Data.com (discontinued) vs. Owler

Data.com is a good prospecting and data information tool for any agency or company doing outbound prospecting. Data.com requires you to also have Salesforce CRM, so this tool is really only suited for those companies that can afford Salesforce. Because of this, Data.com seems like a better fit for companies with at least 30 or more employees (total in the company) and at least 5 Salesforce users. Data.com is not a good fit for small businesses.

Incentivized

Owler is best used as a supplemental asset, as it allows you to get very granular on specific prospects. I believe its limitations lie in the fact that while you can see the competitive companies, it's difficult to get any prospecting information out of them ie., contacts, without going for the highest level plan.

Incentivized

• The contact information the website provides tends to be accurate.
• I like that it is free and works on a point system- the more info you give, the more info you get.
• I like that you can update contact information as needed.

Incentivized

• Great industry info.
• Really good industry- or company-specific rss feed.
• Love the funding/merger/acquisition alerts that we get on companies and portfolios that we follow. Often even more timely than Crunchbase since it's based on press releases rather than Crunchbase's data team reaching out to VCs to get their portfolio updates.
• Pretty good firmographic data on companies (# of employees, ann. revenue, website, c-suite members, etc.).
• We get all these great benefits for free!

Incentivized

• Even though it has a lot of features, sometimes it gets overwhelming for a newbie. So I would really appreciate it if the user interface gets more friendly.
• There are some digital advertising channels that Data.com struggles to connect. Also, within some channels like LinkedIn, it would be great if data.com could get more granular on ad type, ad targeting level (speaking from a marketing perspective).
• It has limited visualization capabilities where there is a lot of scope for improvement.

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.

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.

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.

The accuracy of Data.com versus SalesIntel is second to none. Data.com integrates with our current Salesforce platform, which takes out a lot of the manual manipulation of lists that we used to have to do when we had other platforms. This is particularly helpful because time is money.

Incentivized

Apollo is more of a complete system for things like sequences, tracking sales, meetings, recording meetings. It has a very strong search capability for individual contacts that can be broken down in many ways. Like job status, titles, geogrpahy. It also gives insights into technology in use and intent

Incentivized

• As a freelancer, I've made thousands of dollars building sales lists, for what began as a $50 trial.
• Cross referencing with LinkedIn helps to explain to clients the job title progression a person has had, which can add to your credibility and strengthen your report content.
• Data.com hasn't had a negative return for me. Every dollar and minute of effort I have used it was worth it.

Incentivized

• Owler has enabled those in my organization to demonstrate their knowledge on companies to clients without spending too much time working to procure information from various sources.
• Owler contributes to a more comprehensive analysis of companies when making investment decisions.
• Owler can be frustrating to use and inefficient as a result of a lack of robust data quality measures.

Incentivized