Analyzing N-able (NYSE:NABL) and Viant Technology (NASDAQ:DSP)

N-able (NYSE:NABL) and Viant Technology (NASDAQ:DSP) are both small-cap business services companies, but which is the better stock? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their institutional ownership, risk, valuation, profitability, earnings, analyst recommendations and dividends.

Insider & Institutional Ownership

96.4% of N-able shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 11.4% of Viant Technology shares are held by institutional investors. 2.0% of N-able shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 28.8% of Viant Technology shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares N-able and Viant Technology”s revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
N-able	$511.43 million	1.74	-$17.03 million	($0.05)	-94.70
Viant Technology	$344.20 million	2.22	$8.35 million	$0.32	37.63

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

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent ratings and recommmendations for N-able and Viant Technology, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
N-able	2	3	3	0	2.13
Viant Technology	0	1	6	2	3.11

N-able presently has a consensus price target of $7.55, suggesting a potential upside of 59.45%. Viant Technology has a consensus price target of $17.79, suggesting a potential upside of 47.72%. Given N-able’s higher probable upside, research analysts plainly believe N-able is more favorable than Viant Technology.

Profitability

This table compares N-able and Viant Technology’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
N-able	-1.99%	3.40%	1.96%
Viant Technology	2.43%	1.31%	0.84%

Risk and Volatility

N-able has a beta of 0.64, suggesting that its share price is 36% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Viant Technology has a beta of 1, suggesting that its share price has a similar volatility profile to the S&P 500.

Summary

Viant Technology beats N-able on 10 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About N-able

N-able, Inc. provides cloud-based software solutions for managed service providers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and internationally. The company's solutions enable MSPs to support digital transformation and growth within small and medium-sized enterprises. It provides software platform designed to be an integrated, enterprise-grade solution that serves as an operating system for its MSP partners and scales as their businesses grow. In addition, the company offers remote monitoring and management solutions provide MSP partners with visibility and insights into the availability and performance of their customers' networks, infrastructure, devices and applications through a centralized dashboard; data protection as-a-service solutions, such as backup and disaster recovery for servers, virtual machines, workstations, files, data, and key cloud-based applications, as well as multi-tenant platform and secure remote delivery architecture. Further, it offers security services through patch management, endpoint security, managed detection and response, web protection, e-mail security, and archiving and vulnerability assessment solutions. Additionally, the company engages in professional services automation, automation and scripting management, password management policies and reporting, and analytics. N-able, Inc. was incorporated in 2020 and is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts.

About Viant Technology

Viant Technology Inc. operates as an advertising technology company. It provides Household ID, a people-based innovation that combines digital and personal identifiers into a normalized household profile; AI Bid Optimizer, solution that uses AI to analyze historical bid opportunities to predict the lowest media cost for desired advertisement; and Viant Data Platform, which offers marketers control over their own data with actionable insights into their marketing initiatives within a single platform. The company also offers Holistic, an omnichannel DSP for marketers and their agencies to manage omnichannel campaigns and access metrics from each channel to inform decisions in other channels; Viant Identity Graph, which reduces or eliminates the need for cookies by enabling matching of people-based identifiers that anchor digital identifiers that allows marketers to reach targeted consumers in a privacy-conscious manner; and Direct Access, a path optimization program. In addition, it provides campaign analysis and data intelligence tool that empowers customers with differentiated insights, including conversion lift, multi-touch attribution, foot-traffic data reports, digital-out-of-home lift, sales reporting, and ROAS analytics; and self-service platform that provides customers with transparency and control over their advertising campaigns and underlying data infrastructure. The company sells its platform through a direct sales team focused on business development in various markets. It serves purchasers of programmatic advertising inventory; and large, independent, and mid-market advertising agencies, as well as marketers. The company was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Irvine, California.