Apollo is a sales platform that helps revenue teams find and engage leads, automate outreach, manage deals, and enrich data.
$59
per month per user
Crunchbase
Score 6.4 out of 10
N/A
Crunchbase is a provider of private-company prospecting and research solutions. The vendor boasts that over 60 million users—including salespeople, entrepreneurs, investors, and market researchers—use Crunchbase to prospect for new business opportunities, and that companies all over the world rely on Crunchbase to power their applications, making over 3 billion calls to their API each year.
$0
Vena
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Vena Solutions provides a financial process automation solution to automate Corporate Performance Management, accounting and budgeting, Regulatory & Compliance, and other finance-related processes. It is scaled for medium to large-sized organizations.
N/A
Pricing
Apollo.io
Crunchbase
Vena
Editions & Modules
Basic
$59
per month per user
Professional
$99
per month per user
Organization
$1,188
per year per user
Basic
$0
Crunchbase Starter
$29
per month, per user
Crunchbase Pro
$49
per month, per user
Crunchbase Enterprise
Custom Billing
Professional
N/A
Complete
N/A
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apollo.io
Crunchbase
Vena
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
20% discount for annual billing on the Basic and Professional plans.
—
The Professional Plan is the most flexible way to get started quickly and can be added onto as a company grows. The plan includes: Vena Platform, Customer Success Manager, Standard Support and Customer Portal.
Complete Plan includes everything in Professional, plus: Vena Insights, Premium Support, Sandbox Environment, and Expert Managed Services.
For a limited time, new customers who use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Online) as their primary ERP can get a free year of Vena and 40% off implementation costs.
Vena also offers special pricing for not for profit organizations. To learn more, speak to an expert.
In both tools i have to rely on zoominfo in exacting details to Salesforce. Once its exacted from there then i have to move to Salesloft or outreach to create an automate sequence for reaching out to ICP's. But in Apollo.io i no need to reply on 3rd party tools like zoomonfo …
It has more data and it's for sure more accurate, Crunchbase has a better platform when talking about visual and it's also easier to search. Also, it has better filters which can help companies to dive deeper into researching accordingly to their needs
Apollo.io played big role for us in saving $$$ by bringing data mining, AI Email Writing and acting as CRM altogether...for small to medium organization they can surely rely on Apollo.io...and it is doing things mostly right with some room for improvement for sure. Sales and Marketing team saves time in getting their emails drafted based on prompts, list of contacts they can fetch in minutes of time, earlier we used to have seperate tool just to mine data, then we used to upload the CSV file to email marketing tool, then we used to draft email...for all these process we were using three different tools - Apollo.io brought everything under one umbrella.
Looking to create lists of target companies through the advanced search feature or the query builder if one is planning to reach out to the individuals listed in the profile. Looking for investment and company history information to inform sourcing or competitive landscape research.
Vena is great for managing data and putting all of your information in one easy-to-locate spot. It also makes finding data faster and easier. It is also great for tracking project performance and budgeting. It is fairly user-friendly and easy to use from an admin side.
Firstly, finding the details of the potential customers that is there name, designation email and phone number since these are the most important cases most of the times I can get this data in Apollo.io
I can pull the bulk data of the targeted organization, or I can pull the emails based on the location and job titles
Apart from the email capture, the thing which helpful is that the email sequence can find emails and send emails in Apollo.io itself and also the report and the dashboard are so clean
Friendly UI and UX Apollo.io was the first tool which I used. Since then I'm still using Apollo.io for easy understanding
Crunchbase has an easy-to-navigate user interface. The bar at the top of the screen that shows the different data points available on companies is particularly helpful for quick navigating.
The ability to make and import lists and save searches is helpful for customizing the software to your particular needs.
The web and mobile app data that Crunchbase offers is very helpful to gauge trends and interest in companies for diligence purposes.
There are certain features about prospecting that require updates. For example, if people switch organisations, it should be automatically requesting the new email or new contact data for a particular contact in order to be updated in the system
The lead databases that are created if their new addition should automatically be updated in the list that I created with Apollo.io
Preparing forecasts under different scenarios can be challenging. Your input templates need to be set up to toggle between the various scenarios. We found that certain templates, particularly workforce were not able to easily switch between different scenarios.
Connection to Bamboo - initial testing of this resulted in the history being deleted and only showing the current employees. For us it was important to have the history in Vena.
No native connection to Tableau - while a CSV upload is a way around would be great to have this since you already have a Power BI connection.
Vena has been a huge win for us as an organization, as it vastly improved our budgeting process by removing manual consolidation that was incredibly time consuming, and it allows us to see a multi-year view of our organizational budget across all of our funding sources. We've seen Vena's platform grow over the years and we've not yet fully adopted some of them so it feels like there's still potential to get even more value out of the platform.
Apollo.io does provide campaign setup help and made my SDRs team's life easier, with the use of lead enrichment, lead distribution, I can manage my team from a single dashboard. It also comes with CRM that helps me navigate the progress on leads and what my SDRs progress.
In our experience, the customer service is horrible to non existent. If we were a fortune 100 company with a staff of computer people I am sure this would be a valuable service as they would "speak the language" but that is not us. Not being able to reach customer service when we are thinking about upgrading is, in my opinion, a crazy business model.
I would rate Vena's overall usability as an 8 out of 10. Vena offers a user-friendly interface, especially for those familiar with Excel, making it relatively easy to use. Most features are intuitive. However, some advanced functionalities may require more training or time to master, so it's not a perfect score. Overall, Vena provides a solid user experience that supports efficient financial planning.
Vena has been available and running. There are notifications well ahead of scheduled maintenance and so far, scheduled maintenance has been occurring during off hours and fortunately has not occurred during a time that is crucial for us to be actively using.
Vena Solutions pages load quickly and only a few times does it get a bit slow, only when there are many integrations and the reports are long. But in general it is always fast and honestly I am very satisfied with the speed in the generation of statistical reports and the pages
The team wants to solve probelms, but we are finding that they don't know how to solve the more technical issues quickly. I suspect that they don't have a mature process for escalations, and they don't have a usable knowledge base article repository. They seems to push emails around to let us know that people are working on the issues to find solutions, but this takes weeks and oftentimes still leaves us without a resolution.
They give standard answers. They are not a customer first business. I tried to cancel my subscription after using it for only 1 week as we found the information was outdated and not at all useful. But they would not cancel the year long subscription I mistakenly signed up for
They are very quick to respond when you submit a ticket and typically fix issues quickly as well. I only didn't give this a 10 because there is still an open issue with our Salesforce connection that we've been waiting on now for a few months.
Our initial in person training was a little rough b/c I felt like our trainer wanted to focus on maximizing Vena rather than understanding what we were needing for our organization. He was very responsive and added insights, but could have worked to understand our needs a little better.
The training was structured as a group training to learn the basics of creating a data model and mapping a template. While we had nearly 10 participants, I was the only actual implementer so we probably didn't actually need the training and could have just learned the initial skills from the implementation consultant. Two years later, when we hired a new team member, they completed several modules in Vena Academy (a self paced learning course) which allowed them to get up to speed on the basics with just a bit of supplemental guidance from me as our existing admin.
The Vena consultant had great knowledge of both the Vena solution and Excel and Excel functions. He was able to help suggest ways to build our templates that met our requirements using Excel functions we had not previously considered using. And we have been able to use the Excel information he provided in other ways outside of Vena. He was very patient and flexible as we learned the Vena tool and created templates
All of these platforms are good and offer valuable tools, but where Apollo.io is different is how this one platform does the job of several different ones. It is nice not having to use multiple platforms to get things done and makes integration and analytics issues occur less often. It is user friendly and constantly working to improve.
Crunchbase is definitely bottom of the barrel in this space. At similar pricing models, all competitors I have tried have significantly bigger and more updated databases. Crunchbase may have been great sometime in the past, but they are not worth engaging now.
Vena is a strong fit for teams that want to keep working in Excel while adding structure, workflows, and a centralized database. Vena emphasizes its native Excel experience, along with planning templates, workflow automation, and integrations for budgeting/forecasting.
Planful is more positioned as an end-to-end financial performance platform, with a broader emphasis on planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, AI/ML-driven forecasting support, real-time collaboration, and enterprise-scale (including multi-entity/multi-currency environments). It also supports Microsoft 365 reporting via Spotlight. We selected Vena because it was a better fit for our current use case and team setup:
Our Operations and FP&A teams primarily use it for budgeting and forecasting, so the Excel-based workflow made adoption easier.
It was easier to implement and simpler for users to learn and operate day-to-day.
It fit well with our need to improve planning structure without forcing a major process change.
Vena solutios is a software that provides robust tools that help different departments in their statistics and we can visualize a lot of promising and visually attractive data. Vena Solutions' level of scalability is high and sustainable over time thanks to the fabulous technical support that is ready to help us at all times
Crunchbase has been great and given us a lot of new companies to go after that have received funding and turned into great meetings. We do not pay a ton, so the ROI is great.
We have nothing but positive results using Crunchbase and rely on it heavily for prospecting.
It might add more value if we get a more expensive or advanced version.
Automated monthly financial statements saves us 3 hours a month.
Moving reporting away from IT has begun to save hours of IT involvement, which will only grow as we shift more reports to Vena. This frees up IT to work on more important IT initiatives.
Using budget templates saved hours of copy and paste time when gathering inputs from each department.
