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Microsoft Copilot Alternatives & Competitors

Discover the top 10 alternatives to Microsoft Copilot for market research. We cover both consumer-grade tools, like Copilot, as well as tools better suited for enterprise organizations with complex business needs. For each tool, we provide the features, key use cases, and pros and cons to help you make the right decision.

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Consumer-Grade vs. Enterprise Generative AI Tools

When considering a generative AI (genAI) tool to streamline your workflow or automate certain manual tasks, it’s important to choose a tool that is designed to meet your specific needs.

Consumer-grade tools are well-suited to individual consumer needs, such as writing assistance, summarization, and answering one-off questions. Because they tend to be more affordable, they are a popular choice for individuals and small businesses, and they may fit a greater number of use cases than an enterprise tool.

However, consumer-grade tools have important limitations. They are not designed to protect highly sensitive organizational data, nor do they take special measures to ensure the information they provide is accurate and reliable. Because these tools are trained on public web data, they can be prone to hallucination, and they often do not provide citations for easy verification of generated information.

Meanwhile, enterprise genAI tools are purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights. They take serious measures against hallucination, are highly rigorous about data accuracy and verifiability, and adhere to the highest security and data privacy standards. Rather than being trained on public web data, these tools are trained on high-quality business and financial data, and are designed for market and investment research. These are the tools large corporations, consultancies, and financial firms need to gain a competitive edge, without compromising safety and security.

Microsoft Copilot

Consumer-Grade and Enterprise-Grade

Best for: Integrating AI into business workflows with Microsoft applications

Copilot is Microsoft’s genAI-powered tool that seamlessly integrates into Microsoft 365 applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Leveraging OpenAI’s GPT-4 and other advanced language models, Copilot is designed to enhance productivity for professionals who already rely on Microsoft 365 by offering advanced natural language processing and contextual assistance.

Copilot is suitable for individuals or businesses, with the latter version offering enhanced data protection and collaboration capabilities. However, Copilot does not provide access to premium, proprietary content sets, nor is the tool meant for market and investment research.

Features and Capabilities

Natural Language Processing for Document Creation

Copilot uses advanced natural language processing (NLP) to assist with content creation and editing. Users can describe the content they want in plain language, and Copilot can generate text, suggest improvements, and provide writing prompts. This feature is particularly useful for drafting reports, creating presentations, and composing emails.

Data Insights and Analysis

In Excel, Copilot leverages AI to analyze data and generate insights. It can create charts, summarize data trends, and even suggest formulas based on the user’s needs. This capability helps users make data-driven decisions more efficiently by providing actionable insights and simplifying complex data analysis tasks.

Automated Design Suggestions

For PowerPoint, Copilot offers automated design suggestions based on the content being created. It can recommend layouts, styles, and visual elements that enhance the presentation’s effectiveness. This feature streamlines the design process and ensures that presentations are both visually appealing and aligned with the content.

Context-Aware Assistance

Copilot provides context-aware assistance across Microsoft 365 applications. By understanding the current task and context, it delivers relevant suggestions and automations that are tailored to the user’s immediate needs. This feature enhances productivity for any Microsoft user by offering timely and accurate support.

Copilot also integrates with Microsoft Graph, allowing it to access and analyze data across various Microsoft services. This allows Copilot to provide more personalized and contextually relevant assistance by leveraging data from emails, calendars, and other sources within the Microsoft ecosystem.

Streamlined Collaboration

Copilot supports team efforts by facilitating shared document editing and providing collective insights. It helps streamline communication and collaboration by offering tools that assist in real-time content creation and project management.

Enhanced Security

Copilot adheres to enterprise-grade data privacy and security standards in its Enterprise version, which makes it a safe choice for security-conscious organizations.

Copilot Pros:

Can generate images, presentations, and documents via NLP
Can summarize and analyze single documents
Robust compliance and end-to-end data security
Supports voice commands, facilitating hands-free operation
Tool is continuously being improved and updated
Supports collaboration efforts within teams
User-friendly interface and seamless integration with Microsoft 365

Copilot Cons:

Not meant for market or investment research
Data sources are limited to internal content, with potential to use a plugin to access web data; no premium or proprietary external content
Limited by its reliance on the Microsoft ecosystem, restricting functionality for users who work with non-Microsoft tools
Many customers complain about hallucinations
No citation capabilities reported

Below, we list the top Microsoft Copilot alternatives.

AlphaSense

Enterprise-Grade

Best for: Conducting comprehensive market and investment research using internal and premium external content, with 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.

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 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 – 175K+ 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:

Generative Search

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.

Smart Summaries

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.

Smart Synonyms™

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, 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 sentiment over 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 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

ChatGPT

Consumer-Grade and Enterprise-Grade

Best for: Getting high-level publicly available information on a company or industry, brainstorming ideas, and generating content

ChatGPT is a consumer-grade generative AI tool developed by OpenAI and is widely considered to have set off the genAI boom in 2022. Known for its accessibility and ease of use, ChatGPT soared to popularity for its ability to answer questions or summarize large volumes of information in seconds. The tool’s conversational interface, ability to ask follow-up questions to each query, and capability to perform complex tasks like data analysis and content creation set ChatGPT apart from traditional search engines—and captured the world’s imagination.

However, ChatGPT’s limitations became obvious fairly quickly. The tool frequently generated hallucinations and misinformation with striking confidence, undermining its reliability and trustworthiness. For a layperson conducting research, this is inconvenient but hardly catastrophic.

For an enterprise organization, however, the consequences of using such false information can be severe. Because ChatGPT is trained on publicly available web data, and also has no security or data privacy standards in place, it cannot be safely used by business or financial professionals.

Since the tool’s debut, upgraded versions have been released, including ChatGPT Plus, ChatGPT Pro, and ChatGPT Enterprise. ChatGPT Plus is largely similar to the free version, except with faster response times, enhanced accuracy, and the ability to handle more complex tasks. ChatGPT Pro is similar to ChatGPT Plus, but it’s specifically designed for power users such as researchers, developers and professionals who require higher output and additional features. ChatGPT Enterprise, however, differs in several important ways.

Marketed as the version of ChatGPT ideal for organizations, Enterprise comes with enhanced security and data protection, customization options for specific company needs, and integration options with third-party tools, APIs, and systems. However, ChatGPT is not a full-fledged enterprise generative AI tool, as it’s incapable of searching through an organization’s entire internal knowledge base.

The tool is only able to source information from the internal documents you upload directly, as well as public web data. This leaves a tremendous amount of knowledge—both internal and external—on the table. Without access to premium, proprietary external content, or to the entire internal knowledge base of an organization, ChatGPT is limited in the scope and quality of research it can support.

Since ChatGPT Enterprise is not trained specifically on business or financial data, and the model is not built for market intelligence and investment workflows, this tool is inadequate for enterprise search and holistic market research.

Related Reading: AlphaSense vs ChatGPT

Features and Capabilities

Natural Language Understanding

ChatGPT excels at processing and understanding natural language, allowing users to input complex queries in plain English. This makes it easy for users to gather insights from highly complex and unstructured data sets without needing to know specific technical commands.

Document Drafting

One of ChatGPT’s key capabilities is its ability to generate human-like text, which can be applied to drafting reports, summaries, and even high-level market analysis. This feature helps reduce the time spent on routine writing tasks, freeing up resources for higher-level strategic and analytical work. It’s also capable of image generation, though this is a limited offering for users on the free tier.

Advanced Voice Mode

A relatively new feature that is available for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Team, Edu, and Enterprise users (with a limited monthly preview for free users), this allows users to have a spoken conversation with ChatGPT. Users can ask questions or have discussions through voice input, and ChatGPT provides a spoken response.

Data Summarization

ChatGPT can quickly summarize large amounts of information, making it ideal for condensing lengthy reports, news articles, or financial filings into key takeaways. This helps users extract the most relevant insights without having to sift through large volumes of data manually.

Conversational Interface

The platform provides a conversational interface, allowing users to ask follow-up questions, refine queries, and interactively explore datasets. This makes it more intuitive and user-friendly compared to traditional data tools, enabling faster and more flexible research.

Integration with External Data Sources

ChatGPT Enterprise (the premium version of ChatGPT) can be integrated with various external systems and databases, allowing users to pull in real-time data or access specific datasets for analysis. This capability is crucial if users are needing to ensure accuracy in the answers they receive. However, ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus lack this capability.

ChatGPT Pros:

Able to process large amounts of information in seconds
Versatile use cases across wide range of text-based tasks
Well-financed, which is driving rapid innovation
Has a free tier, which makes it highly accessible to individuals and small businesses
Highly intuitive user experience with no learning curve
Able to generate images, tables, and charts via natural language prompts
Enterprise version integrates with company data for easy file upload

ChatGPT Cons:

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
Only provides citations to whole webpages, not snippets of text
Can only search through uploaded documents, not the entire internal knowledge base
No guardrails in place to protect against hallucination or inaccurate information
Lack of transparency around how the model interprets and handles queries
Lack of domain-specific expertise in highly technical areas

Google Gemini

Consumer-Grade and Enterprise-Grade

Best for: Leveraging Google’s AI for real-time market insights and data synthesis

Gemini, previously known as Bard, is a generative AI tool developed by Google, designed to provide advanced natural language processing and understanding. Its primary function is to generate and interpret text-based information from Google search results with high accuracy, making it a valuable resource for various applications. Gemini integrates Google’s extensive data and AI research capabilities to offer users a powerful tool for detailed information analysis and synthesis.

While Gemini can be used by both individual consumers and enterprises, it lacks certain key features—such as premium, proprietary content sets and AI trained on financial data—to support full-scale market analysis or investment research.

Features and Capabilities

Advanced Natural Language Processing

Gemini leverages natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand and generate text with high accuracy. Its models are trained on vast amounts of data, allowing it to handle complex queries and provide contextually relevant responses.

Multimodal Processing

Gemini can interpret and generate diverse data types, such as text, images, audio, or video, which promotes more dynamic and versatile user experiences.

Comprehensive Data Access

As part of Google DeepMind’s suite, Gemini benefits from extensive access to Google’s vast information ecosystem. This broad data integration enables Gemini to analyze and generate insights from a wide range of sources, ensuring that the information it provides is both current and comprehensive. This feature is particularly valuable for generating reports and summaries based on diverse datasets.

Integration with Google Ecosystem

Gemini’s integration with Google’s ecosystem provides seamless compatibility with other Google tools and services. This feature facilitates efficient workflows and data management, particularly for users already utilizing Google’s suite of productivity and analytical tools.

Gemini Pros:

Deep integration with Google’s vast information ecosystem
Advanced NLP that handles complex queries with nuanced understanding
Continuously being updated and improved
Able to generate documents, emails, and presentations via natural language processing
Can summarize and analyze single documents
Cites source documents
Supports team collaboration
User-friendly interface

Gemini Cons:

LLM is only trained on public web data and Google Workspace content, not on business-grade or financial data
Does not provide access to premium, proprietary external data
Output is only as good as the quality of data it’s trained on
Less accessible than other tools, since it’s part of Google and thus may be less flexible in terms of integration with other platforms
Internal content is limited to Google Workspace
Susceptible to inaccuracy, though some guardrails against hallucination exist
Does not link to specific snippets when citing sources
Lack of transparency around how the model interprets and handles queries
Several high-profile cases of security breaches when using this tool
Not sufficient for enterprise-grade market or investment research

Perplexity AI

Consumer-Grade

Best for: Quick, precise, and well-referenced answers sourced from the web

Perplexity AI is a consumer-grade generative AI tool designed to assist users in extracting and synthesizing information from various public sources. The platform leverages 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 principal offering is an AI-powered answer engine, similar to ChatGPT. Perplexity has also recently added the Enterprise Pro version of its platform, specifically designed for teams. This version 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 tiers, that allows users to 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.

Related Reading: AlphaSense vs 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 only links to webpages and is not able to link to exact snippets of information in the sources.

Quick Summaries

Perplexity can quickly summarize large volumes of information, which helps users save time and turns 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
Collaborative workspaces
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 Pros:

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
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 Cons:

Trained on publicly available data, rather than business-grade or financial data
Does not provide access to premium, proprietary external content sets
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
Cannot cite exact snippets from where information was sourced
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

Glean

Enterprise-Grade

Best for: Efficiently searching for and extracting insights from internal company documents—most relevant for marketing, HR, IT, engineering, sales and support teams

Glean is an enterprise search and knowledge discovery tool for modern professionals. Founded in 2020 by a team of former Google engineers and industry veterans, Glean’s goal is to help teams more efficiently access and utilize their internal knowledge and data, ultimately improving productivity and knowledge sharing within the organization.

As an enterprise search platform, Glean enables organizations to search across various data sources within their internal systems—including documents, emails, databases, collaboration tools, and more. Customers refer to Glean as “Google for the internal workspace,” citing the powerful and customizable search functionality that helps find any topic, project, or technology at work.

In 2023, Glean launched a new suite of generative AI tools—based on their proprietary knowledge model—aiming to improve the accuracy and security of enterprise data and content, as well as enhance productivity and collaboration among teams.

Though Glean is a great choice for enterprise organizations looking for an enterprise search tool, it is not well-suited for market research or investment research, as it does not provide access to premium, proprietary content sets.

Features and Capabilities

Glean Assistant

Referred to as “ChatGPT for your enterprise,” this is a digital workplace AI assistant that can be used for engineering, sales, support, and other queries—pulling answers directly from internal company resources. In addition to answering questions, this tool assists users in finding information, creating content, and automating tasks within their workflow. Assistant also configures with Slack, so that Glean can answer questions raised in Slack channels.

AI Answers

This is an NLP-based feature that draws from various sources of content, context, and permissions within an organization’s knowledge base to provide a single, concise answer to any query.

Unified Search Across Applications

Glean connects with numerous company applications, providing a centralized search experience that allows users to find information seamlessly across different platforms.

Company Knowledge and Context

For each company, Glean creates an enterprise knowledge graph, which understands all the content, people, and activity in an organization, as well as how each piece of information relates to one another. This allows Glean to understand each organization’s unique internal language and the specific collaborative relationships between workers.

Permissions and Data Governance

Glean is committed to complying with all real-time enterprise data permissions and governance rules. This means the platform ensures that each user only has access to information they are allowed to access.

Full Referenceability

Unlike models operating in black-box environments, Glean prioritizes transparency, ensuring that users always know exactly where each piece of information is coming from, as well as who is responsible for it.

Enhanced Security

Glean adheres to enterprise-grade data privacy and security standards, which makes it a safe choice for security-conscious organizations.

Glean Pros:

Strong tool for searching and discovering any internal company information
Powerful search functionality with limited filtering capabilities
Generative AI features that make search faster, easier, and more precise
Includes guardrails to protect against hallucination
Will cite and link to all source documents
Great collaboration and knowledge sharing features
Offers 100+ integrations including Slack, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive, and SharePoint
Robust compliance and end-to-end data security

Glean Cons:

Limited to only internal content; no premium external content sets available
Relatively new in the market; product is still developing and learning
Not built for market research or investment research workflows
Search capabilities are limited in terms of phrase matching and keyword proximity
Relevancy score can be inaccurate, leading to sifting through irrelevant search results
Limited customization options, which may not be ideal for teams with unique needs
No ability to set up customizable alerts
Lack of transparency around how the genAI model interprets and handles queries

Hebbia

Enterprise-Grade

Best for: Deep analysis and extracting insights from large unstructured datasets

Hebbia is a search engine and large-language model productivity tool, founded in 2020. Powered by AI and machine learning, Hebbia generates valuable insights from public and private content through a combination of chat-style search and generative AI. Companies and professionals rely on Hebbia to streamline and automate their research and due diligence processes, without compromising accuracy.

Hebbia is designed for enterprises, but it does not provide access to premium, proprietary content sets, nor is it purpose-built for market and investment research.

Related Reading: AlphaSense vs Hebbia

Features and Capabilities

Advanced Search Engine

Hebbia offers an advanced search engine that uses AI to delve into unstructured data across documents, emails, and databases. It allows users to input natural language queries to find relevant information quickly, making it easier to locate critical insights hidden within large data sets.

Hebbia Matrix

A core feature of Hebbia, the Matrix is an AI feature that allows users to search across vast datasets, including internal documents, emails, research reports, and other unstructured datasets. Matrix integrates multiple data sources into one centralized platform and then provides context-rich insights by showing how different pieces of information are interconnected.

Search results are presented in an intuitive, visually structured format, such as in a table, chart, or grid. Users can tailor the Matrix to prioritize certain documents or emphasize specific datapoints based on their goals.

Document Understanding

Hebbia’s AI models are capable of deep document understanding, enabling users to extract and summarize information from lengthy reports, research papers, and other text-heavy sources. This feature reduces the time spent reading through documents by providing concise summaries of key points.

Intelligent Indexing

The tool automatically indexes documents and data, organizing information in a way that makes it easily searchable and accessible. This intelligent indexing allows users to structure unorganized data sources, enhancing their ability to retrieve relevant information efficiently.

Customizable AI Models

Hebbia provides customizable AI models that can be tailored to specific industry needs or business requirements. Users can adjust the AI to focus on particular keywords, topics, or types of data, ensuring that the tool delivers the most relevant insights for their specific use cases.

Seamless Integration

Hebbia integrates seamlessly with existing workflows and tools, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, cloud storage solutions, and other enterprise software. This integration allows users to incorporate Hebbia’s capabilities into their current processes without disrupting their workflow.

Interactive Data Visualization

The tool offers interactive data visualization features that help users better understand complex data sets. By presenting information in charts, graphs, and other visual formats, Hebbia enables users to identify patterns, trends, and insights more easily.

Hebbia Pros:

Able to summarize individual documents
Can index any document of any type, via portal or API
Features intelligent semantic search
Full transparency about how genAI model interprets and handles queries
Pre-indexes company filings and research
Supports uploads of private company data
Offers a full suite of collaborative tools and access controls
Features end-to-end encryption and robust compliance

Hebbia Cons:

Relatively new in the market; product is still developing and learning
Limited to internal content and public external content; no premium or proprietary external sources such as broker research or expert calls
Not suitable for holistic market or investment research
Must import data from external sources
Cites sources but does not link to exact snippets
Lack of transparency around guardrails against genAI hallucination
Lacks sentiment analysis features
No company insights, snapshots, or tearsheets
Integrations for internal content are possible, but users complain about bugginess

Fintool

Enterprise-Grade

Best for: Using AI to automate financial research and uncover deeper insights from SEC filings and earnings transcripts

Fintool is a generative AI tool designed specifically for financial professionals, such as analysts, portfolio managers, and investors. Fintool uses advanced machine learning algorithms to process and interpret SEC filings and earnings transcripts, helping users make informed investment decisions with real-time data analysis and risk assessment.

Fintool is limited in its utility for holistic market research, as it does not provide access to premium, proprietary content sets, such as expert calls or broker research. Overall, Fintool best serves the use cases of earnings analysis and extracting insights from financial documents, and it’s geared primarily toward financial professionals.

Features and Capabilities

Conversational Interface

The platform provides a conversational interface, where users can ask natural language questions about SEC filings, earnings calls, and conference transcripts. The tool responds with citations to all sources used and also suggests follow-up questions.

AI-Powered Analysis

Fintool uses advanced language models trained on SEC filings and earnings call transcripts to deliver detailed and reliable financial insights.

Data Extraction in Tabular Format

Fintool organizes financial metrics, KPIs, and unstructured data from filings and transcripts into easy-to-use tables, which can then be exported in CSV form. Users can customize these tables with natural language prompts.

Real-Time Alerts

Fintool reads thousands of filings in the background and can notify users of specific relevant updates on a real-time basis.

Internal Data Upload

Fintool allows users to upload their own internal data into the tool, with enterprise-grade security. Fintool seamlessly integrates with cloud providers to help users discover and leverage their internal content more effectively.

Enterprise-Grade Security

Fintool adheres to enterprise-grade data privacy and security standards, which makes it a safe choice for security-conscious organizations.

Fintool Pros:

Provides access to SEC filings and earnings transcripts
Excels at automating routine tasks such as report generation and updating financial models
Allows users to upload their internal data; platform integrates with cloud providers
Quickly analyzes complex financial data and generates actionable insights
Cites exact snippets of source documents in generated responses
Tabular interface for company screening using the user’s own criteria
AI-powered table generation via natural language prompts
Robust compliance and data security

Fintool Cons:

No content sources outside filings and earnings transcripts
Lack of premium proprietary content sources, like broker research or expert calls
Not suitable for holistic market or investment research
Geared toward financial professionals, not toward corporate or consultant users
Potential limitations in handling specific or niche financial queries that require deep human expertise
No specific guardrails against hallucination
No integrations with other tools
Lack of transparency around how the model interprets and handles queries
No LLM verticalization, though customized for investor workflows

Bloomberg

Enterprise-Grade

Best for: Real-time financial data and market analytics, with in-depth industry reports

Bloomberg Terminal is an enterprise market research and analysis tool geared primarily toward the financial services industry. Launched in 1981—well before individual computers or the internet were common at firms—Bloomberg led the way in democratizing access to financial market data.

Since then, Bloomberg has become one of the highest-rated market research tools giving users access to unique market data, news, and insights, enabling professionals to turn intelligence into a competitive advantage.

However, as a legacy solution, Bloomberg has struggled in recent years to keep up with modern research needs. Though they have traditionally been slow to adopt new technologies such as AI, it’s become increasingly apparent that competition is fierce, fast-moving, and highly adept with technology. In order to stay competitive, Bloomberg has slowly adopted genAI capabilities, though their lack of experience in the space is clear. Compared to competitors with years of experience developing an AI tech stack, Bloomberg struggles with clunky UI, limited functionality, and an over-reliance on third-party tech.

Still, Bloomberg Terminal is a powerful research insights tool that has many top-notch features for financial research.

Related Reading: Bloomberg Terminal Alternatives

AlphaSense vs Bloomberg

Features and Capabilities

Real-Time Data and News

Bloomberg Terminal offers access to real-time financial market data, stock prices, bonds, commodities, currencies, and derivatives. They also offer real-time news coverage of companies, industries, and markets worldwide, along with real-time alerts on significant market events. Finally, Bloomberg provides access to equity research reports from leading analysts, a highly valuable content set that most competitors cannot offer.

Analytics and Modeling Tools

Bloomberg Terminal offers advanced charting, financial modeling, and analytics for equities, fixed income, and commodities. There are also risk analytics, asset allocation, and portfolio optimization tools available for asset managers and financial professionals.

Trading Platform

Bloomberg offers a complete trading solution, bringing together pricing, analytics, liquidity, automation, and execution in one place.

Generative AI

Bloomberg recently made its foray into generative AI with its BloombergGPT large language model (LLM), which is built for finance and is trained on a vast range of financial data. Their model is safeguarded against hallucination since all genAI responses must be grounded in Bloomberg content. However, it is not clear how the LLM interprets and handles queries.

BloombergGPT enables users to ask complex financial questions in natural language and receive actionable insights, sourced directly from Bloomberg’s proprietary datasets and news archives. Additionally, the tool can summarize earnings calls, news articles, filings, and complex reports to deliver quick and valuable insights to busy professionals. BloombergGPT also assists in data analysis and visualization by generating charts, graphs, and trend analyses for financial data in the platform.

Bloomberg Pros:

Proprietary news, research and analytics from internal and external sources
Tools for internal collaboration opportunities
Market execution and order management tools
Access to traditional markets and other asset classes
Custom charts, monitors, and alerts for market information
Includes generative AI functionality, purpose-built for finance
Integrated platform for trading and executing orders across multiple asset classes

Bloomberg Cons:

An expensive option, costing about $2,000 a month, per user
A steep learning curve for new users
Geared primarily toward financial services users, not corporate or consultant users
No sentiment analysis or synonym recognition
No expert calls and transcripts
Lack of broker research access for corporates
Cannot ingest internal content
Lack of transparency around how the LLM interprets and handles queries

Fiscal.ai (FinChat)

Consumer-Grade and Enterprise-Grade

Best for: AI-generated charts and models, as well as limited financial data, for financial analysis

Fiscal.ai is an AI-powered investment research platform combining institutional-grade financial data, analytics, and conversational AI. Fiscal.ai only offers access to filings, earnings transcripts, and financial data (from S&P Capital IQ). It does not provide access to sources such as broker research and expert call transcripts, which are crucial for holistic and comprehensive market research. Compared to many other tools in this list, Fiscal.ai is highly cost-effective, and it differentiates itself with AI-powered chart and model generation.

Fiscal.ai’s genAI is limited to answering only company research and metric questions—asking industry research questions yields responses with errors and hallucinations. Fiscal.ai also does not offer integrations with internal content, which means their genAI cannot be leveraged to improve the discoverability of internal research.

Overall, while Fiscal.ai markets to both consumers and enterprises, it lacks the security standards and integrations necessary to truly serve enterprise needs.

Features and Capabilities

Natural Language Querying

Fiscal.ai allows users to input queries in natural language, making it easy to search for specific financial data, company information, or market trends. This feature eliminates the need for complex financial databases or coding knowledge, enabling users to extract relevant information quickly and efficiently.

Real-Time Market Insights

Fiscal.ai provides real-time market insights by processing the latest news, earnings reports, and market movements. Users can get up-to-date information on stock prices, market trends, and economic indicators, helping them make timely investment decisions.

Document Analysis

One of Fiscal.ai’s key capabilities is its ability to analyze financial documents such as SEC filings, annual reports, and earnings call transcripts. It extracts key insights, summarizes critical points, and highlights important information, allowing users to digest large amounts of data without spending hours reading through documents.

Integration with Financial Data Sources

The tool integrates with various financial data sources, ensuring that users have access to a comprehensive range of information. This includes data from stock exchanges, financial news outlets, and regulatory bodies, providing a holistic view of the market landscape. However, this does not include access to broker research or expert calls—which are key to an effective and differentiated market research strategy.

Customizable Dashboards

Fiscal.ai offers customizable dashboards where users can monitor their preferred data feed, news, and market updates. This feature allows users to personalize their interface according to their specific needs and interests, ensuring they have quick access to the most relevant information. The amount of dashboards allowed per user depends on the pricing tier selected.

Sentiment Analysis

Fiscal.ai includes sentiment analysis tools that evaluate the tone and sentiment of financial news, reports, and social media discussions. This helps users gauge market sentiment, identify potential market-moving events, and understand the broader impact of news on stock prices and investor behavior.

Fiscal.ai Pros:

User-friendly interface, similar to ChatGPT’s
Able to generate models and charts in-platform via natural language prompts
Cost-effective for smaller businesses or individual users
Employs guardrails against genAI hallucination and verifies accuracy of information to ensure reliable results
Provides paragraph-level citations and multiple sources for each snippet of a response
Robust compliance

Fiscal.ai Cons:

Only includes filings, earnings transcripts, and financial data (from S&P Capital IQ)
No premium proprietary external sources such as broker research or expert calls
No LLM verticalization, but customized for investor workflows
Cannot upload documents and data at scale, which is crucial for enterprise organizations
Lack of transparency around how the LLM model interprets and handles queries
Lacks end-to-end data security, which is crucial for enterprise organizations

Quartr

Consumer-Grade and Enterprise-Grade

Best for: Streamlined access to public companies’ documents for financial research and corporate performance analysis

Quartr is a financial tool with generative AI capabilities, meant for investors, analysts, and corporate professionals who are looking for a way to quickly gather and analyze information about publicly traded companies. Quartr streamlines access to earnings call transcripts, company presentations, and investor relations materials—helping users stay informed about corporate performance and market trends.

While Quartr is a great source of earnings transcripts and company presentations, it does not offer any information about private companies, nor does it provide access to valuable premium content sets such as expert calls and broker research. Additionally, Quartr does not offer integrations with internal content, so its genAI capabilities cannot be applied to internal company knowledge. For these reasons, Quartr is not well-suited for holistic market and investment research on an enterprise level.

Features and Capabilities

Earnings Call Transcripts

Quartr provides full earnings call transcripts from publicly traded companies, and users can search for specific keywords and topics within those transcripts. The platform also offers audio playback of earnings transcripts.

Investor Presentations and Reports

Quartr hosts slide decks and other materials presented during earnings calls or investor days. This makes it easier to analyze visual data shared by companies.

Quartr AI Assistant

Quartr’s genAI model is trained exclusively on first-party information from public companies, such as earnings call transcripts, company filings, and presentations. This tool makes it easier to extract insights from the documents, and with citations and direct links, it facilitates easy source verification. The tool also enables users to ask questions about a specific company’s financial health, future outlook, or specific datapoints—and receive detailed answers that help streamline the research process.

Custom Alerts and Notifications

Quartr sends users personalized notifications about newly uploaded earnings calls or any other materials for tracked companies.

API Integration

Quartr provides access to live and recorded events, transcripts, audio, presentations, and reports from over 11,000 global companies, which can be integrated seamlessly into any platform.

Quartr Pros:

Provides centralized access to large repository of financial data
Provides live access to earnings calls and industry events
Real-time, customizable notifications for specific keywords or events
User-friendly interface
Generative AI capabilities that streamline the research process
API integration facilitates collaboration and easy incorporation of data into existing workflows
Provides citations to original sources to ensure data accuracy and reliability

Quartr Cons:

Data is limited to public companies and only includes company documents
No premium or proprietary content sets for market research, such as expert calls or broker research
No integration with internal content
Primarily designed for financial services users, not corporate or consultant users

Choosing an Alternative to Microsoft Copilot

Copilot is a great tool for professionals and teams who already rely on Microsoft Office and want to streamline their workflows with generative AI, enhanced data protection, and collaboration capabilities. However, Copilot does not provide access to premium or proprietary content sets that are necessary for holistic market and investment research, and its capabilities are really only valuable within the Microsoft Office ecosystem. Additionally, the lack of citations to sources, as well as propensity toward hallucination, make this an unsuitable tool for enterprise organizations who are looking for a secure, transparent, and trustworthy market intelligence platform.

When choosing an alternative to Copilot, consider the following criteria in your search:

Organizational size: Are you an individual consumer or part of a small business? If so, you may be satisfied with any of the consumer-grade tools listed above. If you are part of an enterprise organization, you will need to look exclusively at enterprise tools to support your organization’s needs.
Key use cases: Each platform described above serves specific use cases and excels in certain areas. Consider what you need to truly get an edge over your competitors. More content? Faster speed? Differentiated insights? Think about your biggest priorities and how you intend to use the platform, and then choose the one that is designed specifically for those use cases.
Data coverage: What kind of data do you need access to in order to gain a complete picture in your research? Some platforms will come with premium content sets like broker research and expert calls, while others may only come with lower-value public data. Consider what type and volume of data is necessary for your goals.
Data quality: When choosing an alternative to Copilot, opt for one with accurate, up-to-date, and reliable data. User ratings and reviews from websites like G2 and TrustRadius can help you make better decisions here.
User interface and user experience: A market intelligence platform should streamline your workflow and enhance your research process. Make sure that the solution you select is truly benefiting you, whether by saving time, increasing confidence, widening the breadth of your research, or all of the above.
Advanced features: Consider what additional features, other than content sets, are paramount to your process and workflow. Might you benefit from advanced AI search features like synonym recognition and sentiment analysis? Or maybe you need automated monitoring, company tearsheets, or customer analytics? Make sure the platform you choose supports your unique business needs and makes your job easier.

Try AlphaSense for Free

Regardless of your professional role, industry, or business goals, AlphaSense can help you make better financial and strategic decisions while accelerating the pace of your research.

See how your intelligence will transform when you use an all-in-one platform that combines premium and proprietary content, your own internal data, and leading AI technology that enables you to extract maximum value from your content.

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