Citrix ShareFile review

What ShareFile is

Citrix ShareFile, founded in the United States in 2005, is a secure file exchange and client portal rather than a purpose-built deal room. Its natural home is the professional practice: an accountant collecting year-end records, a solicitor sending a draft lease for comment, a wealth manager exchanging statements. It scores 8.2 overall in our table, with high marks for security and ease of use and lower marks for deal tools, support and value.

That profile matters. A UK firm that already uses ShareFile for client work will be tempted to use it for the next sale or refinancing too, and sometimes that is the right call. The question is which transactions it can carry and which ones it cannot.

The professional firm use case

For an accountancy practice or a law firm, the strength of ShareFile is that clients get used to it. They know how to log in, where to upload and how to sign. Our data lists e-signature, single sign-on, two-factor login, a mobile app, an API, bulk upload, dynamic watermarks, document rights control and a full audit trail. That is a broad set for a published entry price, and SSO in particular is unusual at this level: many rooms with published pricing in our line-up do not offer it.

Document rights control is the feature that lifts it above plain file sharing. It lets the owner limit what a recipient can do with a file and withdraw access later, which matters when a draft set of accounts or a valuation goes to a party who may not stay involved.

Where it fits in a deal

ShareFile works well where the counterparty is known and the flow of documents is two-way and steady. Good examples are a refinancing with one lender, a shareholder buying out a co-founder, an SEIS or EIS raise with a small group of investors, or a practice acting for the buyer and collecting diligence material from its own client.

It is a weaker fit for a competitive business sale. Without a structured Q&A module, enquiries from several bidders arrive by email, and the seller’s adviser has to build the questions log by hand. Without redaction, any version of an employee list, customer schedule or pricing file that should be anonymised has to be prepared outside the platform before upload. Neither is impossible, but both add time at the point in a process when time is shortest.

UK GDPR and security credentials

ShareFile lists SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA in its credentials. For a UK controller that is a solid starting point for a supplier assessment, but it does not answer the question the ICO cares about: where personal data in the room is stored, who the sub-processors are and what transfer mechanism applies if data leaves the UK. We have not confirmed ShareFile’s hosting regions, so ask for them, along with the data processing terms, before you upload staff or customer records. Our guide to UK GDPR in a due diligence data room sets out the questions in order.

Two-factor login and SSO help on the access side. If your firm already uses a single identity provider for staff, connecting ShareFile to it means leavers lose access to deal files on the same day they lose access to email.

Pricing in sterling

The published entry price of $55/mo works out at approx. £41 at the rate we use. Treat that as indicative: confirm which plan the price applies to, how many internal users it covers and whether VAT is added. A firm that already pays for ShareFile may be able to run a small transaction at no extra cost, which is its main financial argument. Our data room costs page compares flat, per-user and quoted pricing in pounds.

How it compares

Ellty publishes pricing from $149/mo (approx. £112) and adds structured Q&A and AI tools to e-signature and document rights control. SecureDocs is another published-price option with e-signature, at a higher entry point.

For the full picture across every provider we score, see our ranking of UK data rooms.