Analyzing Certara (NASDAQ:CERT) and National Research (NASDAQ:NRC)

Certara (NASDAQ:CERT) and National Research (NASDAQ:NRC) are both small-cap healthcare companies, but which is the better investment? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their risk, earnings, analyst recommendations, institutional ownership, valuation, dividends and profitability.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of current ratings and recommmendations for Certara and National Research, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Certara	1	6	5	1	2.46
National Research	0	1	1	0	2.50

Certara presently has a consensus target price of $8.85, suggesting a potential upside of 9.26%. National Research has a consensus target price of $26.00, suggesting a potential upside of 33.26%. Given National Research’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe National Research is more favorable than Certara.

Volatility & Risk

Certara has a beta of 1.46, suggesting that its stock price is 46% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, National Research has a beta of 0.35, suggesting that its stock price is 65% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

This table compares Certara and National Research’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Certara	-3.60%	3.52%	2.42%
National Research	4.18%	142.50%	14.70%

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Certara and National Research”s top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Certara	$418.84 million	3.01	-$1.60 million	($0.10)	-81.00
National Research	$137.39 million	3.23	$11.60 million	$0.25	78.04

National Research has lower revenue, but higher earnings than Certara. Certara is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than National Research, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

74.0% of Certara shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 47.3% of National Research shares are held by institutional investors. 1.1% of Certara shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 9.2% of National Research 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.

Summary

National Research beats Certara on 10 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Certara

Certara, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides software products and technology-enabled services to customers for biosimulation in drug discovery, preclinical and clinical research, regulatory submissions, and market access in the United States and internationally. It offers solutions for model-informed drug development, as well as biosimulation solution used to predict both pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. The company provides Simcyp Simulator, a mechanistic biosimulation platform mechanistic biosimulation investigational new drug and translational stages; Simcyp Biopharmaceutics, used to identify and refine drug formulations; and Simcyp Secondary Intelligence which integrates toxicology with quantitative analysis of networks of molecular and functional biological changes to identify drug toxicity and adverse drug reactions. In addition, it offers Phoenix WinNonlin, a platform for non-compartmental analysis, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic, and toxicokinetic; phoenix hosted, that provides a secured and validated certara amazon web services workspace; Phoenix NLME, a population modeling and simulation software for nonlinear mixed effects models; and pirana modeling workbench. Further, the company provides pinnacle 21, a cloud-based platform for clinical data automation, standardization, and validation; Pinnacle 21 Data Exchange, used to define data standards and specifications; and Metadata Repository, to enable study design using controlled and standardized data. It serves life sciences companies, biopharmaceutical companies, research organizations, academic institutions, and global regulators, as well as animal health, crop science, bio science, medical devices, and public sector industries. Certara Inc. was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey.

About National Research

National Research Corporation provides analytics and insights that facilitate measurement and enhancement of the patient and employee experience. Its portfolio of subscription-based solutions provides actionable information and analysis to healthcare organizations across a range of mission-critical, constituent-related elements, including patient experience, service recovery, care transitions, employee engagement, reputation management, and brand loyalty. The company also offers marketing solutions that allow the tracking of awareness, perception, and consistency of healthcare brands; assessment of competitive differentiators; and enhanced segmentation tools to evaluate needs, wants, and behaviors of communities through real-time competitive assessments and enhanced segmentation tools. In addition, it provides experience solutions, such as patient experience, employee engagement, health risk assessments, care transition, and improvement tools. Further, the company provides reputation solutions that allow healthcare organizations to share a picture of their organization and ensure that timely and relevant content informs consumer decision-making; and governance solutions for not-for-profit hospital and health system boards of directors, executives, and physician leadership. National Research Corporation was founded in 1981 and is headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska.