Financial Survey: Health Catalyst (NASDAQ:HCAT) vs. Certara (NASDAQ:CERT)

Certara (NASDAQ:CERT) and Health Catalyst (NASDAQ:HCAT) are both small-cap healthcare companies, but which is the better investment? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their valuation, risk, earnings, dividends, analyst recommendations, institutional ownership and profitability.

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of current ratings and recommmendations for Certara and Health Catalyst, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Certara	1	6	4	1	2.42
Health Catalyst	1	7	3	0	2.18

Certara currently has a consensus price target of $8.45, indicating a potential downside of 9.53%. Health Catalyst has a consensus price target of $2.45, indicating a potential upside of 44.12%. Given Health Catalyst’s higher possible upside, analysts plainly believe Health Catalyst is more favorable than Certara.

Profitability

This table compares Certara and Health Catalyst’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Certara	-16.75%	3.86%	2.65%
Health Catalyst	-90.61%	-1.83%	-0.80%

Risk & Volatility

Certara has a beta of 1.42, meaning that its stock price is 42% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Health Catalyst has a beta of 1.53, meaning that its stock price is 53% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

74.0% of Certara shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 85.0% of Health Catalyst shares are held by institutional investors. 1.1% of Certara shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 19.4% of Health Catalyst shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Certara and Health Catalyst”s gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Certara	$418.84 million	3.40	-$1.60 million	($0.45)	-20.76
Health Catalyst	$311.14 million	0.41	-$177.97 million	($3.68)	-0.46

Certara has higher revenue and earnings than Health Catalyst. Certara is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Health Catalyst, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Summary

Certara beats Health Catalyst on 10 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Certara

Certara, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides software products and technology-enabled services to customers for biosimulation in drug discovery, preclinical and clinical research, regulatory submissions, and market access in the United States and internationally. It offers solutions for model-informed drug development, as well as biosimulation solution used to predict both pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. The company provides Simcyp Simulator, a mechanistic biosimulation platform mechanistic biosimulation investigational new drug and translational stages; Simcyp Biopharmaceutics, used to identify and refine drug formulations; and Simcyp Secondary Intelligence which integrates toxicology with quantitative analysis of networks of molecular and functional biological changes to identify drug toxicity and adverse drug reactions. In addition, it offers Phoenix WinNonlin, a platform for non-compartmental analysis, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic, and toxicokinetic; phoenix hosted, that provides a secured and validated certara amazon web services workspace; Phoenix NLME, a population modeling and simulation software for nonlinear mixed effects models; and pirana modeling workbench. Further, the company provides pinnacle 21, a cloud-based platform for clinical data automation, standardization, and validation; Pinnacle 21 Data Exchange, used to define data standards and specifications; and Metadata Repository, to enable study design using controlled and standardized data. It serves life sciences companies, biopharmaceutical companies, research organizations, academic institutions, and global regulators, as well as animal health, crop science, bio science, medical devices, and public sector industries. Certara Inc. was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey.

About Health Catalyst

Health Catalyst, Inc. provides data and analytics technology and services to healthcare organizations in the United States. It operates in two segments, Technology and Professional Services. The company provides data operating system data platform which provides clients single comprehensive environment to integrate and organize data from their disparate software systems; and analytics applications, a software analytics applications build for data platform to analyze clients face across clinical and quality, population health, and financial and operational use cases. It offers services expertise solutions comprising data and analytics, domain expertise and education, tech-enabled managed, and implementation services; and opportunity analysis and prioritization, data governance, data modeling and analysis, quality and process improvement strategy, cost accounting, data abstraction, and population health strategies. The company was formerly known as HQC Holdings, Inc. and changed its name to Health Catalyst, Inc. in March 2017. Health Catalyst, Inc. was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in South Jordan, Utah.