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Firmex Alternative

Firmex draws your charts. Sifrsys measures every cell it draws.

Firmex suits a team sharing chart-heavy workbooks that need to look right in a browser. Sifrsys suits a team whose workbooks carry Arabic text, Hijri dates, and numbers a buyer will check against a source cell. Both claims below are testable, and the Firmex ones cite Firmex.

The spreadsheet question

Two viewers, two different bets.

Firmex bet on coverage. Its published viewer renders data, charts, and images, opens Excel files up to 50GB, moves between worksheet tabs, and lets a viewer inspect formulas unless the uploader hid them as a file protection. That is a wide surface and it works.

Sifrsys bet on accuracy and on citation. It renders a narrower set of things and proves how closely it renders them. The test suite compares output against LibreOffice ground truth in real Chromium across four producer dialects, and a committed baseline fails the build if a number moves.

  • Display strings100%
  • Font styles100%
  • Alignment100%
  • Merged cells100%
  • KSA number formats100%
  • Fills99.7%
Sifrsys spreadsheet fidelity against LibreOffice ground truth in real Chromium, four producer dialects. Test suite in tests/fidelity/ with a committed baseline.

The fills row is why the rest is worth believing. A benchmark that reports 100% on everything has usually stopped measuring. Fills scored 99.7% on the 4 August 2026 run, 877 of 880 cells, against a committed 99.3% floor where a regression breaks the build.

Arabic, Hijri dates, and the dollar sign bug

Umm al-Qura Hijri dates and Arabic-Indic digits render correctly in Sifrsys where LibreOffice, the ssf library, and every competitor put through that suite render them wrong. The specific failure is worth naming: the [$-2060401] number format used to render a US dollar sign against Arabic-Indic digits. That is fixed. If your workbooks come out of a Gulf finance team, this is the row that decides the evaluation, and it is not a row most vendors have ever been asked about.

Sifrsys vs Firmex

Feature by feature, with the source for every Firmex row.

Firmex rows read from firmex.com on 4 August 2026. Where their documentation is silent, the row says so.

Sifrsys compared with Firmex, August 2026. Firmex rows sourced to firmex.com.
CriterionFirmexSifrsys
Charts in the Excel viewerRendered, with imagesNot yet
Formula inspectionYes, unless the uploader hid themValues, not formula editing
Spreadsheet file ceiling50GB, larger files download5M cells, then a raster fallback
Measured render fidelityNot published100% on five dimensions, 99.7% fills against a 99.3% floor
Hijri and Arabic-Indic digitsNot addressed in the docs checkedUmm al-Qura, verified in tests/fidelity/
AI answers with cell citationsNot publishedRevenue!B14:F34, clickable
WatermarkingTiled in the viewer and on downloadsBurned into the page bitmap
Pricing modelOne-time per project, or annual subscriptionFlat monthly plan
Published pricesNone. Quote form$0 / $399 / $999 / custom
OwnershipDatasite business unit since July 2021Independent
Sifrsys compared with Firmex, August 2026. Firmex rows sourced to firmex.com.
Streaming
Purpose-built OOXML parser. The maintained libraries either drop cell styles in streaming mode or hold the whole workbook in memory to keep them.
infrastructure/hetzner/worker/src/xlsx-model/
11.7%
Watermark ink left in the worst of 64 sampled 25% crops
All four fields legible. Survives JPEG q50 and a 50% downscale.
99.7%
Fills matched on the 4 August 2026 run, 877 of 880 cells
Against a committed 99.3% floor in tests/fidelity/baseline.json that fails the build on regression

The honest part

Choose Firmex instead if any of these is true.

Pricing model

One-time fee, annual fee, or a number on a page.

Firmex publishes its pricing structure without publishing prices. The Single Project Data Room is a one-time fee, priced on data requirements and project length, with access for a fixed time frame. The subscription is an annual fee, priced on data volume over the year, covering unlimited projects. Both end at a quote form.

The structure is clear and the number is not, which makes budgeting a negotiation. Sifrsys puts the numbers on the pricing page: free Starter, Teams at $399 per month, Pro at $999 per month, custom Enterprise, no per-page fees, and a 14-day trial that takes no credit card. If a published number is the thing you care about most, SecureDocs publishes one too and it is lower than ours. That comparison says so.

Switching

What moving off Firmex involves.

If you hold a single-project room, wait for it to close and start the next one elsewhere. If you hold a subscription, the switch is an export of the folder tree and originals, an upload, and a rebuild of the permission map. Files are parsed and indexed on arrival, and participants join by magic link with no account to create. Test your heaviest workbook first, before anything else, because the chart gap above is the one thing that will not survive the move. For the first ten paying companies Sifrsys does the migration and permission mapping at no charge. The same pattern applies moving from Intralinks.

Sources

Every competitor fact on this page, with its URL.

Read from the vendor's own pricing page or documentation on the date shown. Vendors change these pages. Check the date before you rely on a row.

2026-08-04Firmex pricing models: single project one-time fee, and subscription annual fee: https://www.firmex.com/pricing/
2026-08-04Firmex Excel viewer: chart and image rendering, 50GB file ceiling, formula inspection: https://www.firmex.com/resources/news/firmex-excel-viewer/
2026-08-04Datasite announcing its acquisition of Firmex, dated 26 July 2021: https://www.firmex.com/resources/news/datasite-announces-acquisition-of-toronto-based-firmex/

Firmex alternative FAQ

Questions buyers ask when comparing these two.

Yes. Firmex publishes that its Excel viewer offers accurate rendering of data, charts, and images, handles files up to 50GB, lets viewers move between worksheet tabs, and allows formula inspection unless the uploader hid formulas as an Excel file protection. The Sifrsys spreadsheet viewer does not render charts or pivot tables yet. If your data room is mostly chart-heavy models, Firmex is the better viewer today.
Firmex does not publish prices. Its pricing page describes two models: a Single Project Data Room billed as a one-time fee, priced on data requirements and project length, and a Data Room by Subscription billed as an annual fee, priced on data volume over a year. Both route to a quote form. Sifrsys publishes flat plans: free Starter, Teams at $399 per month, Pro at $999 per month, and custom Enterprise, with no per-page fees.
No. Datasite announced its acquisition of Toronto-based Firmex on 26 July 2021, and the announcement is still published on the Firmex site. Firmex operates as a strategic business unit inside Datasite with its own management team. Sifrsys is independent. That matters when a buyer shortlists Firmex, Datasite, and Ansarada expecting three competing quotes.
Rendering accuracy against LibreOffice ground truth in real Chromium, across four producer dialects. Display strings, font styles, alignment, merged cells, and KSA number formats match at 100%; fills scored 99.7% on the 4 August 2026 run, 877 of 880 cells, against a committed 99.3% floor. The test suite lives in tests/fidelity/ with a committed baseline that fails the build on regression. Umm al-Qura Hijri dates and Arabic-Indic digits render correctly where LibreOffice, the ssf library, and every competitor put through that suite render them wrong.

Run the test yourself

Open your worst workbook in both viewers.

Take the file with merged headers, Arabic labels, and a Hijri date column, and load it into each. The free plan takes no card, so the test costs an afternoon. The Trust Center lists what Sifrsys does not claim, charts included.

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