Salesforce (NYSE:CRM – Get Free Report) and Bridgeline Digital (NASDAQ:BLIN – Get Free Report) are both technology companies, but which is the superior business? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their risk, institutional ownership, analyst recommendations, dividends, valuation, earnings and profitability.
Profitability
This table compares Salesforce and Bridgeline Digital’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.
| Net Margins | Return on Equity | Return on Assets | |
| Salesforce | 21.99% | 24.90% | 11.27% |
| Bridgeline Digital | -8.65% | -14.51% | -8.76% |
Earnings & Valuation
This table compares Salesforce and Bridgeline Digital”s gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.
| Gross Revenue | Price/Sales Ratio | Net Income | Earnings Per Share | Price/Earnings Ratio | |
| Salesforce | $41.52 billion | 4.54 | $7.46 billion | $10.97 | 20.87 |
| Bridgeline Digital | $15.62 million | 0.60 | -$2.52 million | ($0.12) | -6.17 |
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.
Institutional & Insider Ownership
80.4% of Salesforce shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 15.1% of Bridgeline Digital shares are held by institutional investors. 3.5% of Salesforce shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 27.5% of Bridgeline Digital shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, large money managers and endowments believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.
Analyst Ratings
This is a summary of recent ratings and recommmendations for Salesforce and Bridgeline Digital, as reported by MarketBeat.
| Sell Ratings | Hold Ratings | Buy Ratings | Strong Buy Ratings | Rating Score | |
| Salesforce | 3 | 14 | 30 | 3 | 2.66 |
| Bridgeline Digital | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2.00 |
Salesforce currently has a consensus price target of $275.14, indicating a potential upside of 20.18%. Bridgeline Digital has a consensus price target of $4.62, indicating a potential upside of 524.24%. Given Bridgeline Digital’s higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Bridgeline Digital is more favorable than Salesforce.
Risk & Volatility
Salesforce has a beta of 1.26, meaning that its stock price is 26% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Bridgeline Digital has a beta of 0.92, meaning that its stock price is 8% less volatile than the S&P 500.
Summary
Salesforce beats Bridgeline Digital on 13 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.
About Salesforce
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.
About Bridgeline Digital
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.
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