Head to Head Survey: Lightspeed Commerce (NYSE:LSPD) versus PagerDuty (NYSE:PD)

Lightspeed Commerce (NYSE:LSPD) and PagerDuty (NYSE:PD) are both small-cap technology companies, but which is the better investment? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their risk, profitability, dividends, analyst recommendations, earnings, institutional ownership and valuation.

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of current ratings and target prices for Lightspeed Commerce and PagerDuty, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Lightspeed Commerce	3	9	4	0	2.06
PagerDuty	2	5	3	0	2.10

Lightspeed Commerce presently has a consensus price target of $11.54, indicating a potential upside of 16.84%. PagerDuty has a consensus price target of $12.56, indicating a potential downside of 13.75%. Given Lightspeed Commerce’s higher probable upside, equities research analysts plainly believe Lightspeed Commerce is more favorable than PagerDuty.

Insider & Institutional Ownership

68.7% of Lightspeed Commerce shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 97.3% of PagerDuty shares are held by institutional investors. 6.0% of PagerDuty shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Risk and Volatility

Lightspeed Commerce has a beta of 1.84, suggesting that its stock price is 84% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, PagerDuty has a beta of 0.96, suggesting that its stock price is 4% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Lightspeed Commerce and PagerDuty”s revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Lightspeed Commerce	$1.23 billion	1.11	-$144.41 million	($0.70)	-14.10
PagerDuty	$492.55 million	2.33	$173.85 million	$2.00	7.28

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

Profitability

This table compares Lightspeed Commerce and PagerDuty’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Lightspeed Commerce	-7.81%	1.06%	0.95%
PagerDuty	37.50%	18.52%	4.84%

Summary

PagerDuty beats Lightspeed Commerce on 10 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Lightspeed Commerce

Lightspeed Commerce Inc. engages in sale of cloud-based software subscriptions and payments solutions for small and midsize businesses, retailers, restaurants, and golf course operators in North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and internationally. Its Software as a Service platform enables customers to engage with consumers, manage operations, accept payments, etc. The company's cloud platforms are designed interrelated elements, such as omni-channel consumer experience, a comprehensive back-office operations management suite to improve customers' efficiency and insight, and the facilitation of payments. Its platform functionalities include full omni-channel capabilities, point of sale (POS), product and menu management, employee and inventory management, analytics and reporting, multi-location connectivity, order-ahead and curbside pickup functionality, loyalty, and customer management solutions. The company also offers tailored financial solutions, such as Lightspeed Retail, Lightspeed eCommerce, Lightspeed Restaurant, and Lightspeed B2B solutions. In addition, it sells hardware, including tablets, customer facing displays, receipt printers, networking hardware, cash drawers, payment terminals, servers, stands, bar-code scanners, and an assortment of accessories, as well as provides installation and implementation services. The company was formerly known as Lightspeed POS Inc. and changed its name to Lightspeed Commerce Inc. in August 2021. Lightspeed Commerce Inc. was incorporated in 2005 and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada.

About PagerDuty

PagerDuty, Inc. engages in the operation of a digital operations management platform in the United States and internationally. The company’s digital operations management platform collects data and digital signals from virtually any software-enabled system or device and leverage machine learning to correlate, process, and predict opportunities and issues. Its platform includes PagerDuty Incident Management that provides a real-time view across the status of a digital service while incorporating noise reduction to remove false positives; AIOps that applies machine learning to correlate and automate the identification of incidents from billions of events; Process Automation offers centralized design time and run time environment for orchestrating automated workflows that span across departments, technologies, and networks; Customer Service Operations, which is offered to orchestrate, automate, and scale responses to customer impacting issues. It serves various industries, including software and technology, telecommunications, retail, travel and hospitality, media and entertainment, and financial services. PagerDuty, Inc. was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.