SQAD gives you media costs, flowcharts, and media authorizations. In contrast, Bionic gives you a fully-integrated media planning and media buying system.

About SQAD

SQAD was founded in 1990, and is located in Tarrytown, NY.

SQAD’s main products are, MediaCosts, MediaLogic, and MediaTools (acquired with Workhorse Software in 2014).

About MediaTools

MediaTools should not be confused with Mediatool, a similar product with confusingly similar name.

The biggest strength of Mediatools is creating advertising flowcharts and securing media approvals.

Mediatools biggest weaknesses are lack of support the other parts of the media planning and media buying processes, obsolete 1990’s software technology, lack of innovation, and high cost.

How Bionic is Different

In contrast, Bionic provides advertising flowcharts as one of many features in its media planning and buying software.

Bionic provides a complete solution for media planners, and avoids the painful process of transferring data from one system to another. And Bionic offers all of this at a much lower price, flexible month-to-month licensing, and on a modern cloud-based platform.

Key Differences

  1. One Trick Pony – SQAD Mediatools is a great tool for creating advertising flowcharts, but it lacks the other tools required in the media planning process. As such, Mediatools is a “point solution” – or “one trick pony” – that you have to surround with other tools to create a complete media planning solution. In contrast, Bionic provides you with a complete solution that includes state of the art advertising flowcharts along with everything else you need to get your job done as a media planner.
  2. Obsolete Technology – SQAD Mediatools is built using 1990’s software technology that must be installed on your PC. Although Workhorse offers “web access” version, it’s not a substitute because it’s lacking many key features. You need to use the installed product to get the full Mediatools product. Because it’s installed, you can’t access your data without the correct client software. In contrast, Bionic provides its software through a modern, cloud-based system. If you have a web browser and an internet connection, you can securely access your media plans.
  3. A Hassle to Maintain – Because SQAD Mediatools is installed on every PC, it’s a hassle to maintain and to upgrade. With Bionic, you’re always running the latest software because you’re accessing modern cloud-based software that’s maintained by Bionic.
  4. Lack of Innovation – In the fast past world of advertising, you’re either quick or you’re dead. While innovative when it was first released in the 1990’s, Mediatools has lately been slow to innovate and has fallen behind the rest of the advertising world. In contrast, Bionic has a proven track record of innovation with software upgrades every few weeks to stay ahead of the curve.
  5. No Research Capabilities – With SQAD Mediatools, you’re on your own to do your research and to gather information outside the system. With Bionic, you have a built-in, searchable catalog of advertising inventory and products that will help you to reach your market. This helps you make smarter decisions and eliminates re-keying and errors.
  6. No Requests for Proposals (RFPs) – With SQAD Mediatools, there’s no functionality to support the RFP process. With Bionic, you can create RFPs, send them, track them, receive proposals online, and import them into your media plan.
  7. No Media Plan Presentations – SQAD Mediatools does not enable you to create PowerPoint presentations, which are critical in the process of getting approval on your media plan. With Bionic, you can create PowerPoint presentations with a click of a button.
  8. No Insertion Orders – With SQAD Mediatools, creating your insertion orders is a labor-intensive, error-prone process of copying from spreadsheets into other systems or other spreadsheets. With Bionic, the process of creating your insertion order schedules is automated.
  9. No Ad Server Integration – With SQAD Mediatools, you have to re-key into ad servers to execute your digital media plans. This leads to implementation errors. With Bionic, you can automatically traffic your media plans to leading ad servers such as DCM and Sizmek.
  10. Weak Performance Monitoring – With SQAD Mediatools, you can’t monitor your marketing performance and pacing against your goals. This is like having a finance system that lets you create budgets, but doesn’t allow you to track your revenue and expenses against that budget. With Bionic, your marketing performance data flows in automatically from other systems and is compared against your plans. You get alerted if anything is not going as planned.
  11. High Price – SQAD Mediatools doesn’t post prices on its website. You have to ask for a price quote. It’s reputed to be very expensive. With Bionic, you get No Nonsense Pricing including software, upgrades, and all the support you need for $195 per month per user.
  12. Inflexible Terms – With SQAD Mediatools, you are locked into a long term contract. With Bionic, you get flexible month to month licensing and a money-back satisfaction Guarantee.  You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel any time.

What’s missing or wrong?

We’d love your suggestions to improve this competitive review. It’s incomplete. Please let us know what is missing or wrong. We’ve done our best to present a factually correct review, but competitors are often reluctant to share information. We’ve relied on the internet and third parties to source this information.