CaptivateIQ in San Francisco offers their flagship sales commission management product designed to enable companies to manage and tailor mission critical sales incentive compensation programs for their workforce.
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Salesforce Spiff
Score 8.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Spiff headquartered in Sandy offers their sales commission engine and automation platform, providing a personalized performance dashboard for individual contributors, commission plan building tools, approval workflow for commission plans, and integrations with payment (e.g. Stripe, Paypal), as well as CRMs and ERP systems.
Spiff is supposed to be similar. i chose Captivate because of several reasons: 1-Pricing was much cheaper. 2-it looked a bit easier to implement back then to me
Spiff is super sleek and a top contender, honestly, though the price point difference between Captivate and Spiff took Spiff off the table quickly for us. Sales Cookie: we used it for a bit as Captivate didn't have a Hubspot integration, but we quickly outgrew the software and …
The UI of Xactly is very confusing and has too many clicks. Spiff has a nice UI, but making agile adjustments is cumbersome, as well as the reporting was very basic.
I have used Spiff in the past and it works, but there are a few additional hoops to jump through to set up an individual dashboard. I prefer the clear dashboard and displays from CaptivateIQ.
We were previously using Spiff for our commission calculation, but it required much more time for implementation, handled exceptions much more poorly, and overall needed more hands-on support from us than we wanted. The design of dashboards and team structures is also much …
CaptivateIQ hand down is more robust in its approach and flexibility. The system provides a simple process flow which is adjustable without any complex or multi tier approach. CaptivateIQ gives the admin/owner complete control of the system with extreme customer support. The …
We have one experienced user in our organization. Based on his experience in the previous company, he recommended the team implement CaptivateIQ as our commission calculation platform. After the first meeting with the CaptivateIQ team, we felt that the key features that …
This is much more robust and intuitive than Spiff. Spiff was also a great tool but the deeper and more focused features make CaptivateIQ a superior solution for a growing sales org.
I was not in the selection process, but CaptivateIQ is much simpler to use than Spiff. The tool is more intuitive to use and I don't have to spend as much time looking for commission details.
Both seem to solve the same problem and have not had issues with either.
Salesforce Spiff
Verified User
Representative
Chose Salesforce Spiff
Personally, I didn't make the decision to use Spiff at my current org, that is just the system they use across the entire company. I have used CaptivateIQ at a previous company. I will say that between the two tools, I prefer using Spiff. I feel the overall setup and modeling …
The administrative burden is substantially lower in Spiff than with CaptivateIQ (we're actually using the two concurrently), resulting in fewer administrative errors in Spiff commissions and way less time managing commissions in Spiff.
CaptivateIQ failed to show the depth of details I can get with Spiff. Spiff is much easier to navigate and overall is a more effective tool to forecast and visually much more pleasing.
The team at Spiff made it easy to choose their platform, they were extremely diligent and made the process seamless. They had worked with us on pricing and we were extremely satisfied with the end result. The user interface and simplicity was also a driving factor in choosing …
Spiff was the most user-friendly of all the systems evaluated and had some built-in features not ready yet in other platforms (like ASC 606 Reporting). Spiff also had a great sales process and has offered incredible support throughout implementation and use.
I liked the level of service spiff provided, as well as the option to not use a spreadsheet oriented interface. QuotaPath and captivate were both reasonably compelling. Xactly seemed terrible for SMB companies, their pitch was basically that you could buy a base model and …
Spiff is a great tool and is similar in a lot of ways, but its simplicity of use is what I prefer. Spiff makes it easy for salespeople to navigate, and easy integration and interface tools make it easy for the various sales teams to get what they need out of the same software.
In terms of setting up special incentive programs, it might be better to have those paid out directly. Sometimes the system needs to be manually updated if for say a special service is sold to a pre-existing company. On our end we have to create "new customers" to reflect these new structures of incentives. It still works on CIQ, but it would be helpful for something on the site to allow us to modify this directly.
Spiff can serve well organizations that regularly pay OTE and performance-based incentives as it takes away the pain for users to track their OTE pay. It is also very convenient to access past reports for comparison or whatever purpose you may need it for. The build-in ticketing system also allows users to easily raise inquiries and for admins to have a single inbox for inquiries that they need to address.
Employee Self-Service: CapIQ include self-service portals for employees. This allows them to access their compensation details, track their performance, and understand how their pay is structured.
Error reduction - Manual calculation of incentives and bonuses is prone to errors, especially in organizations with complex compensation structures involving multiple variables, such as sales targets, performance metrics, and different payout rates. These errors can result in underpayments, overpayments, or discrepancies in compensation, which can lead to dissatisfaction among employees.
Real-Time Updates: In dynamic environments, compensation plans may change frequently due to shifts in business goals or market conditions. Compensation incentive software can quickly adapt to these changes, ensuring that compensation calculations remain accurate even as plans are updated. CapIQ allowed me to track my incentives live.
Reporting is challenging. Even exporting payouts requires selecting a date, so if I want a full year of payouts for the entire team, I have to run 12 reports and combine the data. They have a reporting function, but it also requires a significant setup, and I have yet to figure out how to combine data from all of our plans with different columns.
Tracking down changes from prior periods can be tricky. This usually happens due to user error (whoops - admin set up something not quite right), but it might be nice to easily see what changed or why there is an increase or decrease from a prior period impacting the current payout.
Although reporting has been improved, it's an area that I feel could use more development (which they are doing).
Exports are good but to make them great, being able to customize the formatting and data that shows and which data doesn't show would be a great improvement.
The backend can be somewhat confusing with statements and obligations and which should be used when and so on, just as one example. With that being said they are very willing to teach and also just do the updates for you if needed, but if it was a little more intuitive without that help would make it better.
I enjoy using it and it is easy to see where you stand, the issue is still no live tracking, or at the very least, twice daily updates. You have the update in the morning, but I would like to see where I stand at the end of the day as well
I give this rating because I think that this works really well, and it helps our teams see things faster and we are able to keep up with pay outs, I give Captivate a 10/10 because I love the format and how quickly we are able to see the payouts
Overall, the use cases of Spiff have been helping us to address important problems when it comes to commission calculation: (1) Accuracy of the commission calculation, (2) Transparency over how the commission is calculated, (3) Automation of commission calculation, which in turn saves us significant amount of time and energy and allow us to focus more on more important tasks
In all my time using Spiff, I only recall it being unoperational (outside the times when there is scheduled maintence. During those times, Spiff does a good job at communicating when their services will be offline and why). The times when I do get a small error, 9 times out a 10 a simple refresh of the browser will fix the issue.
Pages load quickly, dashboards update numerous times throughout the day, and the integrations are seamless and operate without a hitch. On occasion, commissions will be delayed in calculating corrctly by a day or so, but that is quite rare. I don't find that delay to be a huge hinderance anyways.
We used support during our initial setup regarding statment errors. They were quick and concise to respond and help us solve our issues regarding this. They also directed us to the office hours that enabled us to learn of new features and upcoming announcements.
I needed my account to be set up and there seemed to be some technical issues with onboarding and a customer service rep made herself immediately available to liaison with our IT department to get me up and running. I did not expect them to tend to our request with such urgency.
The training was conducted by our Spiff Account Manager and they would even create recorded videos we could send to the sales team so when they log in, they would understand how to use Spiff. Account managers at Spiff are a huge reason why I like that company.
Spiff is super sleek and a top contender, honestly, though the price point difference between Captivate and Spiff took Spiff off the table quickly for us. Sales Cookie: we used it for a bit as Captivate didn't have a Hubspot integration, but we quickly outgrew the software and needed a more complex solution. Xactly just doesn't have a great user experience and level of customization needed for our plans. All of this to say, Captivate absolutely wins every time on value for cost and functionality compared to other solutions we have vetted.
It is a night and day difference between Sheets and Excel. The fact that it is integrated with Salesforce and calculates commission as you close deals make it super transparent and efficient when it comes to tracking your performance and commission. Spiff takes the manual work out of the equation. Reduces human error and increases collaboration.
We have a fairly large Enterprise sales team (200+ people and growing). Back when I first started at my organization this number was actually around 100 people. We've doubled in size since then and we have had zero problems adding these additional users.
This has increased our turn around time and expense in preparing commission payments
This has allowed us to decrease expense related to processing commissions
This has increased transparency within the sales teams but at the same time, alot of individuals are overwhelmed with the amount of visibility. There really is a fine line on what is to much for some people.