Buyers evaluate too few options
Nine products regularly reach mid-market shortlists. A typical buyer seriously evaluates two, chosen from what they have heard of, and the middle of the market goes unexamined.
Research · updated August 2026
An annual assessment of the category from the position of a small competitor inside it. Written from what we see in evaluations, quotes, and stalled projects rather than from vendor briefings, which means it is partial and observed rather than comprehensive.
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Where the products sit on breadth against accounting depth. Position is our assessment from evaluations we have participated in rather than a scored index.
What we found
These are opinions formed from primary observation, held with moderate confidence, and stated as such rather than as findings.
Nine products regularly reach mid-market shortlists. A typical buyer seriously evaluates two, chosen from what they have heard of, and the middle of the market goes unexamined.
Every vendor has repositioned around AI. Generally available functionality lags announcements by twelve to eighteen months across the category, ourselves included.
Vendors selling exclusively through partners optimise for what partners can sell and implement, which pushes toward configurability and away from opinionated defaults.
Not one major mid-market vendor publishes list pricing. That is a category norm rather than an accident, and it costs buyers real money in the 2.1× spread we observe.
The number of systems a mid-market finance function runs keeps rising. Increasingly the valuable thing is not the ledger but whether everything agrees with it.
Cloud deployment removed a category of infrastructure risk and did not touch the causes that actually stall projects: requirements, data, and decision authority.
The most consequential thing we observe is how few options buyers evaluate. Two is the typical number, chosen from brand recognition, and the second is frequently there to make the first look considered.
This matters because the middle of the market is where the fit usually is. A services business at $40M evaluating QuickBooks against NetSuite is choosing between something they have outgrown and something built for a company four times their size, while four products fitted to exactly their shape go unexamined.
Unpublished pricing is a category norm and it persists because it works — for vendors. Different customers pay materially different amounts for the same configuration, and the variance tracks negotiating sophistication rather than requirements.
We publish ours, which is partly a positioning decision and partly a bet that transparency is becoming more valuable than price discrimination in this segment. We would be interested to be proven wrong about that, and so far it has not cost us obviously.
Several vendors in this category sell nothing directly. That has a product consequence beyond the commercial one: a product sold through partners has to be configurable enough that a partner can adapt it to any customer, which pushes against opinionated defaults.
The result is systems that can do almost anything and require a project to decide what they should do. That configurability is genuinely valuable for complex businesses and it is a substantial part of why implementations take six months.
A mid-market finance function in 2016 ran an accounting system and a payroll provider. In 2026 it runs eight to fourteen systems, and the accounting system is one of them rather than the centre.
That shift makes the ledger less strategically important than it was and makes agreement between systems considerably more important. Several vendors have noticed; the ones building marketplaces of certified connectors are responding to it, and the ones treating integration as a partner problem are not.
We are a small, early competitor with a narrow product, no manufacturing or warehouse capability, US-centric statutory coverage, and considerably less operating history than anyone else on the map above. Any assessment we publish about this category should be read with that in mind.
What we would claim is a useful vantage point rather than a comprehensive one. We see quotes, evaluations, stalled projects, and data diagnostics across a range of vendors, and that is a different view from either an analyst’s or an incumbent’s.
This page is observation and opinion rather than survey research, and it should be weighted accordingly. It draws on our own primary data — 63 quotes, 74 data diagnostics, 41 stalled deployments, 38 timed closes — and on evaluations we participated in during 2025 and 2026.
The vendor positioning map is our assessment from evaluations rather than a scored index. Our scored comparisons use published weights and are separate from this page.
We took no vendor briefings in preparing this, which is both a limitation and deliberate. Briefings would improve the accuracy of the roadmap picture and would make it harder to publish the parts vendors would object to.
Every observation here is one we would revise on evidence. Where you think we have something wrong, tell us — several corrections from last year’s edition are reflected in this one and noted in the changelog.
Questions
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