When making investment decisions or conducting in-depth market research, the right intelligence tool can make all the difference. Most researchers are inundated with information overload. Even if they have access to all the right data, the task of analyzing it and extracting all the relevant insights is often a manual one, fraught with fragmented data from consumer grade search engines.
Market intelligence tools can shorten time to insight and expedite the research process, particularly when they have advanced search and AI capabilities. However, these platforms are not all made equal, and not every platform is right for every business. The breadth and depth of content, how advanced the search technology is, how proactive the monitoring capabilities are, and how all the capabilities align with your unique business needs and budget are all important factors in selecting the right platform.
Below, we compare biopharma deal database DealForma with AlphaSense, an all-in-one market intelligence platform, comparing use cases each platform works best for and where each falls short. We also provide a feature comparison chart and discuss how to choose the best platform for your purposes.
DealForma
Best for: Tracking deal activity in the biopharma and medtech sectors
DealForma is a specialized database and analytics platform built for tracking deal activity in the life sciences industry, particularly in biopharma, medtech, and diagnostics. The platform offers detailed structured data on a wide variety of deal types — including licensing agreements, mergers and acquisitions, venture financings, IPOs, codevelopment partnerships, and royalty monetizations.
Primarily intended for business development, competitive intelligence, and investment teams, DealForma makes it easy to benchmark deal terms, track competitor activity, and identify emerging trends in dealmaking.
Founded in 2017, DealForma is still in pre-seed funding stage and operates with a very small team. This means it has certain resource constraints, particularly in terms of developing new features and the breadth of data coverage they offer. Currently, DealForma lacks AI-powered search or natural language processing capabilities, relying instead on structured search filters.
Finally, the platform’s exclusive focus on the life sciences sector makes it a limitation for users seeking a more holistic and comprehensive market view. Even within the life sciences sector, DealForma’s content centers heavily around deals, drug pipeline and asset data, clinical trials, and regulatory data. It does not offer earnings transcripts, expert call transcripts, or broker research reports. Users also cannot upload their own internal content to DealForma.
Therefore, DealForma is ideal for professionals in the life sciences industry who are exclusively seeking highly structured, transaction-level data for business development, licensing, or investment decision-making. For those looking for cross-sector, qualitative, or financial content research, DealForma may not be the right fit. Additionally, users looking for an AI-powered platform that will accelerate their pace of research and give them a competitive edge will need a different platform.
DealForma features include:
Comprehensive Deal Database
DealForma offers the following in its deal database:
- Licensing, R&D, and Academic Agreements: Detailed records of partnerships, including financial terms, milestones, and royalties
- M&A, Spin-Outs, and Asset Purchases: Information on mergers, acquisitions, company spin-outs, and asset transactions
- Deal Comparables and Financial Metrics: Structured data enabling users to benchmark deals by stage, modality, therapy area, target, and territory
- Contracts and Press Releases: Access to original source documents and official announcements for each deal
Funding and Investment Tracking
DealForma provides data on private and public funding rounds for life sciences companies, including investor details and amounts raised. It also provides profiles of private equity and venture capital investors, detailing their investment activities and portfolios.
Company and Asset Profiles
DealForma provides comprehensive profiles encompassing company overviews, financials, and strategic activities for global biotech, pharma, medtech, digital health therapeutics, and diagnostics firms. It also provides insights into investment firms specializing in the life sciences sector.
Drug Pipelines and Sales Data
DealForma offers the following information on drug pipelines and sales:
- Data on drug discovery platforms and compounds in pre-clinical or early clinical stages
- Information on approved drugs, including labeling and marketing details
- Sales performance data and launch timelines for pharmaceutical products
- Tracking of clinical development stages and regulatory approvals
- Specifics on how drugs are administered, their dosages, and formulations
Advanced Search and Filtering
With its granular filters, DealForma allows users to filter data by stage of development, indication, modality, target, geography, and more – all using natural language queries. DealForma does not offer AI or generative AI search capabilities for more sophisticated querying capabilities.
Interactive Dashboards and Analytics
DealForma offers market analytics dashboards — pre-built charts and reports for market trends, licensing landscapes, and funding activities. DealForma also integrates with Tableau to provide interactive charts and visuals, customizable by therapy area, modality, stage, and more.
Analyst Support
All subscribers receive support from analysts to assist with data interpretation, perform custom analyses, and provide insights tailored to specific business needs.
Export and Reporting Tools
DealForma offers the ability to generate reports with AI summaries and export tools. Data can be exported in various formats, including Excel, PDF, and CSV for easy integration into presentations and internal analyses. Importantly, internal data cannot be uploaded into DealForma.
DealForma Pros:
- Highly specialized focus on life sciences
- Comprehensive and structured deal data on various deal types
- High-quality data updated in real-time
- Intuitive search and filtering capabilities
- Interactive and customizable dashboards, charts, and visuals
- Dedicated analyst support for data interpretation, custom analyses, and report generation
DealForma Cons:
- Limited to life sciences; not usable for deal analysis in broader industries
- No expert call transcripts
- No broker research reports
- No earnings transcripts
- No AI, generative AI, or NLP search capabilities
- Limited collaboration tools; no internal document integration or annotation capabilities
- Data sourcing may require occasional manual validation if using for investment-grade analysis
AlphaSense
Best for: Corporate, consulting, and financial services professionals looking to implement a comprehensive market research strategy powered by automated features and proprietary AI technology
AlphaSense is a leading enterprise-grade market intelligence and AI search platform built for robust market and investment research. Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also recently named one of Fortune’s Top 50 AI Innovators.
Here’s how AlphaSense enables you to extract insights and answers from both high-value internal and external content with the power of artificial intelligence and generative AI — all on a single platform.
Extensive Out-of-the-Box Content Library
AlphaSense allows you to combine valuable internal content with 10,000+ private, public, premium, and proprietary external data sources into one platform. Our content includes:
- Healthcare news, industry reports, company reports, clinical trial updates, and regulatory content from sources such as PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, World Health Organization, MedlinePlus, and FDA
- Company documents, such as earnings transcripts, company presentations, SEC and global filings, ESG reports, and press releases
- Over 1,500 research providers including Wall Street Insights®, a premier analyst research collection for corporate professionals
- Expert call transcript library with over 185,000 vetted interviews (including with competitors, suppliers, doctors, and KOLs)
In July 2024, AlphaSense acquired expert network company Tegus, bringing unparalleled access to even more insights, and covering more industries and companies than ever before. Learn more about the combined offering at AlphaSense and Tegus.
Enterprise Intelligence
AlphaSense’s Enterprise Intelligence solution allows you to integrate and query your own internal content alongside the premium external sources listed above. That includes:
- Internal research, notes, and presentations
- CIMs and investment memos
- Reports from industry and market intelligence providers
- Emails, newsletters, web pages, and RSS feeds
In this way, AlphaSense centralizes all your internal and external knowledge in one place, and allows you to leverage our industry-leading search, summarization, and monitoring tools to enhance and accelerate your research.
Our genAI capabilities deliver instant, accurate, and secure summarizations with the ability to ask follow-up questions across both your proprietary internal content and hundreds of millions of premium external documents.
AI Search & Summarization Technology
AlphaSense has invested 10+ years into the development of our tech stack. Our industry-leading suite of AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights:
Our generative AI chat experience transforms how users can extract insights from our vast library of premium content sources. Generative Search is trained to think like an analyst, so it understands the market research intent behind your natural language queries.
When searching for insights, Generative Search helps you get up to speed on a company or topic by instantly surfacing the answers you need. You can dig deeper into topics by asking follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query. Each answer provides citations to the exact snippet of text from where the information was sourced, so that it can always be referenced back.
Generative Grid applies multiple genAI prompts across many documents at the same time to quickly provide organized answers to research questions at scale, in an easy-to-read table format. This enables users to summarize documents using pre-built criteria to save time when executing repeatable workflows.
Generative Grid pulls data from both premium external documents in the AlphaSense platform and users’ internal content. From there, users can choose pre-built templates or create their own to automate routine workflows. Each summary provides a direct citation to the source material it was pulled from.
Users can leverage this tool to track clinical trials, compare competitors at a glance, parse through medical studies in seconds, track biopharma deal activity, or analyze merger proxy filings, among many use cases.
This feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights (reducing time spent on research during earnings season), quickly capture company outlook and bull/bear cases from analyst research, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees. All Summaries provide you with citations to the exact snippets of text from where the summaries are sourced — combining high accuracy with easy verification.
This unique feature is proprietary to AlphaSense and has the ability to understand both the keyword and search intent behind any of your queries, factoring in search results that include variations in business language. For example, a search for “TAM” will also bring back results on “addressable market” and “market size.”
Relevancy Algorithm
AlphaSense’s advanced algorithm also eliminates noise (i.e., content with matching keywords but ultimately irrelevant to your specific search objective) and surfaces only the most relevant results based on market research workflows. This algorithm saves you precious time and energy, allowing you to get straight to analysis and other high-level tasks.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment Analysis, a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature, parses through content and identifies nuances in the tone and subjective meaning of text. It then uses color coding to help readers identify the document’s positive, negative, and neutral sentiments.
This technology assigns each search term a numerical sentiment change score to help users track any slight change in market sentiment over time. Users can take advantage of it to make better-informed investment decisions and improve risk management strategies.
Company Perspectives (BamSEC)
Make quantitative investment research easier by transforming how you work with public company data. By streamlining access to SEC filings, earnings and events transcripts, financial documents, and more, BamSEC enables analysts to focus on what matters, save time, and do better work.
BamSEC allows users to search across multiple companies and SEC filings. Customers can use these documents to perform due diligence on companies and explore performance metrics efficiently.
Using the tables on BamSEC, users can explore past filings, create models, and benchmark company performance, all in one place, without needing to pull up individual filings to manually track a company’s metrics.
Financials and Metrics (Canalyst)
Gain instant access to over 4,000 global fundamental models and over 60 industry dashboards, all hand-built and sourced by sector-focused analysts. Unlike building your own models and comp sheets, using our off-the-shelf models, dashboards, and data reduces your time spent on manual data sourcing, allowing you to focus your time on analyzing data, not aggregating it.
Integration Capabilities
Users can easily integrate content at enterprise scale through our Ingestion API or enterprise-grade connectors — like Microsoft 365/Sharepoint, Box, Google Drive, S3, and more.
Our integration capabilities allow for more streamlined collaboration with members across your organization and improve overall team productivity. Our proprietary AI technology allows you to search across all internal and external company content to find crucial insights, catching what other platforms miss in a secure and automated way.
AlphaSense also offers content processing and content management. Content processing allows company recognition within user documents, while content management features support custom tags, metadata and folder structures to better search through internal content.
Monitoring, Analysis, and Collaboration Tools
AlphaSense is designed to help users find insights faster. In order to do that, we offer a number of tools that extend beyond search and summarization to help users accelerate research tasks.
- Customizable dashboards create a centralized information hub for monitoring key companies and themes, while tailored alerts provide real-time updates.
- Powerful collaboration tools like Notebook+ and commenting features help teams manage and share insights more effectively.
- Table Tools allow you to move faster with spreadsheet-style visualizations directly from company filings, so you can chain together, edit, and optimize tables for analysis.
- Image Search allows you to discover insights buried in charts to quickly capture data without reading through pages of documents.
- Snippet Explorer allows you to effortlessly look at any topic or theme and all its historical mentions in a single view.
- Our Black-lining feature allows you to automatically identify any QoQ changes in SEC filings.
- Automated Monitoring allows you to set up real-time alerts that send instant updates on any relevant market movements, news, emerging trends, and competitor activities. We also generate snapshots of companies and topics regularly that keep you ahead of the curve with actionable insights.
AlphaSense Pros:
- Vast content database that spans key market perspectives, including broker research, expert calls, company documents, news & regulatory sites
- 10+ years of investment in AI
- Incorporates AI search technology, machine learning, and sentiment analysis
- Generative AI features like Generative Search, Smart Summaries, and Generative Grid for enhanced and streamlined workflow
- AI and genAI tools can be applied to integrated internal content
- 4,000+ pre-built financial models that update automatically
- Live transcripts that allow users to view past, present, and future event transcripts in a calendar and view event transcripts in real time
- Automated and customizable alerts
- All-in-one research platform
- Mobile app that includes all platform content and AI search capabilities
- User-friendly interface
- Internal note-taking, sharing and collaboration features
- Support for APIs and integrations
- Supports enterprise-level organizations and teams
- Enterprise-grade data production complying with global security standards: SOC2, ISO270001, FIPS 140-2, SAML 2.0
- Excellent customer support team, including 24/5 chat with product specialists, a Live Help button on the website, and regular live AlphaSense Education webinars
AlphaSense Cons:
- Visualization tools are limited at this time
- Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses
Features Comparison
Why Choose AlphaSense?
AlphaSense is trusted by 20 of the largest pharmaceutical companies, 95% of consulting firms, 80% of the top asset management firms, and 88% of the S&P 100.
Unlike DealForma, which is exclusively designed for tracking deal activity in the life sciences industry, AlphaSense is purpose-built to empower professionals across all industries to conduct deep, comprehensive, and streamlined market research.
To that end, AlphaSense provides a vast content universe across all critical market research perspectives, as well as an industry-leading suite of AI and generative AI tools that helps users get the most value from that content in less time.
DealForma is a great choice if you are only looking for deep, structured insights on biopharma licensing, M&A, and drug pipelines. However, if, you are looking for AI-powered discovery that provides a holistic picture across financial documents, earnings calls, expert research, and internal content across industries, choose AlphaSense.
