Owler is a sales intelligence app developed by the company of the same name San Mateo and acquired by Meltwater June 2021, providing competitive insights, company information, and other sales relevant information.
$8.25
per month
SimilarTech
Score 5.5 out of 10
N/A
SimilarTech is a sales intelligence software solution offered by SimilarTech Ltd.
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.
1. Looking up the technologies, analytics tools, and services used by your competitors and industry leaders. 2. Checking what has changed technology-wise on the website of your competitor, since you've noticed an improvement in their rankings or other website improvements. You can even set up alerts to receive emails every time a new change was made to the technology of the website you're interested in (usually your top competitors').
We were considering changing a hosting provider because we were not happy with the speed of our website. So, we used SimilarTech to look up which hosting providers our competitors and some other faster websites were using, to help us make an informed choice.
When the company was considering a new live chat vendor, we also used SimilarTech to see what software some of the best websites on the web are using.
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
Given the tasks SimilarTech was designed for, I don't really think there are any issues with it. It's hard to think of a situation where I couldn't get the information I needed from SimilarTech.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Overall SimilarTech had a positive impact, as it saves a lot of time (days) when it comes to research of the competition and new up-and-coming technologies for our website.
Moreover, it helps to monitor updates on the websites of the industry leaders, and to keep up with tech.
