Head-To-Head Review: Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) versus Twilio (NYSE:TWLO)

Twilio (NYSE:TWLO) and Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) are both computer and technology companies, but which is the better investment? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their risk, dividends, profitability, valuation, institutional ownership, analyst recommendations and earnings.

Insider & Institutional Ownership

84.3% of Twilio shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 54.0% of Backblaze shares are owned by institutional investors. 4.5% of Twilio shares are owned by insiders. Comparatively, 5.2% of Backblaze shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Twilio and Backblaze’s top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Twilio	$4.15 billion	2.21	-$1.02 billion	($4.01)	-14.28
Backblaze	$102.02 million	2.45	-$59.71 million	($1.42)	-4.11

Backblaze has lower revenue, but higher earnings than Twilio. Twilio is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Backblaze, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of current ratings for Twilio and Backblaze, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Twilio	2	11	9	0	2.32
Backblaze	0	0	4	0	3.00

Twilio currently has a consensus target price of $70.52, suggesting a potential upside of 23.16%. Backblaze has a consensus target price of $11.25, suggesting a potential upside of 92.97%. Given Backblaze’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Backblaze is more favorable than Twilio.

Volatility and Risk

Twilio has a beta of 1.35, meaning that its stock price is 35% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Backblaze has a beta of 1.02, meaning that its stock price is 2% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

This table compares Twilio and Backblaze’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Twilio	-14.02%	-0.22%	-0.18%
Backblaze	-42.34%	-104.71%	-36.79%

About Twilio

Twilio Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides customer engagement platform solutions in the United States and internationally. It operates through two segments, Twilio Communications and Twilio Segment. The company provides various application programming interfaces and software solutions for communications between customers and end users, including messaging, voice, email, flex, marketing campaigns, and user identity and authentication. It also offers software products to build direct, personalized relationships with their end users, such as segment, a platform that provides tools for first-party data by unifying real-time information collected; and engage, an automation platform for the delivery of omnichannel campaigns. Twilio Inc. was incorporated in 2008 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

About Backblaze

Backblaze, Inc., a storage cloud platform, provides businesses and consumers cloud services to store, use, and protect data in the United States and internationally. The company offers cloud services through a web-scale software infrastructure built on commodity hardware. It also provides Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, which enables customers to store data, developers to build applications, and partners to expand their use cases. This service is offered as a consumption-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and serves use cases, such as public, hybrid, and multi-cloud data storage; application development and DevOps; content delivery and edge computing; security and ransomware protection; media management; backup, archive, and tape replacement; repository for analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning; and Internet of Things. In addition, the company offers Backblaze Computer Backup that automatically backs up data from laptops and desktops for businesses and individuals, which provides a subscription-based Software-as-a-Service and serves use cases, including computer backup, ransomware protection, theft and loss protection, and remote access. It serves the public cloud IaaS storage and Data-Protection-as-a-Service markets. The company was incorporated in 2007 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California.