I spent years of my life building an advanced NetSuite Connector. It got acquired by Stripe and has now been absorbed into their connector offerings. While at Stripe, I led the buildout of the Stripe Billing to Salesforce CPQ connector.

Point being, I know both NetSuite and SalesForce really well.

I’ve been asked by many startups over the years I’ve consulted with on various NetSuite products why NetSuite continues to be the market leader. I’m building in a completely different space now (health tech), but I was recently asked this question again and figured I’d drop my thoughts in a blog post for posterity.

Here’s my take on why NetSuite and SalesForce continue to dominate and why it’s hard-to-impossible for startups to disrupt them.

1. Risk Aversion

One of the biggest reasons NetSuite dominates is that finance teams—particularly CPAs and accountants—are inherently risk-averse. The idea of introducing a new ERP tool that could potentially disrupt financial reporting, compliance, or audit trails is a nightmare scenario. A small mistake in these areas can lead to massive financial and compliance risks.

“Nobody gets fired for using NetSuite”

In a way, NetSuite has become synonymous with stability, even if it isn’t the most innovative product on the market. It does one thing exceedingly well: it ensures compliance without breaking the accountant’s workflow. For a CFO or finance team, that’s what matters most.

They don’t like new tools and they want something that works and minimizes risk.

Additionally, many companies have gone public on NetSuite. If you are going to switch from QuickBooks, you want something that can take you to the public markets.

2. NetSuite Knows Its Customer

For developers or non-finance teams who interact with it, NetSuite may seem clunky, unintuitive, and outdated. But you—the developer or product guy who loves great software—is not who NetSuite serves. The primary customers are CFOs and finance teams, and these customers are happy. They love NetSuite and believe it’s best in class. They love its terrible UX that never changes.

Change in financial software, especially at large organizations, can be costly and disruptive. Many accountants and finance professionals have spent years mastering the quirks of NetSuite—these quirks are not seen as deficiencies. For them, the idea of a sleek, modern tool is less appealing if it means they have to relearn their workflows or face the prospect of business disruptions.

Another way to think about it: why does your CPA still use QuickBooks or still ask for a list of PDFs at the end of each year? Why aren’t they using Puzzle?

3. It’s Better than the Competition

It might seem wild to say, but while NetSuite is terrible if you are a product person or a developer, it’s often seen as the lesser of several evils. SAP, Oracle ERP, and Intacct are worse.

And, they innovate just enough so they can tell the other orgs "they have an API", "you can run custom SQL", etc.

4. The Professional Services & Support Ecosystem

This is huge.

NetSuite has spent a lot of time and money building out their professional services and support networks. NetSuite has built a massive ecosystem of consultants, support teams, and integrators who are experts in making the system work for a business.

Why does this matter if you have an internal dev team?

You dev team is going to take one look at NetSuite, and if they are any good, tell their manager they will quit before they spend their days hacking on NetSuite. And, they can make a very good case that they shouldn’t spend one minute on back office optimization or finance tools and all of their time should be spent on product work.

The consultant ecosystem enables finance teams to get what they need without bothering internal developers.

These professional services teams understand the nuances of financial reporting and compliance requirements. They know how to navigate the system’s quirks to make sure everything checks out during audits and financial reviews.

It’s not just the tool that matters, but the army of professionals behind it.

5. Fat & Happy Ecosystem

The consultant ecosystem is really important. And it’s really hard to replicate:

• If you are a great engineer, you aren’t going to do NetSuite & SalesForce work. You are going to work at a tech company.
• If you love solving business problems and engineering is a bit of a side quest (the best NetSuite consultants are like this) you want to work with real, big businesses who are fine paying high consulting rates ($200-400/hour). These companies are on NetSuite or SalesForce.

6. Platform Lock-in

This is obvious, but has to be said:

• NetSuite is expensive and generally has a multi-year contract
• Most companies are going to spend at least $100k customizing NetSuite
• The cost of migrating data alone out of NetSuite would be massive, not to mention all of the change management.

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What Would Disruption Look Like?

Stripe, Mercury, Ramp, etc all have a chance. I think it’s very hard for a startup to disrupt ERPs and CRMs.

Here’s the playbook any existing FinTech with a large SMB and growing enterprise segment could run:

• Build amazing accounting primitives on top of their existing products and expose them as first-class APIs.
• Create a nice markup language and set of front end components (could just be React with a custom component library).
• Open source a configuration of that markup language as the base set of forms to drive admin interaction with the accounting primitives.
• Build a modern Typescript runtime to execute lambda-style customizations on various triggers (beforeSave, beforeView, cron, etc). If you build a testing suite and a AI first MCP to help built out triggers you’ll be cooking with gas.
• Incentivize the ecosystem to build out forms and customization layers on top of the open source base across different verticals.
• Pick a couple of segments internally that are on QuickBooks and set a couple of navy seal teams to build whatever those early adopters need to stay on QuickBooks as long as possible, using your system as a sub-ledger. Target single subsidiary companies to begin with.

The beautiful thing is NetSuite’s data model schema is open. There are some hard-won lessons embedded in those table definitions. Pick that data model apart, understand the missteps, and copy their schema to start. One of the most challenging things here is having enough domain knowledge to intelligently design a system that will actually work for the end user, which is the accountant. You can use NetSuite’s open data model schema as a great starting point here.