Most comparison pages in this category are easy to write because the other side hides its price, gates a trial behind a sales call and will not say where your documents live. Papermark does none of that. It publishes a rate card, runs a permanent free plan, ships page-by-page analytics on every tier and puts its source code on GitHub. It is the closest thing we have to an analogue rather than a rival, which makes this the hardest table on our site and the one most worth reading. If you want the wider field first, our roundup of the best virtual data room providers in the UK sets the enterprise incumbents in context.
So the honest version of the question is not "which is better". It is narrower: where do your documents need to be resident, does your bill scale with your headcount, and which end of the deal do you want the software to help with. On the first two, we think a UK buyer usually lands with us. On several other things, listed plainly below, Papermark is ahead and we say so. Everything we attribute to them is quoted from their own published materials and dated, because a comparison page that paraphrases a competitor into a weaker claim is not a comparison, it is a liability.
What Papermark is genuinely strong at
Fair credit, and a lot of it. Per vendor materials accessed 7 September 2026, Papermark's homepage states it is "TRUSTED BY 70,000+ GLOBAL COMPANIES", which is more adoption than we have and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Its security page states, per vendor materials, "Papermark has achieved SOC 2 Type II certification, demonstrating our commitment to the highest standards of security, availability, and confidentiality", and separately that "Papermark is certified against ISO/IEC 27001, the international standard for information security management". We hold no first-party certification of any kind, so if a buyer's security questionnaire wants a certificate in the supplier's own name, that requirement points at Papermark and away from us. Their own compliance answer, per vendor materials, splits the verbs carefully and we have kept the split: "Papermark is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, and aligns with GDPR and CCPA requirements".
On product, three things stand out. Their file structure is real: the rate card lists "Creating folders" from the Pro tier and "Unlimited folder levels" from Business, alongside "Granular file level permissions" and "Data Room groups" on the Data Rooms tier, per vendor materials. We have no equivalent, and the section below on our gaps says so without softening it. Their developer surface is substantial: their developer page states, per vendor materials, that you can "Build on top of Papermark with a versioned REST API, the papermark CLI on npm, and an MCP server with 43 tools", and their MCP documentation states that server "exposes 43 tools that wrap the full Papermark API (datarooms, documents, links, folders, visitors, analytics) so an agent can build and run a dataroom, share documents, and read view analytics on your behalf". And it is open source in a way you can inspect: the repository is public, the core carries an AGPLv3 licence, and their security page states, per vendor materials, that "Papermark is available as SaaS and open source, meaning our code is publicly reviewable by the community and security researchers".
An honest comparison
Papermark publishes its prices in euros, and the headline figures on its pricing page are the annual rate, which its own blog confirms for the two tiers where a monthly rate is also published. Where a Papermark figure was only readable behind JavaScript or only appeared on a blog post rather than the rate card, the cell says so rather than guessing. Verify anything commercially important with Papermark directly.
| What matters | 99 Data Rooms | Papermark |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | Yes, flat GBP: Pro £19/mo, Business £49/mo, Enterprise £99.99/mo | Yes, EUR: Pro €24, Business €59, Data Rooms €99 a month, headline figures billed annually |
| Charging model | Flat per plan. No per-user fees at any tier | Flat per plan up to an included headcount, then per seat: "€20/m per additional team member" on Business, "€33/m per additional team member" on Data Rooms |
| Seats included | Unlimited on an Enterprise company account; billing scales on storage and AI capacity, never headcount | "1 team member included" on Free and Pro, "3 team members included" on Business and Data Rooms |
| Free tier | Yes, 3 rooms, 25 active links, forever, no card | Yes, €0, "1 team member included", "50 links", "50 documents", "Unlimited visitors", "No credit card required" |
| Data residency | Primary data resident in the UK (London); encrypted backups in an EU region | "Out of the box, Papermark is hosted in Europe by default", Frankfurt for EU customers; region selection is "via Enterprise plan". No UK region published on its site, 7 Sep 2026 |
| Certifications | None first-party. SOC 2 and ISO are held by our infrastructure providers, Supabase and Cloudflare | Papermark states SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001 certification, per vendor materials |
| Folders and file structure | No folder interface. One organised room, documents in the order you set, member roles and per-document scopes | "Creating folders" from Pro, "Unlimited folder levels" from Business, "Granular file level permissions" on Data Rooms |
| In-platform redaction | No | AI redaction, on the Premium tier per its blog, not on the published rate card |
| NDA acceptance gate | Yes, on Business (£49/mo), with acceptance receipts | "NDA agreements" on the Data Rooms tier (€99/mo) |
| Per-viewer watermarking | Yes, on Business (£49/mo) | "Dynamic watermark" on the Data Rooms tier (€99/mo) |
| E-signature | Built in from Pro, 5 a month, unlimited from Business, with an audit certificate | Electronic signature for signing the NDA at the gate. We found no general-purpose e-signature product on its site, 7 Sep 2026, verify with Papermark |
| AI legal drafting | Yes, from Pro, from 17 vetted England and Wales templates | Not published on its site, 7 Sep 2026. Its published AI targets redaction and a document assistant |
| Q&A workflow | Yes, on Business | "Q&A module with permissions", on the Data Rooms Plus tier per its blog (€249/mo) |
| Public MCP server | Yes, read-only, no account, at mcp.99datarooms.com/mcp | Yes, at mcp.papermark.com/mcp, "43 tools that wrap the full Papermark API" |
| Self-hosting | No | Yes, open source. Its own FAQ states self-hosting is "only for personal needs" and that "Advanced features are under enterprise licence" |
| Track record | Newer platform, shorter track record | Public repository created May 2023; states "TRUSTED BY 70,000+ GLOBAL COMPANIES" |
The per-user question, which is the one that moves money
Both companies publish a rate card, so the interesting difference is not transparency, it is shape. Ours is flat per plan with no per-user fees anywhere: Pro is £19 a month, Business is £49, Enterprise is £99.99, annual billing is ten times the monthly price, and an Enterprise company account carries unlimited seats because our billing scales on storage and AI drafting capacity rather than on headcount. Recipients and viewers never pay and never need an account. Adding the fifth colleague, or the fifteenth, changes nothing on the invoice. Full detail is on the pricing page.
Papermark's published model includes a headcount and charges above it. Per vendor materials, the Free and Pro tiers state "1 team member included", Business and Data Rooms state "3 team members included", and the rate card adds "€20/m per additional team member" on Business and "€33/m per additional team member" on Data Rooms. Viewers are not seats on either side: their pricing page states "Unlimited visitors", which is the same position we take. We are not going to do arithmetic on your behalf, because your headcount is not ours to guess: read their published per-seat rate, count the colleagues who would need an account, and compare that with a flat figure that does not move. It is also fair to record that their ladder ends somewhere different. Per their own blog rather than their rate card, the top published tier is "Data Rooms Unlimited" at €999 a month with "unlimited team members with no per-seat charge", so at sufficient scale the per-seat element goes away on their side too.
Where Papermark is better, plainly
Four things, and none of them are close. Certifications. Papermark states SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001 certification; we hold neither, and the SOC 2 and ISO certifications behind our stack belong to Supabase and Cloudflare rather than to us. If your buyer needs a certificate with the supplier's name on it, that is a real reason to choose them, and our trust page says the same thing in our own words. File structure. They ship folders, unlimited folder levels from Business and granular file-level permissions; we do not have a folder interface at all. Redaction. They publish AI redaction on their Premium tier; we have no redaction capability, so a document that needs sections blacked out has to be redacted before it is uploaded to us. Self-hosting. Their code is public and can be run on your own infrastructure, which is an option we simply do not offer, and for a team whose data protection stance is sovereignty over residency that can be the deciding fact.
Two honest qualifications on that last point, both drawn from their own materials rather than from us. Their security FAQ states that "As an open source solution, Papermark can be self-hosted but only for personal needs" and that "Advanced features are under enterprise licence". And the repository's licence file is a dual licence: the core is offered under AGPLv3, while the enterprise directory carries a separate commercial licence whose terms state the software "may only be used in production" under an agreed commercial subscription. Open source here means an inspectable core with a proprietary enterprise edition, which is a normal and reasonable way to build a company. It is worth knowing before self-hosting becomes a line in a procurement paper.
Where 99 Data Rooms wins
Residency is the first and, for a UK buyer, usually the decisive one. Papermark's security page states, per vendor materials, "Out of the box, Papermark is hosted in Europe by default", with "GDPR-compliant hosting in eu-central-1 (Frankfurt) for European customers requiring data residency", a US region in us-east-1, and region selection offered "via Enterprise plan". We found no UK hosting region published anywhere on its site as of 7 September 2026, which is an observation about its published materials rather than a statement that one cannot be arranged. Ask them. 99 Data Rooms is UK-built and hosted in London, with primary data resident in the UK and encrypted backups in an EU region, AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2 or higher in transit and a DPA on request; the detail is on our security page, and the data residency entry explains why the backups half of that sentence matters as much as the primary half.
The second is the shape of the bill, covered above: flat GBP per plan, no per-user fees, unlimited seats on a company account. The third is journey length, and it is the difference that surprises people. One document travels the whole way with us without leaving the platform. Draft an England and Wales agreement in the AI legal drafter from 17 vetted templates, which assembles vetted clauses rather than inventing legal wording and is a starting point, not legal advice. Gather documents into a room and gate it: an email-required link on free, verified email with a one-time passcode from Pro, and on Business NDA acceptance before a single page is visible, receipts included. Share a tracked, revocable link and read page-by-page analytics from Pro. On Business each viewer's copy carries a per-viewer watermark. Then sign it, built in from Pro at five a month and unlimited from Business, with an audit certificate recording signer IP, intent-to-sign consent, timestamps and a SHA-256 fingerprint. Electronic signatures are admissible for most commercial documents in England and Wales, with deeds, wills, land transfers and lasting powers of attorney carrying extra requirements (see Sources). This is general information, not legal advice.
The fourth is jurisdiction, and it is quieter than the others. The drafting library is England and Wales wording, the company lookups run against Companies House, and the price is in the currency your bank account is in. None of that is a technical advantage. It is just less translation work for a UK team.
The API and MCP question
This one deserves care, because both companies make claims here and the reader should be able to check them rather than take a side. Papermark states, on its own blog and per vendor materials accessed 7 September 2026: "Papermark is also the only secure data room with a fully transparent, public API and MCP server, so engineering teams and AI agents can create and run secure data rooms programmatically, something no enterprise VDR on this list offers". That is their wording, limiter included, and it is worth reading the limiter carefully rather than stripping it.
Here is ours, stated as fact so you can test it yourself. 99 Data Rooms runs a public, read-only Model Context Protocol server at mcp.99datarooms.com/mcp. It needs no account and no connection, it touches no customer data, and it answers questions about the product from the source, so you can point your own AI assistant at this page's claims and interrogate them. Send it an MCP initialize request and it will hand you back a handshake naming the server. Separately, and on Business and Enterprise plans only, an AI assistant can be connected to your own rooms: access is off when a room is created, read-only by default, the write scope is a separate explicit consent, every call is logged where the room owner can read it, an organisation can switch it off for the whole company, and you can revoke the connection at any time. The AI assistants page lists the exact tool set, and the MCP page has the endpoint.
Set the two side by side and the difference is scope rather than existence. Papermark's server, per their documentation, exposes 43 tools that drive the product: creating data rooms, uploading documents, minting links and reading analytics. Ours is deliberately two separate, narrower things: a public server that answers questions about the product with no account at all, and an authenticated connection into your own rooms that is read-only until you say otherwise. If what you want is to build data rooms programmatically from an agent, theirs is the broader surface today and you should say so in your own evaluation. If what you want is to check a vendor's marketing claims without signing up for anything, ours is the one you can query this minute.
Where we are behind, plainly
Beyond the four in the section above, here is the rest of the list, because a comparison that only concedes what is comfortable is not worth reading. We are newer and smaller: Papermark's public repository dates to May 2023 and its homepage claims tens of thousands of companies, while our track record is shorter and we publish no equivalent adoption figure. We have no folder interface, and describing what we have honestly means saying it plainly: one organised room, documents in the order you set them, and member roles with per-document scopes, which suits a room a reviewer reads from top to bottom and does not suit a sprawling multi-workstream index. We have no in-platform redaction. We hold no first-party certifications. We do not offer self-hosting or a public write API, so there is no version of us you can run on your own infrastructure. E-signature on Pro is capped at five a month. And our storage ceiling is a published number rather than the "Unlimited encrypted storage" their Data Rooms tier advertises. If any of those is your gating requirement, we would rather you knew now than after a migration.
The honest recommendation
Choose Papermark if you want folders and granular file-level permissions, if you need in-platform redaction, if you want to read or self-host the code, if a first-party certificate is a hard procurement requirement, or if you want to build and run data rooms programmatically from an agent today. Those are real, checkable reasons and we would rather you acted on them than on a table. Choose 99 Data Rooms if your documents need to be resident in the UK, if you want a flat price in pounds with no per-user fees as the team grows, or if you want gating, tracking and watermarking alongside drafting and signature from Pro, all in one login rather than a room plus a signing tool plus a drafting tool. For the neighbouring comparisons, our DocSend page covers the tracker end of this category and our Drooms page covers the other European option with published pricing and a permanent free tier.
One last thing on checking us rather than believing us, since this is exactly the page a reader should be sceptical of. Every product claim we make about ourselves is pinned by automated tests that run in continuous integration before anything merges, so a price or an allowance that changes in the product changes here or the build fails. Every Papermark claim above is quoted verbatim from a URL in the Sources list with the date it was read. And if you would rather ask than read, point your own AI assistant at our public MCP server and make it answer from source.
Try the UK-hosted alternative free
You can compare the two on your own documents for nothing. Start for free: three rooms, twenty-five active links, forever, no card, with an email-required gate and basic totals analytics from the moment you open one. Verified email with a one-time passcode, page-by-page analytics and drafting start on Pro at £19 a month, and NDA gating and watermarking on Business at £49. Load a real pack into a room, share it, and see whether the whole journey in one place is worth more to you than folders and a self-hosted install. If it is not, Papermark is a good product and you should use it.
Sources
- Papermark tier names, prices, included team members, per-seat rates and free-plan limits: Papermark pricing, https://www.papermark.com/pricing (fetched 7 September 2026). Figures render in EUR by default and the headline prices are the annual rate.
- Papermark monthly versus annual rates for the Pro and Business tiers, and the wider tier ladder including Data Rooms Plus and Data Rooms Unlimited: Papermark blog, https://www.papermark.com/blog/open-source-free-data-room-software and https://www.papermark.com/blog/best-virtual-data-rooms-for-due-diligence (both fetched 7 September 2026). These tiers appear in blog prose rather than on the rate card.
- Papermark hosting regions, certification statements, encryption, open-source framing and the self-hosting FAQ: Papermark security, https://www.papermark.com/security (fetched 7 September 2026). That page states it was last updated February 2026.
- Papermark data room features, including NDA acceptance and dynamic watermarking: https://www.papermark.com/data-room (fetched 7 September 2026).
- Papermark REST API, CLI and MCP server, including the 43-tool figure: https://www.papermark.com/dev, https://www.papermark.com/docs/mcp and https://www.papermark.com/agents (all fetched 7 September 2026).
- Papermark's "only secure data room with a fully transparent, public API and MCP server" claim, quoted verbatim above with its limiter: https://www.papermark.com/blog/best-virtual-data-rooms (fetched 7 September 2026).
- Papermark adoption claim ("TRUSTED BY 70,000+ GLOBAL COMPANIES"): Papermark homepage, https://www.papermark.com/ (fetched 7 September 2026).
- Papermark source repository, licence file and creation date: https://github.com/papermark/papermark (fetched 7 September 2026). The LICENSE file offers the core under AGPLv3 with a separate commercial licence covering the enterprise directory.
- 99 Data Rooms public read-only MCP server: https://mcp.99datarooms.com/mcp, re-verified 7 September 2026 (an MCP initialize request returns a handshake naming the server).
- Electronic signature admissibility in England and Wales: Law Commission, Electronic execution of documents (2019), https://lawcom.gov.uk/project/electronic-execution-of-documents/ ; HM Land Registry Practice Guide 82, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electronic-signatures-accepted-by-hm-land-registry-pg82
Not on the evidence of its own site. Papermark's security page states that it is hosted in Europe by default, names Frankfurt for EU customers and a US region, and offers region selection via its Enterprise plan. We found no UK hosting region published there as of 7 September 2026, which is an observation about its published materials rather than a statement that one cannot be arranged, so ask Papermark. 99 Data Rooms hosts in London, with primary data resident in the UK and encrypted backups in an EU region.
Papermark publishes its prices, which is more than most of this category does. Per its pricing page on 7 September 2026 the tiers are Free at €0, Pro at €24, Business at €59 and Data Rooms at €99 a month, with the headline figures billed annually. Business and Data Rooms include three team members and charge €20 and €33 a month respectively for each additional one. 99 Data Rooms is flat GBP with no per-user fees: Pro £19, Business £49 and Enterprise £99.99 a month, for the whole team.
No. There are no per-user fees on any 99 Data Rooms plan. Every tier is one flat price for the whole team, an Enterprise company account carries unlimited seats, and billing scales on storage and AI drafting capacity rather than headcount. Recipients and viewers never pay and never need an account. Papermark's published model includes one to three team members depending on tier and charges a stated monthly rate per additional member above that.
No, and we will not imply otherwise. 99 Data Rooms holds no first-party certification. The SOC 2 and ISO certifications behind our stack are held by our infrastructure providers, Supabase and Cloudflare, and we run on their audited platforms without claiming their audits as our own. Papermark states that it holds both, per its own security page, which is a genuine advantage if a certificate in the supplier's own name is your gating requirement.
No. There is no folder interface in 99 Data Rooms. What exists is one organised room per audience, documents shown in the order you set rather than a folder tree, and member roles with per-document scopes, which works well for a pack a reviewer reads through and less well for a sprawling multi-workstream index. Papermark publishes folder creation from its Pro tier and unlimited folder levels from Business, so if file structure is central to your process that is a real reason to choose them.
Yes, two distinct things. A public read-only MCP server at mcp.99datarooms.com/mcp answers questions about the product with no account and no connection, and touches no customer data, so you can point an AI assistant at it and check what this page says. Separately, on Business and Enterprise plans, an assistant can be connected to your own rooms: off when a room is created, read-only by default, fully logged, revocable at any time and vetoable by an organisation. Papermark also publishes an MCP server, with a broader tool set aimed at driving the product programmatically.
Comparison details are checked against public vendor pages at the date shown in the article and may have changed since. Names and trademarks belong to their owners.