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Avanti Slingshot and ePS Pace are enterprise print MIS products with real depth — Slingshot holds JDF certification and strong direct-mail and warehouse modules; Pace offers broad estimating-to-accounting scope. Both now sit in the Graphic Communications division of CAI Software, after a run of ownership changes: EFI spun the software business out to ePS, Ricoh sold Avanti to ePS in June 2025, and ePS merged with CAI in October 2025.
| TWIST PRINT | AVANTI SLINGSHOT / EPS PACE | |
|---|---|---|
| AI estimating | Proprietary AI estimator — 2.4M real quotes | No documented ML features; “Agentic AI” appears only as a G2 category label |
| Public pricing | All plans published: $299–$1,500/mo total | Pace listed “from $999 per user/month” (Capterra); Slingshot prices not published |
| Cost at 10 users | Lite: $400/mo total | Pace at listed rate: ~$9,990/mo |
| Ease of use | “Simple para ser tan potente” — Anda Diseño | Pace: 2.0/5 ease-of-use in Capterra review data |
| Implementation | Weeks (Go!/Lite)* | Enterprise 4-phase projects; multi-site cases run months+ |
| JDF certification | Open APIs + MCP instead | Slingshot: JDF-certified ✓ · Pace: PIA JDF cert ✓ |
| Languages & regions | English + Spanish · 17 countries | English only |
| Ownership stability | Independent, founder-run since day one | Three ownership changes in ~4 years (EFI → ePS/STG · Ricoh → ePS · ePS + CAI) |
WHERE AVANTI SLINGSHOT / EPS PACE IS STRONG
Credit where due: Slingshot's JDF certification and prebuilt device-integration libraries are real, its direct-mail and warehouse depth is genuine, and the team behind it has done 150+ MIS implementations. Pace's functional breadth is wide and its customer-service scores are solid.
WHERE TWIST WINS
The documented facts: Pace lists at $999 per user per month, its ease-of-use scores 2.0/5 in review data, enterprise deployments are multi-phase projects, and the products have changed owners three times in about four years. No machine-learning feature is documented behind the AI labels. Twist is live in weeks, publishes flat-tier pricing, and its AI is in the product — not in the category tags.
THE DECIDING QUESTION
Do you have an enterprise budget and a year of patience — or do you want to be live this quarter?
Your MIS vendor got acquired. Again.
Consolidators now own much of the print-MIS market: printIQ (Banyan Software, Aug 2022) and DocketManager (Banyan portfolio, new CEO Oct 2025); Avanti, Pace and PrintSmith inside CAI Software's Graphic Communications division after the EFI → ePS spin-out, Ricoh's June 2025 sale of Avanti, and the October 2025 ePS–CAI merger. That can mean stability. It can also mean your product's priorities are set by a portfolio, not by your industry. Twist Print is independent and founder-run: the people who built it still ship it, and the roadmap answers to printers.
Both are part of the Graphic Communications division of CAI Software: EFI spun its software business out to eProductivity Software (ePS), Ricoh sold Avanti to ePS in June 2025, and ePS merged with CAI Software in October 2025 — three ownership changes in roughly four years.
Capterra and SoftwareAdvice list Pace from $999 per user per month; implementation costs aren't published. Twist Print's full Pro plan is $1,000/month total for up to 50 users.
No machine-learning or generative features are documented for either product as of July 2026 — “Agentic AI” appears as a directory category label, not a shipped capability. Twist Print's AI estimator is trained on 2.4 million real quotes.
"We had gone through Hagan Monarch, we'd gone through EPS. The implementations were nightmares. It was drastically affecting us."
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