Bloomberg Terminal vs. PitchBook

Depending on which area of the finance sector you may work in, the Bloomberg Terminal will have plenty of helpful functionality for you. Two specific scenarios for myself in the Structured Finance area are tracking the pricing benchmark and following outstanding deals in the market. You can follow progress of the deals, how well they are advancing, and final pricing details

Incentivized

If you're a private markets investor, PitchBook is an excellent option as it provides a fulsome overview of the landscape of potential target assets and contains various levels of information. If you're middle market and focus on founder businesses, then PB would be less helpful, but it would still offer a good start. If you're workign regularly in the public markets space, I would point you towards other resources (e.g., CapIQ). PB doesn't have a great Excel plugin and the times that I've used it or seen it used in the past, it feels clunky and out of date compared to CapIQ's Excel plugin.

Incentivized

• Communicating with investors, banks, partners, etc
• Tracking key market metrics
• Monitoring existing and previous structured finance deals

Incentivized

• PitchBook provides a very comprehensive database of not just companies and investors but also M&A activity, financials, funds and LPs.
• Pitchbook is multi-dimensional it how it can be used. For example, it can help to accomplish various business objectives, including deal sourcing, due diligence, private market intelligence and fundraising.
• PitchBook has an easy-to-navigate user interface. It enables the user to quickly find the data and information that he or she needs.

Incentivized

• Visual user interface
• A lot of functionality, need tutorials and lessons to narrow down
• Expensive!
• Some information may be delayed

Incentivized

• Reduce the price and allow users to share licenses. It is really expensive for companies that are not investment banks to access this information. Maybe consider different tiers
• Tell when the information has been audited by a third party. In some cases, the information may be wrong for early stage companies.

Incentivized

PitchBook has a friendly UX, robust search, and is pleasing to look at. The site is quick and the layout of information in both the website and app is pretty good. Data can generally be exported and watchlists and saved searches can be created. Support team can also help with finding / exporting data.

The overall support for PitchBook is about average. It is not excellent for two primary reasons. First, PitchBook can run slow from time to time, and I cannot copy and paste from the Chrome extension. I have found neither of those issues to be a function of the computer I am using. However, the PitchBook support team has proved helpful on several occasions.

Incentivized

While there are a lot of competitive services in the marketplace, each good in its own right, the Bloomberg Terminal is considered the top product. It has key fast information and can help individuals make fast decisions. It also has a top-tier support desk that can answer questions for you and teach you functionality to apply to your role

Incentivized

PitchBook is truly a best in class financial research and diligence hub that provides accurate and relevant background research needed prior to performance any venture capital, private equity and M&A transactions. It is a thorough database that stands out among its peers, with clear and precise categorizations of research classified by industry sector, growth maturity of company, and a number of other key attributes.

Incentivized

• Appropriate pricing of deals due to market comparisons
• Instant communication with key stakeholders
• Top and quick newsbreaks

Incentivized

• PitchBook is a big time saver given the various publications, data sets it provides
• Given it's fairly up to date / real time, it's easy to stay up to date on the latest deals
• By utilizing the pricing data of deals, it can help provide guidance on what we pitch to companies

Incentivized