Pointerpro Alternative
Eleven areas where Brilliant Assessments outshines Pointerpro
It’s hard to evaluate software. While a free trial is often available, time constraints usually prevent an in-depth investigation, and customers often make purchasing decisions based on marketing hype and crafted demonstrations. From a market positioning perspective, Brilliant Assessments and Pointerpro appear to be similar, but in reality, they are pretty distinct.
Find out how we outperform their platform in areas that may be critical to your procurement.
We make creating advanced personalized feedback easy
Feedback in Brilliant Assessments draws on predefined text, ratings, classifiers, segmentations, and scoring data from the system. It is generated using our Results Wizard, which is available in the result tile builder and in Word as an Add-In.
This makes building feedback elements fast and intuitive. Defining a spider chart for all subsections with two comparative benchmarks takes under a minute. And, of course, all the scores are calculated automatically, without formulas.
As a quick start option for PDF or Word reports, Brilliant Assessments also comes with 14 professionally designed templates that you can adapt to your requirements, changing colors and images using the familiar Microsoft Word experience. Alternatively, you can use an existing Word document as a starting point or start from scratch.
Pointerpro has a new graphical report design tool that demonstrates well but hides that the data shown has been crafted in formulas beforehand. In reality, charts are time-consuming to build and limited.
We automate scoring and ratings for your feedback reports
Most of Pointerpro’s assessment and feedback capabilities are based on formulas. In contrast, Brilliant Assessments automates 95% of those capabilities. We have calculations (a formula equivalent), but you don’t need this in most scenarios.
Building formulas in Pointerpro is not complicated, but it is time-consuming and introduces the risk of human error. For a 50+ question assessment with a detailed feedback report, expect to build, test, and maintain hundreds of formulas. Mistakes are well hidden.
Brilliant Assessments has a highly intuitive builder where scores and ratings (the basis for reports and results page elements) are calculated automatically at all levels - formula free. The assessment structure is front and center, so how scores are calculated is always apparent.
We deliver a truly mature enterprise-grade advantage
Our team comes from an enterprise software background, as reflected in the software. Brilliant Assessments was initially designed for an assessment of 164 questions in six sections, each with four or five subsections. Our next customer had over 800 primarily conditional questions organized into 15 sections. If an assessment has over 30 questions, it will need the robust design Brilliant Assessments offers, especially if it needs to scale in the future.
Pointerpro was originally called Survey Anyplace and was initially developed as a quiz application and has grown from there. Its available answer formats include cute quiz tool widgets like ‘slot machines’, ‘scratch cards’, and smiley-face emojis. Only over the last few years has Pointerpro added PDF reporting and pivoted to address the assessment market - and it shows in the product maturity. Moreover, Pointerpro still refers to surveys throughout their help articles (rather than assessments) and encourages users to make them short and sweet. Example here.
If you want to develop an extensive, enterprise-grade assessment with multiple questions and complex requirements, PointerPro isn’t the tool for the job.
Our iterations automate re-engagement
Iterations are great for before-and-after assessments (training, coaching, or engagement) or periodic check-ins. Brilliant Assessments' iterations support the same individual, team, or 360 responding multiple times. Feedback reports are enhanced to include how the respondents have (hopefully) improved over time.
Iterations can be fully automated, so the system sends welcome and reminder emails and the appropriate report on completion, including the current and previous iterations.
This function suits service evidence applications, re-engaging with clients over time and recertifying. While many customers don’t have this on their initial requirements list, most implement it once they see the differentiation this innovation provides.
Pointerpro does not currently have this functionality.
We include advanced cohort assessments that group responses in every subscription
At Brilliant Assessments, we call a group of responses a cohort. Our platform produces high-quality, detailed reports for any cohort, including teams and 360s. Chart types include options to segment data by role (vital for 360s), by unlimited classifiers, or by respondent. Specialist charts, such as stacked bars, histograms, and scatter plots, are ideal for showing the distribution of your cohort's answers. Feedback can also be highly personalized using ‘rating text’ at the assessment, section, subsection, and segmentation levels.
Assessments can be self-initiated through a link, or the assessment administrator can manage invitations.
Pointerpro’s Group Reporting functionality leverages limited benchmarking functionality. Results can’t be split by multiple roles and classifiers, which is essential for all but the most superficial reports. There is also no user initiation functionality.
Pointerpro requires custom development and costly subscription upgrades to achieve the cohort assessment functions that come with Brilliant Assessments as standard.
We enable customers and partners to activate a portal without extra cost
Brilliant Assessments includes a white-labeled Partner Portal for Customers and Partners to purchase and resell your assessments, manage all aspects of their responses and cohorts, and even set up a results page experience.
Inviting respondents is a 10-second process, and the full response experience can be set up to reflect the partner’s branding, colors, and standard wording. Partner self-registration is available.
Pointerpro’s attempt to copy this functionality (DistributR) comes with a significant hike in price.
We allow for unlimited benchmarks
Brilliant Assessments’ advanced benchmarking allows you to define an unlimited number of benchmarks based on classifying questions in the assessment. As well as the average score, you can define percentile scores like quartiles and/or top 10%. This is also unlimited. The benchmarks are simple to define, and scores at all levels are calculated automatically.
Charts can show multiple classifiers. In feedback reports, you can also have multiple charts in a report showing different benchmarks. Benchmarks add great value to respondents, showing them where they stand rather than a bland score.
Pointerpro offers only Average benchmarks and only enables filtering by one classifying question – which applies to the whole report.
We deliver various feedback reporting methods
Every Brilliant Assessments subscription includes the ability to deliver deep, impactful feedback in the format that makes the most sense for your assessment. Feedback can be offered as a Results page, a PDF Report, or an accessible Word document.
Results can be delivered to respondents upon completion, set as a landing page at the point of sign-in, and generated for cohorts in every subscription. Partners can also create their own results pages. Chart elements can be drilled down on for more granular detail, showing on-demand tiles. All feedback supports unlimited scores, ratings, benchmarks, and classifiers.
Pointerpro currently offers PDF reports with limited formulas and widget-based dashboards. Report generation is also not included in the trial version of Pointerpro and comes at an additional cost. They even say you need your hands held to get up and running! We can confidently say you don’t need a product expert to use Brilliant Assessments, but we’re here to help if you want some pointers along the way while you build on your free trial.
Pointerpro are sales-focused; we are product-focused.
It's difficult to understand what you’re getting with Pointerpro unless you talk to the sales team. The free trial also doesn’t allow you to try many of the features you need to create a detailed assessment.
We let our product functionality sell for us. The online demo video, try-me assessment, the ungated free trial, and upfront pricing combine to give you a complete view of the solution before you buy. You can also talk to us if you like. However, instead of sales reps, you’ll meet with customer success managers focused on making our software work for you rather than getting a commission.
At Brilliant Assessments, we’re also big on innovation. We’ve continuously found that when we build new features and functionality in the product, Pointerpro follows us about 6 months later. If you like having the leading edge, Brilliant Assessments is for you.
The success of this approach is reflected in our churn rate (cancelled subscriptions) of 3% per annum, which is super low for software. We don’t know Pointerpro’s churn rate, but having converted many of their ex-customers, we expect it to be close to 20%.
Our pricing is simple and clear
We offer a 14-day free trial for you to try our software out before fully committing. Once you’ve come on board, we offer comprehensive annual and monthly subscriptions suited to your needs. Our pricing is upfront, all-inclusive, and charged proportionately.
Pointerpro’s marketing touts “from” pricing that is less than one percent of what it actually costs. They only disclose how much you’re paying after a meeting and have multiple add-ons for white labeling, onboarding, additional administrators, their partner portal (DistributR) functionality, and their “premium” non-chat-based support.
Pointerpro only offers an annual subscription, locking you in from day one. Plans are also report-based, meaning reports will be inaccessible once the count is exceeded.
When we do a competitor comparison, we actually do our homework
There are many unfortunate inaccuracies in PointerPro’s analysis of our platform.
Do contact us if you have any questions about these comparisons. We’re not about throwing stones; we’re about helping you select a suitable platform for your assessment needs.
Last Reviewed: December 14, 2024 | Disclaimer: Some of the facts in this article may have changed since publication but we do regularly review this content to maintain accuracy. If you believe there are false statements in this article please contact us directly.