Crunchbase vs. DiscoverOrg (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

Uses [of DiscoverOrg] include searching for prospects in accounts. Getting all of the relevant contact information in one place. Using the export button saves time by allowing you to select one or more leads to import into CRM. Sophisticated search allows for you to build lists, and export as above. Good support with various experts available to help you get started and get better at using it.

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

• Prospecting Lists/Lead Gen - Discover Org does this very well because of it's ability to provide current information (email/phone) on an individual at a company. It's easy to segment & drill down by categories - to find the right targets to reach out to.
• Insights - DiscoverOrg is great at providing insights or "scopes" on prospects as well. Meaning it will show who is handling what project (Decision-Maker) and what projects they are particularly interested in at the moment/what initiatives. For example, the scopes may show that they are interested in AI initiatives or a Merger & Acquisition or Digital Transformation & will say who is in charge of the initiative.
• Stellar filtering capabilities - you can filter lists in so many ways. You can go by function, or even look at companies with small marketing teams (let's say less than 10), or you can search for companies with an "x" amount of $ budget for IT spend. Or even companies that use a specific HR workplace management system.

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

• Speed - it can be quite slow at times.
• Improvement on the search capabilities - since there is so much to search (which is a plus) it makes it harder to do this in a timely manner. You have to dedicate a certain amount of time to be able to pull a proper, useful and clean list.
• Make it more user friendly - there are so many different tabs, search buttons, pull down, etc. I think it can be quite confusing to a new user.

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

The tool is simply better than most other lead/company data repositories, and they are dedicated to keeping their data clean, even if they are far from accomplishing this task at present. The tool works, and it is relatively easy to use. Overall, DiscoverOrg provides the level of lead/contact, customer, and even industry level data the sales orgs have come to expect from this sort of tool in a format that is fairly easy to use. They do also provide support for sales teams looking to use the tool effectively, which is great!

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.

Straight forward

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

Great customer service and support team.

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.

ZoomInfo acquired DiscoverOrg and I believe legacy DiscoverOrg will phase out in the near future. ZoomInfo is 100x better than DiscoverOrg and are very pleased with it's functionality and easy of use. We only selected DiscoverOrg because we were on an auto-renewal contract and did not unsubscribe in time. We did not plan to renew DiscoverOrg. But since then we have been upgraded to ZoomInfo and are finding much more value in that platform than we did in DiscoverOrg.

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

• After using DiscoverOrg, our lead are now well qualified and suitable. We are able to generate good and qualified. This is the positive impact.
• After using DiscoverOrg, our sales team is now able to cold call the target contacts, the number provided by DiscoverOrg, the interaction held is now increased and we are able to produce good leads.
• After using DiscoverOrg, we are able to understand better because of their reports and dashboards which is very informative.

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