Datasite (formerly Merrill DataSite) is the premier data room for large, banker-run M&A — and it is sold like it: custom quotes, demos, procurement. If your process is a fundraise or a mid-market sale run by you or one advisor, you need its controls, not its machinery.
Datasite facts verified on datasite.com and its resource pages, August 2026.
| Datasite | YourDataRoom.app | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is built around | A banker-run M&A process at scale: a product family (Diligence, Prepare, Acquire, Outreach, Pipeline, Archive) covering deal marketing through post-close archiving, 16,000+ transactions a year. | Running a diligence process — the room, its phases, and the counterparties in it are the core objects. |
| Dynamic per-viewer watermarking | A watermarking tool that batch-generates per-recipient watermarked PDFs (variable text, up to 10 recipients at a time) for controlled distribution. | Every plan, from $49/mo. Viewer name, email, and timestamp burned into every page of view-only PDFs, server-side, at request time. |
| Staged disclosure | Granular role-based permissions by user, group, or document, with real-time or staged release options — configured and kept current by the deal team’s admins. | A phase is a property of every document and every investor, enforced by the server on each request. Above-phase documents are invisible — absent from listings, 404 on direct fetch. |
| Visitor Q&A | A full Q&A workflow: ask teams and answer teams, question categories, routing and approval rules, duplicate-question detection — plus AI bulk Q&A that answers a spreadsheet of buyer questions with citations. | Investors ask the data room directly; the AI answers with citations from the documents their phase allows, any hour. |
| Per-visitor analytics | Project dashboards, file activity monitoring, and integrated trackers — built for a deal team monitoring many workstreams at once. | Per-investor engagement across the whole room — sessions, documents viewed and downloaded, questions asked — on every plan. |
| Pricing model | No published prices. Its own FAQ: "Datasite pricing is customized for every transaction" — every pricing question routes to a quote or demo request. | Flat $49 / $149 / $349 per month, published, capacity-tiered, every capability in every plan. |
Datasite’s staged release is real, and it is permissioning: admins configure who can open what, and update it as the deal advances — which fits a deal team whose job is running the room. In our model the phase is a property of the document and the investor, and the server filters everything by it on every request: what an investor cannot see is not locked, it is absent — no listing entry, no count, no search hit, and a direct request returns 404, not 403, so a counterparty cannot infer that undisclosed material is waiting. The enforcement detail — including what we have not built, like redaction — is on the security page.
The live demo data room is open — ask it a question and watch the citations come back. Pricing is here, flat and published — no quote, no demo call.