AlphaSense is used by several departments in our company. Our competitive intelligence team uses it to access sell-side analyst reports about our competition and transcripts of conversations and meetings with analysts and other broker-dealers. We also greatly value the expert interviews that provide a perspective on products, comparisons, and even sales methodologies. That's very valuable.
I have recommended AlphaSense to my colleagues and former colleagues who have go on to other companies. It's a vital part of the competitive intelligence toolkit, if your competitors are public. There is still value even if the majority are not public, as AlphaSense provides some information if a company is in private equity. It's more difficult with the startups, so investigate the offerings.
We love it.
Pros
Rapid access to relevant broker information and analyses
Ability to tailor dashboards to see new information on a topic or company
AI augmentation of the analyses and content available means rapid search results of relevant information
Cons
Manual search is still king for finding that one thing, but the search may require boolean logic.
Exporting clips of reports can be a bit onerous
Configuring dashboards is not intuitive. However, help from the account team makes it easy.
Likelihood to Recommend
Because many of our competitors are public companies, there is a lot of information published among analysts and brokers. Accessing this information in a single portal is facilitated by AlphaSense's dashboarding capabilities, where our team can configure result sets and search to appropriately fetch results for each competitor. Some competitors have a single product with lots of options; others choose to have a portfolio of products. If we had to search all of these reports individually, it would take a significant amount of time. AlphaSense makes it easy. And leveraging their AI is rapidly proving to be another time saver.
AlphaSense is our primary tool for monitoring competitors and the market. We find tremendous value in the analyst research and the expert insights, in addition to the press releases and earnings releases available in other tools. The intelligent AI summaries are a great time saver, and the various search tools make it easy to narrow down the most relevant content to my search. Sentiment analysis and the ability to review charts and tables have also proven valuable tools.
Pros
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.
Cons
Alternative tools offer contact and list building capabilities.
Integrations with more complementary tools like Crayon or Clozd could prove useful.
AI tools could help improve searches and alerts.
Likelihood to Recommend
AlphaSense is the best overall Ml/CI solution I've ever used. The tool has far surpassed the capabilities I used in the past (tools like Nexis and Factiva) and offers unique content and better usability. I have found some gaps that require incremental subscriptions to complementary tools (HG Insights, Crunchbase, Crayon, etc.). Still, I believe these capabilities could be added through acquisition or further product development.
Alternatives
FactSet and Factiva
AlphaSense has the most sources and best usability of any tool I've used.
We use AlphaSense in lieu of desktop research. We use it to create custom reports on a variety of topics that influence the strategic business decisions of the company. We also use the table explorer feature extensively to pull data from SEC filings.
Pros
Keyword Search
User-friendly Interface
Table Explorer
Cons
Latency, reports take longer to load
Errors in Table Explorer
More information on private companies
Likelihood to Recommend
Keyword search function is very powerful and helps to scan quickly through the documents. Private company data is very limited.
Alternatives
S&P Capital IQ
AlphaSense is more user-friendly. Keyword search is way better and table explorer feature makes it easier to collate data.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Product Management (Internet company, 10,001+ employees)
AlphaSense is a good resource to use within an organization that requires consistent knowledge of industry happenings, analyst opinions, deep insights into topical concepts, and general financial information. It is used to bolster our organizational awareness of industry and general news happenings with/without bias. The product addresses gaps in understanding the latest news with a focus on delivering a breadth of resources from different organizations, hence providing the team with a plethora of viewpoints to make our own inferences.
Pros
Industry updates and news.
Analyst opinions.
Financial information.
Opinion pieces.
Cons
Veracity of financial results.
Speed of transcripts for earnings announcements.
Streamlined search and de-cluttering of the interface.
Better coaching/tab for just beginners.
Likelihood to Recommend
AlphaSense is well suited to understanding industry happenings especially if focusing on a variety of analyst opinions. It is not that well suited to getting overarching information like "forecasts" for a huge industry (for example: IoT, Blockchain, etc.) It is also not well suited to searching for opinion pieces/industry research reports that focus on a non-company or non-regional aspect.
Alternatives
Gartner Peer Insights, Frost 3D Universal, S&P Capital IQ and Deloitte Consulting
AlphaSense is much, much pricier than other offerings we go with - and has increased pricing on us in the upcoming year by 200%. Previously, AlphaSense used to stack up much higher compared to the other offerings we had. However, with the price change and the relatively useless "peer professional interviews" offering that is being forcibly added to the offering beginning in late 2024, this price is going to go up even further, which means Alphasense is going to quickly shoot up the charts in terms of being not that much focused on value for money.
Identifying industry trends, assessing company performance, sentiment linked to companies, getting reminders from recurring industry publications
Pros
Capital market day summaries
Investment bank analyses on companies
Industry reports
Research publications
Cons
APIs to AlphaSense data
Complex search to ad hoc users
Limited set of KPI metrics on dedicated company pages
Likelihood to Recommend
AlphaSense is the first tool I have come across that allows me with a single license to build an understanding of a given company or industry thanks to access to so many otherwise paywall-protected documents
Alternatives
Gartner Peer Insights
AlphaSense is the only service that allows access to thousands of otherwise behind paywall research publications and insights
VU
Verified User
Advisor in Corporate (Computer Software company, 10,001+ employees)
I use AlphaSense for technology research, competitive insights, and reviewing earnings calls/analyst sentiment. If I have a new technology I want to understand better or want to explore how others are using a specific technology, I use AlphaSense's research and also their customer service to find insightful articles and analyst research. For earnings calls, I use the transcripts and analyst reports as well to understand how the call was received and what topics are important for competitors and alliance partners. I've also used research from AlphaSense to build business cases around new product development and partnership opportunities.
Pros
Well-organized research and results makes searching large amounts of data easy to handle! The filters are especially easy to use and go as broad or as specific as you want.
AlphaSense's customer service and research assistants are always helpful and quick to respond. If I reach out through live chat, they will work through what I'm trying to find and even follow up after the fact to make sure I got everything I need.
AlphaSense's daily news feed is easy to set up and makes keeping up to date easier. I have several different news feeds that are sent straight to my email for me. With constantly evolving technologies and with competitor insights, this is extremely valuable!
Cons
AlphaSense has started to integrate AI insights and analyst sentiment (emotion ratings). While these features will be very valuable in the future, they are still in the early stages currently and the results aren't always 100% how I interpret the materials based on my experience.
Like any research database, AlphaSense doesn't have access to 100% of research in the world. I've run into some topics/private companies that unfortunately have very little research. The more research they can add, the better, but this is a limitation for all databases.
Limited functionality on financial outputs. While you can pull these numbers from different research databases, databases like Capital IQ/Market Intelligence provide these numbers in a much easier to use format.
Likelihood to Recommend
AlphaSense is an amazing research database in my opinion. The combination of easy to use filters (both for key words and for sources) makes finding the materials I'm looking for easy! As a strategist, this tool is my favorite research tool for analysis. If you are struggling to find what you need, their customer service and research assistants are great to work with and will work with you to find what you need. I've always been impressed by their customer service and their user interface.
On the other side, the financial number access (such as earnings $$ for revenue, OPEX, CAPEX, etc.) aren't as strong here. If you are solely looking for the numbers, not the analysis or research, I would recommend using a different tool like Capital IQ.
Alternatives
S&P Capital IQ
I've used IDC, eMarketer, GlobalData, and Capital IQ. IDC's research is limited and hard to search through. eMarketer's data is unreliable (we've found several inaccurate data points). GlobalData is difficult to search and not as insightful. Capital IQ is better for financial analysis, but difficult to search research articles.
AlphaSense uses reliable sources, simplifies the search experience for research articles, and adds additional insights on top.
VU
Verified User
Director in Corporate (Telecommunications company, 10,001+ employees)
Every market intelligence we launch, starts with the use of AlphaSense. We want to research press articles about a specific subject, find info about a company private or not, reading CEO speech transcript, finding broker reports about a sector or a company. It's our best source of info.
Pros
accessing value added study
identifying quickly private company
support their customer
Cons
price point for SME
Likelihood to Recommend
strong tool for any market intelligence report to do
We use AlphaSense to do competitive and market research and analysis for our networking teams. We have access through the subscription to both a large selection of news and analysis sources as well as the comprehensive search capability. We specifically search for insights that relate to the different audiences/personas that we do marketing for.
Pros
Using boolean searches and inferences to find trends and themes in the news reports.
Sentiment analysis and trend / keyword analysis.
Collaboration with your team to save notes, tags, and classify insights.
Emailing saved searches to you weekly, as you request.
Cons
I wish there was a cheatsheet to more easily access the search boolean logic for putting together complex queries.
I would like more market research sources that can provide best practices for buying groups and marketing specifically.
Easier ways to share articles with non-users other than downloading a PDF.
Likelihood to Recommend
AlphaSense is a great tool for competitive and financial analyst research specifically, due to the breadth of sources included within their database as well as how it is all indexed and linked to the companies mentioned. It's also got amazing search functionality and so therefore if you are looking for commentary about specific issues or themes, it makes that easy to find. The added layer of interviews with knowledgeable people in the industry can help unpack more competitive insights that are only known to practitioners.
I use AlphaSense in multiple ways -- as a current awareness tool, to drive ongoing competitive and market research initiatives, to support due diligence efforts, and to monitor adjacencies. Not to mention as an indispensable tool in tackling Executive, Board-level, and ad hoc requests across a myriad of topics.
Pros
Quick view of earnings/company performance.
Industry assessment, by theme or keyword.
Deep dive by topic.
Tearsheets, by company, topic, product.
Cons
Increased search simplicity: ease of use across simple searches/quick searches.
Clear visibility to equity research access/page count status.
Tighter integration with Stream!
Likelihood to Recommend
Very well-suited to deep vetting of concepts, quickly -- extraordinarily useful for a quick deep dive into a specific topic, whether it is a company, a product, a business unit or an individual executive, or a team, in preparation for a meeting or in response to a market move. Gets a bit clumsier for discovery work -- for casual searching that is unprompted or if/then searching. But if you know what you're looking for? If you are following a trail? AlphaSense is an astonishing tool that can take days of work and boil it down to minutes. I would be absolutely lost without it -- I've built influence maps, conducted due diligence, and replaced market research with content from Stream? It's astonishing the power that the AlphaSense platform has and can deliver.
Alternatives
Decline to list.
VU
Verified User
Strategist in Sales (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)
