AlphaSense vs. IBM Watson Discovery

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AlphaSense
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
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…N/A
IBM Watson Discovery
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
IBM offers Watson Discovery, a natural language processing (NLP) application with options to measure sentiment, detect entities, semantic roles, and other concepts.N/A
Pricing
AlphaSenseIBM Watson Discovery
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AlphaSenseIBM Watson Discovery
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AlphaSenseIBM Watson Discovery
Considered Both Products
AlphaSense
Chose AlphaSense
AlphaSense is easier to use, it's expensive however provides value
IBM Watson Discovery

No answer on this topic

Features
AlphaSenseIBM Watson Discovery
Financial Research
Comparison of Financial Research features of Product A and Product B
AlphaSense
7.7
187 Ratings
4% above category average
IBM Watson Discovery
-
Ratings
Private Company Data5.4153 Ratings00 Ratings
Industry-Specific Information8.7179 Ratings00 Ratings
Independent Research Access8.9172 Ratings00 Ratings
M&A Analysis7.9142 Ratings00 Ratings
Supply Chain Data7.797 Ratings00 Ratings
ESG Data6.696 Ratings00 Ratings
Credit Ratings Reports6.484 Ratings00 Ratings
Macroeconomic News8.7132 Ratings00 Ratings
Search Tools9.0174 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AlphaSenseIBM Watson Discovery
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Yext
Yext
Score 7.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
S&P Capital IQ
S&P Capital IQ
Score 7.6 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
S&P Capital IQ
S&P Capital IQ
Score 7.6 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AlphaSenseIBM Watson Discovery
Likelihood to Recommend
9.7
(251 ratings)
8.9
(26 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.7
(20 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(249 ratings)
5.4
(3 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(22 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.6
(22 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.6
(16 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
6.5
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
5.9
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
9.1
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.1
(22 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
8.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.2
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.2
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AlphaSenseIBM Watson Discovery
Likelihood to Recommend
AlphaSense
AlphaSense is very well suited to investing teams that need a research management system that has a robust database behind and rich content management features for note-taking. AlphaSense may not be well-suited to individual investors who want data access but don't need to be sharing notes to a wider team. The sharing features are what make AlphaSense most useful.
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IBM
Overall, IBM Watson Discovery is an amazing technology that we use with our clients to address various business problems, but the biggest challenge has always been about ingesting, analyzing, enriching, and searching huge collections of documents and allowing our end users and SMEs to be able to search for what they need to reduce the time and efforts spent daily on a manual search through various collections of documents. We have successfully managed to reduce manual work by over 80%, and now our SMEs are being used for the skills they have to gather insights rather than do manual work.
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Pros
AlphaSense
  • Summarizing information across multiple company documents via their new Generative Grid tool.
  • Aggregating the latest insights from diverse sources - broker research, expert insights, company documents, and news.
  • Providing a repeatable way to query information.
  • Smart keywords to help you search, e.g., car = auto = automotive.
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IBM
  • It is an excellently fast platform with documents and the answers to queries.
  • With automation learning beneficial as it saves time.
  • When searching for a document, everything stays located and easy to find.
  • Acceptance of various documents.
  • It has a quite comfortable Technical support, always available when required.
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Cons
AlphaSense
  • I believe the AI agent could be improved to answer more detailed questions and provide better data.
  • Access to real time financial data in a similar vein to Koyfin.
  • The ability to easily search across all company decks to be able to quickly gather all relevant slides for a specific topic, similar to what Quartr offers.
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IBM
  • I believe AI should be more flexible about providing data. However, it's understandable that you need to provide the details you need in a more specific and detailed way.
  • The interface could use more tweaking. Being new to the program, it was kind of hard to navigate.
  • Luckily, there was a customized feature of the dashboard that I could set up, and having something that you know where you are placed always feels familiar and comfortable.
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Likelihood to Renew
AlphaSense
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
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Usability
AlphaSense
AlphaSense has a very intuitive user interface, and I can tell they have been focused on expanding their product breadth and continuing to innovate on current products. Some basic features are missing or I can't find (I can't just sort expert calls by only the ones that are applicable to that ticker, most relevant is the one that works best, but I want just the ticker)
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IBM
IBM Watson Discovery has the best user capabilities and easily transform business decision-making portfolio. The automation system saves time used in data analysis as opposed to manual research that consumes a lot of time. The visualization across the dashboard enables my team to interpret complex data and use it to make reliable marketing decisions.
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Reliability and Availability
AlphaSense
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 :).
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Performance
AlphaSense
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
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
AlphaSense
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.
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IBM
Similar to all IBM Watson and Salesforce product solutions, the overall support would be a 10/10. Their provided FAQ's help with frequently experienced issues and if still unable to figure something out, their customer service representatives are always super responsive. With instant chat functions available, it is easy to ask a quick question rather than sitting on hold.
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In-Person Training
AlphaSense
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.
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Online Training
AlphaSense
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.
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
AlphaSense
use friendly UI made the transition seamless
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
AlphaSense
Special features of AlphaSense that made us decide on this CI platform: - US-based market and competitive intelligence platform with various premium content (broker information, expert calls, earning transcripts, original company documents etc.) - AlphaSense is a trusted CI platform by world’s leading corporations and financial institutions - AlphaSense’s proprietary AI stack has been meticulously engineered over a decade so that their AI accelerates speed-to-insight so clients can act with confidence when making critical decisions - Private and public companies, therapeutic areas and products can be monitored - Datalog is available up to 15 years, and advanced search is supported for them - Curated newsfeed is available from more than 3,500 top news publications, client requests and hand-picked vendors for premium subscription - Very advanced company profiles are available by default with newsfeed, original company documents, expert calls and reports - Newsfeed and alerts can be also set by admins and individual users
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IBM
Discovery differs from its competitors due to the better ease of implementation and the high level of natural language recognition, it is equal in integration resources such as API and workflow or process pipeline, but it loses in the price for a high volume of documents and/or research. If you own or plan to use other services from the IBM Watson family, there is no doubt that Watson discovery is your best option. Another important point is if you plan to use a cloud or on-premise service (local server or private cloud).
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
AlphaSense
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.
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Scalability
AlphaSense
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.
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
AlphaSense
Very professional and knowledgeable team. Easy to work with and communicates in a way that's helpful for users who aren't experts on the platform
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IBM
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
AlphaSense
  • 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.
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IBM
  • We find its Enterprise plan expensive for a country of LATAM. For US or Europe based businesses, looks great.
  • A Big Data and massive queries based company would find the service expensive. Maybe a flat price plan would be helpful.
  • Have you thought in making a cheaper plan where you take the learning from your customer's data to enrich your AI tool?
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ScreenShots

AlphaSense Screenshots

Screenshot of AlphaSense's AI search, available across 2,000+ premium business data sources including SEC filings, earnings calls, broker research, business journals, and news. It can be used to stay ahead of market-moving trends and instantly surface critical information buried within millions of documents.Screenshot of a single view of the industries, companies and themes within a fully-customizable dashboard, that can be tailored to fit any research process.Screenshot of a purpose-built generative AI that offers insights from a premium content universe.