If you are shopping for a CPQ right now, you will find a mess. Salesforce CPQ hit end-of-sale. Conga merged with PROS and is figuring out what it is. The market is full of tools calling themselves “AI-native” or “agentic” without much to back it up. And every vendor’s comparison page conveniently makes them the winner.
This is not that. This is what we have learned from building a CPQ, talking to hundreds of sales teams, and watching the market shift. We will be honest about where each tool fits, including where Veles does not.
The market right now
The CPQ market is projected to hit $5.8 billion in 2026. It is growing at roughly 15 percent a year. That growth is not coming from happy customers buying more seats. It is coming from companies that tried a legacy CPQ, failed, and are now trying again with something different.
Two-thirds of CPQ implementations fail to reach full completion or adoption. That is not a typo. 67 percent. The average enterprise CPQ deployment takes 6 to 18 months and costs $100K to $750K in implementation services alone, not counting licenses.
Those numbers explain why most sales teams still quote in spreadsheets.
The categories
CPQ tools in 2026 fall into four buckets:
Legacy enterprise. Salesforce CPQ, Conga, Zuora. Big, complex, expensive. Built for governance teams and deal desks at large organizations. Implementation timelines measured in quarters.
Modern mid-market. DealHub, Nue.io. Cleaner UI than legacy but still built as tools the rep operates. Faster to implement than Salesforce CPQ but still measured in weeks to months.
Startup-focused. Salesbricks, PandaDoc. Simple, fast, cheap. Good for straightforward pricing. Limited when deals get complex.
Agentic. DealOps, Veles. The agent does quoting work autonomously. Still an emerging category.
Tool by tool
Salesforce CPQ (Revenue Cloud)
What it is: The legacy managed package hit end-of-sale in March 2025. No new licenses. Salesforce is pushing everyone to Revenue Cloud Advanced, now branded as “Agentforce Revenue Management.”
What it costs: $75 to $200 per user per month for licenses. Implementation runs $50K for a simple deployment up to $750K or more for enterprise. Three-year total cost of ownership can reach $600K to $900K.
Implementation time: 6 to 18 months. Migration from legacy CPQ to Revenue Cloud takes 12 to 24 months.
Who it is for: Large Salesforce-native enterprises with dedicated CPQ admins.
The honest assessment: Over 6,000 organizations now need to re-evaluate their CPQ. The specialist talent pool is shrinking as architects retrain on Revenue Cloud or leave the ecosystem entirely. If you are on legacy Salesforce CPQ, you are on a clock. If you are not on it, do not start.
Revenue Cloud is a full rebuild, not an upgrade. You are migrating catalog, pricing rules, approval logic, and integrations. That is a project, not a setting change.
Common complaints: Reps build shadow quotes in spreadsheets. Quote calculator hits performance ceilings past 500 line items. Years of custom price rules make the system brittle and undebuggable. Renewal and amendment flows produce wrong numbers.
Conga CPQ
What it is: Enterprise CPQ, now merged with PROS (completed February 2026). Part of the “Connected Commerce” platform. Salesforce-native.
What it costs: Enterprise pricing only. Implementations can run $400K or more. Total cost of ownership is among the highest in the category.
Implementation time: Months. Often 6 to 12 or longer depending on complexity.
Who it is for: Large enterprises with complex commercial operations and teams dedicated to managing CPQ.
The honest assessment: Conga is powerful for organizations with the resources to run it. The PROS acquisition gives them AI-driven price optimization that most competitors do not have. But this is a platform that requires experienced administrators, ongoing maintenance, and a real budget.
Common complaints: Initial setup is complex and requires experienced resources. UI could be more intuitive. Limited customization despite being marketed as flexible. Administrative burden is real and ongoing. Multiple users have reported slow performance and difficult troubleshooting.
Zuora CPQ
What it is: Subscription management and billing platform with CPQ capabilities added on.
What it costs: Quote-based pricing. No public pricing. Implementation starts at $10K to $50K and takes a minimum of one year. Plan upgrades are required for individual features like SSO and CPQ access.
Implementation time: 12 months minimum.
Who it is for: Enterprise subscription businesses where billing complexity is the primary problem.
The honest assessment: Zuora is a billing platform that added quoting. If your primary challenge is subscription billing, metering, and revenue recognition, Zuora handles that well. If your problem is deal execution and helping reps quote faster, you will be implementing a billing system you do not need to get a CPQ that is secondary to the product.
Common complaints: Steep learning curve. Functionality outside the Zuora ecosystem requires manual data exports. Subscribers report unexpected costs from threshold-based pricing. Server outages mentioned in multiple reviews. A single feature like CPQ access can require upgrading your entire plan.
DealHub
What it is: CPQ, CLM, billing, and DealRoom platform. Mid-market to enterprise focus. No-code configuration for sales ops.
What it costs: Starts around $500 to $1,000 per user per month. Custom pricing based on modules.
Implementation time: 8 to 12 weeks. Significantly faster than legacy tools.
Who it is for: Mid-market to enterprise sales teams that want guided selling, digital sales rooms, and contract management in one platform.
The honest assessment: DealHub is a solid modern CPQ. The DealRoom feature (a digital sales room where buyers can access proposals and contracts) is genuinely useful. Users report 80 percent reduction in back-end errors. The no-code configuration means RevOps can make changes without developers. It has a 4.6 out of 5 on Gartner Peer Insights from 132 ratings.
But it is expensive, and the guided selling approach still puts work on the rep. Complex quotes have loading-time issues. Managing multiple integrations gets messy. The price point puts it out of reach for startups.
Nue.io
What it is: Salesforce-native quote-to-revenue platform. CPQ, billing, and pricing in one system. Entirely no-code.
What it costs: Not public. Reports suggest around $60K as a threshold. Subscription-based.
Implementation time: Users report fast setup. “Easy to implement, easy to configure, easy to train teams on.”
Who it is for: Growth-stage SaaS companies (Series A to IPO) that are committed to Salesforce.
The honest assessment: If you are on Salesforce and want to stay native, Nue is hard to beat. It uses standard Salesforce objects, requires no Apex and no custom objects. Customers include OpenAI, Glean, and Flywheel. The “configuration not code” approach means everything happens through the Salesforce UI.
The limitation is clear: Salesforce only. If you are on HubSpot, Attio, or anything else, Nue is not an option. And if you are on Salesforce today but not sure you will be forever, you are coupling your quoting to your CRM.
Salesbricks
What it is: SaaS CPQ built for startups. Simple quoting, deal execution, billing, and order management.
What it costs: $500 per month (Startup tier, billed annually). $1,500 per month for Growth tier.
Implementation time: Fast. Users praise quick setup compared to heavier tools.
Who it is for: SaaS startups with straightforward pricing. Pre-Series B companies getting their first CPQ.
The honest assessment: Salesbricks solves a real problem for early-stage companies. The pricing is transparent, the setup is fast, and users consistently praise the ease of use. If your pricing is simple, your team is small, and you need to replace spreadsheet quoting with something real, Salesbricks is a good starting point.
Where it runs into limits: complex deal structures. Multi-year ramps, custom discounting logic, and approval workflows will push you past what the platform was built for. It is a quoting tool, not a deal execution platform.
PandaDoc
What it is: Document automation platform with CPQ capabilities. Strong HubSpot integration.
What it costs: Starter at $19 per user per month. Business at $49 per user per month. Enterprise is custom. CPQ for Salesforce is a premium add-on on Enterprise plans.
Implementation time: 30 to 60 days for full deployment. One of the fastest in the market.
Who it is for: SMB to mid-market sales teams that need proposals, e-signatures, and basic quoting in one tool.
The honest assessment: PandaDoc is the tool many teams are using before they realize they need a CPQ. It handles proposals, documents, and basic pricing tables well. 4.7 out of 5 on G2 from over 3,300 reviews. The pricing is the most accessible in the category.
But PandaDoc CPQ is a feature, not a product. There is no real configure-price logic. No deal execution engine. No multi-option quoting. No real-time governance or margin protection. The quote output is a document with a pricing table, not a deal structure. If your pricing has any complexity at all, you will outgrow it quickly. The Salesforce integration costs extra and has quality issues in reviews.
Sequence HQ
What it is: CPQ, billing, metering, and revenue recognition for B2B SaaS. $20M Series A. Claims 10x revenue growth in 2025.
What it costs: Not public. Has a startup tier for companies under $1M ARR.
Implementation time: Users report no long or painful implementation phase. Claims average 9 days to value.
Who it is for: SaaS companies where billing and revenue recognition are as important as quoting.
The honest assessment: Sequence is genuinely impressive if your primary problem spans quoting, billing, and rev rec. The product handles multi-year ramps, backdated contracts, percentage-based pricing, and mid-contract co-terms. Users report improved accuracy and reduced internal coordination from having everything in one system. 4.8 out of 5 on G2.
The trade-off is that bundled billing means bundled complexity. If your problem is specifically that reps hate quoting and deals are messy, Sequence is solving a broader problem than the one you have. It is finance-team-first, not seller-first.
DealOps
What it is: AI-native pricing platform. $7M Series A from Pear VC and General Catalyst (August 2025). 11 employees.
What it costs: Not public. Custom pricing.
Implementation time: Not well documented. Early-stage product.
Who it is for: Companies with hybrid and usage-based pricing. Skews enterprise and upper-market.
The honest assessment: DealOps is the closest thing in the market to a pure “AI pricing” tool. They claim 10x faster quoting and 30 percent lifts in average contract size. The backing is real (investors include leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Salesforce). They have processed over $1 billion in revenue through the platform.
The question is whether this is a CPQ or a pricing optimization layer. DealOps focuses on pricing recommendations, A/B testing, and analytics. “Guided selling” still means the rep is doing the work. The team is small and the product is early. If you need a full CPQ today, DealOps may be a complement rather than a replacement.
Veles
What it is: Agentic CPQ. MCP-first architecture. The agent builds quotes from call context and CRM data.
What it costs: Free tier up to 25 contracts. Contract-based pricing after that.
Implementation time: Hours, not months. Bring your product catalog.
Who it is for: B2B SaaS companies, founder-led through Series D, with 25 or more active contracts and five or more sellers. Teams that need quoting, deal execution, and pricing governance without a six-month implementation.
The honest assessment: We built Veles because we sat in the seat. We ran sales teams that used legacy CPQ and watched reps build shadow quotes in spreadsheets because the tool was slower than doing it by hand.
Veles is different because the agent does the work. Through MCP, the agent pulls call transcripts, CRM data, and deal history to assemble quotes. The rep reviews and sends. Multi-option quoting is built in. Governance surfaces in real-time instead of blocking after the fact. No CRM dependency. Works with Salesforce, HubSpot, Attio, or anything else.
What we do not do: billing. If your primary problem is billing and revenue recognition, look at Sequence or Zuora. We focus on deal execution.
What we are honest about: we are early. We do not have the enterprise feature depth of Conga or the Salesforce-native depth of Nue. We have a product that works for the teams it was built for, and we are expanding from there.
The “AI” question
Every CPQ vendor in 2026 is claiming AI capabilities. Here is what most of them actually mean:
Rule-based automation marketed as AI. Dynamic pricing rules, conditional logic, and guided selling workflows. These are useful features. They are not artificial intelligence. DealHub, Nue, and most others fall into this category.
Analytics and dashboards with AI labels. Salesforce Einstein Discovery, Zuora’s forecasting add-ons. These analyze data after the fact. They do not do quoting work.
Actual AI applied to quoting. DealOps uses machine learning for pricing recommendations and A/B testing. Conga’s PROS acquisition gives them real price optimization algorithms. These are genuine AI capabilities, but they augment the rep rather than doing the work.
Agentic. The agent builds the quote autonomously from context. The rep reviews. This is what Veles does through MCP. This is not a feature added to an existing product. The agentic layer is the architecture.
IDC predicts that by 2027, 50 percent of enterprises will deploy AI agents. The CPQ market is not there yet. Most tools are adding AI features to existing products. A few are being built from the ground up for a world where the agent, not the rep, does the quoting work.
What to actually look for
Forget the vendor marketing. Here is what matters when you are choosing a CPQ:
How long until you are quoting? If the answer is months, that is a red flag. Modern CPQ should be live in days to weeks, not quarters.
Who does the work? Does the tool make quoting faster, or does it do the quoting? There is a large difference between guided selling (the tool suggests, the rep builds) and agentic (the agent builds, the rep reviews).
What happens when pricing changes? If every pricing change requires a developer, a consultant, or a six-week project, your CPQ is a constraint, not a tool. Test this during your evaluation.
What does it cost per deal, not per seat? Per-seat pricing means you pay more when you hire, whether those reps close deals or not. Ask vendors what the cost looks like per closed contract over three years.
Does it need your CRM to function? CRM-native tools lock you in. If you ever change CRMs (and you might), your CPQ goes with it. CRM-agnostic tools integrate with your CRM for reporting but do not depend on its data model.
What do reps actually say about it? Ask for references from frontline reps, not sales leadership. The VP of Sales approved the purchase. The rep has to live with it. Those are different conversations.
The bottom line
The CPQ market is in transition. Salesforce CPQ is winding down. Conga is digesting an acquisition. Legacy tools are adding AI features to products that were not built for them. New entrants are building from scratch.
If you are choosing a CPQ right now, you have more options than you did two years ago. But the old pattern of spending $200K on implementation and waiting nine months to find out it does not work is still the default path if you are not careful.
Start with the problem. If your reps are quoting in spreadsheets because your CPQ is too slow, the answer is not a better CPQ with the same architecture. If your finance team needs billing and rev rec, do not buy a pure CPQ and hope it grows into billing later. If your team is five people and your pricing is simple, do not buy an enterprise tool because you think you will grow into it.
Pick the tool that fits the problem you have today, not the one the vendor says you will have in two years.
Simon, Veles’ CEO