Dropbox DocSend vs. Firmex Virtual Data Room

It's super great for sharing sales collateral, investor pitch slide decks, and other one-time viewing content. It's mainly built for sales but has been a huge benefit as a small startup. It best for PDF content that is okay to be horizontally oriented and scrolled (e.g. the forward and back buttons are on the side of the viewing interface).

Incentivized

Great for transactions involving file sharing where large amounts of documents need to be shared between multiple parties at different organizations. I could also see its utility as a document management site for an entity going through a reorganization or transition. It is not appropriate as a permanent document management system.

Incentivized

• Additional information from users who have already downloaded the files or material.
• Additional information if the download link(s) have been resent.
• Password encryption if necessary.
• Email verification for third-party download via email.
• Add-ons with other platforms and applications, such as Outlook and Gmail.
• Seal of documents by electronic signature

Incentivized

• Status updates
• Visual display
• Organization capabilities

Incentivized

• Customer support is an area that is possible to improve, providing an [quick] answer.
• [Providing] more details about how to interact with the tool, in some cases, is complicated for new users to understand and start to use the program.
• The collaboration feature can be improved to allow users to have a better experience using the tool and interacting.

Incentivized

• This is a bit of a stretch, because as far as I know, no data room provides this, but I think it would be interesting if they added a feature to manage supplemental due diligence requests. In almost every transaction I've been involved with, the buyer has supplemental due diligence requests, either because the seller did not want to provide a document or because they did not think it was sufficiently material (or they just forgot!). These supplemental requests get handled separately, using a Word or Excel document, but I think it would be nice if it could be handled directly in the data room. The reason this would be handy is that you could include dynamics links in the questions (Page 2 is missing from Document 1.1.2 - and then there is a link right to Document 1.1.2) and in the answers (See Document 3.3.4 for the missing financial statements - and then there is a link right to the missing document).
• This is partly on the users, but I do not like it when a data room allows you to delete a document without there being an ongoing reference to the deleted document. It makes it hard for the other side (the purchaser) to keep straight the numbering of the due diligence documents. At a minimum, the software should just keep the numbering of the documents the same with an "Intentionally Deleted" next to the deleted document.

Incentivized

I haven’t used the support as our internal teams do a great job of fixing and supporting our DocSend use.

Incentivized

Our organization previously used ClearSlide but switched to DocSend as a cost savings. It was not made clear during the sales process that DocSend does not natively possess audio conferencing or screen-share capabilities. We had to add on the join.me integration after the fact, which has not worked well. When our contract is up with DocSend we will be moving back to ClearSlide

Incentivized

I think Firmex stacks up well with Merrill DatasiteOne, and I do not really have a preference between the two. Likewise, there are other data room services out there, and the good ones generally work pretty much the same, and I do not really have a favorite (this coming from someone who has a favorite on most things). Firmex does work much better for complex transactions than Dropbox Business, OneDrive and other cloud base file-sharing services because those services are designed for (1) more general uses, and (2) collaborating across organizations. Firmex is better for due diligence on corporate transactions because of things like the ability to print a complete data room index of 1000s of documents (this makes it easier to tell individuals in the organization who has to review what documents) and strong protections on what people who download documents can do with them (ie: watermarks, locked PDFs so they cannot manipulate the documents). Firmex is optimized for due diligence review, rather than collaboration.

Incentivized

• For about $100 you can optimize all
• Of your pipelines that rely on decks or documents - worth it!
• The time you’d spend having to send each link to individual clients without tracking is well worth the $100 on the product
• We’ve been able to close our fundraising round and increase partnerships by utilizing DocSend - would recommend!

Incentivized

• Positive impact on conducting due diligence efficiently.
• Positive impact on being responsive to fast-moving transactions because of the e-mail updates when new documents get uploaded.

Incentivized