There is a big challenge with buying software today, which is that anyone can copy anyone else's marketing. A couple people making a small investment of time and money can make themselves appear to be direct competitors with a piece of high quality enterprise-class software like Badger. They can claim that they have similar capabilities and features despite not having the 15+ years of iteration and experience that Badger Maps has. 

Because anyone can quickly use AI to build a thousand page website by copying an existing software company's marketing, almost every type of software has 20 new competitors that look very similar if you just read their website. However, while AI helps make it faster to build an app, it remains very difficult and takes a long time to build a full software product, and so while you can copy marketing, you can't really copy the quality of a full-featured product. This is why many of the largest public companies in the world are software companies. 

In a pilot you can take a close look at the "hard parts" of building a field sales platform where the less developed apps tend to run into problems such as:

• The quality of the native mobile app
• The integration
• The level / speed / quality of the support
• The security
• The breadth and depth of the supported features and capabilities

In our experience, a head to head pilot of a product in the field will quickly show which app is higher quality. You can get a free pilot of Badger integrated with your CRM here.

The Differentiators between field sales software solutions:

1. AI Capabilities

Badger has an outstanding AI offering to automate our field sales workflows like:

• An AI route planner to plan a day or a week's routes automatically as a scheduled job
• Email automations
• Automated scheduling
• Automated follow-ups
• Pre-meeting briefs
• Voice-to-CRM that breaks up a recording and sends it to the correct field in the correct object of your CRM

2. Mobile Apps on iPhone and Android devices

The quality of the experience of a software platform often starts and ends on the mobile device for a field sales rep. Time is short and people are rushed when they are in the field. The workflows on the mobile app and its user experience need to be tight.

In our opinion, the Badger Maps mobile app is just better than our competitors' mobile app. Better workflows, better layout, better functionality. And we support a free pilot for your team and a 90-day money-back guarantee to prove it.

3. CRM Integrations - Real-time and 2-way

Badger Maps uses GridSquid, which we believe is the best way for software to integrate with CRM systems. The integration is real time. It's two-way, it has a perfect track record. Great integrations at scale are really hard to do with CRMs, because they are so configurable and have multiple objects. This is an area where Badger is a better performing, lower-risk, and safer choice for your valuable data.

Our Competitor copied our product and our marketing, years after we were already established in the market as the leader in the space. That is really hard to do successfully, because we were always years ahead. This allowed us to win more customers and larger customers, which we then could use that revenue to invest in more engineers to improve the product and get further ahead. It's hard to start a race years late, be a copycat, and win, which is why you don't often see software companies get overtaken unless there is some kind of disruption that occurs (like Siebel Systems getting overtaken by Salesforce because of the disruption of the cloud). But you do see late entrants in other industries where you don't have that barrier to entry, like Shake Shack going from a shack making burgers to a public company even though there were already many established burger companies.

Our Competitor has a rough track record in the CRM integration area from what we have heard directly from people who have used both products and from what we've read about in their customer reviews. We believe their integration is not as good as ours. Fortunately this is something you can try before you buy - Badger Maps has free trials of our software, for individuals or teams, fully integrated with your CRM. And we have a 90-day money-back guarantee to put our money where our mouth is. We recommend that you try both our product and our Competitor's product in the field before you purchase one.

4. Multiple Objects

There are different ways to connect to multiple objects in a CRM system. If the vendor of a piece of software asks you to change the architecture of your CRM in a way that will make it more brittle so that they can integrate with it, it's a very good indication that they don't have a high-quality integration solution.

Also if your sales team can't seamlessly see the relationships between the objects in their CRM in their mobile field sales app there is a problem. For example, in Badger you can easily navigate, visualize, and understand the relationships between the account, the contacts that work at that account, the opportunities that are related to them, and the relationships with any custom objects cleanly and quickly. This is a smoother and cleaner experience in our app than in our Competitor's app in our opinion, and we believe that is something to look closely at because good access to data is important to sales reps' success in the field.

5. Customer Service

Enterprise software can be complicated and sometimes you need help. You can test the quality of a customer service experience during your trial by opening up a ticket, sending an email, or trying to call the vendor. See how we do and how they do. We invest a ton in having a fantastic customer success and service experience. And something most companies can't claim - you'll be talking to a real human being whether you call, chat, or email. 

6. Territory Management

Our Competitor claims that they do territory management, but we believe that their offering has only very basic capabilities here that would not meet the needs of most teams using our territory management solution. We'd recommend that you ask them for a trial or even just a demo of their territory management solution. Our territory management solution includes:

• Badger Align - Territory alignment and balancing. Builds and optimizes field team's territories.
• Badger Lead Routing - Automatically routes leads to the appropriate rep based on their geographic territory, and allows rules and guidelines to be set.
• Badger Scoreboard - Gamification that shows reps their live results and activities in charts and graphs.
• Badger Insights - Map-based analytics for your CRM data. Basically a visual version of excel on a map that's connected to your CRM.

7. The app's interface and workflows

When you do a pilot of our application and our competitors' application, we believe that you will quickly see that we have put more thought and engineering cycles into creating a great user interface, useful workflows, and great automations. We're confident enough that Badger Maps offers a 90-day money-back guarantee.

How to Evaluate Field Sales Apps

While keeping in mind all the differentiators that we laid out in the previous section, we believe that evaluating field sales apps starts with using the application on the mobile devices that you use in the field. It's important that you use the app on the specific devices that your reps have in the field.

It's also important to pilot the field sales solution fully integrated with your CRM so that you know that it doesn't just integrate "in theory" with your CRM but that it will integrate with your specific configuration.

Another great data point that you can use to evaluate software companies is to look at how many employees and specifically how many engineers a software company has on LinkedIn. Software companies that have more engineers for a longer time tend to have better and more mature applications. Badger Maps and its two sister companies have about 100 employees in 2026. One of our sister companies, ZenZorrito, has its offices in Spain to serve our European customers. Our other sister company, Grid Squid, exists because the integration that we built to connect Badger to CRM systems was so good that we started selling it as a separate product to other software companies. If you are evaluating us and our Competitor (or any other two pieces of software) it's very helpful to go to LinkedIn and see how many people are building and improving the product.

Confusion with CRM systems

Our Competitor will make claims that they are a CRM. Badger Maps is not a CRM, and in our opinion, neither is our Competitor - even if they would like to identify that way. While companies do use both Badger and our Competitor as basic CRM systems because you can store customer data there and track customer interactions, a full featured CRM system does many, many more things such as:

• Lead and Opportunity Management - CRM's capture leads, qualify them, manage sales pipelines, and forecast revenue.
• Marketing Attribution and Campaign Tracking - CRM's track where leads and revenue originated (e.g., Google Ads, LinkedIn, referrals, trade shows, email campaigns), measure campaign ROI, support multi-touch attribution, and connect marketing spend to pipeline and closed revenue.
• Sales Automation - CRM's automate workflows, lead routing, follow-up reminders, approvals, email sequences.
• Customer Service and Support - CRM's manage support tickets, customer issues, SLAs, knowledge bases, and post-sale customer interactions.
• Reporting and Analytics - CRM's provide dashboards and reports for pipeline health, sales performance, forecasting, customer trends, marketing effectiveness, and business KPIs.
• Integrations and Data Management - CRM's connect with email, calendars, ERP systems, marketing automation platforms, phone systems, finance software, and other business applications while maintaining a centralized customer database.

In our opinion, building a CRM can't be done well by a small company. Salesforce has about 15,000 engineers. That's like a Madison Square Garden full of engineers. Zoho has about 10,000, which is like a sold out NCAA college basketball arena. When someone with 7 full-time engineers tells you that they are a CRM, just raise an eyebrow and think about where the Knicks play basketball being full of coders building a CRM. And then picture them coding for 25 years.

That being said, many field sales teams haven't had the best experiences with their field team using a CRM in the past, because CRM's are often built for the browser first and the field team needs to use the CRM in the field. We often see smaller companies use Badger Maps as a "training wheels" CRM, where their field team starts using Badger, and then we help them to add a full featured CRM when they are ready. Badger Maps is integrated with these CRM's and enables sales teams to capture 50% more data in their CRM, right from their workflows in Badger that their sales reps are doing in the field.

Badger recommends and integrates with full-featured CRM systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Pipedrive, Monday, Zoho CRM, Insightly, Sugar, Veeva, Odoo, NetSuite by Oracle, and more. These CRMs can enable sales teams with all these important capabilities. We support teams that use Badger as a basic CRM and once they have gathered good data from the field we can add the CRM of their choice which they can fill with the good data that was gathered with Badger. Then they can use Badger along with that CRM to make that CRM work great for a mobile field sales team.

In the end, we suspect that a company saying that it's a CRM when it clearly is not a CRM is doing so because their CRM integrations are not that good. So what's really going on is that they would like people to use their product "stand alone."

Reviews

Review websites like G2 and the Apple App Store are also great places to learn about software companies and what people like and don't like about them. For companies that have a field team who will be using software on a mobile device? It's particularly important to take a close look at their mobile reviews.

If you plan on integrating a CRM, it's also important to look closely at reviews that discuss their integration. We have heard from our customers and read in reviews about our competitor that their CRM integration has lost people's data and not been able to accommodate everyone's CRM configuration.

You can see Badger Maps on Apple App Store and see that we have more reviews (over 1,100 ratings) and better reviews than our Competitor.

G2 is another great place to learn about software companies, here you'll find G2's comparisons, reviews, and analysis about Badger Maps and our competitor. And Google is another great place to read reviews and compare software companies. We have many more reviews on Google and they are also far higher than our competitor's reviews are.

And it's worth noting that we have caught our Competitor writing fake reviews about us (the user name was easily linked to their employee by Googling it), which is a pretty low integrity move. Cringe.

Third Party Analysis

You can leverage independent experts to learn about a software space. Consulting firms and specialists may be hired by companies that want to evaluate a type of software, and then sometimes those analyses end up getting published on the web. You can find a detailed analysis of the mapping and routing space, written by Filter Advisors, a technology consulting firm, summarized and linked here.

He Said, She Said…

Badger Maps has served field sales teams since 2012 — including enterprise teams with over 1,000 reps in the field.
The claims below misrepresent what Badger does. We've responded to each one with direct links to the specific features that contradict them.