AlphaSense vs. Morningstar Direct

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AlphaSense
Score 9.5 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
Morningstar Direct
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Morningstar headquartered in Chicago offers Morningstar Direct, an investment portfolio managment application focusing on financial and risk analysis.N/A
Pricing
AlphaSenseMorningstar Direct
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AlphaSenseMorningstar Direct
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AlphaSenseMorningstar Direct
Considered Both Products
AlphaSense
Chose AlphaSense
AlphaSense makes it easy to get to the right info quickly. The coverage of industries and companies for broker research is much more than the other products. AlphaSense also includes detailed financial info for companies and its AI-based summaries are helpful.
Morningstar Direct

No answer on this topic

Features
AlphaSenseMorningstar Direct
Financial Research
Comparison of Financial Research features of Product A and Product B
AlphaSense
7.0
177 Ratings
1% below category average
Morningstar Direct
-
Ratings
Private Company Data5.0145 Ratings00 Ratings
Industry-Specific Information7.5171 Ratings00 Ratings
Independent Research Access7.8165 Ratings00 Ratings
M&A Analysis6.7137 Ratings00 Ratings
Supply Chain Data6.094 Ratings00 Ratings
ESG Data6.292 Ratings00 Ratings
Credit Ratings Reports6.980 Ratings00 Ratings
Macroeconomic News8.0125 Ratings00 Ratings
Search Tools9.0164 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AlphaSenseMorningstar Direct
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
S&P Capital IQ
S&P Capital IQ
Score 8.0 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
S&P Capital IQ
S&P Capital IQ
Score 8.0 out of 10

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AlphaSenseMorningstar Direct
Likelihood to Recommend
9.6
(245 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.5
(20 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(241 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(21 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.6
(21 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(16 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.4
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
7.0
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
8.7
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.6
(21 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
8.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.3
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.5
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AlphaSenseMorningstar Direct
Likelihood to Recommend
AlphaSense
- When I need to find additional data from filings to flesh out my thoughts on a company AlphaSense is very well suited - When I am understanding a space for the first time, I can flesh out various experts, docs and other information AlphaSense is very well suited - Can get better at valuation analysis
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Morningstar
Morningstar Direct is great for classifying funds in order of performance and has a huge database to check against. Pretty much every category you can imagine is covered. It is best for research and analyzing before making big decisions. The interface is fairly clean and relatively simple to use.
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Pros
AlphaSense
  • More and unique content. Investor research and expert interviews are very valuable.
  • AI-generated bright summaries allow you to quickly understand the takeaways from an earnings call or an interview transcript.
  • Search tools and criteria allow me to narrow in on the right content quickly.
Read full review
Morningstar
  • Best for research.
  • Analyst reporting is fantastic.
  • The ability to look at a wide variety of assets is great.
Read full review
Cons
AlphaSense
  • The whole platform should be much faster with less lag.
  • The layout of the document search isn't great. Often, I find it hard to expand sources or dates.
  • Financials sections should be customisible, i.e. bolden certain ratios, remove others etc.
  • "Error loading documents, please refresh the widget" should be seen fewer times than often.
  • Why can't I export events dates to my Outlook calendar?
Read full review
Morningstar
  • The system is sometimes slow.
  • Glitchy and sometimes hard to use.
Read full review
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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Morningstar
No answers on this topic
Usability
AlphaSense
For my daily work AlphaSense is inevitable, as it holds a real added value compared to most of the CI platforms. It really makes my work more efficient and contributes to better strategy and decision making in the company. Datalog is
available up to 15 years, which is a real advantage compared to other CI platforms that can only start competitor monitoring following the signature of the agreement.
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Morningstar
No answers on this topic
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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Morningstar
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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Morningstar
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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Morningstar
No answers on this topic
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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Morningstar
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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Morningstar
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
AlphaSense
use friendly UI made the transition seamless
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Morningstar
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
AlphaSense
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.
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Morningstar
Morningstar is slightly more buggy and laggy. But includes far more data and is more trusted.
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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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Morningstar
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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Morningstar
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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Morningstar
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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Morningstar
  • Returns not yet realised.
Read full review
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.