Virtual Data Rooms Rating Overview

Best Virtual Data Room Providers

Virtual Data Room Software Guide

Are you looking for deal room software? Review the rating of the best virtual data room providers on our website. Potential users expect to get safety, multi functional tools, and quality technical support. Take the most out of our independent review of virtual data rooms. We gain a lot of experience in the course of our work and know for sure which aspects are critical for companies. We offer:

• Virtual data room comparison
• VDR selection recommendations
• Online data room usage guide
• VDR software dictionary
• Tips for choosing data room for M&A and Due Diligence

Users face many VDR terms when choosing the best data rooms software. That’s why we prepared a VDR Dictionary to help users understand the difference between electronic data room providers. You will find definitions and terms in the field of secure cloud services. The VDR Dictionary will help you better understand the data room services provided by the data room vendors. Become familiar with the terms of the virtual data room and find the answers to all questions. Learn more about deal room software, certifications, and choose the right provider for your business needs.

What Is a Virtual Data Room?

A virtual data room (Deal Room) is a cloud-based solution to share files and interact with other users in a completely secure manner from any device and location.

Even those companies that managed the data rooms in the past have already moved to the clouds. Within the next couple of years, there will be no white-collars in the business space who remember how these rooms looked like.

Difference between Data Rooms

A reliable virtual data room is not only a tech solution. It’s also the company (provider) behind it.

When choosing software for business, you need to pay attention to the experience and reputation of the provider. Review the ranking of virtual data room providers. Compare the best providers and explore services and features. Examine the year the providers were founded and the location of the head office.

Online data room providers differ from each other on many levels. These are the experience, reputation, support service quality, SLA, and other additional benefits. An extra important indicator is the provider’s understanding of its customers’ industry and how well they customize their VDR services to the needs of the industry. For example, a provider that works primarily with banks is unlikely to be the right solution for a medical research company.

Here is a short checklist for choosing a digital data room:

• The provider has been on the market for a long time
• Rating above 4.5
• Experience with both small companies-of-one along with global brands with a large number of employees
• SLA certification
• Fast response time (no more than 30 minutes)
• Expertise in due diligence processes
• The provider’s technical solution meets the needs of your business (95% or higher)
• Regardless of the client’s attitude towards cybersecurity, the provider focuses on protecting data
• The provider constantly introduces innovations to make the user experience within the VDR faster, more convenient, and easier

The most important criteria for choosing a data room software is a “crash test.” It’s the examination of data room services during the trial period. To be sure that the chosen provider will suit your company’s needs, you should test its work in every way possible. Anything from “dumb” questions to the “this feature doesn’t work properly” scenario goes.

But, before proceeding to a trial, your team must prepare and choose a provider. To make it easier for you, we have arranged a small guide on how to select the best data room and its provider among dozens of virtual data rooms.

Why Use Online Data Rooms?

Different types of businesses from various industries use virtual data rooms in different ways. Some companies use VDRs exclusively as a data storage solution. Others use them as a unified system for project management and communication within the company.

Despite the fact the most known virtual data room providers have their use cases in almost every business vertical, the most popular use cases for VDRs are merger and acquisition, and IPO deals (M&A). 

Here are the most popular VDR use cases:

• M&A Due Diligence
• Capital raising
• Legal Document Management (Licensing Deals)
• Regulatory Risk Management
• Commercial Real Estate Transactions
• Corporate Repository

Such transactions usually involve several parties. These are the sell-side, the buyer, legal consultants, and banks, etc.

As the number of participants grows, the risk of sensitive data leaks also increases. Thus, a VDR becomes a necessary and universal tool to ensure the transaction’s security and confidentiality. It also unifies all the communication channels related to the transaction.

How to Use Deal Room Software?

If you are searching for a deal room software and considering a trial from virtual data room vendors, here’s a checklist for you below. It will speed up testing and team onboarding, and make the whole flow as organic as possible. Let’s consider a VDR getting started workflow:

• Registration. The standard procedure for any online service.
• Installation. Some VDRs work only in the cloud. Others provide native clients for every platform (Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, Android, iPad OS, iOS, etc.). Such clients, especially desktop ones, often have an advanced functionality or speed compared to the cloud version. Therefore, we recommend installing them on the selected devices.
• Setting up the structure. Please note that the best data room providers let users create a new data room structure from scratch. Another option is to use templates prepared for different use cases.
• Uploading the files. A familiar drug & drop procedure of moving selected files into created folders.
• Adding users. It’s also possible to set up user groups and distribute access rights between users and groups.
• Sending email invitations to users.
• Working inside a virtual room in a regular mode or conducting situational transactions.
• Analyzing the usage stats and user activity. The best virtual deal rooms provide admins with tools to analyze user activity and all processes that occur with documents and data in the VDR.

In some cases, when the VDR is used only for conducting a single transaction, the point “Close VDR” follows. In other cases, point 7 is supplemented by the item “Feedback collection and workflow optimization.”

Virtual Data Rooms Comparison

How to Choose the Data Room Providers?

Choosing a VDR provider is a rather complicated task since businesses share sensitive data with a provider. Unlike any other web service businesses use (Slack, Hangouts, etc.), a virtual data room requires a more efficient approach to its selection — since you give the provider access to the sensitive data. The future of your business depends on the quantity and quality of security levels a virtual data room provider ensures.

Here is an out-of-the-box guide a company can use to compare virtual data rooms when choosing a virtual data room vendor:

• Describe the custom scenarios: how, when, and what tasks your team will use the virtual data room for. You can use the User Story Mapping (USM) approach to do this. This methodology is mostly used to develop digital products, but it is ideal for the first step of choosing a VDR software provider.
• Define a team responsible for selecting and implementing VDR into business processes and defining the timelines and milestones for the project.
• Based on the USM, compile a checklist of the features your business needs from the VDR. You can break it down into components depending on their importance to your business.
• Select those online data room providers that match your checklist.
• Analyze the technical solution in combination with the vendor’s reputation.
• Check virtual data room reviews. Pay attention to the cases from your industry.
• Select the top 2-3 vendors that meet both technical and business criteria.
• Sign up for a free trial (top providers always offer one).
• At the end of every trial, analyze the usability of the VDR and the quality of the provider’s communication.
• Choose the provider that meets your requirements.

Choosing a VDR Provider for Small Businesses

For small businesses, flexibility is one of the most important criteria. Thus, small businesses need to look at exactly those features that involve large and frequent changes:

• The pay-as-you-go option allows small businesses to flexibly change users and payment options.
• Convenient and quick management of documents; users get access to the documents on-the-go from any device.
• Fast and easy onboarding: small businesses don’t have months or even days to spend learning how to use a virtual data room. Everything should be clear and user-friendly.

Choosing a VDR Provider for Medium Businesses

For midsize businesses, security and scalability are a must. But, the list below also includes all the options specific to small businesses:

• Documents and files security.
• An ability to scale up from small to large and back rapidly.
• Transparent pricing policy and reliable support.

Choosing a VDR Provider for Large Businesses

For large companies, enterprise-level security comes first. The second requirement is migration options since large businesses are likely to have used a different provider before. It is the use of the safety and convenience of VDR data sharing options to acquire companies or raise an investment that allows a medium-sized business to become a large one.

• Enterprise-level security.
• Ease of migration.
• A dedicated manager (-s) who helps large businesses to adapt the VDR to their needs as much as possible.

How to Compare Virtual Data Rooms?

We brought together independent experts to create a special methodology to test virtual data rooms. We wanted to come up with an approach that would take into account both the technical and behavioral factors of the services.

This approach allowed us to collect the best data room providers on this site. These providers meet all the security and distributed work requirements regardless of the industry the business operates in.

Here is a consolidated list of criteria that our experts used to create a comparison table of online data room providers. Many components are the basis for each of these criteria:

We use two independent flows to test each of these criteria biweekly:

• Our experts sign up for trials and evaluate the provider of virtual data rooms using an extended expert questionnaire.
• We ask real users of the best virtual data rooms to fill out the user’s questionnaire. A simplified version of the expert questionnaire, it does not require the evaluation of data security protocols.

This approach ensures that our experts are unbiased — each of us has our favorite brands, you have to admit. Thus, our users get an updated independent rating of the best virtual data rooms twice per month.

So, this website provides the most up-to-date information for businesses looking for the best data room providers.