Deltek Costpoint
| Vendor | Deltek (subsidiary of Roper Technologies) |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Herndon, Virginia, USA |
| Ownership | Roper Technologies subsidiary (acquired 2016; Roper is publicly traded, NYSE: ROP) |
| Deployment | Cloud (incl. GovCon Cloud Moderate with FedRAMP Moderate equivalency) and on-premises |
| Target market | US government contractors and project-based defense and aerospace enterprises |
| Industries | Government contracting, aerospace and defense, federal professional services |
| Pricing | Not published; quote-based (checked August 2026) |
| Website | deltek.com/en/products/project-erp/costpoint |
The short version
Costpoint is project ERP for one customer type: companies that bill the US federal government.
Deltek organizes the entire suite around contracts and projects instead of treating projects as an add-on module. Accounting, procurement, human resources, manufacturing: each part assumes a project structure underneath. Compliance lives in the core as well, with support for FAR and DFARS regulations, Cost Accounting Standards (CAS), and audit readiness for the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA). Within the US government contracting (GovCon) segment the product is close to a de facto standard; Deltek states that 84 percent of the top 25 US government contractors run it.
Vendor, history, ownership
Founded in 1983 and headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, Deltek has spent its whole history on project-based businesses. Costpoint has been the flagship for government contractors since the mid-1990s, sitting alongside Vantagepoint for architecture, engineering, and consulting firms and several smaller project-ERP lines.
The ownership record deserves a read before a ten-year commitment. After a stretch as a public company and a period under private-equity owner Thoma Bravo, Roper Technologies acquired Deltek in December 2016 for approximately $2.8 billion. It has operated since then as a standalone business inside Roper, a diversified, publicly traded US technology group. Measured against software-industry norms, that is a quiet decade.
What it covers
- Project accounting with indirect cost pools, rate calculations, and job costing across cost-plus, time-and-materials, and fixed-price contract types
- Contract and subcontract management, with procurement workflows aligned to federal purchasing rules
- Core financials, budgeting and planning, and billing formats that follow government invoicing conventions
- Manufacturing capabilities, including MRP, for defense and aerospace producers that combine projects with production
- Human resources, payroll, and DCAA-compliant time and expense capture
- Reporting and business intelligence with full audit trails
Who buys it
The buyer profile runs from midsize firms to the largest defense primes, and it is narrower than the size range suggests. Aerospace and defense companies, federal IT and professional services providers, and research organizations billing the government under regulated contract types account for most of it. According to Deltek, the substantial majority of Costpoint customers are small and midsize businesses, so this is not purely a large-prime system. Outside the federal orbit the product plays practically no role; its design assumptions are tied to US federal procurement.
Licensing, hosting, cost
Cloud is the primary deployment model in Deltek's positioning. Defense-related workloads get the GovCon Cloud Moderate (GCCM) environment, which Deltek describes as meeting FedRAMP Moderate equivalency per US Department of Defense policy, with US-only hosting; the offering is listed on the FedRAMP Marketplace. On-premises installations remain available for organizations that require them. Pricing is not published and every quote is project-specific, so a multi-year comparison across shortlisted candidates is the only reliable budgeting basis. Our ERP TCO Calculator is one way to structure it.
Bottom line for buyers
If DCAA audits your revenue and CAS governs your accounting, Costpoint is the default answer, and the burden of proof sits with whoever proposes something else. Replicating indirect cost pools, government billing formats, and audit trails on a generalist suite is a different order of effort, which is why the product owns its segment. The same machinery becomes dead weight for commercial project work: a company without federal contracts carries compliance overhead it never uses, and the US-specific design limits international reach, so commercial firms usually land on a different shortlist entirely. Even inside GovCon the pick is not automatic. Unanet contests the smaller end of the market, and Deltek itself sells other project ERPs, which is exactly what a structured selection process is for.
What the Deltek Costpoint website looks like
Current view of the vendor homepage, captured by our editorial team.
Comparable products
- JAMIS Prime ERP — GovCon Cloud ERP on the Acumatica Platform
- PROCAS
- Unanet ERP GovCon — ERP for US Government Contractors