Highspot vs. Seismic vs. Showpad vs. Dock (2025 Comparison)

Back when I was the VP of Marketing at Lattice, I spent a lot of time trying to find a sensible way to host our sales content so that:

• Marketing could easily upload and update it
• Sales and Customer Success could quickly find what they needed
• Prospects could actually access and engage with it

I evaluated the major sales enablement platforms—Highspot, Seismic, and Showpad—to see if they could solve this problem.

Spoiler: They didn’t.

They were too bulky for what we needed at the time, so we ended up limping along with a company-wide wiki and a maze of Google Drive folders. Eventually, I left to co-found Dock and build the sales enablement solution I wish we had.

Since then, I’ve kept a close eye on the sales enablement software market to understand where Seismic, Highspot, and Showpad excel, where they’re weaker, and what makes Dock different. 

In this guide, I’ll share the pros and cons of each tool, so you can pick the best tool for your business.

TL;DR 

Choose Dock if you:

• ✅ Want a simple content management system that makes it easy to admin and easy for reps to find and share content
• ✅ Want to enable buyers, not just train sellers
• ✅ Need a flexible, collaborative sales deal room for reducing deal complexity
• ✅ Want to manage deals, onboarding, and renewals in one place
• ✅ Prefer a simpler, more easily adoptable platform built for startups and mid-market teams

Choose Seismic, Highspot, or Showpad if you:

• ✅ Need a traditional Learning Management System (LMS) for sales training
• ✅ Want to create and manage slide decks within the platform
• ✅ Require a solution for a large, global enterprise (2,000+ employees)

If you just want a high-level overview of the category, here’s my quick take on each tool:

• Dock: Best for enabling buyers with sales deal rooms and managing the full customer lifecycle. If you need digital sales rooms, customer onboarding, and a simple yet powerful sales content system, Dock is the best choice.
• Seismic: The enterprise leader, offering the most comprehensive feature set (including content automation, creation, and sales training), but complex to implement and best for large, global teams.
• Highspot: Best for enterprise teams needing a strong sales content management system with solid search functionality but with limited deal room features and a high price tag.
• Showpad: Best for UI design and data security, but with a weaker backend, less customization, and basic deal room functionality.

The Big Differences

While all four platforms fall under the sales enablement umbrella, their approaches—and ideal use cases—differ significantly. 

Dock is built for buyer enablement and collaboration, while Highspot, Seismic, and Showpad follow the traditional sales CMS and LMS model focused on training and internal content management.

Dock

Dock takes a different approach than traditional sales enablement tools. Instead of just storing content and training sellers, Dock enables sales teams and buyers to work together in one shared workspace.

We’re a bit different in terms of ethos, market, and functionality: 

• Instead of following the legacy CMS + LMS model, Dock is centered around customer workspaces (aka digital sales rooms). In addition to organizing content with boards and tags, sales enablement teams can templatize the entire customer-facing sales process.
• Dock is built more for buyer enablement versus pure sales team enablement. For example, the sales CMS is designed to make it easy to share content directly with your prospects, and our deal rooms room let you work collaboratively with your buyer champion.
• Dock doesn’t have an LMS (more on why later). 
• Dock is built for the whole revenue team to collaborate with buyers—not just the sales team. It can also be used for customer onboarding.
• Dock also includes tools for project managing your deals, sharing price quotes and order forms, and onboarding customers.
• Dock is built for small and mid-market SaaS companies, so we’re a lot more affordable.

Highspot vs. Seismic vs. Showpad

Highspot, Seismic, and Showpad are the big incumbent sales enablement platforms. They were all founded over ten years ago, with a similar approach and target market.

They all offer two key functions: 

1. Sales training and learning management system (LMS) —creating and sharing courses and lessons for sales teams to help with onboarding and education around new product releases, information about features, and how to answer prospect questions during discovery
2. Sales content management systems (CMS)—a central repository for content assets (pitch decks, demo videos, whitepapers, product explainers, etc.) that makes it easy for sales reps to find and share the information they need during the deal cycle 

In terms of the main differences: 

• Highspot started with a sales CMS and built their own training and coaching functionalities as native applications (rather than purchasing and integrating existing solutions like Seismic). As a result, their integration is pretty solid. Also, their search function tends to be better than that of their competitors. 
• Seismic is a traditional sales CMS that recently added training and coaching functionality via an acquisition of Lessonly. Forrester calls it the “most fully featured solution,” but its legacy search functionality and sprawling ecosystem can make it harder to use. 
• Showpad focuses on the user experience and interface, but Forrester says it needs to up its game on the backend—customers need to work to build their own customizations. They pioneered the deal room space, but it’s outdated at this point and built on legacy technology.

They are all built for larger enterprises. None of them publicly disclose pricing, but a single user typically runs from $50—$60 per seat (with discounts for larger organizations). They typically have minimum contracts starting at $30,000.

In summary: 

Now, let’s look at each of the tools in a bit more detail: 

1. Dock

What it is: Dock is a client-facing workspace that helps revenue teams close deals, onboard customers, and manage renewals. With Dock, you can organize everything shared at each stage of the customer journey—from sales content to order forms to project plans to customer onboarding. 

Where the other three are sales enablement tools with some buyer enablement tools tacked on later, Dock was built to embrace both buyer enablement and sales enablement—because sales enablement today is more about enabling buyer teams to buy. 

Who it’s for: Dock is built for revenue teams at startups and mid-market companies (50-2,500 employees). It gives you all the tools you need to manage complex B2B deals without adding unnecessary complexity and tech sprawl.  

Pricing: Dock’s pricing starts at $49 per internal user per month, with no charge for external collaborators (prospects, customers, or partners). Growth & Enterprise plans require a minimum of five seats and a $250 monthly platform fee, making Dock a more affordable and flexible option compared to enterprise-focused alternatives like Highspot and Seismic.

Dock Pros

A content management system that enables buyers, not just your sales team 

Dock’s content management system is purpose-built for sharing external client-facing assets. This feature matters because today’s buyers aren’t talking to sales reps — Gartner analysis shows that buyers only spend 17% of the buying process talking to sales. 

So, the goal of a sales enablement tool should be more than just making it easy for your sales team to find content. 

• You need to make it easy for your buyer champion to find the content they need to make the case for your solution to the CFO. 
• You need to make it easy for your economic buyer to check that your product makes financial sense. 
• You need to make it seamless for your customers to see what makes you the best choice, find out how much it will cost them and place an order. 

Dock lets you do all that. “We've actually had customers that are doing a business case to their CFO pull up the Dock and just scroll through it,” said Champify Co-Founder Stephen Ruff. 

A CMS built for the whole revenue team—not just sales enablement 

The other three platforms were built exclusively for Sales Enablement teams to train and enable Sales teams—so there’s a lot of resistance from salespeople or other revenue teams when they’re expected to use them.

Dock was built to be a communal resource for all your revenue teams. It’s easy for Marketing & Enablement to organize content, and it’s just as easy for Sales and Customer Success to find content and share it with customers. 

Content can be organized into boards and tags, as well as being discoverable via search.

Flexible, collaborative deal rooms 

If what you really want is a tool that lets you partner with your buyers to provide all the information and tools they need to actually buy something, Dock is a better choice than Highspot, Seismic, or Showpad. 

Gartner’s 2022 Market Guide for Revenue Enablement Platforms predicts that 1 in 3 B2B sales cycles will be run through a deal room by 2026. As a result, the other platforms jumped on the deal room bandwagon pretty recently, as they became a must-have for B2B sales teams.   

Sales rooms aren’t an add-on for Dock — they are at the center of the product experience. So, where the other tools offer digital sales rooms, which are basically static templates for sharing content, Dock is an advanced sales deal room.  

Dock has a modern, in-line editing experience for creating deal rooms. This allows users to design a buyer experience that matches their sales process. You can also create custom templates for each industry and segment. 

Dock offers integrations with software like Gong, Loom, Typeform, Google Slides, and pretty much everything else, so you’re able to embed any content within the deal room. Dock embeds deals and opportunities with Salesforce and HubSpot, and builds its own widgets like a Security Profile, which allows you to host security documentation and get ahead of security reviews.

As a result, Dock makes it way easier for your buyers to buy. For instance, this reviewer on G2 says, “In the last week, I've had at least four potential customers I'm working with tell me how appreciative they are of the Dock Workspace I sent after our initial call.

Sharing a Dock to help guide the sales process and give prospects tools to self-serve has been a game-changer for our team.” 

The entire sales cycle in the same place

Dock’s deal rooms also work across the customer lifecycle from sales to onboarding to renewal. So, they’re not just about sharing content with customers — you can use them to manage the entire workflow of your deal process. 

Unlike Seismic, Showpad, and Highspot, Dock deal rooms feature a project management system, so you’re able to run mutual action plans and onboard customers. Within Dock, you can share project checklists and Kanban boards, send due date reminders, and more.  

Dock’s deal rooms help prospects self-serve their own buying experience, so you don’t have to constantly be there to steer them toward the close. They can access your slide deck and meeting notes. They can add action items to the mutual action plan. You can both see how the deal is progressing so things don’t grind to a halt because of simple miscommunication. 

You can also handle the entire pricing, quoting, and order process within Dock. 

Dock is a full order form solution that can generate and sign order forms from a product library and add legal and billing terms set by the revenue operations teams. 

So, instead of buying a sales enablement tool, a CPQ tool and a project management tool for your sales team, you can get all that functionality in one single platform.  

Our customers tell us that they see dramatic results from using Dock for the sales process. For instance, this mid-market customer wrote in a G2 review: 

“We're primarily using Dock to share sales collateral (videos, solution briefs, etc.), PoC documentation and to align with our buyers on mutual action plans. This gives our buyers a positive experience with one centralized location to access all important information related to our product, and most importantly, provides our team with strong indicators of a buyer's level of engagement outside of our direct interactions with them.” 

Buyer engagement signals and analytics

Like the other platforms, Dock provides analytics around viewing the deal room and at the asset content level. We excel by giving you insight into the engagement levels of each individual stakeholder. 

Want to know if your economic buyer has looked at your price quote? You can do that with Dock. 

Want to make sure you’re building multithreaded relationships with various stakeholders across the deal cycle? Yup, that too. 

Dock also gives sales reps a real-time activity feed and notifications to understand the status of deals. This data is incredibly useful for sales leaders who are coaching reps and forecasting deals. Whereas tools like Seismic just tell you whether reps have completed a training session or not, Dock gives you the ability to provide real-time feedback on how to close deals and provide a more accurate sales forecast.

Dock Cons

No sales training or LMS tools 

If you’re looking for a traditional sales learning management system (LMS), don’t look at us. While we’ve built internal sales enablement playbooks into the product, we don’t have a full-blown LMS.

But this is by design. In my experience, most companies end up using their company-wide LMS for sales training. So, it didn’t really make sense to us to bloat our platform with training and coaching features you don’t need or want. 

Most of our customers use a company-wide learning management system (e.g., WorkRamp) instead of a specific platform just for the sales team. They handle knowledge management through a company-wide Wiki-style system (e.g., Confluence, Notion, etc.). 

No content creation tools 

If you need content creation functionality (like creating personalized PDFs, for example), you’d be better off with Seismic. Our customers typically create content directly in the Dock sales room, or with their usual content creation tools — like Google Slides, Figma, a video editing solution, and so on, and then upload the assets to the platform.

If you want to go that route, the good news is that Dock integrates with most content creation tools (you can find a full list of integrations here.) 

2. Highspot 

As of 2022, Highspot was the market leader in revenue, market share, and retention for sales enablement tools, making it a safe bet for enterprise sales teams. Notable clients include Siemens, Nvidia, and Vodafone. 

Highspot has a sales CMS, sales playbooks, digital sales rooms, sales training tools, and a sales coaching platform. 

Highspot Pros

Native applications 

Highspot calls itself “the industry’s only natively-built platform.” Instead of following the usual Frankenstein-style M&A approach taken by most enterprise platforms, Highspot built its own training and coaching capabilities into its content management platform. As a result, Forrester says that Highspot customers avoid the “integration pains that have dogged some M&A-led strategies.” 

Superior search functionality 

Instead of the nested folder system used by Seismic and Showpad, Highspot created “Spots” — internal webpages that host content around a specific theme. For example, you might create a Spot for “Competitor Materials,” hosting all your competitor analyses. 

You can also use Search to find content in your CRM, email, social media, and other sales platforms without manual tagging. 

Users like these features. For instance, one review from a Global Sales Enablement Director on G2 says, “I love how easy it is to build pages to organize content. It's like having an organized book of key assets. Reps can easily search through the book (i.e., pages) to quickly find key content to self-educate or share with prospects and customers. It keeps users coming back.” 

Top-rated content analytics tools 

According to Forrester’s 2022 Sales Content Solutions review, Highspot had the best sales analytics features, with “credible, contextually relevant insights for its equip-train-coach platform.” You can hook Highspot up to your CRM system and get integrated reports on which content performs best and which sales playbooks are most effective. 

Highspot Cons

Not as strong on compliance as other solutions 

Forrester cautions, “Highspot’s compliance features may not be strict enough for all SCS customers in highly regulated markets.” If compliance and security are your top priorities, then Showpad may be a better bet — as a Belgian company, it complies with the EU’s rigorous data regulations. 

Inflexible deal rooms 

Highspot has relatively new deal room features. Also known as digital sales rooms, these are personalized workspaces where reps can collaborate with buyers and share sales collateral, quotes and resources. 

The functionality of Highspot’s deal room is pretty limited, at least judging from the online product tour Highspot offers — lots of PDFs and videos, but no obvious way to share a pricing calculator, mutual action plans, or add other interactive elements that would make the deal process flow more smoothly and let you collaborate with your customers. 

Complex user experience

This analysis is pretty subjective, and the picture that emerges from reviews is mixed. Some reviewers say that Highspot is easy to use, but others struggle. 

But Forrester notes that Highspot’s “rapid-fire release cycles challenge customers to absorb new functionality.” 

It may be a question of what you’re using Highspot for. It seems to make finding content internally easy, but harder to share content or collaborate with buyers. 

For instance, a review by a mid-market Account Manager on Gartner says: 

“In my sales role, I want to find, customize, and share content as fast as possible. Compared to similar platforms, I have a hard time finding what I need with the way we have Highspot set up. It's also too many clicks to get to my own copy of the content that I can edit. There's a million ways to ‘pitch’ the content to customers, but all I care about is a simple link without the desire to track it or get alerts. I think the sharing part could be simplified.” 

3. Seismic 

Seismic is a traditional sales enablement tool focused on sales training, content management, and content creation. It is built for enterprise companies (5,000+ employees) and may have taken Highspot’s top spot recently, at least in terms of the number of customers (currently at 2200). Notable customers include Alliance, American Express, Google, and Cisco. 

Seismic Pros 

Content creation and sales communication tools 

Seismic supports product marketing teams and sales, letting them create content in the platform. It comes with many fancy content bells and whistles, like email templates, choose-your-own-adventure-style presentations, content automation tools that let you pull data from your CRM into your content, and content mix-and-match tools to create customized content for customers from a selection of pre-built assets. 

The Aragon Research Globe™ for Sales Enablement Platforms 2024 report also flags that Seismic features sales communication tools (customer engagement via multiple channels, including phone calls, emails, and text and SMS messaging) that Highspot and Showpad lack. 

Strong content management system

To counteract a somewhat frustrating nested folder structure, Seismic has introduced Semantic Search technology, which lets users use natural language to find content. Seismic also lets assets live in multiple places at once, so they’re easy to find (for example, you can house your sales ROI calculator in an internal folder for reps and a customer’s DSR). 

Additionally, changes made to the assets will update live — meaning that you can update your content once, and it will update for all the customers you’ve shared it with. 

Seismic has sophisticated analytics for sales collateral — for example, it can track everything from which pages of a PDF a customer stops reading to the amount of video watch time.

All the enterprise bells and whistles 

As a long-standing frontrunner in the enterprise sales enablement space, Seismic offers the support that large global sales teams need — 150+ implementation partners, “the most features of any sales enablement platform” according to their website, an intelligent sales assistant, sales playbooks, content analytics, coaching, guided selling, and all that jazz. 

Forrester calls it “high-investment, high-reward.” 

Seismic Cons  

May be too comprehensive, even for enterprises 

Forrester warns that Seismic may not be user-friendly: “Seismic’s years of market leadership and strong financial position have enabled it to build the most comprehensive solution in the marketplace, but leaves it open to competition from vendors with offerings that are easier to use at the enterprise level.” 

Plus, Seismic’s M&A approach to adding new functionality has led some reviewers to complain about poor integration. For example, this review by a mid-market associate on G2 says: “Seismic has a lot of products/services — hard to know what's available. Additionally, some products could be better connected into one ecosystem (e.g., LiveSocial, Lessonly).” 

Not a great fit for SMBs

Getting the most out of Seismic will cost you, says Forrester: “The level of resources, budget, maturity and alignment required to get the full benefit from Seismic may be out of reach for some clients.” 

That seems to be borne out by reviews. For instance, this small business employee says, “The first process of Seismic can be quite time-consuming, especially when organizing and tagging a large number of documents. At times, the on-site support for adoption issues was not enough to make sure that the maximum value from the very beginning is achieved.” 

Limited deal room functionality

If you’re looking for a collaborative digital sales room, this probably isn’t it. Seismic offers a basic deal room. You’re able to drag and drop assets from the content management system and add text where needed — but it’s basically a static template. 

No sales order form tools 

Seismic’s LiveDocs tools let you personalize content quickly, leading the Aragon review team to say that the feature “eliminates the need for a separate CA or Configure Price Quote (CPQ) offering.” 

Eh… we’re not convinced. The LiveDocs feature is aimed at customizing sales presentations, not building quotes or acting as an order form, so our guess is you’ll probably still need a separate tool for quotes and payments.  

No project management tools

B2B sales are only getting more complicated. As a result, sales reps need to double up as project managers, steering the buyer through the process of making the purchase — aligning with stakeholders, planning the POC, signing off on security protocols, figuring out the correct licensing requirements and all the rest. 

You can’t do any of this in Seismic. No matter how compelling your sales content is, you’ll either have to fall back on internal checklists the customer can’t see or manage the process in another yet another tool. 

4. Showpad

Showpad is one of the most popular sales enablement platforms, founded in Belgium in 2011. Like the other two, it’s a combined sales CMS and LMS, although it leans more heavily toward user experience and interactive content. Notable customers include Culture Amp, Just Eat, and Fujifilm. 

Showpad Pros 

Privacy and security controls

If you work in a highly regulated industry, you’ll probably appreciate its powerful privacy and security controls in compliance with the more stringent EU data regulations. 

Focus on customer experience

Showpad has gone all in on UX, and its solution is the most visually appealing of the Big Three. For instance, this Global Sales Director on G2 says, “We came from a world where we had a very messy document repository of sales assets and no control on versions — with Showpad, it is really simple to use, sellers have their key content at their fingertips and there are powerful customer sharing capabilities.”  

AI innovations

Showpad has some pretty cool AI technology, including a bot that recommends content assets to sales reps, automated buyer engagement analytics, in-call AI coaching that tells your salespeople how they’re doing, and tools that detect and tidy up duplicated Showpad content. 

Showpad Cons 

Comparatively weaker backend

Showpad offers an open API, and Forrester says that Showpad’s “‘there’s an app for that’ philosophy requires customers to put in their own work to get the results from a more customized offering.” You may need to be prepared to dive in and build your own apps to make it fit your team’s needs. 

Limited deal room functionality 

Showpad’s deal room at least allows you to message back and forth with prospects, but it’s still mostly just a place to share content (as with the other two solutions). Without integrating another tool, there aren’t many interactive elements (like mutual action plans or order forms). 

Legacy search issues 

Like Seismic, Showpad stores files in nested folders, and it seems like this is still making it hard to find content assets — for instance, this G2 reviewer says: “I find the UX weird in terms of finding what documents are available in certain folders — it's not obviously clear at first. Also, it's hard to share folders with clients as it relies on users accepting an invite directly rather than being able to share a join link.” 

Try Dock for free

So, there you have it. 

If you want a traditional, enterprise-scale sales CMS and LMS, Highspot or Seismic are probably a good fit. Seismic has more features, but Highspot built them all themselves. If you need more data security, you might want to take a look at Showpad. 

And, if you’re looking for a solution that lets you collaborate with your buyers in dynamic deal rooms, then Dock is probably your best bet. 

To try Dock for free, create your first workspace now. Or, if you’d like a personalized demo, you can book a call with our sales team.