NetSuite vs Greentree: Four reasons the grass could be greener on the other side

Reason 1:

Connectivity counts for a lot

Greentree doesn’t play nice with other applications or in modern markets. Its lack of open APIs means that any new business applications you want to connect with require you to invest in (and maintain) custom coding.

And if you don’t want to pay out for development time, you run the risk of data silos. So, the information you have spread around your business remains just that – widespread and disconnected.

Sure, you can download data and upload it elsewhere, but in the 2020s, and the drive for accessible data and real-time reporting, you’d expect better than that.

By comparison, NetSuite has taken a “productised” approach to application integration and extensions. It offers a technology platform that provides the tools to allow you, your partners, and developers to customise NetSuite to meet your specific business needs. Tools include SuiteScript, which allows new functions, processes, and entire applications to be built and hosted in NetSuite. And then there’s SuiteTalk, a Web Services integration tool that enables NetSuite to be integrated with legacy systems and third-party applications.

Reason 2:

Getting old isn’t always a good thing

Greentree is a child of the 80s. And in many ways, it’s still stuck there.

While the 80s may hold fond memories for entire generations (think Purple Rain by Prince, Dancing in the Dark with the Boss, and Come on Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners), it was a time free of Covid-19 and the demand for mobility. Greentree was never designed for a generation of users who demand mobility, dashboards at their fingertips, and flexibility. While you can cloud provision, it’s expensive, slow, and still lacks many business requirements.

For example, Greentree is still delivered primarily through a thick client (a new user interface launched in 2019) and designed for a Windows environment. While the thick client could be emulated through terminal services, it’s not built for the ubiquitous, seamless web browser access and experience expected by today’s users. Browser access is better than before but is still limited to things like timesheet capture. Users report the overall experience is complex to navigate, unintuitive and very dated. And as many Greentree implementations are on-premises, there’s no support for flexible remote working unless you have a VPN network. And can we just mention that it has extremely limited mobile connectivity?

From the outset, NetSuite was built purely for the internet; it has never been an on-premises application. So, it’s not retrofitted for mobility. It is fast, browser-based, secure, and easy to use by design. Just what every remote worker wants.

Reason 3:

The cost of customisation

Having a solution that fits how you like to do business is natural. But how much is it going to cost you to get what you want? Especially if it’s built in Jade, a proprietary development language originating in New Zealand. (And is customising your system actually the right decision? But that’s another whole topic!)

Today’s users want more self-determination, but not at a crippling cost. After many years of wearing consultancy costs from partners to do every last thing, most Greentree users have a natural desire to keep their TCO down and leverage their internal skills and maturity to take more of a DIY approach.

With NetSuite, you’ve struck gold. With the right internal capabilities, you can configure or customise the application yourselves. There’s no need to pay hand-over-fist to have a partner build those expensive reports for you.

Reason 4:

Cloud, first and forever

If you appreciate the vendor and product pedigree, and their cloud-first strategy and maturity, then you’ll want to get to know more about the ownership of your solution.

Greentree was a New Zealand business, bought by MYOB in 2016 for a $27m. Since the acquisition, MYOB have done little with the product. Today, it’s estimated that fewer than 1000 businesses are still using Greentree, and most of those are in New Zealand.

Whereas NetSuite is 100% owned, developed, supported and invested in (heavily) by Oracle, one of the world’s largest, most advanced and trusted software organisations. So, it stays genuinely evergreen.

And it has 27,000 customers in 215 countries/territories.