As a CRE deal sponsor, you wear many hats. You must raise capital, manage partners, report on investment performance, and distribute cash flows. Fortunately, there are many investment management platforms out there to streamline workflows for you and your investors.
Understanding Juniper Square
Founded in 2014, Juniper Square is an investment management software for the private equity, venture capital, and commercial real estate industries. It helps GPs and LPs connect, communicate, and collaborate through the entire private investment lifecycle.
Exploring Juniper Square pricing plans
Unfortunately, Juniper Square doesn’t list its pricing on its website. You must request a demo. From there, you can get a quote from a company sales rep.
However, Juniper Square used to advertise three pricing tiers starting at $18,000 per year: Sponsor for firms under $50M in equity and Professional and Enterprise for larger equity under management levels.
Additional costs apply for services like off-cloud backups and integrations with only the top-tier Enterprise, including a dedicated customer success manager.
What to consider before choosing Juniper Square
Before you sign up for Juniper Square, consider the following:
Add-on services
Not all of Juniper Square’s features are included in a basic subscription. Some are optional add-ons. These include:
- An investor portal where LPs can explore their investments, export their data, and communicate with sponsors in a more real-time and data-driven way.
- A reporting application that helps you consolidate ad-hoc quarterly reporting templates into an efficient, unified experience delivered directly to investors through the portal.
- An insights application that serves as an analytics tool to optimize fundraising operations inform investor relations strategies, and make more data-driven decisions.
Integration options
According to Juniper Square’s website, you can integrate the platform with Outlook, Hubspot, Yardi IM, and Yardi Voyager. In addition, you can develop tailored integrations with an event-driven API.
Customization and scalability
Outside of the limited pre-built integration options, you can customize Juniper Square’s investment management software field data, portal, entities, positions, transactions, and assets.
While this offers some flexibility to tailor the Juniper Square platform as your business grows, it may be more cumbersome than other, more cost-effective, seamless, and scalable alternatives.
Comparing Juniper Square with Agora
To better appreciate Juniper Square’s value proposition, it helps to see how it stacks up against competitors, such as InvestNext, SyndicationPro, and AppFolio Investment Manager.
Let’s compare Juniper Square with Agora:
Juniper Square | Agora | |
Investment management | Use end-to-end fund administration, treasury, and investor services with a modern portal. | Access streamlined fundraising, investment dashboards, financial reporting, and more. |
Investor CRM and communication | Manage contacts and leads while getting investor insights and tracking team activity. | Seamlessly track investor/lead tasks, emails, calls, meetings, notes, and documents from a central hub. |
Fundraising & onboarding | Target investors with lead lists, offer step-by-step onboarding guidance, control access to sensitive data, and gain fundraising insights | Professionally market deals, offer a sleek subscription process, track capital raising, and collect e-signatures and capital contributions online. |
Investor portal experience | Offer investors an interactive portal with document sharing, on-demand analytics, reporting, investment details, and data security protection. | Get a fully branded, white-label investor portal for a frictionless, transparent, and secure investing experience that includes access to deal performance and important documents. |
Reporting & analytics | Produce automated capital calls, K-1 distributions, personalized investor reports, statements, and notices with custom branding. | Automatically generate and share personalized performance reports, K-1s, and return projections to build trust with investors. |
Customization and scalability | Customize some aspects of the platform. Juniper Square is designed for CRE, private equity, and venture capital firms of all sizes. | Get a fully customizable platform that can grow with you as you scale. Agora is for CRE investment firms of all sizes. |
Integration and compatibility | Integrate Juniper Square with Outlook, Hubspot, Yardi IM, and Yardi Voyager. Other integrations require custom API development. | Seamlessly integrate Agora with over 5,000 apps, including QuickBooks, Yardi, Salesforce, Hubspot, Teams, Google Sheets, and more. |
Cost considerations and ROI | Pricing starts at $18,000 per year ($1,500 per month), making it one of the more expensive options on the market. | Pricing starts at only $8,988 per year ($749 per month), making it an affordable option with a high potential ROI. |
Why some users are choosing Agora over Juniper Square
While Juniper Square offers powerful features, it’s designed for a broader range of private investment verticals—not just commercial real estate, but also private equity and venture capital. As a result, it may not always align with the unique needs of sponsors and investors in the commercial real estate space.
That’s why many sponsors opt for Agora instead. It’s tailored specifically for the CRE industry. In fact, one of the founders comes from a real estate background, and many Agora features were built in direct response to requests from CRE customers.
Today, Agora boasts countless success stories of customers who have taken their investment firms to the next level through Agora’s purpose-built tools for accounting, automation, investor communications, document management, fundraising, investor relations, onboarding, and more.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Juniper Square may be a good option for private equity, venture capital, and some commercial real estate firms. However, with its high starting costs and limited flexibility, it may not be the best fit for every firm, especially those focused exclusively on commercial real estate.
For CRE sponsors seeking a more affordable, purpose-built, and scalable alternative, Agora may be the better choice.