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 synonyms and tone/sentiment | ✓ | ✕ |
| Access to expert call library and broker research | ✓ | ✕ |
| Seamless user interface, with cloud functionality and intuitive UX design | ✓ | ✓ |
| Ability to upload your own internal content | ✓ | Enterprise only |
| Integrations | ✓ | Enterprise only |
| Generative AI summarizations of content | ✓ | ✓ |
| Ability to search by industry and by region | ✓ | ✕ |
| Ability to find data and KPIs within structured and unstructured formats | ✓ | ✕ |
| Ability to search by topic or theme | ✓ | ✕ |
| Ability to search more than one ticker at a time | ✓ | ✕ |
| Capacity to search through varied content sources across companies, industries, and topics | ✓ | ✓ |
| GenAI provides citations to specific text snippet 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 |
AlphaSense
AlphaSense is a leading all-in-one market intelligence and AI search platform built for robust financial and market research. This tool is designed for research and business professionals looking to implement a qualitative research strategy powered by automated features and proprietary AI technology.
Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also recognized by Forbes as atop 50 AI company in 2023.
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 and generative AI—all on a single platform.
Features and Capabilities
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 external content sources include trade journals, news, regulatory documents, earnings transcripts, investor presentations and other company documents, and SEC and global filings. AlphaSense users also have access to two premium and proprietary content offerings. These are:
- Wall Street Insights®– A collection of broker research from Wall Street’s leading firms, covering global sector themes, industries, and companies from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms, available within the AlphaSense platform. Research professionals can even preview the contents of a broker report, saving them wasted time and money on potentially fruitless research.
- Expert Transcript Library– Tens of thousands of proprietary one-on-one call transcripts with industry experts, competitors, customers, partners, and former and current executives, with the ability to conduct your own 1:1 expert calls for less.
AlphaSense and Tegus
As of July 2024, AlphaSense and Tegus have joined forces, bringing unparalleled access to even more insights, and covering more industries and companies than ever before.
Both platforms come with extensive libraries of high-quality research, as well as data and AI tools that allow users to extract the most value from the insights they find.
Tegus has an extensive and fast-growing library of high-quality expert research, which includes coverage of 35,000+ public and private companies across TMT, consumer goods, energy, and life sciences sectors. Additionally, Tegus' financial data offering, which includes financials, KPIs, and fully drivable models on more than 4,000 public companies, as well as its BamSEC self-serve solution to search and access securities filings, adds new and unique offerings to AlphaSense's extensive product suite and datasets.
Additionally, Tegus’s Canalyst feature provides instant access to over 4,000 global fundamental models and over 60 industry dashboards, all hand-built and sourced by sector-focused analysts in Vancouver. Unlike building your own models and comp sheets, using Tegus’s 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.
Enterprise Intelligence
In addition to the external content sources listed above, AlphaSense’s Enterprise Intelligence solution allows you to upload and search through your own internal content. 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 knowledge in one place—the internal and external—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.
AlphaSense meets the highest industry standards–including SOC2, ISO27001 compliant, regular, accredited third-party penetration testing, FIPS 140-2 standard encryption on all content, and SAML 2.0 integration.
AI Search & Summarization Technology
Our industry-leading suite of generative AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights, leaning on 10+ years of AI tech development. This includes our RAG approach and our proprietary AlphaSense Large Language Model (ASLLM)—trained specifically on business and financial data—which matches or beats the leading third-party LLMs over 90% of the time.
Our suite of tools currently includes:
This feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights(reducing time spent on research during earnings season), quickly capture company outlook, bull/bear cases, 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. We also apply this same technology to our collection of expert calls.
Our generative AI chat experience transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources. Our chatbot is trained to think like an analyst, so it understands the market research intent behind your natural language queries. Whenever you search for information, generative AI is there to help you get up to speed on a company or topic by instantly getting you the answers you need. You can dig deeper into topics by asking follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query. Each answer will always provide citations to the exact snippet of text from where the information was sourced.
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, anatural 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 sentiments across time. Users can take advantage of it to make better-informed investment decisions and improve risk management strategies.
Integration Capabilities
Customers 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 featureshelp teams manage and share insights more effectively.
- Table Toolsallow you to move faster with spreadsheet-style visualizationsdirectly from company filings, so you can chain together, edit, and optimize tables for analysis.
- Image Searchallows you to discover insights buried in charts to quickly capture data without reading through pages of documents.
- Snippet Explorerallows you to effortlessly look at any topic or theme and all its historical mentions in a single view.
- Our Black-liningfeature allows you to automatically identify any QoQ changes in SEC filings.
- Automated Monitoringallows you to set up real-time alertsthat 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 withactionable insights.
AlphaSense Strengths
- Extensive content database that spans key market perspectives, including broker research, expert calls, company documents, news & regulatory sites.
- Incorporates AI search technology, machine learning, and sentiment analysis
- Generative AI features, like Smart Summaries for earnings, expert calls, and broker reports
- GenAI tools can be applied to integrated internal content
- Automated and customizable alerts
- All-in-one research platform
- 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 Weaknesses
- Visualization tools are limited at this time
- Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses
Perplexity
Perplexity is an advanced generative AI tool designed to assist users in extracting and synthesizing information from various public sources. Its primary purpose is to streamline the research process by generating detailed, contextually relevant responses to complex queries. The platform leverages sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand and analyze vast amounts of text data, making it a useful asset for professionals who need to quickly gather and interpret information.
Their main offering is a consumer-grade AI-powered answer engine, similar to ChatGPT. However, Perplexity has also recently added the Enterprise Pro version of its platform, specifically designed for teams. This platform 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.
Additionally, Perplexity has recently introduced a brand-new feature called Internal Knowledge Search, exclusively for Pro and Enterprise Pro users, that lets them search for information across the web and their internal databases, all in one place. Internal knowledge bases will be limited to files users upload to Perplexity.
Features and Capabilities
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.
Real-Time Web Results
Perplexity provides real-time data from the web, ensuring users have access to the most current public information available. This is especially useful for research or queries that are more timely or that are likely to change on a frequent basis.
Source Attribution
One of Perplexity’s strengths is its ability to provide clear source attribution for its answers. This feature allows researchers to verify the accuracy of the information and trace it back to original sources, adding a layer of reliability to market research findings. However, Perplexity is not able to link to exact snippets of information in the sources.
Quick Summaries
Perplexity offers the ability to summarize large volumes of information quickly, which helps users save time and can turn complex datasets into digestible insights.
Conversational AI Interface
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 Enterprise Pro version offers the following features in addition to those listed above:
- Unlimited file uploads
- Greater customization options
- Enhanced search capabilities, relative to the consumer-grade version
- Enterprise-grade data privacy and security
- Internal knowledge search, which allows users to search across internal documents they uploaded into Perplexity, as well as the public web—all in one place
Perplexity Strengths
- Utilizes real-time data from the web in its answers, ensuring relevant and timely responses
- Handles complex queries and generates responses that are contextually rich and highly relevant
- Great at integrating diverse data sources
- Cites source documents for generated responses, though does not cite snippets
- 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 Weaknesses
- Trained on publicly available data, rather than business-grade or financial data
- Output is only as good as the data the model is trained on, so hallucination and inaccuracy are highly likely
- The tool struggles with highly complex or technical queries, leading to longer response times and incomplete answers
- Unable to integrate content at Enterprise scale due to lack of support for Enterprise-Grade connectors
- Internal Knowledge Search only searches across uploaded documents, not the user’s entire internal knowledge database
Frequently Asked Questions
Enterprise vs Consumer-Grade
The main difference between Perplexity and AlphaSense is that AlphaSense is an enterprise-grade tool, designed for financial and business research, while Perplexity is first and foremost a consumer-grade tool. While this means Perplexity is cheaper and accessible to a wider range of use cases outside of business contexts, it also means that the tool is severely limited in its ability to serve enterprises and meet financial and business research needs. While Perplexity has an Enterprise Pro version, it’s much more limited—in terms of content, customization, analytical features—and more general than AlphaSense.
Financial and Business Data vs General Information Retrieval
Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro version is better-suited for larger organizations, but it is not specialized to financial and business use cases. Instead, Perplexity is designed for broad, enterprise-level knowledge search and general information retrieval across industries.
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.
AlphaSense does both—provides access to premium, 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.
AlphaSense’s extensive content universe, purpose-built for financial and corporate professionals, provides access to over 10,000 public, private, and premium content sources. These include company documents, news, regulatory documents, broker reports, and expert call transcripts—everything you need for full-scale market research.
In addition to this, AlphaSense’s Enterprise Intelligence feature enables secure searches, summaries, and follow-up questions across your organization’s proprietary internal data. Every AI search feature in the platform can be applied to both external and internal content for enhanced, accelerated research.
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 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).
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 customizable 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.
Overall, AlphaSense is a much better option for organizations looking for a powerful market and investment research tool. Perplexity is better-suited for individual consumers looking for an effective generative AI tool that is trained on web data, or enterprises that don’t need financial or business insights but are looking for more general and broad answers.
