AlphaSense vs Perplexity

AlphaSense clients include respected leaders in every sector:

Overview

Feature	AlphaSense	Perplexity
Purpose-built for market intelligence and investment workflows	✓	✕
Advanced AI search that picks up on relevant tone/sentiment	✓	✕
Built-in access to expert call library and broker research	✓	✕
Built-in access to qualitative and quantitative insights necessary for comprehensive market intelligence	✓	✕
Seamless user interface with intuitive UX design	✓	✓
Ability to upload internal content	✓	Enterprise only
Integrations with external third-party tools	✓	Enterprise only
Generative AI summarizations of content	✓	✓
Ability to search by industry and by region	✓	✕
Conversational generative AI, with deep research capabilities	✓	✓
Ability to find data and KPIs within structured and unstructured formats	✓	Limited
Ability to search by topic or theme	✓	✕
Capacity to search through varied content sources across companies, industries, and topics	✓	✓
GenAI provides citations to specific text snippets from where information was sourced	✓	✕
Ability to add annotations and comments	✓	✕
Ability to set up monitoring tools (like alerts and dashboards)	✓	✕
Enterprise-grade data protection and security	✓	Enterprise only
Free version with limited features	✕	✓

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a leading enterprise-grade market intelligence and AI search platform built for robust financial and market research. This platform is designed for investment and strategy teams looking to implement a comprehensive research strategy powered by automated features and proprietary AI technology.

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.

Qualitative and Quantitative Content Universe

AlphaSense is the only tool that combines public and private financial data with expert call transcripts, broker research, news, and AI search in one place. This means you get all the numbers, as well as the qualitative narrative that provides context to those figures, so you can make smarter and better informed decisions.

Premium External Market Insights

Our library of qualitative content includes:

Wall Street Insights® collection of equity research that features more than 1,000 broker sources, including Goldman Sachs
Expert calls, which includes over 220K interviews with pre-qualified experts and the ability to conduct your own 1:1 calls with 70% cost savings compared to traditional expert networks
Company documents, such as earnings transcripts, company presentations, SEC and global filings, ESG reports, and press releases
News, trade journals, and regulatory coverage

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.

Internal Content Integration

With AlphaSense, you can integrate and query your own internal content alongside the premium external sources listed above. This includes:

Internal research, notes, and presentations
CIMs and investment memos
VDRs
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.

Financial Data

On the quantitative side, AlphaSense provides access to the following crucial insights:

Historical Financials & Estimates: Standardized statements and consensus data across 17,000+ public companies
Sector-Specific KPIs: Detailed operating metrics sourced from institutional-grade Canalyst models
Transaction Intelligence: Nearly 1M M&A deals and 680K private funding rounds, enriched with AI-generated deal rationale and strategic context
Dynamic Peer Sets: 125+ pre-built industry comparables with sector-specific metrics

AI Search & Summarization Technology

Our industry-leading generative AI tools are purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights, leaning on 10+ years of AI tech development. Our suite of tools currently 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 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 to 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 clients to summarize documents using pre-built criteria to save time when executing repeatable workflows.

Smart Summaries

This feature allows users 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 links to the exact location in the text from where the summaries pull — combining high accuracy with easy verification.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis, a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature, parses content and identifies nuances in language such as tone and subjective meaning. It then uses color coding to help users identify instances of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment throughout the document.

Integrated Workflows

AlphaSense helps research professionals conduct key workflows with greater speed and confidence by incorporating the following features in the platform:

Generative Search: Surface insights across structured data and qualitative content with full source citations, producing more complete research capabilities.
Natural Language Screener: Use simple prompts to discover equities, funding rounds, and M&A transactions.
AlphaSense Excel Add-In: Excel tool with custom formulas and simple syntax, analysis templates, and pre-built Industry Comps to quickly get you up and running.
Canalyst Model Access: 4,500+ ready-to-use models with detailed financials, operating metrics, and segment breakdowns.
Purpose-built workflows: One-click agents that run full investment workflows, from company and deal screening to performing early due diligence.
Domain-Specific AI: Unlike generic AI tools, our financial AI understands sector dynamics, valuation methodologies, and market context.

Company Perspectives

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, our BamSEC offering 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.

Financial Modeling

Gain instant access to over 4,500 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 undifferentiated work, allowing you to compete on your ability to analyze the data, not aggregate it.

Data Integration Capabilities

Customers can easily and securely integrate content at enterprise scale through our Ingestion API or enterprise-grade connectors — like Egnyte, 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.

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 return data without reading through pages of documents.
Snippet Explorer allows you to effortlessly assess 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:

Extensive content database that spans key market perspectives, including broker research, expert calls, company documents, news, and regulatory sites
Extensive quantitative insights and financial data workflow and analysis tools
14+ years of investment in AI
GenAI features like Generative Search, Deep Research, Smart Summaries, and Generative Grid for enhanced and streamlined workflows
AI and genAI tools that can be applied to integrated internal content
4,500+ 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 real-time 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 24/7 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

Perplexity

Perplexity is an AI-powered generative answer engine designed to streamline research by extracting and synthesizing information from various public sources. The platform leverages sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand and analyze vast amounts of text data, making it a useful asset for everyday users and professionals who need to quickly gather and interpret information.

Perplexity also has an Enterprise Pro version of its platform, specifically designed for teams. This version has added data privacy, enhanced security, and SOC2 certification, so that teams can safely upload their internal organizational data and use the tool for better knowledge discovery and collaboration.

Perplexity includes the following key features:

Natural Language Search

Perplexity allows users to input queries in natural language and receive detailed, accurate responses. This makes it easy for users to gather insights from highly complex and unstructured data sets without needing to know specific technical commands. These responses are sourced from real-time data from the web, and each response includes clear source attribution for easy verification. However, Perplexity only links to webpages and not to exact snippets of information in the sources.

Conversational AI Model

Perplexity operates through a conversational AI interface, enabling users to ask follow-up questions and refine their queries. This interactive capability makes it easier to dig deeper into research topics and uncover more specific insights during the research process. The AI even recommends “next step” questions to help users gain even deeper insights.

However, the default AI model is optimized for quick searches and web browsing, not complex tasks or comprehensive, full-scale research. Access to more advanced AI models is only available for Pro and Enterprise Pro users.

Quick Summaries

Perplexity excels at summarizing large volumes of text and extracting key insights. The AI system can ingest long or complex documents — from articles and reports to PDFs you upload — and quickly provide digestible takeaways or answer your queries about the document.

Perplexity Labs

Available for all Pro users, Labs allows users to build dashboards, presentations, and analytical reports by requesting them through the same conversational AI search engine. This is mostly intended as a space for power users who want to experiment, prototype, or build AI-enhanced workflows. Labs writes and executes code to handle tasks like structuring data, applying formulas, and creating charts, text documents, or spreadsheets.

Enterprise Pro for Teams

Perplexity launched the Enterprise Pro version of its product in late 2024, specifically designed for organizations and teams. This version includes all the capabilities of the standard Perplexity, but with added features focused on data privacy, security, and team collaboration. These features include:

Internal Knowledge Search

This enterprise search functionality allows users to search for information across both the web and their own internal databases. Internal knowledge bases are limited to files users upload directly to Perplexity.

Spaces

A feature designed to streamline collaboration for enterprise teams, Spaces are private collaborative workspaces that function as shared project hubs. Members can save threads, upload files, and work on research tasks together.

Customization and Integrations

Perplexity Enterprise Pro integrates with multiple third-party data sources and apps, which is crucial for supporting enterprise teams’ workflows. Perplexity has also recently announced integrations with data sources like Factset and Crunchbase, which would allow enterprise users to query those databases using the Perplexity search engine.

Enterprise-Grade Privacy and Security

The Enterprise Pro version of Perplexity meets all enterprise-grade security and data privacy standards, including SOC 2 Type II. In this version, any uploaded files or queries made are not used to train the AI model, ensuring all proprietary information stays confidential. For additional data security, Perplexity offers admin-level user management control and content encryption.

Perplexity Pros:

Utilizes real-time data from the web in its answers, ensuring relevant and timely responses
Excels at fast, broad, web-based research
Handles complex queries and generates responses that are contextually rich and highly relevant
Enterprise version incorporates collaboration and customization features
Enterprise users can select more advanced AI models for their search
Great at integrating diverse data sources
Cites source documents for generated responses
Can analyze and extract insights from an uploaded document
Ability to create charts and tables summarizing data
Most useful features are only available for the higher-cost subscription tiers

Perplexity Cons:

No built-in premium content sets
AI is not purpose-built for financial or business use cases
Output is only as good as the data the model is trained on, so inaccuracies are likely
The tool struggles with highly complex or technical queries, leading to longer response times and incomplete answers
Cannot cite exact snippets from where information was sourced
Internal Knowledge Search only searches across uploaded documents, not the user’s entire internal knowledge database
Limited exporting or reporting features

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the key differences between AlphaSense and Perplexity?

Purpose and Intended Audience

The main difference between Perplexity and AlphaSense is that AlphaSense is purpose-built for financial and business research, while Perplexity is primarily intended for quick AI-powered web search. AlphaSense has over a decade of experience supporting leading enterprises in various industries in conducting comprehensive, AI-powered market and investment research. Perplexity is a relatively new platform, and though it does have an Enterprise Pro version, it lacks the content, customization, and analytical features that are required for financial and business use cases. In contrast to AlphaSense, Perplexity is not built to support market intelligence workflows or deep insight discovery.

Data Sources and Content Scope

Perplexity does not offer its own content sets to help enterprises with full-scale market research — it only helps organizations better discover and manage their own content. Otherwise, all other data Perplexity pulls from to generate queries is from the public web, which means the insights it provides are more general and less differentiated. The Enterprise Pro version does incorporate certain content partnerships, but users will need to have entitlements and separate subscriptions with those data providers to access that premium content.

In contrast, AlphaSense provides access to over 10,000 public, private, premium, and proprietary content sources with some of the most differentiated insights you can find anywhere, along with the ability to integrate your internal data seamlessly into the platform. With qualitative insights from company documents, news, regulatory documents, broker reports, and expert call transcripts — as well as quantitative insights found in our Financial Data offering — you can always be confident in the comprehensiveness and accuracy of your research.

Every AI search feature in the platform can be applied to both external and internal content for enhanced, accelerated research — helping you maximize the value of each insight.

AI Capabilities and Customization

Both AlphaSense and Perplexity use advanced AI technology, including natural language search, genAI summaries, and a conversational AI interface. However, AlphaSense’s AI has 10+ years of training on specifically financial and business data, and its genAI model is trained to think like an analyst. The platform also employs guardrails against genAI hallucination, and all answers generated by genAI are citable and verifiable.

On the other hand, Perplexity’s AI technology is trained on public web data, is therefore more susceptible to hallucination and disinformation, and also lacks the security and privacy protections that high-profile companies require in a genAI tool (the Enterprise Pro version does offer the security and privacy protections necessary). All generated answers are citable and verifiable.

AlphaSense also offers advanced analytical features like sentiment analysis and trend detection for deeper and more streamlined research; Perplexity lacks advanced features like these.

Finally, AlphaSense allows for more customization — with its custom dashboards, watchlists, and real-time alerts. Perplexity offers very limited customization; its main strength lies in providing quick, conversational responses to a wide range of queries.

Who should choose AlphaSense, and who should choose Perplexity?

AlphaSense and Perplexity serve relatively divergent use cases, and there are instances where one tool is a more suitable choice than the other.

For individuals looking for an effective generative AI tool that is trained on web data and can provide quick answers sourced from the web, the basic version of Perplexity may suffice. Organizations that don’t require financial or business insights, who are simply looking for general or broad answers, or an easy way to search and query internal knowledge, or who have limited budgets may find the Enterprise Pro version of Perplexity suitable.

However, for those organizations that require a powerful AI-powered market and investment research tool, built specifically for financial and business workflows, AlphaSense is a much better option. AlphaSense provides access to premium, proprietary content — including broker reports, regulatory filings, and expert call transcripts — layered with industry-leading AI search, monitoring, and analytics. It also incorporates robust quantitative insights and integrates with your organization’s internal data, resulting in a unified, end-to-end research platform that delivers deeper insights, faster decisions, and a level of analytical power far beyond what Perplexity can provide.

How do financial services firms use AlphaSense?

Financial services firms can use AlphaSense to make accurate and timely investment decisions with confidence.

Access to exclusive content sources (like broker research and expert call transcripts) can give institutional investors deep insights into competitors and market trends, keeping them ahead of the pack when it comes to investment opportunities and strategies.

Our clients range from asset management companies and hedge funds to venture capital firms and private equity. Here’s how they use AlphaSense to get ahead:

Fundamental Research – Conduct both top-down and bottom up research with both keyword and company searches.
Origination – Uncover unique investment ideas by using AI to surface companies not on your radar.
Due Diligence – Quickly determine the viability of a deal with the ability to map markets, identify segment-specific drivers, and uncover potential red flags.
Earnings Analysis – Accelerate earnings and company analysis by recognizing sentiment shifts and important market events earlier.

“AlphaSense helps us go mile-wide a lot faster, easier, and more flexibly—and then helps us figure out when to zero in.”

– Portfolio Manager, Financial Services Firm

How do corporate strategy, corporate development, and/or competitive intelligence teams use AlphaSense?

AlphaSense is a crucial market intelligence tool for 88% of the S&P 100 and 92% of the largest pharmaceutical companies. One of the biggest differentiators for corporations that AlphaSense provides is Wall Street Insights® — a leading collection of equity research from the world’s leading brokerage firms. This offering allows corporations to conduct more comprehensive competitive analysis, improve client interactions, enhance internal research and strategy, and save their organization time and money with AI and automation.

Here’s how top global corporations use AlphaSense to succeed:

Strategic Planning – Identify growth opportunities with insight from top analysts.
Competitive Intelligence – Maintain a clear understanding of the competitive landscape and monitor specific competitor performance as needed.
Trend Tracking – Stay ahead of emerging trends to capitalize on revenue opportunities.
Market Monitoring – Confidently navigate market shifts by being the first to know of important news and updates.

“AlphaSense gives us information we can’t get anywhere else.”

– VP Competitive Intelligence, Salesforce

How do IR teams use AlphaSense?

Earnings season has always been demanding — and advancements in technology have only increased expectations for speed, accuracy, and real-time insight. IR teams use AlphaSense to craft stronger narratives and efficiently prep the C-suite for successful calls.

With tools like sentiment analysis, Snippet Explorer (instantly showing the quarter-over-quarter history of keywords and KPIs), and Topic Modules (summarizing key trends from earnings at the company and industry level), earnings analysis becomes faster and more accurate and streamlined than ever before.

AlphaSense helps IR teams to:

Craft Earnings Narratives – Easily access and scan previous earnings call transcripts and other company documents to maintain consistent narratives quarter over quarter.
Monitor Sentiment Shifts – Recognize significant sentiment changes when they occur and frame them in the most effective way to stakeholders.
Track Market Trends – Monitor trends and understand how they impact your market.
Q&A Prep – Be prepared to answer the questions that are top of mind for analysts.

“The time saved by using AlphaSense is enormous. It easily saves us several hours a week. Requested information can be prepared in a timely, precise and efficient manner. For our daily work, this is essential.”

– Michael Otto, Director of Investor Relations and Sustainability

How do professional services firms use AlphaSense?

Using the AlphaSense platform, professional services teams can:

Achieve Stronger Proposal Alignment – Quickly gain an understanding of a company’s strategy and performance with access to broker research, expert call transcripts, earnings transcripts, and more.
High-Quality Client and Matter Targeting – Uncover early signals around business inflection points to inform client targeting and new business strategy.
Build Deeper Client Relationships -- Act as a confident thought leader with insights easily surfaced for you.
Discover Great M&A Opportunities – Get smart on companies and the market landscape quickly, so you can deliver the very best recommendations to your clients.
Partner Enablement – Law firms can enable partners with sector intelligence and mobile-ready talking points to support client meetings, pitch preparation, and reputation positioning.

"With AlphaSense, I get answers much faster and from higher quality sources compared to OpenAI's Deep Research. Deep Research gives a ton of information and I can't always limit it or be sure it's correct—often the sources are random business press I have to vet. But AlphaSense gives me concise, reliable answers, typically from respected brokerage analyst reports like Jefferies or Morgan Stanley, so I know the information is credible. That's a big advantage."

– Director, Growth & Strategy at Global Professional Services Firm Specializing in Accounting and Advisory

How much does Perplexity cost?

How much does AlphaSense cost?

What are some additional alternatives to Perplexity?