AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform used by companies and financial institutions. Since 2011, their AI-based technology has helped professionals make business decisions by delivering insights from public and private content—including company filings, event transcripts, news, trade journals, and equity research. The platform boasts users among 4,000 enterprise customers. Headquartered in New York City, AlphaSense employs over 1,000 people across offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, and…
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Elastic Enterprise Search
Score 6.5 out of 10
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Elastic Enterprise Search Swiftype is a platform with modules for Site Search, App Search and Workplace Search, that boasts powering search for thousands of enterprises and websites. The services were developed by Swiftype and acquired by Elastic in late 2017. Powered by Elasticsearch, the vendor states Elastic Enterprise Search is fast, with proven, optimized relevance models designed for real-life, natural search.
AlphaSense is best for colleagues who need to dive into details and collect info on various topics (e.g. analysts). Most colleagues do not have time to search on the platform and cannot exploit the capabilities of AlphaSense. We are now in a "trial mode" for the first subscription year to see in real life how the selected users use their premium accounts, then we will decide on the extension of the number of accounts.
Swiftype is excellent for e-commerce companies and especially the financial services sector where speed plays a major role in executing transactions. It is also very dynamic and customizable. It is very useful for electronics/travel reservations on e-commerce sites also. The only place it is inappropriate is when it comes to indexing a website in which case Google is slightly better, as I mentioned before. There is nothing much to complain about here in regards to the breadth of applications and analytics it offers.
Swiftype does not have indexes ready to go. When you add a new website to the search set, it takes some time to index the website. This is something that is different from what Google does. Google in this particular aspect does a relatively better job.
Swiftype is very expensive, this makes it difficult for smaller companies to afford.
AlphaSense is a very useful tool and is reasonably priced for our organization. While I may not be a hyper-active user, it's a great resource when I need to quickly do a competitive landscape survey, review publicly available documents (transcripts, etc.), or review Wall Street research
The search capabilities of AlphaSense are quite impressive. As a former Search Product Manager, I see where the boolean capabilities of AlphaSense's search allow me to control the scope, proximity, and keywords of the search. The addition of AI to the search keywords facilitates my booleans - frankly I don't have to use a boolean for additional keywords. That's quite helpful. The addition of AI (still in beta) to the search is helping those who don't want to get into the weeds
The availability of Alphasense is great. I have used the software for multiple years and cannot remember ever having an outage issue. This is surprising actually, as I use other software applications that do not have regular outages, but still have outages periodically. Alphasense, on the other hand, never seems to have any outages. Good sign if I can't remember the software not working :).
Loading or performing searches on AlphaSense platform is reasonably fast for most of the time. However, it is sometimes unacceptably long for me to load PDF files (earnings presentation, supplementary financial report) on AlphaSense. Certain features might also take very long time, such as loading for "similar tables" across EDGAR filings, or downloading tables from EDGAR filings
Customer support is very prompt. I get personalized support for search recommendations and content that I could not find in my own search. Support checks in with me on a bi-monthly basis to keep me informed of the many different feature additions, I cannot find a more kind, understanding, and supportive team.
The person was prepared, attentive, understood the nature of my questions, was willing to work through any difficulties or misunderstandings, was patient, and super pleasant to work with. Great customer service.
Our online training was led by a AlphaSense representative. The training is always good. The bigger issue is our time availability to remember the training and utilize it. The trainers will show us examples and then ask us for real industries or companies of interest to use so that the training is most relevant.
Nothing else had the platform capabilities nor the level of access to information that AlphaSense does. Everything else I tried had one area or type of information it aggregated, but none of them were able to integrate information the way AlphaSense does, and most of them didn't really enable access to news, so I had to supplement my work with RSS feeds and dozens of open browser tabs. AlphaSense collapsed all of that effort into one search in one window.
Google Search Appliance is no longer supported. Apache Solr is a popular, free open source solution, but it lacks a web crawler and is more difficult to configure and maintain.
It has been very simple. Contract terms are standard for an online portal. Of course, I would like unit pricing to be lower so I could get more users on the license or to rotate seats to get more value out of each license. Billing frequency has been standard as well. This could be more significant for a larger customer.
The sharing features provides by AlphaSense mean that it can be readily scaled for teams within an organization and, subject to compliance requirements, with client organizations. The ability to share annotations of transcripts and investor releases is valuable, and facilitates collaboration between analysts.
AlphaSense has allowed us to generate deeper competitive insights. For example, we conducted an in depth analysis of the aerial data analytics (drone) industry, and AlphSense helped us narrow in on the market leaders and their various strengths / weaknesses.
AlphaSense has improved our team's overall efficiency. With Stream in particular, we are able to pinpoint insights in a matter of minutes through the transcript feature as opposed to having to conduct a series of calls ourselves. This is a significant time saver.
AlphaSense has allowed us to make more informed decisions on our public holdings by providing us with unfettered access to equity research analyst reports.
