DOCUMENT SHARING

Polybase vs DocSend

DocSend tells you who read your deck. Polybase does that too — page-by-page analytics, email gates and a link dashboard — with the documents living beside your team's chat, tasks and calls.
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POLYBASE
Polybase ships DocSend-style sharing as part of the workspace: create a share link, and recipients open the document in a page-by-page viewer
DOCSEND
DOCUMENT SHARING
Feature
10+
Moving from DocSend
5

DocSend is owned by Dropbox, a US company — the CLOUD Act can reach your documents regardless of storage region, and DocSend does not offer a self-hosted option today. Polybase gives you EU cloud, your own VPC, or air-gapped self-host.

Polybase
DocSend
POLYBASE

One workspace. Every surface.

Polybase ships DocSend-style sharing as part of the workspace: create a share link, and recipients open the document in a page-by-page viewer. You see who viewed which page and for how long, can require an email before viewing, and manage every link from one dashboard. The difference is that the documents themselves live in the same workspace as your team's chat, tasks, docs and calls — and the whole thing can run on EU cloud, in your VPC, or fully air-gapped on your servers.

Unified · Extensible · Yours
DOCSEND

Powerful. But alone.

DocSend, acquired by Dropbox, made link-based document sharing with viewer analytics a category of its own. It is the default tool for fundraising decks and sales collateral: send a link, see who opened it and which pages held attention. Years of polish around investor workflows show — NDA acceptance, e-signatures and virtual data rooms are mature. It is priced per user as a standalone sharing product, runs as a hosted cloud service, and the documents it tracks live apart from where your team actually works.

DOCUMENT SHARING
comparison

A practical comparison.

Review how Polybase and DocSend approach the work your team needs to do.

Feature
Polybase
DocSend
Trackable Document Share Links
Page-by-Page Document Viewer
Per-Page View Analytics
Who viewed which page, for how long
Email Gate Before Viewing
Share Link Dashboard
NDA Acceptance & E-Signature
Virtual Data Rooms
Spaces
Chat, Tasks, Docs & Calls Around Your Documents
Self-Hosted / Air-Gapped Deployment
Pricing Model
Part of the workspace
Per user, sharing only

Based on publicly available information about DocSend as of August 2026. Products evolve — plans and features may have changed; please verify details with the vendor. Spotted something out of date? Let us know at [email protected].

Migration

Moving from DocSend.

A practical sequence for planning the change, moving the useful material and introducing the new workspace.

5 steps
  1. 01

    Export Your Documents from DocSend

    Download the decks, one-pagers and PDFs you actively share from DocSend. Focus on the material that is still in circulation — live fundraising decks, current sales collateral, active proposals.

  2. 02

    Organise Them into Polybase Channels

    Upload the documents into channels that match how you work — a channel per deal, per fundraise, or per product line. The document now sits next to the conversation, tasks and calls about it.

  3. 03

    Create Share Links with the Right Settings

    For each document you share externally, create a Polybase share link. Turn on the email gate if you want to know exactly who is reading, and recipients get a clean page-by-page viewer in the browser.

  4. 04

    Replace Your Old Links

    Send the new Polybase links to prospects and investors, and update anywhere a DocSend link is embedded — email signatures, CRM sequences, your website. Old audiences follow the new links from the next send.

  5. 05

    Track Everything from One Dashboard, Then Cancel

    Watch views, per-page attention and captured emails from the share link dashboard. Once your active links have moved over and the team is working in Polybase, cancel the DocSend subscription.

Why Polybase

What Polybase includes.

The additional workspace capabilities to consider when comparing Polybase with DocSend.

01

The Share-Link Workflow, Included

The core DocSend loop ships in Polybase today: a page-by-page viewer for shared links, per-page analytics showing who viewed which page and for how long, an email-capture gate before viewing, and a dashboard for every link you have out in the world.

02

Documents Live Where the Work Happens

In DocSend, the deck lives in a separate sharing tool while the deal lives everywhere else. In Polybase, the same document sits in the deal's channel — next to the discussion about it, the tasks it generates and the calls where it gets presented.

03

From View to Follow-Up in One Place

When the analytics show a prospect spent three minutes on your pricing page, the follow-up starts right there: discuss it in the channel, turn it into a task with one click, or hop on a call — without switching tools.

04

Your Documents, Your Servers

DocSend is offered as a hosted cloud service operated by Dropbox, a US company. Polybase runs in our EU-region cloud, in your own VPC, or fully air-gapped on your infrastructure. Share links use signed tokens, and self-hosted documents never leave your servers except through the links you create.

05

A Workspace, Not Another Per-Seat Point Tool

DocSend is a separate per-user subscription focused on document sharing. In Polybase, tracked document sharing comes with the workspace your team already uses for chat, tasks, docs and calls — one product, one bill, one place to look.

FAQ

Questions, answered.

Common questions about switching from DocSend to Polybase.

01Does Polybase really have DocSend-style share links today?
Yes — this is shipping, not a roadmap item. You can create share links that open in a page-by-page document viewer, see per-page analytics (who viewed which page and for how long), require an email address before viewing, and manage all your links from a single dashboard.
02What does DocSend still do better?
DocSend has years of polish around investor workflows: built-in NDA acceptance, e-signature flows and virtual data rooms (Spaces). Polybase does not offer NDA or e-signature today. If those are central to how you share, DocSend remains strong there; if you mainly need tracked sharing with the documents living beside your team's actual work, Polybase covers it.
03Can I require viewers to enter their email?
Yes. Any share link can be gated behind an email-capture step, so before the document opens the viewer identifies themselves. From then on, the analytics show that person's page-by-page journey — which pages they read and how long they stayed.
04How secure are Polybase share links?
Share links use signed tokens, and everything travels over TLS 1.3. When you self-host, the documents stay on your servers and are only reachable through the links you issue — and you can manage or retire links from the dashboard. Note that Polybase does not claim end-to-end encryption; at rest we recommend disk-level encryption, and in our cloud disks are encrypted at the provider level.
05Do recipients need a Polybase account?
No. A share link opens directly in the browser viewer — no account, no download required. If you enabled the email gate, the viewer enters an email address first; otherwise the document opens straight away.
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