| Functionality | 3 <p>Cognism's functionality is very limited. Whilst it does offer one of the largest contact databases on the market with a relative strength in mobile data - the product does very little beyond that.</p><p>We were disappointed by the omission of any kind of outbound functionality (email or phone) and were not impressed by the quality of other facets of the product including the granularity of filter provided or the lack of any material automation/AI features.</p> | 3 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">LeadIQ's functionality is narrow. When it comes to prospect search, the first hurdle you'll face is the relatively small size of its database compared to some competitors. Additionally, adjacent features around email engagement are omitted entirely meaning that you will need to pay for dedicated outbound tools separately. However, LeadIQ does provide an email/message personalization AI feature which integrates nicely with many outbound platforms. </span></p> |
| Ease of Use | 8 <p>Cognism's lack of functionality makes it simple and intuitive to use. Its core prospecting interfaces are familiar and easy to grasp. It would take an average SMB employee less than 10 minutes to master the platforms use.</p> | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">LeadIQ's limited feature set means that its web app is relatively easy to navigate. Its prospecting interface is familiar when compared to competitors, however, some interfaces are clunky and cramped and often require a second look to find the data point/button you're hunting for. Overall, it would take an average SMB employee a few hours to master its use.</span></p> |
| Look and feel | 7 <p>Cognism's design is modern and relatively simple, especially when compared with a lot of its competitors. When tested, we find both searches and general interfaces to be fast to load. Additionally, contact profile pages and lists were well laid out and easy to consume.</p> | 2 <p>LeadIQ's UI feels dated. When tested, we find many pages to be overwhelming and confusingly laid out which made navigation difficult at times despite the overall lack of functionality. Additionally, search pages were often slow to load (occasionally taking >5 seconds to load).</p> |
| Customisability | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Cognism offers a handful of basic avenues for customisations. Beyond the ability to create custom searches or build targeted lists, you are also able to define an ideal customer persona to help hone and narrow searches more easily.</span></p> | 6 <p>LeadIQ offers a handful of avenues for customisation that would be help to both SMBs and larger enterprises. For example you're able to map additional custom fields when adding contacts to external CRMs/engagement platforms and you're able to manage/assign territories for individual sales agents.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 3 <p>Frustratingly, Cognism does not offer a self-serve option to try out the platform. Instead, you’ll need to trudge through a sales demo before you are able to access their trial. Once access was granted, we found the platform very simple to set up and use. Given the lack of outbound functionality, there isn't much further setup required either.</p> | 7 <p>LeadIQ offers a simple, self-serve free trial for their platform. When tested, we found the initial setup to be very simple (taking <5 mins). Additionally, the lack of native email sequencing functionality means it doesn't take long to get the most out of the platform either. The only areas which do take some time to configure are buried in settings - such as the ability to <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">manage/assign territories for individual sales agents.</span></p> |
| Customer Support | 3 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">You can contact Cognism's customer support via a live chat widget inside their web app. At first, you'll be greeted by an AI bot which, when tested, we find to be relatively unhelpful and eager to hand off to irrelevant help centre articles. Additionally, we found it difficult to get in contact with a real support agent and instead having to rely on account executives/sales reps who are more focused on driving purchases than provided information succinctly. </span></p> | 3 <p>You can contact a support agent via a live chat widget inside LeadIQ's web app. When tested, we found the default chat bot to be unhelpful and often linking to irrelevant help centre articles. Additionally, when tested, it took over 24 hours to contact a real agent to answer our queries.</p><p>However, LeadIQ does provide a detailed help centre which was able to answer almost all basic questions we had in testing.</p> |
| Integratability | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Cognism provides a number of native integrations with popular CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot), sales engagement platforms (Outreach, Salesloft) and automation platforms like Zapier. Additionally, it offers an API through which users can interact with Cognism's database directly (however this is not part of their standard offering and you will need to pay more to access this).</span></p> | 4 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">LeadIQ provides a number of integrations with popular CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot), email clients (Gmail) and engagement platforms (Outreach, Salesloft). However, we would like to see an API offered (as most competitors do today).</span></p> |
| Ease of Migration | 4 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Cognism offers self-serve export functionality within its web app. Additionally, Cognism offers an API through which businesses are able to interact with their database directly (however this is not part of their standard offering and you will need to pay more to access this).</span></p> | 4 <p>LeadIQ offers self-serve export functionality within its web app.</p><p>However, we would like to have seen an API on offer (as many competitors do currently) for direct querying and interaction with the LeadIQ database.</p> |
