Earnest vs Spiff

Spiff is built for 1,000-person sales orgs with dedicated comp analysts. Earnest is built for the ops lead who also does comp, payroll, and three other jobs.

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The honest take

If you have a global sales force with region-specific comp plans, multi-dimensional quota lookups, and a full-time compensation analyst on staff, Spiff is the right tool. If you have a 10-to-150-person sales team running standard tiered or flat-rate plans and you want commissions running by end of day, not end of quarter, you're probably overpaying for Spiff.

Side by side

Consideration
Earnest
Spiff
Time to first payout
Under 1 hour
6-12 weeks with an implementation team
Pricing
Free – $999/mo, published on the site
Custom enterprise contracts (typically five figures annually)
CRM integration
CSV + BigQuery import
Deep native Salesforce sync
Plan complexity
Tiers, accelerators, kickers, ramps
Turing-complete formula builder — virtually unlimited
Manager workflows
Native adjustment submissions + approval loops
Admin-gated modifications
Learning curve
Build a plan without reading docs
Training required for formula authoring

What Spiff does well

Spiff (now a Salesforce product) was built to handle enterprise-scale compensation. If you need to calculate commissions based on deal stage, territory, product line, and five other variables pulled from Salesforce objects in real time — Spiff can do that. Its formula builder is essentially a programming language, and for orgs that need that level of customization, nothing else comes close.

  • Salesforce integrationis native and deep. If your CRM is SFDC and you want commissions to update in real time as deals progress, this is Spiff's strongest advantage.
  • Infinite plan complexity.If your comp plan has conditional logic that would take 50 lines of code to express, Spiff's formula engine can handle it.
  • Compliance at scale. Built for organizations with dedicated audit and compliance requirements across multiple regions.

Where Earnest is a better fit

Most B2B sales teams don't need a formula engine. They need tiered rates, maybe an accelerator above quota, maybe a quarterly kicker — and they need it running by this afternoon, not after a 6-week implementation with a dedicated project manager.

  • You set it up yourself.There's no "implementation manager." You sign up, build your tiers, add your reps, import your deals, and run the calc. Same day.
  • The price is on the website. No discovery calls, no annual contracts, no surprise invoices. Free for up to 5 reps, flat monthly pricing after that.
  • Managers can submit adjustments. Most enterprise tools treat compensation as finance-only. Earnest lets frontline managers submit bonuses and SPIFs through a native approval workflow, which cuts down on end-of-month back-and-forth.

Try it before you sign an enterprise contract.

Free for up to 5 users. If Earnest handles your comp plans — and for most B2B teams it will — you just saved months of implementation and thousands in annual licensing.

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