KickFire vs. Owler

I've only used KickFire in sales but it's great

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

• Validating HQ location and HQ phone number
• Finding direct phone lines and emails for prospects
• Filter
• Drilling down to specific departments and the contacts within each

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

• KickFire doesn't filter the de-anonymized website visit results much for accuracy. Public IP indexes are far from perfect. Companies change their IPs all the time. Other solutions check each website visit against several indexes and only deliver de-anonymized visits to the client when they are able to reach a certain confidence level in the company identification. KickFire instead does less filtering and lets the client handle it on their own. The downside is that there are more false positives. In our experience, there were a few companies that started showing that they were visiting our site several times a day, visiting just about every page. Later we realized that the company was an ISP/VPN provider (one of the largest in the UK) and that the visitors were actually probably from a number of other companies--they were just using the VPN. Again, this is a con because it gives more work to you in the end. On the other hand, the approach that other solutions take means you miss out on significant website activity because it didn't reach a certain confidence score.

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

We've been happy customers of VisiStat for many years. I've used the service at multiple companies and you can't beat it.

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.

It was designed for people who are business users, not tech users.

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

We've never had any outages in the 7+ years using the system.

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 system is very responsive, and when there are times in which data is loading, the VisiStat system provides humorous loading messages.

Incentivized

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 are very good at solving cases that I bring to them. I'd like to see more proactive support to make sure we are getting the full value out of the solution.

Incentivized

Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.

The tutorials are very good and they explain how to get started using the system. The online webinars are very good for advancing your knowledge of the product.

Incentivized

Don't hesitate to contact VisiStat support. They are extremely helpful.

Incentivized

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 covered this pretty extensively in the cons. The key differentiator here is that KickFire serves up almost all the data (or so it seems) to the end client. The client then has to do their own work on interpreting it. This is good because it means we don't miss out on any website activities, but it's bad because we get a lot of false positives. 6sense uses the confidence score approach I mentioned in the Cons section, which means the match rates of the data we get are much higher. Our experience with Clearbit comes from other tools that are built on it (Bombora, Drift, etc.), and it has not been great. We've seen many more inaccuracies with Clearbit.

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

We've gone from a few thousand unique visitors per month to nearly 200,000 unique visitors. VisiStat doesn't miss a beat.

Incentivized

• KickFire turned our next-to-useless website visit numbers into actionable insights for our marketing and sales teams.
• KickFire shaped our new strategy for our account-based marketing and sales model.

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