Ellty vs Drooms

Drooms has been running data rooms out of Germany since 2001 and is best known in European real estate, where portfolio sales and property financings generate large volumes of leases, plans and tenant files. Ellty, founded in 2020 in Australia, is a newer transaction room built around a fast interface and AI tools from day one. Both are full deal rooms rather than file sharing tools, and both include AI features. What pulls them apart is less the feature list than the setting each was built for: where the data has to live, how the room is bought, and who will be clicking through it.

Facts side by side

Prices are indicative; confirm with the provider.

How the scores split

Security is the closest pillar, two tenths apart. The overall gap of 0.6 is built mostly on ease of use and value, where Ellty leads by 2.0 and 2.1 points, with a smaller lead on deal features. The weights and the rounding rule are on the methodology page.

Where the data lives

This is the first question many European sellers ask, and it is where Drooms has its clearest answer. It lists both cloud and on-premise deployment. For a bank, insurer or public body whose internal rules forbid putting certain records on shared infrastructure, an on-premise room can be the only route to using a dedicated data room at all. Drooms also lists GDPR alignment next to ISO 27001 and SOC 2.

Ellty is a cloud service. It holds SOC 2 Infrastructure, not ISO 27001. For most private sales that is not an obstacle, but a European counterparty with a fixed vendor policy may ask for ISO/IEC 27001 by name, and Drooms meets that requirement on paper. Hosting location is not part of our records for either provider, so ask both where documents and logs are stored, and whether you can pin the room to a region.

Inside the room the controls match: two-factor login, dynamic watermarking on every page, document rights control that limits printing and downloading after a file is opened, and a full audit trail of views and downloads.

Tools for the deal itself

Both rooms cover the working core of diligence: bulk upload to build the index, per-group and per-document permissions, a structured Q&A module and AI features. The two differences cut in opposite directions.

• Drooms includes built-in redaction. In a real estate sale, rent rolls and tenant files carry names, bank details and personal data. Masking them inside the room avoids exporting, editing and re-uploading every affected file.
• Ellty includes e-signature. Side letters, NDAs and closing documents can be signed in the room where they were reviewed, without a separate signing tool and a second audit trail.

Neither lists single sign-on, a mobile app or a public API, so these are not deciding factors between the pair.

Using the room every day

Ease of use is the widest gap here: 9.8 for Ellty and 7.8 for Drooms. Drooms has a long history with property professionals and lenders who use it repeatedly, and they know its structure well. A first-time bidder or an outside accountant who opens it twice in a process may need more time. Ellty is quick to set up, and outside parties tend to find documents and raise questions without a walkthrough, which matters when the buyer pool is broad and many reviewers log in only briefly.

What each costs to evaluate and run

Ellty publishes a starting price of $149 per month and offers a 14-day free trial. A deal team can build a real folder tree, invite a few colleagues as mock bidders and check permissions before spending anything.

Drooms quotes on request and does not list a free trial, so the comparison starts with a demonstration and a written brief. Give Drooms the expected term, the number of external parties, an estimate of data volume and your archive needs, and ask how a room that overruns its planned close is billed. Our pricing guide shows how monthly and quoted models compare over a full process.

Support

Ellty scores 9.2 for support and Drooms 8.9. The gap is small and support carries 10% of the rating. More useful than the score is a direct question to each vendor: which hours are covered in the time zones of your main bidders, and who answers when a buyer is locked out on a Sunday before a bid deadline.

Which room for which process

Choose Ellty when the room should open quickly for a broad set of reviewers, the budget needs a published price, signatures should happen in the same platform, and ISO 27001 is not a fixed counterparty demand.

Choose Drooms when policy requires on-premise hosting or an ISO 27001 supplier, personal data in tenant or employee files must be redacted inside the room, and your team already knows its structure from earlier property deals.

Pick Ellty or Drooms: the deciding conditions

Pick Ellty if

1. 1The budget should start from a published $149 a month
2. 2You want a 14-day free trial before any contract
3. 3NDAs or closing papers should be signed inside the room
4. 4Many reviewers will log in only a few times

Pick Drooms if

1. 1Policy requires an on-premise deployment option
2. 2A counterparty asks for ISO 27001 by name
3. 3Tenant or employee data must be redacted in the room
4. 4Your team runs repeat property deals on the same platform

Look elsewhere if you need single sign-on, a native mobile app or a public API. Neither lists them in our records.

dataroomsproviders.com

Four deals, four outcomes

A single office building sold to private investors

One asset, a short buyer list, a modest data set of leases, surveys and service charge records. Ellty suits this scale: the room can be built in a working session, each buyer group gets its own Q&A thread, and the published price lets the seller fix the data room cost in the sale budget on day one. If rent rolls contain tenant names, the seller redacts before upload.

A pan-European residential portfolio with thousands of tenancies

Hundreds of properties across several EU countries, bidders from three continents, and a compliance team focused on GDPR. Drooms fits this pattern: its real estate track record, GDPR alignment and built-in redaction address the questions the seller’s data protection officer will ask, and the volume of tenant files makes in-room redaction a real time saving.

A German insurer selling a subsidiary under strict IT policy

The insurer’s rules do not allow deal documents on shared cloud infrastructure. Drooms is one of few dedicated rooms in our records that list an on-premise option, which may settle the decision before features are compared. Plan for the extra setup and the internal IT time that hosting the room yourself involves.

A technology company raising a growth round

A lead investor and several co-investors, a fast timetable and a founder team doing the admin. Ellty fits better here. The interface keeps investor questions moving, the AI tools help draft consistent answers to repeated questions, and subscription documents can be signed in the room. A quote cycle with no free trial is harder to fit into a fundraising calendar.

Questions to put to both vendors

Feature lists answer half the security review. The rest comes from documents and direct answers:

• Ellty: request the SOC 2 Infrastructure report and read the scope section. The AICPA’s SOC 2 overview describes what the criteria cover.
• Drooms: request the ISO 27001 certificate and its scope statement, and, if you plan to host on-premise, a clear split of which security duties move to your own IT team.
• Both: where documents and logs are stored, how fast a withdrawn bidder loses access, how long the archive is kept after close, and how deletion is confirmed under the GDPR where it applies.

Setting up and getting help

Ellty’s setup is short enough that the sell side can upload, index, form groups and invite buyers in one sitting. Drooms is best opened with an onboarding session for the people who will administer it, particularly if they are new to the platform; teams that use it across several property deals build that knowledge once and reuse it.

Moving a room between them

Switching platforms mid-process rarely pays: the Q&A history, bookmarks and audit trail all sit in one place. Between deals it is straightforward. Ask the outgoing provider for a full archive of documents, Q&A and activity logs, keep the index numbering identical, and rebuild permission groups from a written access matrix. If you move from Drooms to Ellty, plan where redaction will happen before files are uploaded; if you move the other way, plan how signatures will be collected outside the room.

See the full profiles of Ellty and Drooms, the real estate shortlist, and the Germany guide for local privacy and transfer context. For another Drooms pairing, read Ansarada vs Drooms.