CB Insights vs Crayon (vs AlphaSense)

When making investment decisions or conducting in-depth market research, the right intelligence tool can make all the difference. Most business professionals are inundated with information overload. Even if they have access to all the right data, the task of analyzing it and extracting all the relevant insights is often a manual one, fraught with fragmented data from consumer grade search engines.

The right market intelligence tool can shorten time to insight and expedite the research process — without sacrificing quality or comprehensiveness. But market intelligence platforms are not all made equal, and not every platform will work for every business. The breadth and depth of content, how advanced the search technology is, and how the capabilities align with your unique business needs and budget are all important factors in selecting the right platform.

Below, we compare CB Insights with Crayon, exploring who each platform works best for and where each falls short. We also compare the two with our all-in-one market intelligence platform to show how AlphaSense meets research and business needs in a more comprehensive, robust way.

The platform comparisons are based around the following criteria:

• Features
• Ratings and reviews
• Pricing

Here is an overview of each platform:

CB Insights

CB Insights is a market intelligence and data analytics platform that tracks millions of public and private companies, investors, and emerging technologies around the world. Primarily used by venture capitalists, private equity firms, and corporate strategy teams, this tool helps analyze industry trends, discover investment opportunities, benchmark competitors, and assess market dynamics.

The CB Insights platform primarily focuses on technology market intelligence, and it mostly gathers data from public sources such as patents, funding rounds, partnerships, news mentions, and web traffic. CB Insights’ machine learning engine ingests and structures this unstructured data, and then analysts validate it and add proprietary data.

Although CB insights provides deep, comprehensive access to information in the tech space and competitive intelligence, it lacks premium and proprietary content sets that can give you a more holistic outlook, such as broker research, global and SEC filings, and expert calls. Additionally, though it utilizes machine learning to track trends and topics, it has limited smart search or generative AI capabilities, which limits the scope and speed of research.

Related Reading: CB Insights Alternatives

CB Insights vs Crayon

AlphaSense vs CB Insights

Key features of the CB Insights platform include:

Company Profiles

CB Insights provides in-depth profiles of companies, including startups and established firms, particularly in the tech space. These profiles include information on funding history, key investors, business models, product offerings, and more.

Venture Capital and M&A Tracking

Users can monitor venture capital investments, private equity deals, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity, particularly in the tech space. This feature helps in understanding where investors are placing their bets and identifying potential investment opportunities.

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.

Research Reports

The platform provides a library of in-depth research reports on various industries, technologies, and market trends. These reports offer qualitative and quantitative insights, including market forecasts, growth drivers, and key challenges.

Data Visualizations

CB Insights features interactive data visualizations, such as market maps and trend graphs, to make complex market data more accessible and actionable for users.

Customizable Dashboards and Real-Time Alerts

The platform allows users to create tailored dashboards to monitor key metrics, trends, and market movements relevant to their research needs. Users can also set up real-time alerts for specific companies, industries, or market events, ensuring they stay informed about the latest developments.

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
• Deep and broad private company and market coverage
• Powerful visualization and market mapping tools
• Uses predictive modeling and AI to identify trends, risks, and investment opportunities
• Access to in-depth industry reports and research analytics
• Mosaic Score feature helps assess potential success of private companies
• Allows users to set up dashboards and 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
• Cannot help with document-level or compliance due diligence
• 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’
• AI capabilities less advanced than on AI-native platforms
• Leans toward technology market use cases; lack of breadth and depth in other markets

Crayon

Unlike CB Insights, Crayon is exclusively a competitive intelligence platform. It’s designed for mid-market and enterprise teams looking to create sustainable advantages in their respective markets.

Crayon collects content on a variety of companies from both online and offline sources and stores them in one place, easily accessible to users conducting competitive research. It uses advanced AI and machine learning functionality, flagging critical information and displaying actionable insights from millions of sources, saving time on research and analysis.

Companies in many industries — including retail, technology, finance, pharmaceutical, and software — use Crayon’s platform to keep up with market trends, drive better sales, and reduce customer churn.

However, Crayon may not work for companies who have a large amount of competitors to track, or who need to frequently modify the competitors they are monitoring. It still uses human analysts to process data, so scalability is a challenge. Additionally, Crayon lacks key content sets, including broker research, expert calls, SEC and global filings. It has generative AI capabilities, but those are embedded in competitive intelligence workflows and do not support end-to-end research automation. As a result, those looking for all-in-one AI-powered market intelligence may need to supplement Crayon with another tool.

Related Reading: Crayon vs Klue

Crayon Alternatives

Crayon offers the following features for competitive analysis:

Automated Competitive Monitoring

Crayon continuously scans over 300 types of digital signals from public online sources, such as competitor websites, social media, news and PR articles, public forums, and customer review sites. Users can also set up customizable tracking for specific competitors.

AI Capabilities

Crayon incorporates AI and machine learning to collect, score, and filter competitive signals, helping users surface the most relevant updates. The platform generates digestible summaries and insight cards, highlights key changes across competitors, and analyzes patterns and trends to highlight opportunities and risks.

Crayon’s AI also enables content generation for sales and competitive enablement workflows, including battlecards, talk tracks, and internal updates. In addition, features like automated insight generation help teams understand not just what changed, but why it matters.

More recently, Crayon has introduced a conversation genAI assistant called Crayon Answers, which allows users to ask natural-language questions and get synthesized competitive intelligence.

Analysis and Reporting

Crayon provides historical trend analysis to give users insight on a competitor’s evolution over time. Users can also create dashboards and visualizations of CI insights across competitors, as well as build custom reports tailored to different teams.

Sales Enablement

Crayon provides dynamic and customizable battlecards for sales teams, competitor pages with comprehensive profiles on each peer company that are updated in real-time, and a newsletter builder for sharing competitive updates across teams or with leadership.

Collaboration and Integration

Crayon integrates natively with platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and Gong for streamlined communication and collaboration across and within teams.

Crayon Pros:

• Automated real-time alerts
• Can offer more personalized competitor insights
• Uses AI and ML capabilities to surface useful competitor data when coupled with human analysis
• Offers in-depth analytics and metrics
• Integrates with multiple tools, including Slack and Microsoft Teams
• Collects info from both online and offline sources
• Custom reports and battlecards
• Intuitive and navigable platform
• Incorporates sentiment analysis and AI-driven classification

Crayon Cons:

• No expert call library
• No access to broker reports
• Less scalable than similar tools
• No way to track peers’ R&D intelligence on the platform
• No SEC filings, financial reports, and earnings estimates
• No industry-specific reports or thought leadership content
• Content hosted outside its platform; it only provides URL links
• AI is built only for competitive intelligence workflows and requires ongoing curation; limited capabilities compared to AI-native platforms

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a leading enterprise-grade AI platform built for robust financial and market research. AlphaSense uses AI to turn a vast universe of financial and market data into structured, digestible, actionable insights. Features such as integrated workflow support and comprehensive monitoring and analysis tools enable users to take more confident, strategic action.

Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also named for the second year in a row in Inc’s 2025 Best in Business list in the “Best AI Implementation” and “Best in Innovation” categories.

Key AlphaSense features include:

Curated, Premium Datasets

AlphaSense is the only tool that combines public and private financial data with expert call transcripts, broker research, and news in one place. By bringing together qualitative and quantitative insights, AlphaSense gives you the necessary context to make smarter and better informed decisions.

Premium External Market Insights

Our library of qualitative content includes:

• Wall Street Insights, a collection of equity research that features more than 1,700 broker sources, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Citi
• Expert calls, which includes over 260,000 interviews with pre-qualified experts and the ability to conduct your own 1:1 calls with 70% cost savings compared with traditional expert networks. This also includes Channel Checks, which are AI-led interviews with validated industry experts, which result in faster, more consistent, and more scalable insight extraction.
• Company documents and filings, including earnings transcripts, company presentations, SEC and global filings, ESG reports, and press releases
• Live transcripts that allow users to view past, current, and upcoming event transcripts in a calendar, as well as view transcripts of ongoing events in real time
• News, trade journals, and regulatory coverage

Company Perspectives

AlphaSense streamlines access to SEC filings, earnings and events transcripts, financial documents, and more. Users can easily search across multiple companies and SEC filings, as well as explore past filings, create models, and benchmark company performance, without needing to pull up individual filings to manually track a company’s metrics.

Internal Content Integration

Users can integrate and query their own internal content in AlphaSense 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

Internal content is easily and securely integrated through our Ingestion API or enterprise-grade connectors, which support Egnyte, Microsoft 365/Sharepoint, Box, Google Drive, S3, and more. Our integration capabilities allow for more streamlined collaboration with members across your organization and improved 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.

Financial Data

AlphaSense provides access to the following crucial quantitative insights:

• Historical Financials & Estimates: Standardized statements and consensus data across 19,000+ public companies
• Sector-Specific KPIs: Detailed operating metrics sourced from institutional-grade Canalyst models
• Transaction Intelligence: Details on nearly 1 million M&A deals and 750,000 private funding rounds, enriched with AI-generated deal rationale and strategic context
• Dynamic Peer Sets: 125+ pre-built industry comparables with sector-specific metrics

Channel Checks

AlphaSense Channel Checks is a living channel intelligence system. Thousands of consistent conversations every month surface clean, comparable signals on demand and pricing from ground-level channel sources weeks before the market catches on. Our AI-led interviews surface demand trends, pricing movements, and competitive dynamics as they happen instead of in static postmortem reports.

AI-powered synthesis turns expert perspectives into actionable intelligence instantly, not over the course of weeks. You can simultaneously interrogate dozens of Channel Check interviews across peer sets to extract demand, inventory, and pricing insights in seconds. And with full transcript access, you can build conviction through source-level verification and defend investment recommendations with primary source evidence, eliminating the trust gap inherent in third-party research summaries.

AI Search and 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 is a conversational search experience that allows users to ask natural-language questions and source intelligence at scale from across premium external content, internal knowledge, and quantitative data sources. Each answer provides citations to the exact snippet of text from where the information was sourced, so that it can always be referenced back.

With Deep Research mode, users can automate the creation of in-depth analysis about companies, trends, or industry topics. The model conducts dozens of searches, parses through thousands of potentially relevant results, and reasons over all of it to produce comprehensive, detailed analysis about any topic — in a fraction of the time it would take a human.

You can also take Generative Search on the go with our mobile app, giving you access to instant answers, wherever you work.

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

Every earnings transcript in AlphaSense features an AI-generated Smart Summary, which creates a tearsheet of key takeaways, analyst Q&A, and the most critical topics discussed in each call. AlphaSense users leverage Smart Summaries during earnings season to extract the most crucial insights from each call in just minutes, ensuring a comprehensive and timely view of key insights.

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

The AlphaSense platform includes the following features that help research professionals conduct key workflows with greater speed and confidence:

• 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 automations: One-click agents that run full earnings workflows, from in-depth call analysis to tracking a company’s self-reported guidance to extracting key themes from analyst Q&As.
• Domain-Specific AI: Unlike generic AI tools, our AI is trained and benchmarked to understand sector dynamics, valuation methodologies, and market context just like an analyst would.

Monitoring, Analysis, and Collaboration Tools

AlphaSense is designed to help users uncover insights faster with the following tools:

• 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.
• A mobile app that lets you track real-time alerts and run AI searches on the go, ensuring you never miss a critical insight.
• 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 users can apply to integrated internal content alongside platform 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
• User-friendly interface
• Internal note-taking, sharing, and collaboration features
• Support for APIs and integrations
• Supports enterprise-level organizations and teams
• A mobile app designed for on-the-go workflows, providing access to our full content library, generative search, and alerts
• 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

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Features Comparison

Ratings & Reviews

CB Insights

Rating: 4.4 out of 5 on G2, 7.8 out of 10 on TrustRadius

Popular positives:

• Strong market and competitive intelligence insights, particularly for emerging tech
• Excellent customer support and backend teams
• Access to critical private company data
• Provides actionable signals for sales and strategy
• High-quality, curated research reports
• Daily insights and alerts help users stay ahead of market developments
• Good for large, enterprise-level teams needing ongoing market intelligence

Popular negatives:

• Limited workflow and output customization
• Non-intuitive interface and inefficient search/filtering
• Limited data on early-stage startups
• Incomplete coverage of certain niche industries
• Free version has multiple limitations

Crayon

Rating: 4.6 out of 5 on G2, 8.5 out of 10 on TrustRadius

Popular positives:

• Strong competitive monitoring and real-time insights
• Multiple collaboration features for enhanced productivity and knowledge sharing
• Responsive customer support
• Strong sales enablement
• Centralizes all competitive data

Popular negatives:

• Too many alerts and irrelevant updates can make it hard to separate signal from noise
• Missing integrations and some difficulty connecting to existing workflows
• Requires continuous refining to ensure high-quality, actionable insights
• Has limitations in customizing outputs

AlphaSense

Rating: 4.6 out of 5 on G2, 9.7 out of 10 on TrustRadius

Popular positives:

• Extremely powerful search across premium and proprietary content
• Access to premium/paywalled sources, such as broker reports, and expert calls
• Massive time savings for research workflows
• Real-time alerts and mobile app for on-the-go intelligence
• Strong monitoring capabilities, including customizable dashboards and alerts
• Generative AI features speed up time to insight and enhance research quality
• Intuitive interface and great customer support
• Strong for enterprise teams and advanced research roles

Popular negatives:

• Visualization tools are limited to financial data at this time
• Lack of collaborative tools for knowledge management

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