Likelihood to Recommend It is a very useful tool if you need to look up corporate family trees. That is our primary use case, and D&B Hoovers makes it very easy to situate a subsidiary company within a larger network of parent companies. It also provides some limited financial information and information about the size of an entity in question, which is also useful for our market research.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros I use the visitor intelligence and it will tell me what office from a company has visited our site. I'll, in turn, go through D&B Hoovers to find the relevant contacts that we would benefit from speaking with at that company. I will call or email them, and it's just in a few months we've been using visitor intelligence has led to several ongoing conversations of companies who will become clients and it's an annual calculation to due. It's an ongoing relationship. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons I'd prefer if the company size estimates were omitted when there is no data behind it to work off of I've never heard from an account rep Training resources? These could already exist but just connecting the dots to them for user would be helpful Read full review 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 Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have been D&B Hoovers customers for a long time. We know the good and bad, and we have learned to utilize D&B Hoovers for the good and unfortunately we have to look at other data sources to compensate for the areas where they are bad. If D&B Hoovers can get better in these other areas as mentioned in other places in the review, they could get a larger dollar spend from my company
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability Whenever I had to use D&B hoovers, I never had a hard time with getting what I need. Additionally, when I show the tool to others, they tend to understand the platform quite quickly. The tool itself is very good and straightforward when I use it to help me put analyses together.
Read full review Owler's interface and user experience are streamlined and clean. It's easy to pick up on what the data visualizations are showing and other information provided in the dashboard
Read full review Reliability and Availability The platform is generally reliable and accessible when needed, with minimal application errors or unplanned outages. There may be occasional maintenance or minor disruptions, but these are usually communicated in advance and handled efficiently. Overall, it offers a high level of availability, ensuring that you can count on it for your daily operations.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Performance While the platform generally functions well, with pages loading in a reasonable time and reports completing within a satisfactory timeframe, there is room for improvement. Performance can sometimes lag with more complex queries or during peak usage times. Additionally, when integrated with other software or systems, there can be occasional slowdowns. Overall, while it performs adequately, optimizing speed and integration efficiency could enhance the user experience.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Support Rating They are terrific at giving instruction/webinars. I am able to call, directly, to an individual and talk to that person. I'm not talking to a robot. They give personal service which is really special.
Read full review Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.
Read full review Online Training The training sessions were well-structured and covered the key functionalities of the platform, making it easy to get up to speed. The trainers were knowledgeable and responsive to questions, which added value to the learning experience. However, a bit more in-depth coverage of advanced features and use cases would have made the training even more beneficial.
Read full review Implementation Rating for our use case, the implementation was minimal and we did not need a lot of help. The D&B Hoovers platform is pretty intuitive and our account manager was ready for any questions that came up when we use the D&B Hoovers platform
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered For company data, D&B wins hands down. Contact and lead information is a toss-up. The information provided was usually a match to both, and I wouldn't say one was better than the other by a wide margin. It really depends on who you are researching. Both did not do well with contacts overseas, but US-based contacts and leads were roughly equivalent.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model The pricing model is generally clear and competitive, but there could be more flexibility in terms of unit pricing or billing frequency to better accommodate varying needs. While the contract terms are straightforward, exploring more options or customizable plans might enhance the overall value.
Read full review Scalability D&B Hoovers is quite effective at adapting to the needs of different departments and locations, allowing for flexible deployment and integration across various parts of an organization. While it scales well and supports a broad range of users and functions, there might be some limitations depending on the size and complexity of the organization’s requirements. Overall, it provides a robust solution that can grow with your needs.4o mini
Read full review Professional Services do not use
Read full review Return on Investment D&B Hoovers allows me to make the most of my time when searching for companies within specific industries. Once I find a company and examine their profile, I can then generate a list of employees in the purchasing and engineering departments. The profiles for each listed employee contain cell phone, Email address and LinkedIn profile. This information helps me to bypass the companies front desk and get directly to the people I need to speak with. By knowing the specific job title for the people that I am contacting and then being able to click on their LinkedIn link to learn a little about them before I make the call, I come across as a sales professional instead of an impersonal cold-caller. In cases where I do need to go through a front desk receptionist whose primary mission is to screen out sales people, I find that three out of four times the receptionist will connect me to the specific employee because I know their name, department, and job title. The Intel provided by D&B Hoovers makes it possible for me to get to the people I need to speak with. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots