Pointerpro Alternative
Seven ways Brilliant Assessments outshines Pointerpro
It’s hard to evaluate software. While a free trial is often available, time constraints usually prevent an in-depth investigation, and customers often make purchasing decisions based on marketing hype and crafted demonstrations. At a glance, Brilliant Assessments and Pointerpro appear to be similar, but in reality, they are pretty distinct.
These are the top seven things you’ll get from Brilliant Assessments, which are missing from Pointerpro.
Standout features that make assessments truly brilliant
These are the features that we felt were non-negotiable to build for a complete assessment platform, that Pointerpro do not offer today OR demand a significant price increase for you to access.
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AI Interpretation in Brilliant Assessments enables you to turn long‑form answers and uploaded documents into feedback, scores, and professional reports, powered by AI. All feedback can then be checked by an assessor before reaching the respondent’s inbox. This enterprise grade tooling means that you can use any type of evidence uploaded or added to an assessment to scale and deliver completely personalized feedback.
Pointerpro has released an AI widget, but it only scratches the surface of what you can achieve with Interpretations. We see this as an attempt to respond to our innovation, but it doesn’t stack up and is prone to unchecked AI hallucinations.
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Brilliant Assessments has AI Suggest functionality which enables you to build components of the assessment, and feedback, by prompting AI with your requirements. This means you can get from a blank page to a readymade assessment in a matter of minutes.
Pointerpro does not currently have AI building functionality.
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Iterations are great for before-and-after assessments (training, coaching, or engagement) or periodic check-ins. Brilliant Assessments' iterations support the same individual, team, or 360 responding multiple times. Feedback reports are enhanced to include how the respondents have (hopefully) improved over time.
Iterations can be fully automated, so the system sends welcome and reminder emails and the appropriate report on completion, including the current and previous iterations.
This function suits service evidence applications, re-engaging with clients over time and recertifying. While many customers don’t have this on their initial requirements list, most implement it once they see the differentiation this innovation provides.
Pointerpro does not currently have this functionality.
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The ability to build flexible and engaging results in Brilliant Assessments is a wonderful perk not available to the same extent in Pointerpro.
Pointerpro have a feature called ‘Outcomes’ but this is formula driven and rigid by comparison to the multi-tile dynamic builder available in Brilliant Assessments.
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We allow for unlimited benchmarks.
Brilliant Assessments’ advanced benchmarking allows you to define an unlimited number of benchmarks based on classifying questions in the assessment. As well as the average score, you can define percentile scores like quartiles and/or top 10%. This is also unlimited. The benchmarks are simple to define, and scores at all levels are calculated automatically.
Charts can show multiple classifiers. In feedback reports, you can also have multiple charts in a report showing different benchmarks. Benchmarks add great value to respondents, showing them where they stand rather than a bland score.
Pointerpro offers only Average benchmarks and only enables filtering by one classifying question – which applies to the whole report.
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We include advanced cohort assessments that group responses in every subscription
This means you can produce high-quality, detailed reports for any cohort, including teams and 360s. Chart types include options to segment data by role (vital for 360s), by unlimited classifiers, or by respondent. Specialist charts, such as stacked bars, histograms, and scatter plots, are ideal for showing the distribution of your cohort's answers. Feedback can also be highly personalized using ‘rating text’ at the assessment, section, subsection, and segmentation levels.
Assessments can be self-initiated through a link, or the assessment administrator can manage invitations.
Pointerpro’s Group Reporting functionality leverages limited benchmarking functionality. Results can’t be split by multiple roles and classifiers, which is essential for all but the most superficial reports. There is also no user initiation functionality.
Pointerpro do have consolodiated reporting but it is formula limited. For more detailed requirements you will require custom development and costly subscription upgrades to achieve the cohort assessment functions that come with Brilliant Assessments as standard.
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We enable customers and partners to activate a portal without extra cost
Brilliant Assessments includes a white-labeled Partner Portal for Customers and Partners to purchase and resell your assessments, manage all aspects of their responses and cohorts, and even set up a results page experience.
Inviting respondents is a 10-second process, and the full response experience can be set up to reflect the partner’s branding, colors, and standard wording. Partner self-registration is available.
Pointerpro’s attempt to copy this functionality (DistributR) comes with a significant hike in price.
Beautiful feedback delivered automatically
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Brilliant Assessments
Automate 95% of feedback, without formulas
Brilliant Assessments enables you to build and deliver personalised feedback to respondents, assessment managers and stakeholders easily, with over 95% of feedback queries addressed without formulas or calculations.
Instead, feedback (and charts) are created using our Merge Manager. This builds merge strings using simple dropdown selections in Microsoft Word or in our results page builder (web based). No formulas, no widgets, and no code.
You can spin up a Spider chart for every subsection of your assessment with two benchmark comparisons in just a few clicks, with scores calculated for you automatically.
Pointerpro
Expect formula-driven feedback and human error
Pointerpro has a graphical report design tool that demonstrates well but hides that the data shown has been crafted in formulas beforehand. In reality, Pointerpro’s web‑based Report Builder uses outcomes, custom scores, and formulas you configure. The assessment engine calculates those formulas from your setup, then applies widget logic rules to show the right text, charts, or KPIs in the PDF. Many widgets (e.g., Formula KPI, Formula Ranking, Spider/Radar charts) visualize the results of those formulas.
Building formulas is time-consuming and introduces the risk of human error. For a 50+ question assessment with a detailed feedback report, mistakes are well hidden. Expect to build, test, and maintain hundreds of formulas.
An assessment building experience that just makes sense
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Brilliant Assessments
What you see is what you get
The builder in Brilliant Assessments is designed to follow the logic of how a respondent will take the assessment. This makes the build easier and also provides the foundations for automated scoring at each level of the assessment.
Beat the blank page with AI Suggest
Brilliant Assessments comes with an inbuild AI Suggest feature which help you 10x the speed of building out sections, subsections, questions and draft feedback for your reports. Pointerpro does not currently have this functionality available.
Pointerpro
Form-based builder
Building your assessment content in Pointerpro is largely form based, which makes it harder to visualize what your assessment may look like to the respondent, and how you may want to organize the calculation of scores.
Manual content creation
As it stands today, Pointerpro surveys, questionnaires and assessments are built manually, question by question. This can be very time consuming when you just want to set up an assessment and hit the ground running.
A mature enterprise-grade advantage
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Brilliant Assessments
Enterprise assessment roots
Our team comes from an enterprise software background, and this is reflected in the software.
Brilliant Assessments was initially designed for an assessment of 164 questions in six sections, each with four or five subsections. Our next customer had over 800 primarily conditional questions organized into 15 sections.
In our experience, an assessment demands the robust design Brilliant Assessments offers, especially to scale in the future. We build our roadmap, improve our product and innovate continuously to service this market.
Pointerpro
Surveys with sizzle
Pointerpro was originally called Survey Anyplace and was initially developed as a quiz application and has grown from there. Its available answer formats include cute quiz tool widgets like ‘slot machines’, ‘scratch cards’, and smiley-face emojis.
Only over the last few years has Pointerpro added PDF reporting and pivoted to address the assessment market. The maturity of this pivot shows. Pointerpro still encourages users to make assessments short and sweet because it still isn’t designed to handle the depth of detail and information that a brilliant assessment demands.
If you want to develop an extensive, enterprise-grade assessment with multiple questions and complex requirements, PointerPro isn’t the tool for the job.
A true product focus
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Brilliant Assessments
Product focused
We let our product functionality do the hard work of selling for us. The online demo video, try-me assessment, the ungated free trial, and upfront pricing combine to give you a complete view of the solution before you buy.
You can also talk to us if you like. However, instead of sales reps, you’ll meet with customer success managers focused on making our software work for you rather than getting a commission.
Leading with innovation
We’re big on innovation, but we can’t take all the credit for that. We listen to our customers’ big ideas and we execute on them to make them possible, before anyone else.
Pointerpro
Sales focused
It's difficult to understand what you’re getting with Pointerpro unless you talk to the sales team. The free trial is only available through a sales rep and doesn’t allow you to try many of the features you need to create a detailed assessment. Plus, expect daily follow ups from the team throughout your trial, trying to seal the deal.
Following on innovation
We’ve found that when we build new features and functionality in the product, Pointerpro follows us months, and sometimes years later. If you like having the leading edge and bringing your innovations to the table, Brilliant Assessments is for you.
Variety (it’s the spice of life, and your assessment)
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Brilliant Assessments
Build any assessment
Brilliant Assessments is extremely feature rich and flexible to allow you to build any (yes any) assessment.
Every Brilliant Assessments subscription includes the ability to deliver deep, impactful feedback in the format that makes the most sense for your assessment. Feedback can be offered as a Results page, a PDF Report, or an accessible Word document. It can include feedback you’ve written yourself, generated with AI or crafted with intelligent, unique AI feedback at scale.
Pointerpro
Adapt to the platform
We’ve had a lot of Pointerpro users come over to Brilliant Assessments after trying to ‘fit a square peg in a round hole’. Often the assessment is required to fit the platform, which can become prohibitive, especially when you’re ready to grow!
It’s for this reason that they even say you need your hand held to get up and running!
We can confidently say you don’t need a product expert to use Brilliant Assessments, but we’re here to help if you want some pointers along the way while you build on your free trial.
Simple and clear pricing
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Brilliant Assessments
Buy how you want to buy
We offer a 14-day free trial for you to try our software out before fully committing. Once you’ve come on board, we offer comprehensive annual and monthly subscriptions suited to your needs. Our pricing is upfront and charged proportionately.
Currently, we have only one gated feature, which is AI Interpretation. This is because of the highly advanced functionality it brings to the table. It is also entirely optional and not essential for every assessment.
Pointerpro
Buy annually, upgrade to unlock
Pointerpro’s marketing touts “from” pricing that is less than one percent of what it actually costs. They only disclose how much you’re paying after a meeting and have multiple add-ons for white labeling, onboarding, additional administrators, their partner portal (DistributR) functionality, and their “premium” non-chat-based support.
Pointerpro only offers an annual subscription, locking you in from day one. Plans are also report-based, meaning reports will be inaccessible once the count is exceeded.
Final Note
When we do a competitor comparison, we do our homework
There are many unfortunate inaccuracies in PointerPro’s analysis of our platform.
Do contact us if you have any questions about these comparisons. We’re not about throwing stones; we’re about helping you select a suitable platform for your assessment needs.
Last Reviewed: October 27, 2025 | Disclaimer: Some of the facts in this article may have changed since publication but we do regularly review this content to maintain accuracy. If you believe there are false statements in this article please contact us directly.