Reviewing SoundThinking (NASDAQ:SSTI) and Braze (NASDAQ:BRZE)

SoundThinking (NASDAQ:SSTI) and Braze (NASDAQ:BRZE) are both industrial products companies, but which is the superior investment? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their dividends, institutional ownership, valuation, analyst recommendations, risk, profitability and earnings.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of recent recommendations and price targets for SoundThinking and Braze, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
SoundThinking	0	2	4	0	2.67
Braze	0	1	16	0	2.94

SoundThinking presently has a consensus price target of $22.50, suggesting a potential upside of 77.17%. Braze has a consensus price target of $60.88, suggesting a potential upside of 76.40%. Given SoundThinking’s higher possible upside, equities research analysts clearly believe SoundThinking is more favorable than Braze.

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares SoundThinking and Braze’s revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
SoundThinking	$92.72 million	1.75	-$2.72 million	($0.32)	-39.69
Braze	$471.80 million	7.43	-$129.17 million	($1.28)	-26.96

SoundThinking has higher earnings, but lower revenue than Braze. SoundThinking is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Braze, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

60.7% of SoundThinking shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 90.5% of Braze shares are held by institutional investors. 7.7% of SoundThinking shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 24.0% of Braze shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Profitability

This table compares SoundThinking and Braze’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
SoundThinking	-3.94%	-12.69%	-6.64%
Braze	-25.06%	-27.85%	-15.66%

Volatility and Risk

SoundThinking has a beta of 1.21, meaning that its share price is 21% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Braze has a beta of 1.06, meaning that its share price is 6% more volatile than the S&P 500.

About SoundThinking

SoundThinking, Inc., a public safety technology company that provides transformative solutions and strategic advisory services for law enforcement and civic leadership. Its SafetySmart Platform, an integrated suite of data-driven tools that enable law enforcement and community violence prevention and health organizations to be efficient in public safety outcomes. It offers ShotSpotter, an acoustic gunshot detection system; CrimeTracer, a law enforcement search engine; CaseBuilder, an investigation management system; and ResourceRouter, a software that directs patrol and community anti-violence resources to help maximize their impact. The company sells its solutions through its direct sales teams. The company was formerly known as ShotSpotter, Inc. and changed its name to SoundThinking, Inc. in April 2023. SoundThinking, Inc. was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Fremont, California.

About Braze

Braze, Inc. operates a customer engagement platform that provides interactions between consumers and brands worldwide. The company offers Braze software development kits that automatically manage data ingestion and deliver mobile and web notifications, in-application/in-browser interstitial messages, and content cards; REST API that can be used to import or export data or to trigger workflows between Braze and brands' existing technology stacks; Partner Data Integrations, which allow brands to sync user cohorts from partners; Data Transformation, in which brands can programmatically sync and transform user data; and Braze Cloud Data Ingestion that enables brands to harness their customer data. It also offers classification products, including segmentation that can define reusable segments of consumers based upon attributes, events, or predictive propensity scores; segment insights, which allows customers to analyze how segments are performing relative to each other across a set of pre-selected key performance indicators; and predictive suite that allows customers to identify groups of consumers that are of critical business value. In addition, the company provides Canvas, an orchestration tool that allows customers to create journeys, mapping out multi-steps, and cross-channel messaging experiences; campaigns, which allows customers to send one set of single-channel or multi-channel messages to be delivered to customers in a particular user segment; event and API triggering; marketing pressure management; and reporting and analytics. Further, it offers personalization products, such as liquid templating platform, connected content platform, content blocks, intelligent timing and channel, personalized variant, and AI item recommendations, and catalogs; and action products. The company was formerly known as Appboy, Inc. and changed its name to Braze, Inc. in November 2017. Braze, Inc. was incorporated in 2011 and is headquartered in New York, New York.