Owler vs. uberVu (discontinued)

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.

I liked uberVU a lot, and thought I was lucky to have found them (they actually responded to my tweet when I was vendor-searching, which was good to know as they were doing just what we were planning to use the software for). They are relatively small, which allows to have a great personal relationship and we felt very valued as a client. They provided great value - some of their competitors allow for more features (which explains their higher price), but there was no way to opt out of the unnecessary features to lower the price - uberVU didn't have any of that, it was just what we needed and in our price range

• 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

• Easy to see what people are saying on social media about clients.
• Creates reports that can be limited to certain time frames.
• Able to see the reach of users so you can breakdown by influencers.

• 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

• I honestly didn't have any issues with them. Being able to set the real-time alerts as "every 15 minutes" took some figuring out to do, and we were still in the trial mode while we did that - it wasn't particularly intuitive for other users, but once we walked them through, everything worked well.

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.

I find it a great tool in the digital strategy world to see what people are saying across social platforms. It's much more efficient that doing a search on the platform itself and provides a lot of information extremely quickly

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

All the users found the product intuitive and easy to use.

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.

A couple of times it was a little slow, but this didn't result in any negative impact for us. There was no downtime as I could recall or notice.

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.

Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.

Every time we needed help, the support was great. We had no issues, mostly needed usability walkthroughs and had questions about features.

I got the training while I was evaluating and in the trial period. Then I trained the others myself

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.

Not applicable since it is SAAS - all we needed was to sign up, which was easy

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

Radian6 and Brandwatch were on the short list. We picked uberVU for its combination of price and features. It did not have extra features we didn't need, they were customizable and flexible enough to meet all of our needs

• 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

• Easier to handle crisis.
• Ability to find out statistics to quantify and qualify what you're doing for customers.