Nucleus Research published its 2026 Commerce CPQ Technology Value Matrix on November 10 and named Conga, DealHub, Oracle and Salesforce as Leaders.
What the matrix says
Nucleus sorts vendors by functionality and usability. This year’s Experts are SAP, Yagna iQ and Zuora. The Accelerators, which Nucleus describes as focused on usability and ease of deployment, are HubSpot, PandaDoc and servicePath. The Core Providers are CloudSense, Nue, ServiceNow and QuoteWerks. The firm names pricing optimization, revenue lifecycle integration and AI-assisted automation as the main areas of market development.
Why it matters for sales teams
Nucleus ties CPQ returns to discount governance. Cameron Marsh, Senior Analyst at Nucleus Research, said, “Organizations that automate discount governance and connect quoting with downstream revenue processes can reduce margin leakage, improve sales productivity, and lower the cost of managing each transaction.” The firm says subscription, consumption-based and hybrid pricing models are pulling CPQ closer to contracting, ordering, billing and renewals. It adds that generative and agentic AI now reaches into proposal generation and pricing recommendations, and that how well those tools work depends on whether they follow the company’s commercial policies. We covered Conga’s deal-level pricing controls alongside AI-assisted quoting in October, and a column on how automating the quote moves the sales bottleneck to the order made the case for watching what happens after the quote.
How to use it
A CPQ shortlist built from the matrix can start with the downstream question Nucleus raises: which billing, contract and renewal systems each quote has to feed. HubSpot and Salesforce sit in different tiers, so teams already on one of those CRMs can score the native option against the specialists on the same sheet. The full matrix is a download from Nucleus.
Source: Nucleus Research via PR Newswire
