Crunchbase vs. Owler

The data is outdated and has significant gaps. It is mostly a replication of what is easily and publicly available, with little value added. Their predatory subscription model includes no notice of renewal and they are very antagonistic towards their customers.

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

• Account-Based Data. Employee range, website, industry, company description, chief executives, latest news, etc. All for the given company you are researching.
• Salesforce integration. I have not used it, but the functionality is supposed to be great. You can run data enrichment in your CRM with the Crunchbase data.
• Funding, mergers, and acquisitions data. Crunchbase has relationships with thousands of VC firms throughout the world and followup with each very regularly to be able to serve up the latest data to their users.
• Tech integrations. Integrations with tools like Bombora, Builtwith, Siftery, and others are really useful because you can use Crunchbase's company profile-based research method, and see the data from these tools specifically related to the given company.

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

• 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

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 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.

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.

Ptichbook. This platform is more detailed and has a lot more information regarding round details. The platform also has other features to build lists, market maps, landscapes and access reports and raw data about companies by vertical or any other segmentation. Also provides emails on c-suite. Crunchbase however is an easier tool to use so if complicated segmentation is not required, Crunchabse is a great solution. It's also super fast to access and provides a succinct and easy to read profile view.

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

• Crunchbase has enabled my company to be more efficient in determining whether or not to conduct further diligence on companies.
• Tailoring searches for certain criteria has been helpful for aggregating competitors and companies of similar profiles.
• The software is not only powerful, but also affordable!

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