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GEP SMART vs Oracle Procurement Cloud vs SAP Ariba Procurement comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Procurement Software category, the mindshare of GEP SMART is 6.9%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle Procurement Cloud is 11.3%, down from 16.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Ariba Procurement is 25.7%, up from 25.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Procurement Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SAP Ariba Procurement25.7%
Oracle Procurement Cloud11.3%
GEP SMART6.9%
Other56.1%
Procurement Software
 

Featured Reviews

CJ
Doesn't require a background in analytics to run reports
SMART has been helpful for sourcing and public bids. For regulatory purposes, our university posts bids, depending on the scope of the bid. We get a lot of value out of SMART's ability to post to a public site and have suppliers see that information, register in the tool, and participate. SMART features for collecting information and its timeline capabilities are highly useful. Then on the contract side, the reporting capabilities are the most valuable. Our use case focuses primarily on post-execution and lifecycle management, so it's essential to be able to report accurately especially compliance-related reports. SMART is easy to use, especially when reporting. It isn't designed for a hardcore analyst. You don't need to have a background in analytics to run reports, which is huge. I realized I hadn't touched too much on the spending side, but we use SMART for all spending analytics, and any commodity manager procurement professional can go in and run a spending report. That was a business decision to restrict who can run reports since that data can be exported and used. But the reporting capabilities are incredibly easy to use.
KM
Highly customizable, scalable and seamlessly integrates
Off late, most of my customers, where I see a trend, are long-standing heavily customized major customers on ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) on EBS who want to convert themselves to the cloud, and they expect us to provide the same level of customizations that EBS supports them in the cloud. So that's the challenge where we are currently. We have a few strategic advisory accounts like that, and we are evaluating those customizations to see how we can plug them as part of the solution offering so that the customer retains their current custom behavior and they don't have to deal with too many changes with their users. And that's the biggest change that we are working on. And there is a bundle of such initiatives that we do internally. Custom roles are one such thing. There are several areas of improvement. In the procurement cloud, we have today the landed cost management, where there's a lot of flexibility, which has been given on the cloud side in terms of costing. So the license and pricing have become a little complex area. And then auto management has completely changed in the cloud, the way the pricing strategy has been. It's been more complex and more flexible in the cloud. So that's the second area where we see challenges. These two, plus yes, now with self-service procurement, the dynamics have changed in global procurement, where the corporate will do the billing and invoicing, and we can do it from any big use, placing purchase orders and all that, the consolidation and the dynamics of testing. So these are some of the things which have greater flexibility, but at the same time, there is complexity in terms of implementation. We try to implement everything within the same window of the same customer window of six months. In future releases, I would like to see the idea of automating the period close process, which would be beneficial for sustenance after go-live. It is more like sustenance, both go live. If there is a mechanism where the period close can be automated, or it can be if the product can come up with a dashboard specifically for that, which ties with the sequence of the sub-ledgers, what are the conflicts to close the sub-ledger areas to facilitate and close the ledger area? Which consumer buying? That's one initiative or one idea that I'm thinking about. There are quite a few like that, which are more from the sustenance standpoint, more than the implementation standpoint.
Argy Soudi - PeerSpot reviewer
Has connected procurement and contracts efficiently while setup and support still require improvements
Support could be faster for critical issues with SAP Ariba Procurement. To get a priority ticket, you need to know people in high places. When patching happens and new releases come out, it can be hit and miss, though mostly it remains reliable. The on-time response is 99.9999%, but the main issue over the years has been with releases and patching. The initial setup of SAP Ariba Procurement is not straightforward. We have been trying to set it up for two and a half years for Gloucester and more. The personal account login is ready-made and allows landing page adjustments, but the overall software implementation can take forever and requires multiple teams to work on it.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The one we use the most is the sourcing module... It's really easy to use. You don't have to train vendors. You can add a new vendor at any time, and that vendor will get an email saying, "You've been selected to participate in our RFP, and you do X to get your ID set up." That works really well."
"In terms of ease of use, GEP has done a lot of work through its enhancements over the years to make the user experience more intuitive. There is a more standard-Amazon-like experience, where manuals and tutorials are not really required, simply because the user experience and what's on the screen are pretty intuitive."
"One of the most valuable features is the opportunity-identification through the spend analytics. Another is around the RFX options to benchmark various pre-qualified vendors that are invited to participate."
"We operate with three different systems that input data. The fact that GEP consolidates all that information into one place is a big deal for us. It streamlines that data for us."
"On the spend side, it's integrated with our accounting system and has bimonthly uploads of data. So we have pretty current spend information that we can access and build reports on."
"Spend gives us a way to put all of our spend in one area and use a category hierarchy to pull real-time spend data."
"The spend module is really amazing and lightning-fast. It can give even the most novice of analysts access to the information needed and the ability to tweak it the way they want to see it. It has a lot of flexibility."
"It's really simple to use. That's one of the reasons we chose GEP over some of the others. It's very Google-like. On the homepage, you just type whatever you need. And there are tabs that can come up if you're looking for a certain word or phrase..."
"Oracle is suitable for those large enterprises that heavily rely on customizations."
"It is a stable solution."
"I like the guided buying features."
"Salesforce provides me with the ability to create reports based on various parameters."
"Ariba allows us to manage our suppliers seamlessly."
"The best features are the ease of use and the workflow management that allows me to understand every step in the approval process so that I can forecast the time through my request and its approval."
"It is one of the best tools in the market."
 

Cons

"We didn't like their dashboard initially, but they responded to that very well. They've given us some customizable dashboards and have also made it so that the dashboards can be exported into PDF and other formats, so that we can share them with the rest of the company... That was a weakness at the beginning, but one that they have responded to adequately and we're really pleased with the result."
"I want to see continued investment in analytics and reporting."
"I'd like to see drag-and-drop reporting. They have the old model for reports where you have to click the "run" button. The thing runs and then you have to export it to PowerPoint."
"We had a lot of challenges and disagreements with SMART. It's been a long road, for sure, on the contract side. There is a little bit of pushback on their part when we need stuff done. Things aren't done very efficiently. I'm still waiting on some changes that were requested well over a year-and-a-half ago."
"We definitely have some asks for enhancements. One of the big ones we'd like to see is what we call "drag-and-drop." If I have an email that I want to maintain in the SMART record for whatever reason — for example, it has supporting information in it — I would love to be able to just drop that into the notes and attachments section without having to save it as a PDF and then upload it."
"Their contracts module is kind of clunky and It took a while for them to correct some of the basic functionality, some of the "Contract Management 101" functions, but it seems to be coming around. It wasn't working the way we'd expected."
"The manuals, especially the ones for the suppliers, are currently available only in English. If these can also be translated into different languages, that would be excellent."
"Very recently, they implemented a customer success team to manage our expectations and communicate them to their technical team. That function is relatively new and some work needs to be done to build that connection so that it's a little more seamless."
"Off late, most of my customers, where I see a trend, are long-standing heavily customized major customers on ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) on EBS who want to convert themselves to the cloud, and they expect us to provide the same level of customizations that EBS supports them in the cloud. So that's the challenge where we are currently."
"Salesforce is expensive, with a subscription-based model."
"Ariba Procurement tends to integrate best with other SAP products and is harder to work with if you have non-SAP products in your architecture."
"They should make the solution more user-friendly."
"SAP could make it easier for people to become SAP Ariba consultants within the SAP ecosystem."
"I would like the solution to be more automatic."
"I would like to see more reports coming out of Ariba and more insights because it has to work in connection with SAP. So unless I run SAP and Ariba, I have to run. I am not able to see the utility of Ariba."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If our organization could use it as a full-fledged solution, then it would be valuable and give a return on investment. However, since we are not currently using it as a full-fledged solution, even facing some bugs and problems with the synchronization with some of the internal software, we are not able to use it in a full-fledged manner."
"My advice is to think wisely when it comes to estimating the number of licenses that you will require. If you settle on a number too early and you need additional ones, then the extra licenses might be quite expensive."
Information not available
"The licensing cost depends on the customer."
"The license is expensive."
"It is an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Energy/Utilities Company
14%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise14
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

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What needs improvement with SAP Ariba Procurement?
Salesforce is expensive, with a subscription-based model. This poses challenges for small and medium enterprises due ...
What is your primary use case for SAP Ariba Procurement?
The primary use case of Salesforce is in the B2B space. I use it to capture, analyze, summarize, and record customer ...
 

Also Known As

SMART by GEP
Procurement Cloud
Ariba Procurement
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Exxon Chevron Macys
BUYDEEM, Capgemini, Asahi Refining
Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT)
Find out what your peers are saying about GEP SMART vs. Oracle E-Business Suite iProcurement and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,275 professionals have used our research since 2012.