Head to Head Review: Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) vs. Bridgeline Digital (NASDAQ:BLIN)

Bridgeline Digital (NASDAQ:BLIN – Get Free Report) and Salesforce (NYSE:CRM – Get Free Report) are both technology companies, but which is the better business? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their valuation, institutional ownership, risk, dividends, analyst recommendations, profitability and earnings.

Insider & Institutional Ownership

15.1% of Bridgeline Digital shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 80.4% of Salesforce shares are held by institutional investors. 27.5% of Bridgeline Digital shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 3.5% of Salesforce shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of current recommendations for Bridgeline Digital and Salesforce, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score
Bridgeline Digital 1 1 1 0 2.00
Salesforce 3 14 30 3 2.66

Bridgeline Digital presently has a consensus target price of $4.62, suggesting a potential upside of 524.24%. Salesforce has a consensus target price of $275.14, suggesting a potential upside of 20.18%. Given Bridgeline Digital’s higher probable upside, equities research analysts clearly believe Bridgeline Digital is more favorable than Salesforce.

Volatility & Risk

Bridgeline Digital has a beta of 0.92, indicating that its share price is 8% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Salesforce has a beta of 1.26, indicating that its share price is 26% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Bridgeline Digital and Salesforce”s revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio
Bridgeline Digital $15.62 million 0.60 -$2.52 million ($0.12) -6.17
Salesforce $41.52 billion 4.54 $7.46 billion $10.97 20.87

Salesforce has higher revenue and earnings than Bridgeline Digital. Bridgeline Digital is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Salesforce, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Profitability

This table compares Bridgeline Digital and Salesforce’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets
Bridgeline Digital -8.65% -14.51% -8.76%
Salesforce 21.99% 24.90% 11.27%

Summary

Salesforce beats Bridgeline Digital on 13 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Bridgeline Digital

(Get Free Report)

Bridgeline Digital, Inc. operates as a marketing technology company in the United States, Canada, and internationally. The company offers HawkSearch, a site search, recommendation, and personalization application for marketers, merchandisers, and developers; Celebros Search, a commerce-oriented site search product that provides natural language processing with artificial intelligence; and Woorank, a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) audit tool that generates an instant performance audit of the site's technical, on-page, and off-page SEO. It also provides Bridgeline TruPresence, a web content management and eCommerce platform to support the needs of multi-unit organizations and franchises; Bridgeline Unbound, a technology suite that empower marketers to easily manage their digital experiences and create personalized customer journeys; and OrchestraCMS, a digital experience platform that enables development of custom solutions, third-party integrations, and delivery of digital transformation initiatives on the Salesforce platform. In addition, the company offers digital engagement services comprising digital strategy, web design and web development, usability engineering, information architecture, and SEO, as well as hosting services. It serves vertical markets, such as industrial distributors and wholesalers, franchises and enterprises, manufacturers, eCommerce retailers, health services and life sciences, technology, credit unions and banks, and associations and foundations through its direct sales force. The company was formerly known as Bridgeline Software, Inc. Bridgeline Digital, Inc. was incorporated in 2000 and is based in Woburn, Massachusetts.

About Salesforce

(Get Free Report)

Salesforce, Inc. provides Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology that brings companies and customers together worldwide. The company's service includes sales to store data, monitor leads and progress, forecast opportunities, gain insights through analytics and artificial intelligence, and deliver quotes, contracts, and invoices; and service that enables companies to deliver trusted and highly personalized customer support at scale. In addition, its platform offering comprise a flexible platform that enables companies of various sizes, locations, and industries to build business workflow and apps with customer; online learning platform that allows anyone to learn in-demand Salesforce skills; and Slack, an intelligent productivity platform. The company's marketing services enables companies to plan, personalize, automate, and optimize customer marketing journey, connecting interaction, and connected products; and commerce services, which empowers shopping experience across various customer touchpoint, such as mobile, web, social, and stores and provides click-to-code tools that offers customers to build and deploy solutions. Further, its analytics offering includes Tableau, an end-to-end analytics solution for range of enterprise use cases and intelligent analytics with AI models, spot trends, predict outcomes, creates summaries, timely recommendations, and take action from any device; and integration service including MuleSoft, which provides building blocks to deliver end-to-end and connected experiences. Additionally, the company provides data cloud, a hyperscale data engine native to Salesforce; vertical services to meet the needs of customers in industries, such as financial services, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing and automotive and government; and offers salesforce starter for small and medium-sized businesses. Salesforce, Inc. was incorporated in 1999 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

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