Helium 10 has been around for over six years whereas SmartScout has been live for less than 2 years. With that in mind, Helium 10 does have more tools to offer. SmartScout has been catching up in a concerted way and now much more competitive with Helium 10. We are going to find out which tools are better for which type of seller.
What tool is better for what type of Amazon seller? Here’s the summary so you can see the results now. But I’ll dive into each of these and give my honest review. I actually use Helium 10 myself still for my Amazon business even after building SmartScout. Yes, I’m biased. But I’ll back up my claims.
SmartScout and Helium 10 both have product databases. It’s a long road ahead to build a successful brand and getting it right at the beginning matters. You can enter many filters to narrow your search down to just the product you’re looking for. This is an effective way to make sure you truly understand a segment before you make a purchasing decision.
Helium 10’s Black Box is comparable to SmartScout’s product database.
The difference maker between the two is that with SmartScout’s product database you can continue to dive deeper and deeper into what makes the product successful. You can see where it’s been featured. You can see where they’re advertising. You can use the traffic graphic to understand the niche in a way that you have to see to believe.
On top of that you can jump right into the entire category and see market share in an organized way. A database of just products is just that. Instead of simply product research with SmartScout you can do Market Research.
Winner:
SmartScout
When SmartScout released their subcategories tool, it illuminated the 42,000 categories on Amazon in a browseable way that completely changed how to do research. Still to this day, no other tool offers this high level view coupled with the granular view.
Before you even start your journey, you have an idea of what revenue possibilities are there. For example, there are dozens of different supplement categories. Knowing which ones are the $50m business vs a $5m business in an instant gives you insight that is better when you don’t have to go on a wild chase to build this up product by product.
As you can see in this image, top to bottom research is at the core of SmartScout. Helium 10 has gaps here. They also don’t let you browse from level to the next without using a different tool.
SmartScout also has historical data on more parts of the Amazon data. It’s very quick and easy to look at a brand, a category or a sellers and see where they’ve been (and where they’re going!). So for completeness, ease of use SmartScout is a better tool for doing research.
Winner:
SmartScout
Helium 10 has really paved the way here. They have a variety of tools that can help Amazon Sellers optimize their product pages. They have the index checker, their frankenstein tool and a full on listing creator. They have a reverse ASIN lookup in Cerebro. It’s been a tried and tested way of optimizing pages on Amazon.
SmartScout recently developed their own reverse ASIN tool. It’s a bit faster and a cleaner UI. They have built more keyword research tools that can help understand how products and brands are competing and see a digital shelf.
Helium 10 is a clear winner here with the depth of tools they have perfected over the years. They’re inspiring us to consider building something but for now Helium 10 is definitely superior.
Winner:
Helium 10
Helium 10’s best competitor research tool is Cerebro. You can select a product and see the search terms of your competitors. In order to see competitor rank movement you will have to enter these into their rank tracker tool manually.
SmartScout has a rank tracker that shows the movement on all keywords instantaneously. It is built inside the reverse ASIN lookup that is currently called “rank tracker”. The historic data is already collected before you show up.
If this were it, I’d call it a draw. Though SmartScout has been building in this space quite a variety of tools that it will take Helium 10 a while to see it. They might copy us eventually, but at this time of writing they don’t have it. What am I talking about?
I’m talking about our Subcategories tool and market share. SmartScout is organized around products, sellers, brands, categories. You can move from one to the next. You kind of have to use to understand how any page you’re looking at, you’re one click away from either zooming in or zooming out on what’s happening on Amazon.
So if you’re looking into your competitors. You can easily see top line revenue, then you can see where they are placing their ads, what their respective win rates are across the entire brand or just a single product. You then can see how your keywords match up head to head with our Keyword Detective tool.
This is just scratching the surface of what makes SmartScout an excellent competitor research tool. It’s great for building FOMO. Once you see what others are doing, you can’t help but want to take over.
Winner:
SmartScout
SmartScout was founded by BuyBoxer. Reselling brands and finding arbitrage opportunities are a part of their DNA. BuyBoxer scaled to $65m a year of sales on Amazon.
SmartScout organizes all the data around sellers and brands and makes them immediately visible with filters. It can answer a question that no other tool can answer for resellers. Of the 1 million brands, what are the top 50 most likely to net my business the most profit. That’s a simple solution inside SmartScout and Helium 10 has no comparable offering her.
Not only that, but with our seller data you can spy on the most successful sellers and see the brands and products that they are selling. It’s a very quick solution to become a great wholesaler.
Winner:
SmartScout
If you’re a big brand, or let’s say a portfolio of brands (aggregator) you have lots of things to consider. You need to move from one category to another and get real quick insights into what is going on. You need to size up people fast and correctly.
Doing this at the product level is simply not tenable. You need to have the birds eye view. You need to understand the nuanced difference between a brand and a seller. Every other tool simply falls on their face in this. SmartScout is the only tool that accurately depicts what is on Amazon. Here’s a few insights that separating them gives you.
Yes, those are a bit technical. Just an example of splitting that up can help illuminate things.
Take a look at the brands and sellers that use our tools. They understand understanding the entire market in a quick way is key. They often use our tools to grow their business. Whether they are acquiring brands, contracts or pitching their services this has turned into the most important tool in their arsenal.
Winner:
SmartScout
Helium 10’s AdTomic is a full fledged advertising platform. It has campaign creation and bid optimization built inside. SmartScout simply doesn’t have an offering here.
SmartScout does offer insights into competitor advertising. The AdSpy tool gives you full vision on what a competitor is doing and how well they’re doing it. You can download your competitors' search terms and understand the win rates across the variety of products and brands.
SmartScout is also able to see how much you’re spending on a specific keyword to see if that’s impacting your rankings. No one actually gives this view from a top level view to help understand if your PPC is actually making a difference.
Helium 10 does give you visibility into advertising via Cerebro. It doesn’t give quite the granularity of AdSpy but if you couple it together with Adtomic Helium 10 is better for people that are looking to run their ads inside the same tool.
Winner:
Helium 10
Both of these tools are great in the arsenal of a seasoned Amazon Seller. Some people use one or another, but some prefer to use both. This depends on your budget and what position your business is. It’s a rapidly changing game and by the time you’re reading it, there could be some rapid changes. Try a free trial and demo today to see how SmartScout can help your business.
If you would like to understand a larger picture comparison between Helium 10 vs Jungle Scout vs SmartScout that is very related to this article. Follow that link.
