Apollo.io vs. Owler vs. uberVu (discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

This is a free service, so it should be compared to free and low cost alerting (e.g. Google Alerts) and PE/VC funding profile (e.g. Crunchbase) services. Owler is well suited for competitive intelligence professionals, named account reps, and marketing professionals tracking company news (web mined company mentions and press releases) and social media (blogs, Video, YouTube). The alerts are high precision and tag for three key events (M&A, Funding, Exec Changes). It is the alerting and social media tools which are the key strength of the service. The company claims two million profiles, but only has 60,000 with full address information. Content includes competitors, user polls, and funding / M&A data. Owler should be viewed as a free complement to other online company research tools, but it lacks the depth to replace subscription services. Missing content includes long business descriptions; financials and discrete sizing data; family tree linkage, and executive profiles (only the CEO is covered) While they offer list building functionality, it is quite thin and non-downloadable. As such, I would not recommend Owler for sales and marketing prospecting at this point. A unique feature is a set of company polls about the direction of the company and CEO performance. Unfortunately, the response rates are often too low to be statistically meaningful.

I liked uberVU a lot, and thought I was lucky to have found them (they actually responded to my tweet when I was vendor-searching, which was good to know as they were doing just what we were planning to use the software for). They are relatively small, which allows to have a great personal relationship and we felt very valued as a client. They provided great value - some of their competitors allow for more features (which explains their higher price), but there was no way to opt out of the unnecessary features to lower the price - uberVU didn't have any of that, it was just what we needed and in our price range

• 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

Incentivized

• Owler enables the user to quickly find the data and information that he or she needs.
• I appreciate the customizable dashboard where you can set alerts and track companies you select.
• The latest news regarding the funding rounds of startup companies is especially helpful.
• The top competitors to companies provided by Owler often give me a great point of reference for my competitive analysis.

Incentivized

• Easy to see what people are saying on social media about clients.
• Creates reports that can be limited to certain time frames.
• Able to see the reach of users so you can breakdown by influencers.

• 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

Incentivized

• The information provided is useful but at times the variation with other websites and tools is substantial which makes it difficult to rely solely on owler
• Information only about bigger companies is available not for smaller and research on smaller ones are important as there are not many tools that do that
• There are few companies that appear as defunct or do not exist but in the actual market there is a lot going on with them and being in market intelligence industry owler needs to capture that
• It would be great if they provide revenue or growth of the in the past three years or so. As it would save our time and efforts to some extent
• They need to maintain the database in aperiodic manner with precise information

Incentivized

• I honestly didn't have any issues with them. Being able to set the real-time alerts as "every 15 minutes" took some figuring out to do, and we were still in the trial mode while we did that - it wasn't particularly intuitive for other users, but once we walked them through, everything worked well.

at this moment Apollo.io seems to be the perfect tool that has mastered all aspects of outbound marketing and CRM to handle and manage sales cycle.

Incentivized

Not really an applicable question as this is a free service, but if they charged $100 / year (GageIn's price) I would still license the service.

I find it a great tool in the digital strategy world to see what people are saying across social platforms. It's much more efficient that doing a search on the platform itself and provides a lot of information extremely quickly

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.

Incentivized

I think it's well designed but always room for improvement. Maybe more customization in layout or information presented. Maybe even a layout that allows comparison and ranking of companies in a similar industry or vertical, or company size, and geography

Incentivized

All the users found the product intuitive and easy to use.

I have yet to see the platform down or running slowly, but there have been multiple instances recently (Q2 2015) when the user links to a news story and Owler gives an Oops message. Users simply click on the story a second time and the story is displayed. This is a nuisance bug. I also have a sense that the system is not processing alerts as quickly as before, but I haven't tracked this closely, so I could be wrong about it.

A couple of times it was a little slow, but this didn't result in any negative impact for us. There was no downtime as I could recall or notice.

The news precision, which is the most important feature for me, is very accurate. They have editors review the news to ensure it is properly tagged by company and event type.

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.

Incentivized

Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.

Every time we needed help, the support was great. We had no issues, mostly needed usability walkthroughs and had questions about features.

I got the training while I was evaluating and in the trial period. Then I trained the others myself

Focus on setting up companies that have limited news coverage first. Public companies are well covered and it is easy to track them. Furthermore, the surfeit of news around public companies can crowd out smaller companies with less news. It is smaller companies where you are most likely to see a benefit in their tracking of news, blogs, press releases, and videos.

Not applicable since it is SAAS - all we needed was to sign up, which was easy

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.

Incentivized

I believe Lead411 and Owler go hand in hand, rather than one over the other. I believe Lead411's contact generation is far stronger based on the cost, but Owler allows you to broaden your horizon for prospecting whereas Lead411 is more of a user-driven search rather than an platform-driven search.

Incentivized

Radian6 and Brandwatch were on the short list. We picked uberVU for its combination of price and features. It did not have extra features we didn't need, they were customizable and flexible enough to meet all of our needs

• It provides more opportunities to gather more clients.
• It gives more results and better results in targeting our sales.
• It is a more effective way to provide information to a large number of potential clients about the events/ projects the company is offering.

Incentivized

• The personalisation of emails has definitely helped us to earn a higher reply rate, with the knock-on that this will be helping with future deals.
• Keeps us very relevant in our conversations with contacts. They are often impressed by the research and knowledge we have on their company and how we have aligned ourselves to help. Again, small differences at the start of calls but this will be helping with the number of opportunities created.
• Reduces SDR prospecting time. Quick and easy to get updates allowing them to process a great number of accounts on a daily basis.

Incentivized

• Easier to handle crisis.
• Ability to find out statistics to quantify and qualify what you're doing for customers.