Crunchbase vs. Data.com (discontinued) vs. Owler

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.

Incentivized

There are many scenarios that make data.com well suited, but most specifically, it works very well when looking for contacts within a certain zip code. You can sort and find information about these contacts and pay by points. This helps because you are able to pick and choose which you want to pay for.

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.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Data.com is a great way to find out accurate revenue and employee numbers for companies across various industries.
• Data.com's filtering capabilities allow our team to quickly find the ideal prospects to reach out to.
• Data.com, being owned by Salesforce, allows for a seamless integration into our CRM. This saves us an incredible amount of time and ensures data accuracy.

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

• Notifications - Something similar to TweetDeck would be nice, so that when news breaks it could be an immediate fact.
• Honestly dont add too much because you don't want it to become more of a social tool with cluttered info, keep it straight to the point.

Incentivized

• Some contacts can be old. Perhaps they could consider validating some that are older than 5 years.
• They don't always detect duplicate companies. For example, I've added the same company twice before, I don't understand how they allow that, or prevent others from adding duplicates. It doesn't happen very often,, only occasionally.
• Sometimes data.com will "autocorrect" a job title incorrectly. For example, entering "Director of People & Culture" will autocorrect it to "Director of peopleandculture" If you don't catch it, it looks pretty bad for the next person who wants to view the contact.

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.

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.

Very intuitive to use and I've never had any confusion with features. Anyone can create an account and use the platform simply by adding a contact or company into the database to earn points. It's a great option if you don't have budget for lists or pay services. It is easy to use and anyone can benefit from it.

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.

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

Whenever I've had a question their support has responded pretty quickly and gives me exactly what I am looking for. I have not had any technical issues so I can't speak to issues there, but as far as general questions from a free user they have impressed me with how quickly they get back to me and the thoroughness of their answers.

Incentivized

Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.

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.

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.

Adobe Workfront may not be the direct competitor of Data.com, but for the services I was using, Workfront looked a little better when it comes to the user interface. But Data.com definitely had more powerful features & better integration capabilities. Also, it was easier to play around with the customer journey in Data.com as compared to other tools I have used in the past.

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• The positive impact is gaining more direct contact information for hiring managers.
• Another positive factor is that it is completely free. You gain points for contact information when you add contact information.
• Since it is a free resource, there are no real negative impacts.

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