Reviewing BigCommerce (NASDAQ:BIGC) & Progress Software (NASDAQ:PRGS)

BigCommerce (NASDAQ:BIGC) and Progress Software (NASDAQ:PRGS) are both retail/wholesale companies, but which is the better investment? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their earnings, institutional ownership, valuation, risk, dividends, profitability and analyst recommendations.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares BigCommerce and Progress Software”s top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
BigCommerce	$324.38 million	1.46	-$64.67 million	($0.64)	-9.55
Progress Software	$694.44 million	3.58	$70.20 million	$1.64	35.45

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

Profitability

This table compares BigCommerce and Progress Software’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
BigCommerce	-12.68%	-82.39%	-4.57%
Progress Software	10.29%	36.88%	10.30%

Institutional & Insider Ownership

79.2% of BigCommerce shares are owned by institutional investors. 9.1% of BigCommerce shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 3.4% of Progress Software shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of current ratings and recommmendations for BigCommerce and Progress Software, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
BigCommerce	1	6	1	0	2.00
Progress Software	0	1	5	0	2.83

BigCommerce presently has a consensus price target of $9.31, suggesting a potential upside of 52.41%. Progress Software has a consensus price target of $63.50, suggesting a potential upside of 9.22%. Given BigCommerce’s higher probable upside, equities research analysts clearly believe BigCommerce is more favorable than Progress Software.

Risk & Volatility

BigCommerce has a beta of 0.98, meaning that its stock price is 2% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Progress Software has a beta of 0.91, meaning that its stock price is 9% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Summary

Progress Software beats BigCommerce on 10 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About BigCommerce

BigCommerce Holdings, Inc. operates a software-as-a-service platform for enterprises, small businesses, and mid-markets in the United States, North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the AsiaPacific. The company provides a platform for launching and scaling an ecommerce operation, including store design, catalog management, hosting, checkout, order management, reporting, and pre-integration into third-party services. It serves stores in various sizes, product categories, and purchase types, such as business-to-business and business-to-consumer. The company was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas.

About Progress Software

Progress Software Corporation develops, deploys, and manages business applications in the United States and internationally. The company offers OpenEdge, an application development platform for running business-critical applications; Chef, a DevOps/DevSecOps automation software; Developer Tools that consists of software development tooling collection, including .NET and JavaScript UI components for web, desktop and mobile applications, reporting and report management tools, and automated testing and mocking tools; Kemp LoadMaster, an application delivery and security product offering cloud-native, and virtual and hardware load balancers; and Sitefinity, a digital experience platform foundation delivering intelligent and ROI-driving tools for marketers. It also provides MOVEit, a managed file transfer software for managing and controlling the movement of sensitive files and securing them both at-rest and in-transit; DataDirect, a secure data connectivity tools for Relational, NoSQL, Big Data and SaaS data sources; WhatsUp Gold, a network infrastructure monitoring software providing complete visibility of all network devices, servers, virtual machines, and cloud and wireless environments to find and fix network problems; Flowmon, a network security and visibility product with automated response across hybrid cloud ecosystems; Corticon, a decision automation platform to transform user experiences by streamlining and automating complex business rules; MarkLogic, a data agility platform to connect data and metadata; and Semaphore, a Semantic AI platform. The company offers project management, implementation, custom software development, programming, and other services, as well as web-enable applications; and training services. It sells its products to end users, independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, system integrators, value added resellers, and distributors. The company was founded in 1981 and is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts.