Editorial Policy
How we test data rooms, how we score them, and how this site makes money — written so you can hold us to it.
How we make money
Secure Data Rooms is operated by the team behind Papermark, an open-source data room platform reviewed on this site. When you sign up for Papermark after clicking a link here, we benefit directly. Links to other providers may or may not carry referral terms; either way, no provider can pay to change a score, a ranking position, or a verdict.
Papermark is our recommended pick for startups and lean deal teams. It earns the top spot in value-weighted rankings because pricing transparency and total cost are heavily weighted criteria in our rubric — a choice we defend openly, since we believe hidden pricing is the category's biggest buyer problem. Where other providers are better, we say so: our own pages recommend Datasite, Intralinks, and iDeals for large enterprise M&A and credit Ansarada for publishing its rates.
The scoring rubric
Every ranked list on this site uses the same weighted criteria. The weights are the editorial position; the scores under them are reproducible from the cited evidence.
| Criterion | Weight | What we measure |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing transparency & total cost | 30% | Published rate cards score higher than quote-only models. Total cost is modeled for a typical lean deal team (3 admins, ~50 reviewers, 2–5 GB, 6 months). |
| Core security controls | 25% | Granular permissions, dynamic watermarking, NDA gating, audit trails, and access revocation — verified in the plan tier we quote, not the top tier. |
| Ease of setup & reviewer experience | 20% | Time from signup to a working room, guest-side friction, and how fast a non-admin can find documents. |
| Deal workflow depth | 15% | Q&A workflows, staged access, analytics, and reporting for live diligence processes. |
| Support & reliability | 10% | Support channels and responsiveness, uptime posture, and certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001). |
Testing and sourcing rules
- Hands-on first. Where a trial exists, we build a real room, invite guests, and test the controls we list. Features we could not verify are attributed to vendor documentation.
- Prices are cited or labeled. Published prices link to official pages. Quote-only vendors get reported ranges from multiple independent sources, always labeled as estimates.
- Every review names weaknesses. Including Papermark's: it does not offer managed Q&A at enterprise scale, and our pages route those deals to competitors.
- Third-party comparisons get real verdicts. An "iDeals vs Intralinks" page declares a winner between those two on the merits; Papermark appears only as a clearly marked sidebar where genuinely relevant.
- Honest dates. "Last updated" changes only when the content materially changes.
- Link policy. Outbound links to providers other than Papermark carry rel="nofollow"; we do not sell followed links.
Corrections
We correct factual errors quickly and update the affected page's date. Report issues via the Papermark GitHub or through papermark.com.