Item: AlphaSense
Rating: 4
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AlphaSense

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am an equity analyst. I use AlphaSense for document searches and financials (consensus sell-side cons forecasts and historical financials). The product helps me research potential equity investments and maintain coverage of existing positions.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Searches for themes or topics within documents.

Cons

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?

Return on Investment

Faster work was produced (I have spent much time providing feedback to the developers).
Crucial data found and deeper competitive insights.

Usability

I find it's still clunky and slow. I don't find it as intuitive to use as other platforms. It still lacks a lot of functionality compared to Bloomberg or CapitalIQ. Annoyingly, Sentieo was easier to use. Some Sentieo functionality (e.g., distribution of analyst ratings) has been removed.

AlphaSense Market Intelligence

I wouldn't say that it has. I am the only user of AlphaSense in my firm. It has saved me time on research projects.

Alternatives Considered

Bloomberg Terminal, S&P Capital IQ, FactSet and Sentieo

All of them are better than AlphaSense. However, Bloomberg is over twice as expensive, and people are just paying a premium for Chat (which I don't want). I have not used FactSet for over three years. When I last used it, I would say that it was slightly better than AlphaSense is now, but only slightly. I last used Capital IQ about seven years ago, when I had been using it for over ten years. I prefer it to Alphasense. I believe it has improved a lot since then, too.

Key Insights

Do you think AlphaSense delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with AlphaSense's feature set?

Did AlphaSense live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of AlphaSense go as expected?

Would you buy AlphaSense again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft Excel

Likelihood to Recommend

Only if they want to save money versus Bloomberg, FactSet, or CapitalIQ (this is why I have it).

Improvements to the platform underway.