Varicent is one of the most versatile ICM solutions on the market. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most complicated. Sales organizations are often drawn to Varicent for its robust features and flexibility, but deterred when they learn how much technical expertise is needed in order to make use of its capabilities.
Whether you’ve been using Varicent for years and it’s time to move on, or you’re just exploring the best options for ICM software, you’re faced with evaluating a number of competing options with different strengths, weaknesses, and approaches to incentive comp. As an ICM provider, we know this. And that’s why we developed an extensive rubric for comparing ICM solutions and finding out the areas where each shines. You can see the scores of every major ICM solution in our 2026 ICM rankings list—and if you want a detailed understanding of how the scoring system works, check out our Buyer’s Guide.
But if you’re looking for a Varicent alternative, here’s your shortlist:
In this article, we’ll give you an extensive breakdown of these alternatives to Varicent, emphasizing the key differences and giving you a clear, side-by-side comparison that accounts for each ICM solution’s strengths and weaknesses.
Varicent strengths, weaknesses, and alternatives
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Strengths |
Weaknesses |
Top ICM software rankings |
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1. Performio ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 2. Varicent ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 3. CaptivateIQ ⭐⭐⭐ 4. Xactly ⭐⭐⭐ 5. Everstage ⭐⭐ |
See how these rankings were calculated in our ICM Buyer's Guide >>
Varicent excels in testing and experimentation. While other ICM software solutions let you experiment with plan configurations, Varicent is the only one with a testing sandbox that applies to the entire platform. That’s why in our ICM Buyer’s Guide, it’s the only tool that we gave a 5/5 in that category. Ultimately, you’re unlikely to find an alternative with significantly better testing capabilities.
But while there’s a lot you can do with Varicent on paper, you might not be equipped to do it in reality. Varicent gives you freedom to use various commission structures, and it can handle whatever sophistication your organization needs, but implementing this complexity requires substantial technical skill and programming expertise. In order to adjust your current commission plan (or prepare next year’s), you have to make changes to the platform itself. And if you want to create and run custom reports, you’ll need a lot of dedicated practice to develop the requisite expertise.
Additionally, Varicent doesn’t just focus on ICM. It’s an SPM solution, too, which means their development resources, support, and expertise are divided.
Now let’s look at your other options
Top Varicent alternatives
The best alternatives to Varicent are Performio, CaptivateIQ, Xactly, and Everstage. A couple of these shine where Varicent falls short, offering a less technical pathway to preparing, modifying, and reporting on compensation plans. Others may force you to make other compromises, limiting your scalability, basic workflows, or support. As you’ll see though, one option stands heads above the rest.
Performio: Where flexibility meets ease of use
Performio was purpose-built to solve the problems with modern ICM. While Varicent splits their attention between ICM and SPM, Performio has remained laser-focused on ICM, perfecting the balance between flexibility and ease of use, handling complexity and exceptions, and giving administrators control over (and access to) the changes they want to make.
Our vision is to create the best solution for ICM’s four core jobs: organizing commission data, managing plans and payouts, providing transparency, and automating workflows.
See how these scores were calculated in our ICM Buyer's Guide >>
Varicent and Performio have many of the same strengths: scalability, automation, complexity, and data management. But Performio is leaps and bounds ahead when it comes to custom reporting, ease of use, and agility. Performio enables sales staff and administrators to handle ICM without waiting on IT or working back and forth with a vendor. It’s as self-service as ICM solutions come. And it does that without forcing you to settle for simpler sales compensation plans or limiting your capabilities.
To leverage Performio’s features—including the ability to generate custom reports—you don’t need a background in programming languages or any familiarity with workflow logic rules. You don’t even need to know any spreadsheet formulas.
Performio is also the only ICM solution that The Forrester Wave gave a halo for above-average customer feedback. It defines time-sensitivity requirements and provides guaranteed resolution times—which no other ICM does.
To get the most from Varicent, you need a strong coding background, plenty of experience with workflow logic rules, and at least some familiarity with spreadsheet formulas.
The one place you’ll find Varicent has an edge over Performio is one of the areas it’s best known for: testing and experimentation. Varicent offers a platform-wide testing environment, while Performio isn’t quite as extensive. As a close second in this category, Performio supports multiple testing environments and offers version control in both runtime applications and testing environments.
Bottom line: As ICM solutions go, Performio is the clear leader in both accessibility and capabilities, giving sales leaders complete control over their plans, workflows, and data. You won’t find another tool that matches or exceeds Varicent in this many critical areas.
CaptivateIQ: Less technical but less advanced
CaptivateIQ has three distinct products for sales planning and ICM, and for our purposes, we’ll be focusing on CaptivateIQ Incentives, their dedicated ICM solution. Most often praised for its ease of use, CaptivateIQ is an intuitive, simple solution for facilitating, managing, and tracking commissions. The 2025 Forrester Wave report noted that “Customers consistently call out value as the reason for selecting the solution because of its ability to make complex tasks simple.”
See the full Varicent vs. CaptivateIQ breakdown >>
CaptivateIQ isn’t nearly as technically challenging as Varicent, but if you want to access its full features, you’ll still need some proficiency in SQL. You’ll also want to be familiar with data modeling and spreadsheet formulas. If you want to generate custom reports within CaptivateIQ, you do need some technical skills, but it’ll be more accessible than building a report in Varicent.
In every other major area of comparison, Varicent has the advantage, or is on par with CaptivateIQ. At the time of this writing, CaptivateIQ doesn’t currently offer testing environment support or version control, making this a significant gap compared to Varicent. CaptivateIQ also doesn’t offer out-of-the-box support for compensation plan components like SPIFs, custom hierarchies, multiple crediting models, and modifying participation modules.
Customer service is another notable difference. CaptivateIQ’s SLA response times are slow at levels one and four, and just average at levels two and three, whereas Varicent offers fast response times at every SLA service level.
Bottom line: CaptivateIQ is more accessible than Varicent, at the cost of critical ICM capabilities. Non-technical users can do more in the platform, but less with the platform.
Xactly: Easier to modify, harder to scale
Xactly breaks their ICM and SPM capabilities into five separate sales management products, and we’ll be looking at Xactly Incent. The platform has been recognized and awarded for its popularity and positive customer reviews, including top spots in the G2 Enterprise Grid Report (based on G2 user ratings and marketshare).
Using our ICM-focused grading rubric, there was only one area where Xactly scored higher than Varicent: agility. And that’s because when you want to build next year’s plan with an effective date or adjust your current plan, Xactly won’t require you to make changes to the platform, while Varicent will. Any time you want to modify incentive mechanisms, crediting structures, or your rates and rules, it’s going to involve a lot more work with Varicent. However, Xactly isn’t perfect here, either. You can prepare your future plans within Xactly yourself, but to change an existing plan, you have to work with their support.
Other than that, Xactly has the same limitations as Varicent and some additional disadvantages. It doesn’t support single transaction dispute workflows. It requires sales data to be preconfigured before importing. You can’t add new data points yourself as your plan grows in complexity. Managing Salesforce Connector requires you to work with their professional services team (and costs extra to add and define new objects).
Bottom line: Varicent outperforms Xactly in most areas, save for the speed at which you can make plan updates. Xactly has a slight edge there, but you’ll still have to work with their team to implement changes.
Everstage: Fastest onboarding, lowest overall score
Everstage is an AI-focused sales compensation platform. It embeds artificial intelligence into your sales processes with AI assistants and agents providing analysis and recommendations. Everstage is best suited for non-technical users, and has the fastest implementation time of all the solutions we reviewed.
Everstage received the lowest overall score of all the ICM solutions we evaluated in summer of 2025. In all but two areas, it performed substantially worse than Varicent. However, it did receive the highest score of any platform in the “onboarding momentum” category for their complementary break-fix consulting and incredibly fast implementation time. The average implementation time G2 users reported was just two months—three months faster than Varicent. In the time it takes Varicent to onboard a customer, Everstage has nearly reached its time to value.
Beyond onboarding speed, the only other advantage Everstage offers over Varicent is greater accessibility. While Varicent requires you to be an expert in coding and workflow logic, you just need to know the basics of programming and have some familiarity with workflow logic to use Everstage.
In every other area, Everstage is more limited than Varicent. Everstage doesn’t have out-of-the-box support for SPIFs, multiple crediting models, or modifying your participation module. It doesn’t support single-transaction dispute workflows or workflows that are conditional based on approval status.
Bottom line: If speed and convenience matter most to your organization, Everstage may be a fine alternative to Varicent. But while it takes longer to implement Varicent, the amount of long-term value your organization can get from it is much higher than what you’ll get with Everstage. Everstage users will likely find themselves frustrated with platform limitations.
Choose the ICM software that’s right for you
Varicent’s greatest shortcoming is its accessibility. As your organization grows or your incentive structure becomes more complex, Varicent can meet your needs—but even basic adjustments will require reliance on IT, Varicent’s support team, or internal expertise in programming, workflow logic, and spreadsheet formulas.
Several alternatives require less technical expertise, but most of them require less foundational skills because they’re simply not as advanced. Only Performio combines ease of use with sophistication, giving your sales leaders total control over your incentive compensation plans and complete freedom to build sales structures that actually fit your targets. Our component-based architecture allows you to quickly pivot and make adjustments without breaking your plan or creating challenges at scale. And you’ll be ready to generate custom sales reports in months, not years.
Performio excels in the same areas Varicent does, but with better flexibility since you’re not reliant on expertise or support and greater access to the advanced capabilities you need to establish and maintain alignment between incentives and organizational goals.
To see what Performio can do for your organization, request a demo today!