CB Insights
Best for: institutional and enterprise-grade users who need to monitor existing and emerging market trends and key players, particularly in the tech sector
CB Insights is a market intelligence platform with a massive database for users seeking technology insights and analyses on companies, private capital, and angel investments. This platform is primarily used to support company monitoring, opportunity discovery and forecasting, and vendor research and evaluation.
It also provides insights into companies’ latest funding rounds, venture capital, proprietary company data, business relationships, patent analytics, earnings transcripts, and more. This data is primarily acquired through machine learning and analyst briefings, a feature unique to CB Insights.
CB Insights offers the following key features:
Market Intelligence and Trend Analysis
The platform identifies emerging industry trends, disruptive startups, and sector-specific developments by analyzing patent filings, earnings calls, news mentions, and investment patterns.
AI-Driven Insights
The platform applies predictive analytics and machine learning to forecast industry shifts, company trajectories, and investment trends. A key AI feature of CB Insights is their Mosaic Score, which helps predict the success or failure of a private company by analyzing their health and growth potential.
Deals and Funding Tracking
CB Insights monitors global venture capital, private equity, and M&A activity, offering granular insights into deal structures, funding rounds, and acquisition trends.
Research Reports and Proprietary Insights
CB Insights creates data-driven reports and generates proprietary research on various industries, including fintech, AI, healthcare, and enterprise technology.
API Access and Data Integration
For enterprise organizations, CB Insights offers API access, allowing integration with internal analytics systems and custom dashboards.
CB Insights Pros
- Excellent platform for tech space opportunities
- Reliable tool for venture capitalists, private equity firms, and corporate development teams
- Comprehensive private market data
- Uses predictive modeling and AI to identify trends, risks, and investment opportunities
- Access to in-depth data and research analytics
- Mosaic Score feature helps assess potential success of private companies
- Allows users to set alerts for industry trends, competitors, and funding news
- Supports APIs and integrations
CB Insights Cons
- Focuses primarily on private tech companies, with very limited public company coverage
- No access to global/SEC filings, ESG reports, newspapers, trade journals, expert calls, or broker research
- Platform’s dashboards and reporting features are less customizable than some competitors’
- No smart search functionality
- Leans toward technology market use cases; lack of breadth and depth in other markets
- Not suitable for small-scale firms
If you’re looking for a more holistic market approach, CB Insights may not be the most ideal tool for your needs. Below are several alternatives you may explore.
AlphaSense
Best for: Conducting comprehensive market research using premium external content, integrated internal content, and advanced AI features for added speed, accuracy, and scope
AlphaSense is a leading enterprise-grade market intelligence and AI search platform built for robust financial and market research. This platform is designed for research and business professionals 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.
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 covering global sector themes, industries, and companies from 1,500+ 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 – 185K+ 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.
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
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 and ISO27001 compliance, 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:
Our generative AI chat experience transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions 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. Whenever you search for information, Generative Search helps 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 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.
Our newest generative AI tool, Generative Grid, applies multiple genAI prompts on 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.
Generative Grid pulls data from both premium external documents in the AlphaSense platform and users’ internal content. From there, users can choose preset templates or create their own to automate routine workflows. Each summary provides a direct citation to the source material it was pulled from.
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.”
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 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.
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.
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 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:
- 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 Generative Search and Smart Summaries for enhanced and streamlined workflow
- 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 Cons:
- Visualization tools are limited at this time
- Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses
PitchBook
Best for: private market financial data for deal sourcing, fundraising, and due diligence
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 4.7 million private companies and around 108,000 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 provides 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
PitchBook is most beneficial for private market intelligence, venture capital, deal sourcing, due diligence, fundraising, networking, benchmarking companies, and asset allocation across your portfolio.
Some of PitchBook’s key 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:
- Great private market coverage, including company patents, financial analysis, information on former and current company investors, and more
- Real-time data and proprietary research reports
- Provides access to broker research through integration of third-party equity research reports for an additional fee
- Advanced search filters help investors get deep insights into companies
- Emerging spaces for investors looking to capitalize on new and alternative markets
- Custom, real-time alerts are available
- Users can upload internal content into the platform
- Supports integrations from third-party software
PitchBook Cons:
- Limited public market coverage
- 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
- Equity research is only available for an additional fee
- Lacks trade journals
Related Reading: PitchBook Alternatives & Competitors
Crunchbase
Best for: Identifying key contacts for outreach and deal sourcing
Crunchbase is a business intelligence platform that provides company data, funding information, and industry insights. It’s a popular option with investors and VCs for tracking startups, funding rounds, and investment information — on the other side, entrepreneurs and startups use Crunchbase to find investors and for competitive research. Sales teams can also use Crunchbase to find high-growth leads and company contacts.
While users appreciate that the platform easily integrates with most sales tools like CRMs and outreach platforms, the market intelligence scope and depth is more limited than with most competitors. Since Crunchbase lacks key content sources like expert calls, earnings transcripts, and broker reports, it cannot be used for full-scale, holistic market research. Additionally, Crunchbase lacks the advanced AI search technology that is integral in a market intelligence platform to facilitate faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive research.
Crunchbase offers the following key features:
Company Profiles
Crunchbase maintains extensive profiles for millions of companies, with details on funding rounds, key personnel, market categories, acquisitions, and industry trends.
Funding and Investment Tracking
Users can access historical and real-time funding data, including investor details, funding amounts and rounds, and more — which is particularly valuable for venture capitalists or investors, as well as startup founders doing competitor research.
Advanced Search Filters
Crunchbase allows users to create custom queries using multiple criteria for a precise search experience. Users can filter results based on company filters — such as industry, location, founding date, and number of employees; investor filters — type of investor and portfolio size; funding round filters — stage and total funding amount; people and leadership filters — key executives, founders, and board members; and acquisitions and IPOs filters — acquisition price and IPO valuation.
API and Data Export
Users can integrate Crunchbase data into their workflows using APIs or export company lists for further analysis.
Crunchbase Pros:
- Comprehensive startup and funding data, particularly for early-stage startups
- Valuable data for sales prospecting
- Ability to export the data or integrate Crunchbase insights into workflows via API access
- Ease of use and intuitive interface
- Real-time alerts and saved searches
- Ability to filter by several categories including industry, funding stage, location, investor, leadership, and more
Crunchbase Cons:
- Limited coverage of large public companies
- Limited investor and M&A insights, compared to certain competitors
- CRM integration isn’t seamless
- Database isn’t comprehensive, even for private companies
- No advanced search capabilities including synonym recognition
- Lack of market research content sources such as expert calls, earnings transcripts, and brokerage reports
Similarweb
Best for: Digital performance benchmarking; retail competitive insights
Similarweb is a comprehensive competitive intelligence platform with a wide range of tools and capabilities including competitive analysis, benchmarking, keyword research, consumer intelligence, and more. Its use on the market is also wide-ranging, with a customer list that includes the likes of Google, Walmart, The Economist, and Adidas.
While Similarweb serves a customer base across industries, such as media, travel, and finance, the platform is largely retail-focused, with many features centering around shopper insights, e-commerce, and sales.
It also has value for digital marketers who need to analyze and segment their audience, so as to generate better and more personalized content. Similarweb offers extensive data coverage, including over 100 million websites and 4.7 million mobile apps. However, beyond this public data, Similarweb lacks premium or proprietary data sets that are integral for full-scale market intelligence.
Similarweb offers the following competitive analysis features:
- Website traffic analysis for competitors to see quantity and sources of traffic
- Digital performance benchmarking based on a core set of KPIs
- Audience insights providing information on competitor audience demographics, interests, and engagement patterns
- Keyword, SEO, and paid search analysis to understand competitor strategies
- Social media monitoring and mobile app insights for competitors
Similarweb Pros:
- Comprehensive web traffic data and competitive benchmarking across digital performance metrics
- Global and multi-language coverage
- Ability to set up custom reports and alerts for competitors’ digital performance updates
- Visual dashboards for compelling data stories and insights
- User-friendly interface
Similarweb Cons:
- Simply a web listening tool; lacks data coverage and content sets that are needed for in-depth competitive research, such as broker research and expert calls
- Limited qualitative insights that are necessary for full-scale competitive analysis
- No real-time data on competitors; data is not always up to date
- Wide range of products and features can be overwhelming; steep learning curve for beginners
- Traffic information can only be set to full months, with no possibility to set a range of specific dates
- Mobile app data is limited, compared to web data
- Free version of tool has significant limitations in terms of data depth and feature availability
- Some users report inaccuracies in certain metrics, such as traffic estimates for smaller companies
- API access is restricted to higher-tier plans
Related Reading: 9 Competitive Intelligence Tools to Trial in 2025
Semrush
Best for: Search engine marketing, competitor keyword research, content marketing, and SEO
Semrush is an SEO, digital marketing, and competitive intelligence tool enabling users to grow their online traffic organically using keyword research, analysis, and SEO techniques. It can help improve your rankings using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media management, content marketing, and ecommerce competitor analysis.
On the platform, users can perform organic research on competitors to understand keywords they rank for and highlight competitive gaps. Users can also benchmark web traffic against competitors to see where they stand in relation to online lead-gen and website performance.
Digital marketers, SEO professionals, content creators, small businesses, and website owners often rely on Semrush to grow and improve their online presence. However, corporate and financial services professionals conducting market or investment research will find the platform lacking, as Semrush does not offer access to premium or proprietary content sets that are necessary for gaining a complete market picture. Since Semrush is geared toward digital marketing and SEO research, it won’t be the best place to find actionable information on private or public companies.
Some of the key competitive analysis features Semrush offers include:
- Competitor keyword analysis for both organic and paid keywords
- Domain overview tool that provides a snapshot of a competitor’s digital performance
- Detailed backlink profiles for websites, allowing users to analyze competitors’ link-building strategies
- Competitive positioning map feature that visualizes market share in organic and paid search for user’s domain, as well as competitors
- Market explorer feature that allows you to analyze the entire competitive landscape within your industry, seeing market leaders, emerging players, and key trends
- AI-powered tools, helping users optimize their copy for SEO, readability, and engagement
Semrush Pros:
- Market overviews and direct competitor comparisons
- Ideal for SEO and keyword research or comparing digital presence to competitors’
- Highly actionable insights for pursuing competitive gaps
- Provides a wide range of digital marketing tools and services
- Offers detailed insights into competitors’ online marketing activities
- User-friendly interface with easy-to-use features
- Provides in-depth analysis of website traffic and rankings
- Offers customized reports and recommendations for optimization, though deeper customization requires higher-tier plans
- Massive analysis reach — 24B keywords and 808M domain profiles
Semrush Cons:
- May be overwhelming for beginners due to the wide range of features
- Some features are only available on higher-tier plans
- Keyword data accuracy may vary
- No real-time data access
- Only sources data from search engines, social media, and advertising platforms
- No expert calls available
- No broker research available
- No AI search or sentiment analysis capabilities
How to Choose an Alternative to CB Insights
With CB Insights, you can access market intelligence for most private tech companies. While it may meet some expectations and be the right tool for certain organizations and individuals, it certainly won’t work for everyone. When assessing potential alternatives, consider the following benchmarks:
- Intended use case: CB Insights works well for venture capitalists, private equity firms, and corporate development teams, particularly those looking for new opportunities in the tech space. Some of the alternatives listed above are better geared for competitive analysis, for SEO research, for sales intelligence, or full-scale market intelligence. Consider what your business and research needs are, and select the platform that is designed to serve those needs.
- Data coverage: CB Insights offers multiple data points on private tech companies, including venture capital, financing, valuations, and proprietary data. Consider whether this data is enough for your needs, or whether you need information on public companies, or non-tech companies and industries. When choosing an alternative, ensure that the platform provides reliable, differentiated insights that will give you the competitive edge.
- Additional features: Can your alternative give you more value for your purchase than what CB Insights offers? Ensure your chosen alternative offers extra features that make a difference, like ESG reports, broker research, expert calls, AI search capabilities, and generative AI. All these features will help you get an edge over the competition.
- Pricing: Consider what it may cost to replace CB Insights with your preferred alternative. Ensure you choose a platform that gives you the most value for your budget. Also, choose a platform that offers flexible plans based on your needed platform seats.
