Unanetvs
Deltek
Deltek: If you are a large federal contractor with multiple business segments and need the depth of Costpoint, and can absorb a longer implementation
Unanet
Project ERP and CRM built for government contractors and architecture and engineering firms
As of 31 August 2026, Unanet's pricing is not published; the vendor quotes on request. ERP for firms that bill projects to public money, with DCAA-oriented timekeeping and indirect rate accounting built in. Softwr lists it under ERP. Unanet is available on Web, Cloud, iOS, Android.
Overview
What Unanet does
Unanet is project-based ERP: timekeeping, expense, resource planning, project accounting, billing and financials for organisations whose revenue is a set of contracts rather than a set of transactions. It ships in two lines. Unanet ERP GovCon targets United States federal contractors and covers indirect cost pools, provisional and actual rate calculation, contract types including cost-plus and time-and-materials, and the audit trail behaviour that Defense Contract Audit Agency reviews look for. Unanet ERP AE targets architecture and engineering firms with the same project cost machinery aimed at commercial and state work. A separate Unanet CRM, built on the former Cosential platform, handles pursuit tracking and proposal content for both. The distinguishing feature is not any single module, it is that DCAA-relevant behaviour is native rather than bolted on. Daily timesheet entry with reason-for-change audit records, floor-check support and indirect rate pools are how the product is built, which is why federal contractors buy it instead of configuring a generalist ERP to imitate the same controls. For a firm bidding cost-reimbursable work, an accounting system judged adequate is a precondition of the award, not an efficiency question. Buyers are small and mid-sized federal contractors, typically from around twenty staff to several hundred, and mid-market AE firms. The trade-offs are opacity and effort. No pricing is published; the product is quoted per user per month with implementation fees on top, reported by resellers to start in the low thousands per year for a small team and to reach five figures in implementation for larger deployments. Implementation is a project, not a signup, and the interface is dated compared with modern SaaS finance tools.
What people use it for
- A federal contractor moving from QuickBooks and spreadsheets because it has won its first cost-reimbursable contract and needs an accounting system that survives a DCAA adequacy review
- A services firm that must calculate and true up provisional indirect rates each year and cannot do it credibly in Excel any longer
- An architecture and engineering practice tracking utilisation and project profitability across dozens of concurrent jobs
- A government contractor consolidating a separate CRM, timekeeping tool and accounting package into one system so pipeline and backlog reconcile
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Unanet.
- No pricing is published for any Unanet product; every line is quoted per user per month with separate implementation fees, so a small contractor cannot budget the first year without a full sales cycle.
- Implementation is a project rather than a signup, involving chart of accounts design, indirect pool structure and data migration, and third parties report implementation fees reaching five figures for mid-sized deployments, an amount easily missed when comparing per-user rates.
- The interface is dated compared with modern SaaS finance products, which raises training time for staff who only touch it to enter a timesheet and increases the support burden on the finance team.
- ERP and CRM are separate products with separate contracts, so a firm that wants pipeline, backlog and actuals in one place pays twice and still deals with an integration boundary between them.
- Its value is concentrated in United States federal and state contracting compliance, so a firm that does no public-sector work is paying for indirect rate machinery and DCAA audit behaviour it will never use, and a non-US firm gets almost nothing from the product’s main differentiator.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Unanet
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- UnanetvsSage Intacct
Sage Intacct: If you need strong project accounting but do no federal cost-reimbursable work, and want published dimensional reporting instead of DCAA machinery
- UnanetvsNetSuite
NetSuite: If you want one ERP across finance, inventory and services and are willing to configure project cost behaviour yourself
Pricing
What Unanet costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Unanet ERP GovCon
On request
- Project accounting with indirect rate pools
- DCAA-oriented daily timekeeping and audit trail
- Cost-plus, T&M and fixed price contract billing
- Government invoice formats
- Priced per user per month, quoted; implementation fees additional
Unanet ERP AE
On request
- Project accounting configured for architecture and engineering firms
- Resource planning and utilisation reporting
- Priced per user per month, quoted
Unanet CRM
On request
- Pursuit and opportunity tracking
- Proposal content library and reuse
- Sold separately from ERP; quoted
Capabilities
Features
DCAA-oriented timekeeping
Daily time entry with change reasons and a full audit trail
Indirect rate management
Fringe, overhead and G&A pools with provisional and actual rate calculation
Contract type support
Cost-plus, time-and-materials, fixed price and hybrid contract billing
Project accounting
General ledger, accounts payable and receivable tied to project and task structures
Resource planning
Forecasting people against funded and pipeline work
Unanet CRM
Pursuit and opportunity tracking with proposal content reuse, from the Cosential acquisition
Compliant invoicing
Government invoice formats including SF1034 and WAWF submission support
Unanet ERP AE
Separate product line configured for architecture and engineering firms
Reporting and dashboards
Contract funding, backlog and utilisation reporting for programme managers
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What does Unanet cost?
Nothing is published. Pricing is per user per month and quoted, with implementation fees charged separately on top of the subscription.
Does Unanet make you DCAA compliant?
No software does. Unanet provides the timekeeping controls, audit trail and indirect rate accounting that an adequacy review looks for; the policies and their enforcement are still yours.
Is Unanet CRM included with the ERP?
No. Unanet CRM, built on the acquired Cosential platform, is a separate product with its own contract.
How does it compare with Deltek?
Unanet typically targets smaller contractors than Deltek Costpoint and is quicker to implement, but has less depth for very large multi-segment organisations.
Keep looking
Where to go from Unanet
- Unanet alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Unanet pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Unanet badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All ERP softwareThe full category
- Best ERP softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best ERP software for
Compare Unanet with
- Deltek
- NetSuite
- Unit4
- Epicor
- Odoo
- Holded
- Striven
- DEAR Systems
- Jaggaer
- Plex Manufacturing Cloud
- SAP S/4HANA
- Ivalua
- Visibility
- Yonyou
- Zip
- GEP SMART
- Unit4
- Ivalua
Other ERP software
Oracle cloud ERP covering finance, inventory, orders and commerce
Pricing on request13 researched notesERP for people-based organisations where the cost centre structure keeps changing
From $800/mo13 researched notesA portfolio of separately acquired ERP products, not one system
From $750/mo13 researched notesSpanish cloud ERP for invoicing, accounting and business management for small companies
From €7.5/mo10 researched notesSource to pay procurement suite that sits on top of an existing ERP
Pricing on request13 researched notesMulti-tenant manufacturing ERP with MES built in, owned by Rockwell Automation
From $500/mo13 researched notesSAP's current ERP, running only on the HANA database, with a migration deadline behind it
From $5,000/mo13 researched notesSource-to-pay on one codebase and one data model, sold to large enterprises by module
Pricing on request12 researched notesChinese enterprise digital transformation platform spanning PaaS and SaaS services
Pricing on request9 researched notesProcurement intake and orchestration that sits on top of the systems you already run
Pricing on request12 researched notesEnterprise source-to-pay from a vendor that also sells the consulting and the outsourced procurement team
Pricing on request12 researched notesERP for people-based organisations where the cost centre structure keeps changing
From $800/mo13 researched notesSource-to-pay on one codebase and one data model, sold to large enterprises by module
Pricing on request12 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Unanet, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Unanet
Unanet alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Unanet pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Unanet
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Unanet badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Best ERP software alternatives
Modular open source ERP and CRM for very small businesses, installable on shared hosting
Open source, no licence fee
French open source ERP and CRM with a low-code studio for changing the data model without forking
Per user per monthEnterprise source-to-pay from a vendor that also sells the consulting and the outsourced procurement team
quote
Community-run open source ERP forked from Compiere, with no vendor behind it
Open source, no licence fee
Community-governed open source ERP, CRM and supply chain built on Java, OSGi and PostgreSQL
Open source, no licence fee
Java ERP and e-commerce framework from the Apache Foundation, sold as a toolkit not a product
Open source, no licence fee