Likelihood to Recommend 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 Sprout [Social] is great for small businesses, small agencies and those who need a platform but don't want to spend a fortune. If you need multiple user log-in's, the cost will add up. This is great to share a log-in for different people to use or add one or two users
Read full review Pros 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 The Landscape system that Sprout Social offers allows me to modify all the images that I want to publish on my social networks. This service allows me to modify the size of the image, add filters, modify the colors and much more, it is a very important tool to be able to have a better presentation of the images that we use in our publications on social networks. It offers me a perfect statistical system where I can consult all kinds of movements that have occurred in all my social networks, I can see statistics individually or generally. The statistics allow me to see group reports, participation, information on audience movement on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and also allow me to view the activity that has occurred in my account. Sprout Social allows me to view a record in real time that shows me all the movements that my social networks are having by my employees. As Director of the Marketing Sector, this is a very important role, as I can know what actions my employees are taking to improve marketing with social networks. Read full review Cons 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 I'd love to see more robust tag reporting capabilities, but they mentioned that this is something in the pipeline for improvement. I wish it was easier to batch content and shift it to approval or draft mode. Sometimes clients can change their mind and moving through each post individually can be a bit time consuming. This is a very minor thing. I'd love to see more customization options come to its reporting feature so we can insert graphics. Currently it supports the insertion of text only. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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 While I am currently no longer working with the company in which I was employed and utilized Sprout Social, I do know that the company is still utilizing Sprout Social on a daily basis and I do not foresee a time when the subscription would be cancelled.
Read full review Usability 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 Sprout Social is extremely user-friendly. The publishing feature is easy to use, and provides previews of what your content will look like once posted. I also love the calendar view where you can view all posts you have scheduled for the month. The collaborative nature of the platform makes working directly in Sprout Social with clients a breeze, and we are seeing our content get approved much faster.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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 Uptime was OK, but given the fact that we are in Europe, there were some specific problems: They tended to take the system down for maintenance during the night in the US, which was during our workday. This was definitely problematic and hard to explain to our clients.
Read full review Performance 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 It is quick to post, however you have to refresh the page every time you add a new scheduled item.
Read full review Support Rating Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.
Read full review Sprout Social's customer support is extremely prompt and always helpful. Not only do they provide quick and useful service, but the representatives follow up multiple times to ensure that the issue is fully address and/or completely resolved. The overall experience is exemplary; very few other companies provide comparable service.
Read full review Online Training Their training is good, but the promotion of it is even better. I don't need or have the time for training, but I was always happy to know it was there. They did a great job sending updates out and making me aware when there was a new feature that I may want training for. As for the training I never used it, so I can't comment on that
Read full review Implementation Rating 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 Make sure you do it all the way. Do not break it into phases. Pour yourself a coffee, start it in the morning and you'll be done before you finish that coffee.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 I used Buffer previous to Sprout Social for two years. It was a good solution as we were getting a handle on scheduling content. It was the first real tool we had for this. But we outgrew it and they began removing features that were critical to our workflow, such as the RSS Feed. While their 50% off policy for non-profits was very helpful, once we started adding up the cost to use features like Replies and Analytics, we discovered that our needs were simply too robust for Buffer to handle. Sprout Social was the solution suggested by all our peers and we've been very happy with it ever since.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Sprout has given insights to lead our creative refreshes every quarter. As we have a healthy budget on paid social, it is crucial to understand the type of creative that works best. Sprout has the ability to send notifications based on certain types of messages received. This is crucial for social media teams who don't have 24/7 coverage but need to be notified of urgent matters. Sprout has saved me hours of time as I no longer pull analytics natively from each social platform. The generated reports give me a look at all of the platforms and can be customized. Read full review ScreenShots Sprout Social Screenshots