house training was given.

Incentivized

I had in person training for a day when first got the software. The training was good. The challenge was that there was a large gap between training and when we went live so we forgot quite a lot

The online training was very helpful in the areas we were shown and was implemented very well via a Skype call and an presentation done via the internet. However it was not thorough enough for all of our needs in certain areas. More training in person on site would have been very helpful.

Incentivized

Online training is quite strong. I have used for specific pieces of functionality.However it is not sufficient in all areas.

The people handling our integration didn't try to get to know our business at all to help us integrate it. They sent us a few lists to go through for chart of accounts, had us send our inventory list over, and they uploaded those. Then we went through a bunch of trainings which to me were not very helpful. I do better figuring it out on my own. I feel like we could have done most of it ourselves with just a little coaching.

Incentivized

Implementation was fine but could have gone quicker.

NetSuite provided me a implementation guide who I did not think was very knowledgeable.

I recommend that you make sure the organization knows how they are going to use the software and come up with an implementation plan before importing all of the data.

I certainly wouldn't select Brightpearl now. With Cloud Commerce Pro you can list directly onto all the marketplaces/website software that it has integrations for (more integrations than Brightpearl has) plus you have Google Translate Professional integrated to help you with foreign language listings. Brightpearl cannot do any of that, so not easy to expand your sales due to the limited number of marketplaces where you can sell.

NetSuite by far is the most expensive; However, compared to the 3 systems notated, the overall functionality, capability and reporting advantages make it my top choice for companies experiencing exponential growth across all departments. Its a best in class solution for just about any user.

Incentivized

Brightpearl's ability to increase or expand its capacity and retain its performance levels to accommodate growth were acceptable but not fantastic. The program was constantly making changes which can be useful, but was also confusing & hard to keep up with since we were never updated that changes were about to be made or had been made.

Incentivized

We have been able to scale our business 25X without any major overhaul with Netsuite. Its dashboard setup makes onboarding new employees very easy and allows data to be shared across multiple offices. Its cloud setup does not put any pressure on IT to scale servers or other infrastructure. We have been able to become much more efficient in all aspects of the business.

• We would not be able to trade on our 12 channels without BrightPearl. It's as simple as that.
• We use Amazon and eBay in both EU and USA and manage several virtual warehouses within BP and this works fantastically.
• Our Amazon and eBay sales increase alone is 3x the cost of Brightpearl.

Incentivized

• NetSuite ERP data is used for material reporting. That is like balance sheet and profit and loss reporting. It plays a key role in financial data management.
• Too many customisation become hard to manage in over a period of time.
• High cost licensing.

Incentivized