Top Seven Product Information Management (PIM) Software in 2023  

In this highly competitive climate, the success of any business is proportional to how well its products are managed. With the goal of delivering an engaging shopping experience, it has become crucial for every business to improve its selling performance across multichannel touchpoints.

By providing a centralized hub for all relevant product data, product information management (PIM) simplifies and provides a single, accurate view of the product data. Product managers and data teams rely on PIM to collect data from multiple sources as well as identify and fix problematic data. Furthermore, the product data is distributed to every distribution channel using PIM. Gartner’s Leadership Vision for 2022 research found that one of the top challenges for product marketers is managing publishing across an ever-expanding set of digital platforms.  And PIM is quite well placed to fulfill this role  in helping enterprises gain growth and success, by delivering exceptional customer experiences.

As the marketplace changes and data drives businesses, getting an effective PIM is the need of the hour. Here are the top seven PIM solutions enterprises can use to succeed in 2023.

1. Pimcore

Pimcore aggregates, enriches, and manages enterprise data through an open-source digital platform to provide customers with a consistent, up-to-date, and personalized experience. Pimcore offers an excellent alternative to costly digital experience platforms and marks its uniqueness with incredible flexibility, an API-driven approach, and more than 100 global solution partners. With over 100,000 organizations, SMEs, and large companies in 56 countries using Pimcore, businesses can rest assured that they are in good hands. Being a fully integrated solution, Pimcore’s comes with an entire suite of software products including PIM, DAM, CMS, eCommerce, and CDP. Once implemented Pimcore PIM provides enterprises with a single view of products, assets, customers, and more. In doing so, it eliminates data silos, optimizes operational efficiency, improves customer experience, and minimizes IT costs. By centralizing and harmonizing all product information, Pimcore delivers the perfect data in lesser time. In addition to the ability to acquire, manage, and share digital data, the open-source PIM platform integrates easily with any existing IT environments.

A recipient of Gartner’s Peer Insights Customers’ Choice in 2022, Pimcore facilitates compelling commerce through Product Experience Management (PXM). With its flexible data model businesses can support millions of SKUs having thousands of attributes and keep them organized by family or category. Product data can be exported and published across  any number of channels .

2. Salsify

Salsify’s robust product information management (PIM) platform helps brands adapt rapidly to new customer demands, market forces, and category disruptors. With Salsify PIM, businesses can validate attributes against internal schemas, carry out fast data imports before data governance, and support multiple data domains such as digital assets, inventory, and customer data. Users can edit attribution, validation, inheritance, and entity ownership rules. By empowering retailers to win on the digital shelf, Salsify drives results for its customers worldwide.

Salsify PIM’s flexible data model and streamlined import process allow enterprises to upload or modify precisely the data they need. And its architecture is highly secure and multi-tenant. Without complicated data migrations, spreadsheets, or long planning periods, data is entered into the platform faster. From creation to review to transformation to end-of-life, Salsify PIM ensures data’s quality by enforcing rules and structures. Salsify centrally manages, automates, and governs go-to-market activities, streamlining operations and maintaining data accuracy. Core product data is mapped and transformed according to each destination’s target schema to ensure consistency and accuracy across all channels.

3. Akeneo

Akeneo’s easy and flexible open-source SaaS PIM helps enterprises deliver impactful product experiences across their sales, marketing, and customer service channels. Using best-in-class product experiences, Akeneo PIM helps businesses drive growth by getting correct product information to its customers quickly and effectively.

The Akeneo platform unlocks business growth by eliminating old and inefficient ways of dealing with product information. Akeneo offers Product Experience Management (PXM) and PIM solutions to help merchants and brands improve product quality and streamline catalog management. The Akeneo PXM Studio combines a PIM platform, extensions, connectors, and the Akeneo App Store to simplify catalog management, improve product data quality, and speed up product information sharing. Since marketplaces operated by third parties would remain popular for a long time to come, customers expect consistent experiences whether they shop online, in-store, via voice assistant, or through native or mobile apps. However, for businesses to differentiate themselves with product experience, Akeneo provides the PIM solution they need.

4. PIMworks

PIMworks provides a wide variety of easy-to-use features for the perfect organizational product experience ranging from automatic data enrichment to syndicating your products to multiple channels and supporting real-time workflows. Its PIM software is designed to help businesses enhance their user experience and deliver a better product experience seamlessly. It allows organizations to increase their overall business productivity, improve growth, and earn more profits. In addition to the ease of retaining customers, PIMworks provides seamless collaboration with multiple internal teams and reduces manual work with artificial intelligence.

PIMworks also automates content management, lowers overall operational costs, creates a central repository of product data and digital assets, improves business performance and productivity, and enhances brand recognition. The integration support of PIMworks offers readymade integrations with top marketplaces, allowing businesses to synchronize their product data fluidly and expand their sales channels. With PIMworks, companies can sell their products across multiple marketplaces quickly and efficiently. Whether it’s on Amazon, Magento, Shopify, or any other marketplace, PIMworks’ centralized hub enables organizations to sell across multiple marketplaces and provide ultimate customer satisfaction.

5. Plytix

As an alternative to the complex, outdated, and unappealing PIM software on the market, Plytix PIM is not just designed for ease of use but also for the aesthetic appeal to end users. Companies can streamline their product content with Plytix PIM and eliminate spreadsheet clutter by centralizing all product information. When teams know exactly where all the product content is located, it becomes easier for them to reclaim their workday. The Plytix team collaboration tool enables team members to edit and optimize the content without affecting anyone’s view or overwriting their work.

To provide business product content anywhere it needs to go, Plytix makes it easier for businesses to sell their products anywhere. The platform takes care of all the heavy lifting for businesses by offering them automated feeds for their sales channels, live catalogs, and automatically updated PDF templates. Getting started with Plytix is easy since the software is intuitive and easy to use. Plytix offers the only PIM specifically designed (and priced!) for small to medium-sized businesses and is most suitable for companies managing over 100 products or selling across multiple channels.

6. Riversand

As a pure-play SaaS provider, Riversand offers product information management (PIM), master data management (MDM), and digital asset management (DAM) solutions. The Riversand PIM solution orchestrates high-scale enterprise-grade data management methods that empower businesses to go beyond the basics of product information management. Furthermore, it reduces labor-intensive processes, launches products to market faster, and discovers new ways to deliver customer outcomes across every touchpoint by enabling highly productive digital supply chains.

Riversand is a leading cloud-native SaaS PIM platform designed to synchronize organizational PIM processes with digital initiatives and centralize user experience to manage, enrich and publish product data efficiently. By combining data-centric eCommerce with  Riversand PIM, enterprises can introduce new products to market faster and stay ahead of the competition. With Riversand PIM, you get a future-proof master data management platform that enables business agility, faster adoption, and more effective collaboration. As a Gartner’s ‘Visionary Leader’ in PIM, Riversand’s fully integrated PIM solution empowers businesses to leverage their product data with tight integrations. In addition, it discovers intelligent insights and automates the onboarding of data as well as its distribution to marketplaces and eCommerce platforms through workflow automation.

7. EnterWorks 

PIM solutions from EnterWorks enable B2B and B2C companies to effectively manage product data across systems, channels, and internal and external audiences. Powered by its breakthrough Agile Data Fabric, EnterWorks helps businesses generate dramatic sales and margin growth by delivering tailored experiences to partners, customers, and marketplaces alike. As made obvious in the course of the ongoing digital revolution, the system architecture is key to innovation, particularly in B2B and B2C models for having complex interactions between buyers and sellers. And EnterWorks’ architecture ensures that businesses can master the complexity of digitally accelerated environments while integrating emerging technologies rapidly.

An innovative PIM from EnterWorks delivers a cloud-ready platform featuring a flexible service-oriented architecture (SOA) with microservices architecture. EnterWorks architecture can be used with open APIs to support artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and machine learning (ML). With the ability to configure, manage, and continuously update content and having the lowest TCO among PIM platforms, the company accelerates global adoption. EnterWorks can be implemented in 90-days, boosting business value and ROI and also providing end-to-end collaboration capabilities for manufacturers, value-added providers, and end-users across the value chain.

PIM: A game changer for online marketplaces

A PIM system specifically designed to meet modern customer demands and powered by digital technology is the key to digital commerce success. As the rules of customer engagement continue to change and evolve, businesses must reassess their PIM capabilities to keep pace with the changing realities. Identifying areas that require improvements is advisable before investing in a PIM solution. Be it launching new product lines or revamping the existing product portfolio, for businesses, PIM can pave the way for smooth functioning, business growth, customer satisfaction, and ROI.

(Disclaimer: Dietmar Rietsch is CEO of Pimcore. A serial entrepreneur with a strong sense for innovation, technology and digital transformation. He is a passionate entrepreneur who has been designing and realizing exciting digital projects for more than 20 years.  The views expressed here are his own)