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AlphaSense vs. PitchBook

AlphaSense is the industry leader in market intelligence and qualitative research for corporations and financial services. Since its inception over a decade ago, AlphaSense has been at the forefront of comprehensive market research solutions, helping professionals make better business decisions.

Today, AlphaSense leverages the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to provide analysts and researchers with clear insight into companies, industries, and markets.

Trusted by the world's leading corporations

95%

of the top consultancies

80%

of the top asset management firms

largest pharmaceutical companies

88%

of the S&P 100

FAQs

AlphaSense vs. PitchBook: Key Differences

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a leading all-in-one market intelligence platform that helps research and business professionals—from analysts and financial researchers to corporate professionals— implement a qualitative research strategy powered by automation and proprietary AI search technology.

Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also recognized by Forbes as a top 50 AI company in 2023.

Here’s how AlphaSense helps you extract insights from both high-value internal and external content with the power of artificial intelligence—all in a single platform.

Extensive Out-of-the-Box Content Library

AlphaSense features an expansive content universe of external market intelligence and research that comprises over 10,000 public, private, premium, and proprietary data sources. Our platform is purpose-built to speed up your team’s access to information on all the relevant topics and companies driving your market.

Our external content sources include earnings transcripts, news wires, trade journals, and SEC and global filings. Within that, AlphaSense also gives users access to two proprietary and premium content offerings.

These offerings 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 Insights – 40,000+ expert transcripts from one-on-one calls with industry experts, professionals, competitors, customers, and former and current executives. You can also request bespoke 1:1 expert calls at affordable rates.

In addition to these sources, AlphaSense enables you to upload, index, and search through your own content. That includes:

Internal research, notes, and presentations
Reports from industry and market intelligence providers
Newsletters, web pages, and RSS feeds
Meeting and conference notes

This enables you to use the power of AlphaSense’s AI and generative AI technology to fill in gaps in your internal research and enhance the quality of your insights.

AI Search & Summarization Technology

AlphaSense comes with the following industry-leading AI capabilities:

Smart Synonyms™

Smart Synonyms™, proprietary to AlphaSense, is a feature that uses AI technology to recognize both the keyword and search intent behind any query.

AlphaSense uses advanced algorithms to eliminate noise from your search (i.e., content with matching keywords but ultimately irrelevant to your search objective) and leverages variations in language to pinpoint the exact information you need.

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 sentiments across time. Users can take advantage of it to make better-informed investment decisions and improve their risk management strategies.

Generative AI

Unlike other consumer-grade generative AI (genAI) tools trained on publicly available data, AlphaSense takes an entirely different approach. Our industry-leading suite of generative AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights and leans on 10+ years of AI tech development. Our proprietary AlphaSense Large Language Model (ASLLM)—trained specifically on business and financial data—matches or beats the leading third-party LLMs over 90% of the time.

Our suite of tools currently includes:

Smart Summaries – this feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights—reducing time spent on research during earnings season, quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees.
Enterprise Intelligence – a first-of-its-kind offering that delivers AlphaSense’s AI-powered search and summarization capabilities to customers’ internal organizational knowledge.
AlphaSense Assistant – a generative AI chat experience that transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources.

Integration Capabilities

Even the best companies fall victim to silos. But forward-thinking organizations know to avoid this pitfall by leveraging the advanced collaborative tools found in modern market intelligence platforms.

Seamlessly Integrate with Other Tools

AlphaSense works with the apps and tools you already use to help you be more productive with less effort. Connect with integrations to Box, Sharepoint, OneNote, or leverage our API suite to securely upload your proprietary content.

APIs

API capabilities provided by your market intelligence platform allow you to build your own tools to get maximum ROI from the content sources you can now access. For example, AlphaSense offers the following APIs for users to leverage our proprietary technology and content across other parts of their strategies:

Alert Feed API: Real-time data feed based on saved searches & alerts.
Search API: Solution that provides real-time, programmatic access to AlphaSense search infrastructure to query and filter the database of documents from a third party domain.
Ingestion API: Integration, processing, and enrichment capabilities for internal or custom content sets.
AI API: Enrichment capabilities that enable company recognition, sentiment, themes and KPI services for internal content.

Monitoring, Analysis, and Collaboration Tools

AlphaSense is designed to help users find insights faster, and then effectively share those insights with teams and C-Suite leadership. To do that, we offer several 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 real-time alerts provide real-time updates.
Smart Alerts monitor the most important themes, companies, and market updates with weekly, daily, or real-time alerts.
Notebook+ and commenting features increase collaboration and help teams manage and share insights more effectively. Notebook+ also includes templates that streamline the process of creating deliverables, as well as folders for better content organization and retrieval.
Table Tools allow you to streamline your quantitative analysis by enabling you to export modeled time-series data on company financials.
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:

Extensive content universe that spans the four key 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 and image search
Automated and customizable alerts
All-in-one research platform
User-friendly interface
Internal messaging and collaboration features
Support for APIs and integrations
Supports enterprise-level organizations and teams
Enterprise-grade data production complying with global security standards
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

PitchBook

PitchBook is a powerful investment research and intelligence platform for venture capitalists, M&A investors, hedge funds, and private equity holders. It has access to valuations, financial histories, investors, and executives on over 3.5 million private and public companies worldwide. It also keeps expanding factsets and meticulous records of over 1.9 million deals with over 450,000 investors and 110,000 funds.

PitchBook also gives you access to information like:

Company patents
Financial analysis
Non-financial metrics like employee counts and social media following
Company leadership teams and management
Deal history, including deal sizes and pre-and post-money valuations
Former and current company investors
Financial data charting and infographics
Networking through executives’ LinkedIn profiles, contact and messaging details

You’ll find PitchBook useful if you’re looking for private market intelligence, venture capital, deal sourcing, or performing due diligence. Moreover, you can use its platform for fundraising, networking, benchmarking companies, and asset allocation across your portfolio.

Some of its features include:

Advanced Search Filters

Using PitchBook’s advanced search tools, users can find deep insights on companies, deals, investors, debts, and lenders. Users can search industries by name, location, age, investors, lenders, and funding stage.

Emerging Spaces

PitchBook uses the Emerging Spaces feature to introduce investors and financial experts to new and emerging spaces. That helps investors learn about trending markets and explore alternative investment opportunities.

High-Quality User Interface

Much like AlphaSense, PitchBook has an intuitive user interface that allows professional and industry experts to integrate the tool into their workflows. It’s easy to navigate, search, and explore different companies and their detailed profiles from the PitchBook Interface.

Moreover, users can also access PitchBook from their PCs or smartphones, allowing them to carry and access insights on the go.

Integrations and APIs

PitchBook supports integrations and APIs that allow you to import and export data to other applications. Also, they offer a Google Chrome extension that enables you to access their services directly from your browser.

PitchBook Pros:

Provides access to a wide array of information, including company patents, financial analysis, information on former and current company investors and more
Advanced search filters help investors access deep insights into companies
Emerging spaces for investors looking to capitalize on new and alternative markets
You can create custom alerts and monitor your dashboard for news
Supports integrations from third-party software

PitchBook Cons:

Lacks access to an expert call library
Limited access to earning transcripts, and no SEC and global filings
No access to advanced AI search functionality or sentiment analysis
Users cannot upload internal content to the platform
Lacks trade journals and access to broker research

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AlphaSense clients include respected leaders in every sector:

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do users choose AlphaSense over PitchBook?

The AlphaSense extensive content universe provides access to the Four Key Perspectives you need to make fully-informed business decisions and get the full scope of the market and your research.

The Four Perspectives AlphaSense utilizes are:

Company – documents published by public and private companies, including company filings, presentations, earnings transcripts, ESG reports
Analyst – research published by top Wall Street analysts on a national and global level
Journalist – content published in news and trade journals, as well as publications by government agencies and NGOs
Expert – on-demand interviews with customers, partners, competitors, former employees, and industry experts

PitchBook holds a large amount of private company data that is particularly valuable for VC, PE, and M&A needs, as well as non-financial data such as employee counts, but they simply do not have enough data sets to truly tap into these four key voices that are integral for holistic research.

When stacked up against the Four Perspectives, here is where PitchBook lacks:

Company – PitchBook holds limited earning transcripts, no SEC or global filings, and their ESG reports are created in-house.
Analyst – PitchBook only offers Morningstar Institutional Equity Research in their standard offering.
Journalist – PitchBook does not hold any trade journals, which severely limits this perspective.
Expert – PitchBook does not have an expert transcript library in its content offering.

For those users who are looking for an end-to-end research process—one that allows them to quickly get smart on an area of interest and understand it from every angle—PitchBook falls short.

Additionally, while PitchBook has a robust keyword search and filtering functionality that allows users to create screeners for private companies and pinpoint specific private companies of interest, they do not have AlphaSense’s AI-based synonym recognition technology nor sentiment analysis, which streamline workflows and prevent research blindspots. Instead, their search functionality allows for basic NLP.

For users who need a 360 degree view of the market and their industries of interest, AlphaSense is the clear choice.

How do financial services firms use AlphaSense?

Financial services firms use AlphaSense to make investment decisions with speed, accuracy, and confidence.

With access to exclusive content sources (such as broker research and an expert call transcript library), AlphaSense users have an insider perspective on competitors and market trends—meaning they stay ahead of the pack when it comes to smart investment strategies.

High-value investment research applications include:

Asset Management – Pinpoint critical company metrics by analyzing earnings reports.
Alpha Generation – Find and capitalize on opportunities faster with AI.
Equity Research – Accelerate due diligence with Smart Search and trend analysis.
Venture Capital Auditing – Aggregate financial metrics across public and private competitors to validate target companies.
Sell-side Research – Accelerate earnings and company analysis by recognizing sentiment shifts and important market events earlier.

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

Wall Street research, once considered exclusive to the financial services industry, is now used by corporations to plan and execute smart market intelligence strategies that give them an edge over competitors.

Corporations can maximize revenue potential through:

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.

How do IR teams use AlphaSense?

Earnings season has always been demanding, and advancements in technology have only leveled up the expectations for speed, accuracy, and real-time insight. IR teams use AlphaSense to keep pace with industry demands, all while delivering exceptional reports to stakeholders and executives.

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, more accurate, and more streamlined than ever before.

AlphaSense helps IR teams to:

Maintain Continuity – 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 Trends – Monitor market trends and understand how they impact your business.
Prepare for Presentations and Earnings Calls – Never miss an important insight and be prepared for every potential stakeholder question.

“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 consultants use AlphaSense?

Consultants use AlphaSense to access the insights they need to deliver smart strategic services and win more business. Using the AlphaSense platform, consultants across industries can:

Achieve stronger proposal alignment – Get smart on a company’s strategy and performance faster with access to broker research, expert call transcripts, earnings transcripts, and more.
Deliver higher-quality market research – Easily analyze 10 years worth of earnings transcripts and get the full picture faster with advanced AI capabilities.
Build deeper client relationships – Act as a confident thought leader with insights easily surfaced for you.
Discover the next great M&A opportunity – Get smart on companies and the market landscape quickly, so you can deliver the very best recommendations to your clients.

How much does PitchBook cost?

An annual PitchBook license costs $25,000 for three users and $7,000 per user for additional seats. PitchBook is one of the pricier options in the market, although it comes loaded with plenty of useful features for financial professionals.

How much does AlphaSense cost?

As an AlphaSense user, you can access more information, smarter features, and an extensive content library at a more reasonable price. With AlphaSense, you’ll either pay by the enterprise or per seat. Contact us for more information on pricing options.

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Experience the AlphaSense Difference

Whether you are conducting financial research or building a market and competitive landscape, you want to be confident that you are detecting and discovering your research blindspots to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

That’s why it’s crucial to select a market intelligence and search platform powered by proprietary AI technology that intuitively understands your needs and precisely surfaces the results you need to maximize ROI.

If you’re ready to level up your research and intelligence strategies, the AlphaSense team is here to help you get started.

Start your free trial today Contact Us