Proton.ai alternative for distributors

What Proton is built for, according to its website

• Proton describes an AI platform for distributors that connects to your ERP and the rest of your data. Its modules are a CRM, product information management (PIM), eCommerce AI and Quote & Order Entry Automation. Order Management, Sourcing, Pricing AI and Inventory AI are labelled early access or coming soon on its pages. Pronto is described as an AI teammate for account briefs, call notes and help preparing a quote.
• Its Quote & Order Entry page says Proton matches messy requests to your catalogue, applies customer pricing, and prepares quotes and orders for approval.
• It lists these inputs: email text, PDF attachments, Excel and CSV spreadsheets, photos, handwritten notes, voicemail and requests a rep describes aloud. It says it matches descriptions, nicknames and customer or competitor part numbers, and that it works alongside EDI rather than replacing it.
• On review, the page says Proton flags low-confidence matches, missing fields and customer-specific exceptions for the rep, and that your team reviews every draft before it goes to the ERP or the customer.
• It says your team agrees which approved quotes or orders Proton may write back, and that Proton writes to your ERP only through the paths your team approves.
• It says it is built for growing, mid-market and enterprise distributors, in industries from industrial and MRO to electrical, HVAC and plumbing, safety, jan-san and packaging, medical and building materials.
• The pages we read show no prices. The call to action is to book a call, and the quote page offers a calculator that estimates the cost of work your reps still do by hand.

What Qotora AI is built for

• Qotora AI does one job: it turns a customer’s request into a quote that a person reviews. It is not a CRM, a product-data tool or an eCommerce platform.
• A request arrives as an email, a PDF, an Excel or CSV file, a photo of a handwritten list, a pasted text message or a voice note. Qotora AI finds each line in your own catalogue and asks when a line could be several products.
• Prices come from your own catalogue data and the rules you set: customer tiers, discounts and margins. Qotora AI never invents a price or a margin.
• A person on your team reviews every quote before it is sent. There is no automatic sending.
• It is read-only on your ERP and the software you already use and never writes into it. A quote is sent to your customer, not posted into your system.
• It matches against your own catalogue and learns from the corrections your team makes. Where a line is out of stock, it proposes equivalents from your catalogue and a person confirms before one enters the quote.

Proton.ai and Qotora AI side by side

How requests, your ERP and setup differ in practice

Requests. The two read a similar range of requests, and we would not tell you otherwise: emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, photos, handwritten notes and spoken requests. Compare how each handles the cases that go wrong: a line that matches several products, a missing quantity, a detail the customer left out. Proton says it flags low-confidence matches and missing fields for the rep; Qotora AI flags them for the person who reviews the quote.

Your ERP. Proton connects to any ERP, built by its own engineers, and can write approved quotes or orders back through paths your team agrees. Qotora AI is deliberately read-only. It connects to Odoo through a direct connector. For any other system, such as Sage 100, SAP Business One, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central or QuickBooks, our team sets up a read-only connection to the database, or a scheduled export that Qotora reads, during onboarding. We do not claim a native or certified integration with those systems. When a customer accepts a quote, your team enters the order in your ERP as it does today. If you want approved quotes posted into your ERP automatically, that is a reason to look at Proton.

Setup. Proton’s integration page says a full platform rollout can take 12 to 16 weeks, and that a single module, connector or workflow can move faster. Qotora AI is one tool: our team does the connection, loads your price rules and reproduces your quote template, and setup is included in every plan. You can book a free consultation before paying anything, and there is a 7-day money-back guarantee from your first quote sent.

Where Proton may be the closer fit, and where Qotora AI may be

Proton may be the closer fit if you want one platform for the whole sales motion, with a CRM, product data and eCommerce alongside quote entry, with approved quotes and orders written back to your ERP, and you have the team time for a larger rollout. Its pages describe exactly that, for distributors from growing to enterprise.

Qotora AI may be the closer fit if you want the quoting step done and nothing else added: a counter team that answers requests in many formats from your own catalogue and your own price rules, with a person approving every quote, no write access to your ERP, a published price and setup that is included.

Proton’s Quote & Order Entry and Qotora AI do similar things at the quote step. Compare the table above, then compare how each handles the cases that go wrong, ideally on one request your team has already quoted.

Questions to put to any quoting vendor

1. Can any quote leave without a person approving it, and who decides which ones?
2. Where does every price on the quote come from, and can I trace it to my own data?
3. What happens when a line could be several products: does it guess or ask?
4. Does it write into my ERP, or only read from it, and how is it connected to my version?
5. Which of my request formats does it read: PDF, spreadsheet, photo, voice?
6. What does it cost per month, what does setup cost, how long does it take, and what happens if it does not fit?

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