CB Insights vs Factiva: How to Choose the Right Tool For You

AlphaSense is trusted by the world's leading corporations:

85%

of the S&P 100

75%

of the top asset management firms

80%

of the top consultancies

20

of the largest pharmaceutical companies

For businesses and professionals who aim to make well-informed decisions that move the needle, superior market intelligence is crucial. But simply having access to company, industry, or market trend information is no longer enough.

Those who want to maintain a competitive edge and stay ahead of the curve need a market intelligence platform that aggregates valuable data and can also filter the signals from the noise using artificial intelligence (AI), increasing speed to insight and confidence in the research.

What’s the Best Market Intelligence Software?

When choosing between market research platforms, your search must begin with identifying your organization’s specific needs and challenges. This critical step helps you determine the essential features and benefits that will be a good fit for your workflow and result in improvements across your research processes.

Note that the optimal market intelligence solution will vary depending on your organization’s resources and needs. The right research platform should enable you to execute on analysis and strategy with greater efficiency and ease, improve decision-making, and put you in the best position to gain a competitive advantage in your market.

In this guide, we will cover two popular market intelligence solutions—CB Insights and Factiva—to determine how each might suit your business needs. We then compare both with AlphaSense to demonstrate how our platform can fill in the gaps and take your market research to the next level.

The platform comparisons are based around the following criteria:

Features
Ratings and reviews
Pricing

Here is an overview of each platform:

Overview

CB Insights

Founded in 2008, 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, specifically for the technology markets.

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.

Through CB Insights, you can find:

In-depth market research and analytics on a company
Emerging and trending topics in the tech market and tech companies
A mosaic score that predicts the success or failure of a company

CB Insights Pros

Excellent platform for tech space opportunities
Access to private companies, their partnerships, and valuation
Access to in-depth data and research analytics
Supports APIs and integrations
Uses machine learning and analyst briefings to collect data on companies

CB Insights Cons

Pricing necessitates having a team of five members with no flexibility for smaller teams
Focuses primarily on private tech companies, ignoring public companies unless they partner with startups
No access to global/SEC filings, ESG reports, newspapers, trade journals, expert calls, or broker research
No smart search functionality or AI features
Ideal only for niche tech-related use cases
Not suitable for small-scale firms

Factiva

Factiva is a Dow Jones company that offers a powerful search engine and business intelligence software. Companies and professional researchers can use Factiva to scout new opportunities and make strategic business decisions using data from its global news database and massive archives.

Factiva holds content from over 30,000 premium trusted sources, including full-text news stories from the Dow Jones Newswire, The New York Times, Reuters, and other licensed newsrooms and publications worldwide. And with advanced search, sharing, filtering, and smart indexing tools, users can easily uncover key intelligence insights from news and company documents.

Overall, Factiva works well for clients looking for a media intelligence tool. This tool is great for tracking the latest news updates in specific industries or companies and for gaining access to a wide breadth of quality media content. However, Factiva is extremely limited in content outside news and company information, and it does not offer AI functionality for added accuracy and efficiency.

Factiva’s key use cases include:

Media monitoring and corporate communications
Application development
Competitive intelligence
Business development and sales intelligence
Sales funnels and business development
Customer engagement and marketing
Advanced analytics and data mining

Factiva Pros

Over 33,000 news archives and sources worldwide
Customizable dashboard and alerts
Supports collaborations and newsletters
Supports third-party integrations and APIs
Offers to track trends and real-time news
Robust search and filtering tools

Factiva Cons

Many Factiva sources share data leading to potential duplicate news and reports
No broker research or expert calls available
No ESG reports available
Lacks AI search optimization capabilities
Data isn’t always accurate

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is an all-in-one market intelligence platform for corporate and financial services users who are looking to implement a full-scale research solution, rooted in AI technology and smart automation capabilities. This award-winning platform is consistently rated by G2 and TrustRadius as the market leader in both financial research and market intelligence.

AlphaSense provides access to more than 10,000 premium, private, public, and proprietary content sources, including news and trade journals, global and SEC filings, ESG reports, earnings transcripts, company presentations, and press releases.

AlphaSense offers two unique content offerings that create a massive competitive advantage for users:

AlphaSense Expert Insights – A 40,000+ expert call library with transcripts of interviews with former and current executives, professionals, industry experts, competitors, and customers.
Wall Street Insights® – A curated collection of indexed and searchable equity research covering companies, industries, and global sector themes, from more than 1,000 sell-side and independent firms.

AlphaSense is also powered by smart search capabilities that ensure users can find the exact insights they need for their research—with greater speed and confidence. These include:

Smart Synonyms™

Smart Synonyms™ technology is an AI-based feature exclusive to AlphaSense, which recognizes the user intent behind every search and delivers results for both the exact search terms and related keywords.

At the same time, this technology recognizes when results are not relevant to the search intent and automatically filters them out, removing unnecessary noise and eliminating hours wasted on combing through potentially fruitless sources.

Automated Monitoring

With AlphaSense, users can access real-time notifications and alerts that keep them updated on new trends, emerging news, and market and company movements. AlphaSense generates and sends frequent snapshots of companies, keeping users abreast on intelligence, critical insights, and market changes.

Instant Company Insights

Using Search Analytics and Company Tearsheets, users get quick and in-depth information on any public or private company. That way, users enhance the reach of their search queries across multiple industries, regions, and document types. AlphaSense focuses on and anchors users’ research capabilities, providing critical insights needed to upscale market analysis and decision-making.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature that mines content and identifies the sentiment behind the language in earnings transcripts and expert calls. The text is then color-coded for users to indicate positive, neutral, and negative sentiments.

AlphaSense also gives each search term and document a sentiment score, illustrating how positively or negatively a company or the market at large feels about a particular topic, as well as how sentiment has evolved over time. Sentiment analysis enables users to pick up on shifts in tone that could signal upcoming market movements and gain a deeper understanding of an industry or trend.

Smart Summaries

Unlike other generative AI (genAI) tools that are focused on consumer users and trained on publicly available content across the web, AlphaSense takes an entirely different approach. As a platform purpose-built to drive the world’s biggest business and financial decisions, our newest Smart Summaries feature leverages our 10+ years of AI tech development and draws from a curated collection of high-quality business content.

With Smart Summaries, you can glean instant earnings insights, quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees.

AlphaSense Pros

All-in-one research and intelligence platform
Extensive content database that spans the four key perspectives of market research, including broker research and expert calls
Incorporates sentiment analysis, NLP, generative AI, and AI search technology
Smart Summaries generative AI feature for earnings and image search
Automated and customizable alerts
User-friendly interface
Internal messaging and collaboration features
Support for APIs and integrations

AlphaSense Cons

Access to the expert call library comes at an additional cost
Private company data access is limited
Broker reports are not available to all users

Features

Get started today

Trial AlphaSense to see how it compares to CB Insights and Factiva.

Start my free trial