Quoting.ai vs Canals AI

What jobs are Quoting.ai and Canals AI built for?

Canals sells 'AI That Keeps Material Moving': one AI layer across the distributor back office. Order entry is where they started, but it is now one of roughly eleven modules alongside accounts payable, cash application, statement reconciliation, PO and receipt tracking, inquiry handling, a customer chatbot, takeoff automation, and part-number conversions. The pitch is breadth plus speed, and a $35M round led by Base10 Partners in May 2026 funds that expansion.

Quoting.ai Supply does one job: turn inbound RFQs into quotes and sales orders in your ERP. Intake covers email, PDF, WhatsApp, fax, and voice, including voice notes in English, Spanish, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Lines are matched against your item file, priced from your ERP's customer price levels, and routed through an approval inbox before anything writes back.

So the real question is not which AI reads a PDF better. It is whether you want one vendor across the whole back office, or a quoting-first tool with deeper controls on the one workflow that touches every order.

Which ERPs can each one write back to today?

Canals has the wider connector bench, aimed squarely at big-distribution ERPs. Quoting.ai's write-back is narrower and aimed at the yards Canals does not list.

The honest summary: on Eclipse, Prophet 21, the Infor family, SAP S/4HANA, or Dynamics 365, Canals connects today, and Quoting.ai's Epicor, NetSuite, and SAP work is still in development. On DDI Inform or Spruce, Quoting.ai writes back today, and Canals means a custom integration project, 'typically a few weeks' in their words. No lumber or building-materials ERP appears on Canals' public integrations list, even though their homepage claims Lumber/Framing and Building Materials verticals.

On setup: Canals claims common ERPs are up and running in under a week and non-integrated systems take about 30 days. Quoting.ai setup is two steps plus an included white-glove kickoff call, and it runs in ERP-light mode wherever write-back is not yet live.

• ▪Canals prebuilt connectors: Epicor Eclipse, Prophet 21, Infor CSD, CSD Enterprise, M3, SX.e, SAP S/4HANA, Dynamics 365, Acumatica, AS400, Bizowie, SHIMS, plus Kore and MindHarbor API partners
• ▪Canals LBM ERPs: none listed (no DDI Inform, no Spruce, no BisTrack)
• ▪Quoting.ai live write-back: DDI Inform and Spruce only
• ▪Quoting.ai in development: Epicor, NetSuite, SAP
• ▪Quoting.ai everything else: ERP-light mode

How do they handle trust, review, and accuracy?

Canals' published workflow is flat: the AI pre-builds the quote or order, reps review it, and submit to the ERP in one click. Their customer outcomes are concrete, including a 2.8X hit rate at Turtle (from 20% to 57%), a 59% drop in returns, and 90% time savings at Warshauer. But those are outcome claims, not per-line accuracy measures, and their headline 96% and 99% touchless figures apply to AP and cash application, not quoting. There is no published path from review-everything to safe touchless quoting.

Quoting.ai treats trust as the product. Every customer sees their Human Edit Rate, the measured percent of AI lines humans correct. Automation is graduated: Assist drafts for your team, Guarded auto-sends only what clears your rules, and Autopilot is something you promote workflows into when the measured numbers justify it.

One credit where it is due: Canals' voice capture goes further than Quoting.ai's. It answers live calls, transcribes voicemails in real time, and records counter and field audio straight into a quote. Quoting.ai accepts voice RFQs, including multilingual voice notes, but it does not answer your phone.

What do they cost, and what proof is public?

Canals' pricing is not published on their site as of July 2026. Their order-entry page describes a tiered, usage-based model that depends on estimated usage and products purchased, contact-sales only, and Capterra lists no free trial. Quoting.ai publishes its pricing method and example scenarios at /pricing, so you can gut-check cost before a call. A like-for-like number still requires quotes from both.

Proof cuts both ways. Canals names roughly 25 customers, including Turtle, Kirby Risk, DSG, The Kendall Group, R.S. Hughes, Crescent Electric, United Electric Supply, and Locke Supply, and claims 100+ distributors and 8,000+ users. Quoting.ai publishes zero named customers. On third-party review sites the picture flips: Canals shows zero reviews on both G2 and Capterra despite that customer base. Ask both vendors for references on your ERP and your product mix, then check the numbers yourself.