Bombora vs. Owler

Bombora is the perfect tool for anyone looking to understand their B2B customer and their buyer's journey better. Companies produce tons of content - and pay lots of money creating and then amplifying it too. But is it really what the customer is interested in? Now you don't have to guess, you can know thanks to company surge data.

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.

• Intent topics, as well as the clusters tied to them, have enabled our PMMs to be more granular with specific workloads that are based on industry.
• The "Account Intent" option within the "Insights" tab allowed us to look specifically into historical data tied to current activities that we were experiencing with that account.

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

• Downloading intent data and trying to use it outside of their environment is tricky because the data is essentially one large worksheet. We want to overlay the data with our own data but joining it all together is tricky. Our data comes from D&B so the names provided by D&B don't always match what we get from Bombora so account matching is not very clean.
• Customer service is a bit hit or miss. I worked with an account rep to try and resolve it but she couldn't. However, she did open a ticket with the Bombora help desk to try and get me answers. I waited more than a week and got no answer. I followed up and the reply was the original owner of the ticket is out and the new ticket owner was wondering if I had rerun the report to see if the problem went away.
• Despite having a self-service type set up for the dashboards and reports, trying to understand what exactly needs to be filled in isn't always easy. The data doesn't match up with what we download so trying to compare the dashboards/reports to the extract is next to impossible?! It shouldn't be this way.

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

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 give Bombora an 8 as they do intent well for now. Not a 10 because again its a one trick pony where there are other platforms like ZoomInfo that offer intent as well plus so much more. From an end user perspective, I'd like Bombora to build out first party intent data capabilities to combine into the scoring.

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

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.

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.

Our CSM team is always available for us to meet with via an outreach click to book an invite and we have standing meetings. They met with us on day 1 of implementation and had us up and running that evening. They even go to the lengths of matching industry tenured folks with us to help us move faster.

Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.

There is a room for improvement in a layman's perspective as it was difficult for our to understand things during training and had to rearrange sessions.

Incentivized

Liked the implementation, however there is a still room for improvement for the support needed in overall implementation

Incentivized

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.

Bombora doesn't give you a token for the number of accounts that are populated. You can search and request as many as you'd like. With other platforms, they provide you a token, and if you use all your tokens for the month, then you have to wait til next month.

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

Need improvement in places such as visualisation & UX

Incentivized

• Bombora played a big role in us proving the effectiveness of ABM for our organization and had a huge impact on us gaining approval for a full ABM platform.
• Bombora helped us identify key target accounts that brought great net new business to our company.

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