Crunchbase vs. Owler vs. PitchBook

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

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.

Appropriate: We will use Pitchbook, for example, when we need to screen for companies in a certain sector or when a keyword gets a priced funding round (Seed, Series A, B, C). Screening of deal as a way to benchmark prices of potential investments Screening of potential LPs based on past investments Challenging: Quickly pull analyst commentary on certian companies/events. consensus sales or prices Analyse non venture deals. for example in biotech, licensing deals are key ways to create value and always analysed in detailed. We will probabaly use dealbook or Cortellis for this

Incentivized

• 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

• 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

• Historical deal dynamics detailing pricing and financing as well as which parties worked on the transaction
• Initial screenign on public and private comparables
• Breadth of private companie details including descriptions, financials, etc.
• Ability to filter / sort and eventually export details on private companies

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

• 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 price is insane. Most of their competitors are free, and those that aren't are less than 5% the price of PitchBook.
• The excel plugin is incredibly complicated and the formula builder function is awful. You cannot search easily to find formulas for things you don't already know (unless you ask support)
• The UI is old, and they are slow to innovate. They need to add in a new incredible feature in the next year or two or my firm might move on, as it's getting harder to justify the price when competitors get better every year (signalnfx!) and PitchBook doesn't.

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.

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 rely on PitchBook when researching potential investments, particularly in the tech and AI space. It’s an excellent tool for early-stage market analysis and becomes especially valuable when evaluating private or emerging startups. PitchBook provides all the essential company details—financials, funding history, valuations—which are critical for my work as an investment professional. The three points I took out is for the lack of market analysis framework and the lack of P&L data.

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

Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.

The overall support for PitchBook is about average. It is not excellent for two primary reasons. First, PitchBook can run slow from time to time, and I cannot copy and paste from the Chrome extension. I have found neither of those issues to be a function of the computer I am using. However, the PitchBook support team has proved helpful on several occasions.

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.

did not participate

Incentivized

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.

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

Really well - though I think Beauhurst has the edge on UK specific investments, and Bloomberg has the edge on immediate updates. I think PitchBook is better than fDi Markets though, I would definitely recommend purchasing a PitchBook license over fDi Markets - but in a policy area that isn’t considering international investment, I might go with Beauhurst.

Incentivized

we can give access to anyone interested

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 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

• It has allowed us to be more targeted in our sales campaigns.
• Great headhunting and market mapping data.
• We have been in a very difficult hiring market so it hasn't given me the ROI I would have hoped, but that isn't PitchBook's fault!

Incentivized