Dewey vs WRDS
Overview
Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) has been providing academic researchers with data for years and most in the space are familiar with their model. It stands out as a well established institution with top financial datasets. While there are many similarities between the WRDS and Dewey missions and models there are some distinct differences we wanted to call out:
Dewey vs WRDS
| WRDS | Dewey Data | |
|---|---|---|
| Affiliation | University of Pennsylvania | Independent, University agnostic |
| Founded | 1993 | 2022 |
| Primary focus | Finance and accounting datasets | Commercial, alternative, and socioeconomic datatsets |
| Data | ~55 data vendors, minimal change | ~30 data vendors, expanding catalog |
| Pricing | Institutional subscription at the data provider level(tiered, negotiated) | Transparent subscription at the platform level (institution or research team) |
| Onboarding time for vendors | 6-9 months, legacy processes | 1 week or less, modern infrastructure |
| Access model | Web + SAS + FTP, institutional account provisioning | Single portal for all datasets, previews, samples, search |
| Tech stack | Legacy (e.g., SAS), limited AI or visualization support | Modern infrastructure, adding AI search and sandbox environments soon |
| Support | Training videos, academic representatives | Dedicated customer success including team onboarding, live chat, usage reports, public Q&A |
| Strength | Regulatory-grade financial data and compliance focus, HIPAA/GDPR-ready | Diverse curated commercial datasets with a modern UX |
| Limitation | Rigid tech, slow onboarding, inconsistent transparency | No public datasets, less useful for core finance-only use cases |
Key points of differentiation
Dewey is the modern, scalable way for universities to access diverse data, move faster, and support research without barriers.
- Straightforward licensing: One license unlocks multiple datasets for research teams or the entire institution, eliminating fragmented, vendor-by-vendor negotiations.
- Fast onboarding and discovery: Researchers can preview and sample datasets instantly using a university email, moving from exploration to analysis without delays.
- Modern platform, evolving catalog: Dewey continually adds new datasets that are automatically included in subscriptions, so researchers and libraries stay ahead without additional procurement cycles.
- Academic research-focused features: Ready-to-use citation snippets (DOIs) and collaborative dataset sharing with role-based team controls streamline publication and lab workflows.
- Hands-on support: Dewey’s team provides direct onboarding, dataset guidance, and responsive human support to help researchers and libraries move quickly and confidently.
- Beyond finance data: Dewey offers place, company, and consumer datasets for social science research. Popular with marketing, business, geography, GIS, real estate departments, and more
- Speed and agility: As an independent, focused startup, Dewey rapidly adds academic-friendly features and datasets to unblock researchers and support evolving needs, all built on a modern tech stack.
This is exactly what the non-finance field requires - this is great!
Updated 6 days ago