iDeals Alternative
iDeals suits a deal team that needs fine-grained Excel permissions and a support desk in fifteen languages. Sifrsys suits a team that wants AI answers cited to an exact cell, on every plan, at a price published on the website. This page sources every iDeals fact to their own documentation and gives the date it was read.
What actually differs
Both products encrypt at rest, watermark documents, log access, and run Q&A workflows. Comparing those is a waste of an evaluation. The rows that move a decision are Excel permission granularity, where the AI permission filter runs, and whether you can read the price without a sales call.
Any data room that adds AI has to answer one question: what stops the assistant quoting a document the person asking is not cleared to open. There are three places to put that check, and they are not equivalent.
The model is free to ignore it, and an attacker can argue with it.
Chunks are in memory before the check runs. One bug is a disclosure.
tenant_id and participant_can_access_document run in the WHERE clause. Restricted rows are never fetched.
The exclusion is structural rather than empirical, and worth saying so plainly: CI reads the deployed function out of pg_proc.prosrc and fails the build if either predicate is missing, and a denial suite calls it from the published anonymous key and counts only SQLSTATE 42501 as a pass. What Sifrsys has measured is the failure that prompted the lockdown, when an unrelated signed-in user retrieved 30 chunks across 13 documents of verbatim deal text before July 2026. iDeals does not publish where its retrieval filter runs, so treat the row as unknown rather than absent and ask them during your evaluation.
Sifrsys vs iDeals
Read from the iDeals pricing page and help centre on 4 August 2026. Where their documentation is silent, this table says so instead of guessing.
| Criterion | iDeals | Sifrsys |
|---|---|---|
| AI document chat | Premier and Enterprise | Every plan, free tier included |
| Answer citations | Not published | Exact page, or Revenue!B14:F34 |
| AI permission enforcement | Not published | Inside the SQL query |
| Excel formula control | Formulas on or off, View and Encrypted | None |
| Permission levels | Eight, No Access through Manage | Five, including fence view |
| Watermarking | Fence, view, encrypted, PDF levels | Burned into the page bitmap |
| Revocable downloads | Yes, Encrypted level | No |
| Pricing model | Storage tiers, quoted by sales | Flat monthly plan |
| Published prices | None | $0 / $399 / $999 / custom |
| Certification | GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA stated | None held |
The watermark number is the one worth understanding. Browser watermarks are overlay elements. Delete the element in DevTools and the mark is gone. Sifrsys composites participant name, email, IP, and timestamp into the page bitmap on the server, tiled, before the image is encoded. Two participants viewing the same page receive different bytes. A screenshot of a leaked page still names the leaker.
The honest part
Pricing model
iDeals does not publish public pricing. Its pricing page names Core, Premier, and Enterprise, describes Core as covering 0.5 to 2 GB of storage, and routes everything else to a quote form. The model is a storage-tiered subscription, so the invoice moves with how much you upload and which tier holds the feature you need. AI chat with document sits on Premier, not Core.
Sifrsys publishes flat plans on the pricing page: free Starter, Teams at $399 per month, Pro at $999 per month, and custom Enterprise. AI is in all of them. There are no per-page fees, the 14-day trial takes no credit card, and the price-lock commitment gives 90 days notice before any change. The same quote-versus-published split runs through Datasite and Intralinks, and it is the reason both of those pages exist.
Switching
Almost nobody migrates a live room. Data rooms are per deal, so teams switch at the start of the next one. That makes the real cost of changing vendor close to the cost of setting up any new room.
The permission map is the step that takes judgement, because eight iDeals levels do not map one-to-one onto five Sifrsys levels. Fence, view, and no-access carry over directly. Encrypted and PDF collapse into download with watermarking. For the first ten paying companies, Sifrsys does that mapping for you at no charge, alongside a lifetime price lock and a direct line to the founder.
Sources
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.
iDeals alternative FAQ
Run the test yourself
Upload a real model on the free plan, ask it something specific, and click the citation. It opens the workbook at that sheet and washes the exact cells. Five minutes settles more than a feature grid does. The Trust Center lists what Sifrsys does not yet claim, including certification.
Free to start · No per-page fees · No credit card required