Ask around for a data room in the mid-market and Ideals is often the quote that comes back — deservedly: mature product, strong certifications, well-reviewed support. The difference is how it is sold: quote-based tiers, storage caps, and overage rates stated in the contract rather than on the page.
Ideals facts verified on idealsvdr.com and its help center, August 2026.
| Ideals | YourDataRoom.app | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is built around | A general-purpose VDR sold per project in three quote-based tiers: Core / Premier / Enterprise. Core is one project with 0.5–2 GB of storage and 5 admins; Enterprise is unlimited projects. | Running a diligence process — the room, its phases, and the counterparties in it are the core objects. |
| Dynamic per-viewer watermarking | Yes, on every tier — dynamic customizable watermarks carrying viewer name, email, company, IP address, and timestamp. Feature parity, plainly. | Every plan, from $49/mo. Viewer name, email, and timestamp burned into every page of view-only PDFs, server-side. |
| Staged disclosure | 8 hierarchical permission levels per file or folder — from no access through fence view to original download — set and updated by admins as the deal progresses. | 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 mature human workflow: question submitters, coordinators, drafters, experts, and answer approvers, with category-based routing and an FAQ builder. "AI chat with document" is a separate feature, gated to the Premier tier and above. | Investors ask the data room directly; the AI answers with citations from the documents their phase allows, any hour — on every plan. |
| Per-visitor analytics | Strong: activity dashboard, per-user activity log with view durations, an engagement matrix, and a full attributed audit trail. | Per-investor engagement across the whole room — sessions, documents viewed and downloaded, questions asked — on every plan. |
| Pricing model | Quote-based — the pricing page shows tier structure but no prices ("Get price"). Core is capped at 0.5–2 GB storage and 5 admins; charges for additional data are "stated in the contract", not published. | Flat $49 / $149 / $349 per month, published, capacity-tiered, every capability in every plan. |
In Ideals, staged disclosure is admin craft: eight permission levels an admin sets per file or group, then re-sets as the deal advances — powerful, and manual. In our model the phase is a property of the document and the investor, and the server filters everything by it on every request: advancing an investor to phase two is one change, not a permissions pass. 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 nobody can infer that undisclosed material is waiting. The enforcement detail — including what we have not built, like formal certifications — 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 required.