Data room software providers

We’ve tested the functionality of several online data room providers and consider Ideals to be one of the easiest to use and set up — and so do Ideals customers.

• As Capterra’s Top 2023 Performer, Ideals is known for its user-friendly interface, cited as the #1 reason for switching to this product from other vendors. 
• Customers especially praise the easy deployment, taking on average 15 minutes to set up a new project. Additionally, they give positive reviews about Ideals’ secure file viewer, document classification with tags and labels, audit trail, and other features that facilitate secure data management.

While Ideals shares the same high-level security features as some other providers on the market, it also offers a unique secure viewer for Excel files enabling conversion-free view of spreadsheets with formulas. Additionally, Ideals’ advanced security settings have garnered high praise from users, particularly its 8 levels of granular access permissions, which far exceeds the standard offered by most virtual data rooms.

In terms of document management, Ideals gets a 5/5 user rating.

• What customers appreciate most is its scroll-through viewer allowing users to instantly move from one document to another. Another helpful feature is audit trails generating activity timestamps on who and when collaborated with documents.
• Additionally, users praise Ideals’ automatic watermarking and IRM (Information Rights Management), which allows downloading documents from the data room in their original format, retaining the document’s printing and copying restrictions.

Expert customer support, available 24/7/365, is what truly makes Ideals stand out. Agents are available via live chat, email, and phone. 

• Their response time in chat is about 30 seconds. 
• They offer dedicated project managers for each project and have a product knowledge base readily available for prospects and customers in the Help Center. 
• Best of all, support agents speak over 10 languages and serve as an extension of the in-house deal team. 
• Customers note that Ideals support is first-class’ and one of the reasons to use this product for a long period of time. Not only do support agents help to solve customer requests, but they take notes on what could be improved in the product.

Ideals has a transparent quote-based pricing model with no hidden fees; therefore, specific plan pricing is unavailable. 

• Because Ideals does not charge per user, it is a favorable option among larger companies and enterprises. 
• Customers also indicate that its pricing is more attractive than competitors and offers the same functionality for a lower price.
• Ideals has three pricing plans — Pro, Business, and Enterprise. 24/7 support, two-factor authentication, audit trails, remote shred, and branding are offered for all packages at no extra charge. 
• They also offer a free 30-day trial for testing the data room — this allows for quality preparing all the documentation for a particular project which, in turn, then smoothly gets absorbed into the real project room when the trial ends.

Compared to Ideals, Intralinks has a more outdated software design. Users note that Intralinks has weak version control and collaboration tools. On the positive side, Intralinks’ audit trail functionality and drag-n-drop features receive mostly positive feedback from users.

Intralinks functions similarly to Ideals, however, it lacks subsequent customer feedback on specific security features. Some users praise Intralinks’ security settings that enable controlled sharing of sensitive information, however, there are no comments on other features.

Intralinks has a helpful reporting feature that helps users collaborate on data in an organized and secure manner. Also, customers mention that Intralinks allows generating reports containing each document ID and time and date of upload, which makes maintaining control of all the documents uploaded much easier.

Intralinks offers multi-channel support via email, phone, and live chat — and it is also available 24/7. However, there’s not enough feedback to make conclusions about its specific advantages or disadvantages.

• A free demo can be requested to navigate through Intralinks’ features. However, no free trial is available. 
• Intralinks includes 24/7 multilingual support, 16 access permissions, desktop and mobile app access to the data room, and Q&A workflows.

• Datasite has received positive customer feedback regarding its access controls, audit trails, file classification with tags and labels, multi-format file viewer, and overall data storage management. 
• Despite the overall positive customer feedback about Datasite’s interface, some users reported switching from Datasite to Ideals because of the latter’s better user experience.

The position of Datasite is somewhat similar to Intralinks’, as while the vendor has a great and rich security functionality in all security aspects, there are not enough customer reviews to draw conclusions.

Among Datasite’s document management features, full-text search with text recognition is cited most by users. Datasite also has daily updates on new documents in the data room, which we found especially convenient.

Datasite has few mentions about its customer support, and they are mostly positive. Users mention that the data room software support is expert-level and technical, and the staff knows how to solve any problem without any additional charge. The support is available 24/7 via phone, email, and chat.

Similarly to other providers, Datasite has a quote-based pricing model. Contact a Datasite sales representative for a custom quote or free demo. No free trial is available.

The Onehub platform’s features for ease of use are a scroll-through document viewer, automatic index numbering, drag-and-drop data upload, and multilingual document index. However, some users report trouble accessing the data room from their work emails and the tricky process of providing access to other users.

The vendor employs multiple data centers, two-factor authentication, access limitations by IP, and data backup. However, it doesn’t comply with GDPR requirements and lacks virus scanning, making it inferior to Ideals.

While some clients say the product’s security is not as strong as the competition, most users leave positive feedback.

Onehub is an excellent tool for teams as it makes it easy to manage and access important documents across multiple devices. By synchronizing files, teams can easily organize and retrieve files whenever they need them. However, according to reviews, occasional document processing delays may slow workflows.

Well-educated technical support is available 24/7 via live chat, email, phone, and online help center. Users rate support experts on review sites differently, which may indicate the dependence of the quality of help on experts who address issues.

The data room software offers four plans with a 14-day free trial for each. If you pay annually, you can save 20%. Moreover, the Onehub provider offers a 20% discount to nonprofits and schools.

According to reviews, users find Donnelley Venue easy to use. They appreciate a mobile device interface, automatic index numbering, and desktop sync.

Although the solution is GDPR and ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified and has two-factor authentication and data backup, it lacks data access expiration features, access limitations by IP, virus scanning, and HIPAA compliance.

Unlike other virtual data room providers mentioned above, Donnelley Venue doesn’t include a scroll-through viewer, multilingual document index, or document version control. Therefore, consider another solution if you have data-heavy projects.

24/7 technical support via email, phone, and online help center is available. Also, teams can use FAQs, forums, and knowledge base. 

Donnelley Solutions uses a variety of pricing models, including on-demand per-page pricing, which may make project invoices highly unpredictable in today’s increasingly data-heavy deals. You can request a free demo on the official website and contact sales for pricing details.