Don't get locked into SPS's black-box managed service model

What you get with SPS

🅧 Vendor-Controlled Onboarding

Managed-services-only model leaves you dependent on timelines and staffing capacity, often turning promised onboarding schedules into months-long delays you can’t control.
 

🅧 Limited Visibility

Minimal insight and transparency into operational performance that includes outdated dashboards.

🅧 Inconsistent Service Quality

Reactive support and uneven delivery quality, resulting in slow issue resolution and ongoing operational disruption.

🅧 Unpredictable Costs

Mandatory testing fees, mapping charges, and change processes can drive a total cost of ownership that is far less predictable than the initial contract.

🅧 Vendor-Controlled Onboarding

SPS operates a managed-services-only model, meaning your team cannot directly control onboarding timelines. Every new trading partner requires coordination through SPS resources, which are often constrained by internal bandwidth. 

🅧 Inconsistent Service Quality

Because SPS is heavily service-driven, outcomes are dependent on the quality and responsiveness of assigned teams. This leads to variability in delivery, inconsistent implementation experiences, and delays in issue resolution.

🅧 Lack of Control & Flexibility

With SPS, your integrations are effectively owned by the vendor. Making changes, updating mappings, or adjusting workflows typically requires submitting tickets and waiting in queues.

🅧 Fragmented Ownership of Outcomes

While SPS positions itself as a managed solution, accountability for outcomes is often blurred. Your team still bears the business impact of delays, errors, and partner issues—but without the control needed to fix them quickly.

Automated Trading Partner Onboarding

Leverage a library of pre-built trading partner integrations, canonical data models, and AI-assisted EDI mapping to accelerate partner enablement. Cleo’s no-code/low-code tooling abstracts transformation logic and communication protocols (AS2, SFTP, APIs), enabling rapid onboarding without dependency on vendor-managed queues or specialized EDI developers.

Real-Time Visibility & Unified Performance Intelligence

Cleo provides event-driven, end-to-end transaction visibility across the full document lifecycle (orders, ASNs, invoices, acknowledgments). A centralized data layer powers role-based dashboards, SLA monitoring, and exception management—enabling proactive identification of failures, automated alerting, and correlation of integration activity to business outcomes like chargebacks, fill rates, and revenue impact.

Responsive, Operationally-Aware Support

Access 24/7 support with defined SLAs, including a guaranteed 1-hour human response time. Cleo’s support model is integrated with platform telemetry, enabling faster root cause analysis across mappings, connectivity, and partner-specific configurations without requiring extensive customer-side debugging.

Lunchskins

"Our previous EDI provider, SPS Commerce, presented multiple inefficiencies, and we needed a solution that truly understood our business and could support our operations effectively..."

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Verst Logistics

Verst Logistics chose Cleo Integration Cloud for it's EDI and API needs, leading to ability to say “yes” to more API requirements and EDI mandates, all while lowering their SLA error rate from 4% to .24%.

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95% Faster Onboarding

New partners would take up to eight weeks to onboard before switching to Cleo. Now, they reduced onboarding time by 95% down to less than three days per partner onboarded.
 

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Duraflame

Duraflame chose Cleo to help mitigate any risks that peak season brings to their B2B integration strategy. They’re now spending less time resolving EDI issues and more time focusing on bringing on new business.

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QUOTE

"Every time a document fails it has to be retransmitted, going against our transaction count. It is in their best interest to keep the platform broken.”
 

QUOTE

“We are not allowed to touch anything within a map. We have to open a ticket, request an update to a map, go into a queue, wait days to get a response, wait for the update then have to test with TrueCommerce. There is a lack of urgency and we can't afford to wait when there is an 856 SLA with Amazon.”

QUOTE

“Cleo has provided much greater flexibility across our critical operational systems. With EDI and API capabilities in a single toolset, the ease of data transformation, and the increased automation through Cleo, we are laying the required foundational elements for our business to properly operate at a global level."

What is the main difference between Cleo and SPS Commerce?

The core difference is architectural and operational control. SPS Commerce operates as a managed-service, “black-box” EDI provider where onboarding, mappings, and issue resolution are vendor-controlled. Cleo delivers a self-service, end-to-end integration platform that combines EDI, APIs, and backend systems into a single orchestrated environment—giving your team direct control, visibility, and automation capabilities.

Why do companies switch from SPS Commerce to Cleo?

Organizations typically switch due to limitations in control, visibility, and scalability. SPS’s managed-service model introduces onboarding delays, limited transparency into integrations, and unpredictable costs. Cleo replaces this with automated onboarding, real-time monitoring, and a unified platform that enables faster issue resolution and lower total cost of ownership.

How does trading partner onboarding compare?

SPS onboarding is vendor-driven and queue-based, often taking weeks or months depending on capacity.

Cleo uses pre-built partner templates, AI-assisted EDI mapping, and no-code/low-code tooling to enable onboarding in hours or days—without requiring vendor intervention.

Does Cleo require EDI expertise like SPS Commerce?

No. SPS centralizes expertise within their services team, creating dependency.

Cleo abstracts complexity through reusable mappings, canonical data models, and intuitive interfaces, allowing both technical and non-technical users to manage integrations without deep EDI specialization.