AlphaSense vs Glean

AlphaSense vs Glean: Key Differences

Glean is an enterprise search solution designed to help organizations efficiently access and utilize their internal knowledge and information. Its main purpose is to help improve employee productivity through better internal search, knowledge discovery, streamlined onboarding, and easy sharing and collaboration.

In contrast, AlphaSense is an end-to-end market intelligence that aggregates premium, proprietary, public, and private business content and allows users to use advanced AI search capabilities to search across this external, as well as their own internal, content. The result is a deep, comprehensive, holistic picture of any company, industry, trend, or market. Here’s how Glean compares to AlphaSense and how you can choose the right platform for your business needs.

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a secure, end-to-end AI-powered market intelligence platform, intended for financial research and business professionals looking to increase research productivity through AI and automation.

Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also recently named one of Fortune’s Top 50 AI Innovators and was ranked #8 on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list.

Here’s how our platform enables you to extract insights and answers from both high-value internal and external content with the power of artificial intelligence — all on a single platform.

Extensive Out-of-the-Box Content Library

AlphaSense’s exclusive collection of 10,000+ private, public, premium, and proprietary data sources is unmatched in the industry. Our content includes:

• Company documents for both private and public firms, including earnings transcripts, company presentations, SEC and global filings, ESG reports, and press releases
• Wall Street Insights®, an exclusive collection of equity research covering more than 1,000 broker sources, including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo
• Expert call transcript library with over 200,000 vetted interviews (including with competitors, suppliers, customers, and KOLs). Learn more about the combined offering of AlphaSense and Tegus here
• News, industry reports, trade journals, and regulatory documents

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, virtual data rooms, 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. With AlphaSense, enterprise users can leverage 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 data 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, purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights, includes:

Generative Search

Generative Search, now with Deep Research capabilities, 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.

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

Generative Grid applies multiple genAI prompts across many documents simultaneously 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, saving 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 earnings transcripts, compare competitors at a glance, parse through deal rooms in seconds, track macro event impacts, or analyze merger proxy filings, among many use cases.

Smart Summaries

Smart Summaries can instantly surface 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.

Smart Synonyms™

This unique feature, proprietary to AlphaSense, 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 time and energy, allowing you to get straight to analysis and other high-level tasks.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis, a natural language processing-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 passages in the document that have positive, negative, and neutral sentiment.

Additionally, 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 this feature to make better-informed investment decisions and improve risk management strategies.

Company Perspectives (BamSEC)

BamSEC effectively makes 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)

Users 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 — including Microsoft 365/Sharepoint, Box, Google Drive, S3, Egnyte, and more.

Our integration capabilities allow for more streamlined collaboration with members across your organization, improving overall team productivity. Our proprietary AI technology surfaces crucial insights across both internal and external company content, 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 enable 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.
• 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:

• Exclusive content universe that spans key market perspectives, including broker research, expert calls, company documents, news, and regulatory sites
• 10+ years of investment in AI
• Incorporates AI search technology, machine learning, and sentiment analysis
• Generative AI features like Deep Research, 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

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Glean

Glean is an enterprise search and knowledge discovery tool for modern professionals. Founded in 2019 by a team of former Google engineers and industry veterans, Glean’s goal is to help teams more efficiently access and utilize their internal knowledge and data, ultimately improving productivity and knowledge sharing within the organization.

As an enterprise search platform, Glean enables organizations to search across various data sources within their internal systems — including documents, emails, databases, collaboration tools, and more. Customers refer to Glean as “Google for the internal workspace,” citing the powerful and customizable search functionality that helps find any topic, project, or technology at work.

Glean incorporates the following key features:

Internal Search and Knowledge Discovery

Glean allows users to search across various apps and data sources — via connectors and integrations — and use semantic search to discover key insights in that data.

Enterprise Knowledge Graph

Glean builds a knowledge graph of content, people, and activities within the organization, which helps map relationships and responsibilities. Using this graph, Glean can also identify subject matter experts within the company and surface them when someone is searching for the go-to person for a particular topic.

Generative AI

Since 2023, Glean offers a suite of generative AI features that aims to improve the accuracy and security of enterprise data and content, as well as to enhance productivity and collaboration among teams. These include:

• AI Answers – NLP-based feature that draws from various sources of content, context, and permissions within an organization’s knowledge base to provide a single, concise answer to any query
• In-Context Recommendations – Provides relevant additional content and context to any asset users are working on, such as a document or presentation
• Work Assistant – A digital workplace assistant that can be used for engineering, sales, support, and other queries — pulling answers directly from internal company resources. Assistant also configures with Slack, so Glean can answer questions that are raised in Slack channels.

Enterprise-Grade Security

Glean was built with enterprise scalability and security in mind. It strictly enforces user permissions and access rights, based on your organization’s existing security model. The platform also provides full transparency regarding where each piece of information comes from and how each response was generated — resulting in easy verification and improved confidence. Glean also encrypts all user data, protects sensitive user content, and meets the highest security standards for enterprise organizations.

Related Reading: Best Enterprise Search Software (Buyer’s Guide)

Glean Pros:

• Strong tool for searching and discovering any internal company information
• Unified search across many sources via over 100 integrations
• Generative AI features that make search faster, easier, and more precise
• Great collaboration and knowledge sharing features
• Integration with Slack allows for greater ease and efficiency with getting answers
• Enterprise-grade governance, permissions, and security standards

Glean Cons:

• Relatively new in the market; product is still developing and learning
• Not built for end-to-end market research workflows
• Search capabilities are limited in terms of phrase matching and keyword proximity
• Relevancy score can be inaccurate, leading to sifting through irrelevant search results
• No built-in external content sets available on the platform, such as company documents, news, broker research, or expert calls
• Limited customization options, which may not be ideal for teams with unique needs
• No ability to set up customizable alerts

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