Crayon vs Feedly (vs AlphaSense)

Overview

Crayon

Crayon is a competitive intelligence tool that businesses use to track the digital footprint of their competitors, as well as their marketing, product launches, and pricing updates. Crayon aggregates data from various sources — including websites, social media, customer reviews, and sales insights — to provide real-time updates on competitor movements, product changes, pricing shifts, and market trends. This platform is primarily used by marketing, sales, and strategy teams to maintain their competitive edge.

Many businesses across a number of industries use Crayon’s platform to keep up with market trends, including finance, retail, pharmaceutical, and technology companies. However, Crayon may not be right for companies that track a large number of competitors, or who need to frequently modify the competitors they are monitoring. This is because Crayon relies heavily on human analysts for data verification, which can slow workflows and limit scalability.

Crayon offers the following key features:

Competitive Intelligence Tracking

Crayon continuously monitors competitors’ websites, social media, job postings, and news mentions to provide real-time updates on key company developments. It aggregates data from 100+ data types across over 300 million sources.

Sales Battlecards

Battlecards provide sales teams with up-to-date, digestible competitor comparisons, with key differentiators, objections handling, and talk tracks.

AI Capabilities

The platform uses AI capabilities to filter and analyze large volumes of data, in order to highlight significant competitor updates such as product launches, pricing changes, and executive shifts. Crayon also uses AI to summarize content and flag new insights worthy of your attention.

Battlecards and Sales Enablement Tools

Crayon enables the creation of dynamic competitor battlecards, which can be valuable in sales workflows. These can also be integrated into platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce.

Collaboration and Workflow Integration

The platform integrates with CRMs, messaging tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, and sales enablement tools for more streamlined workflows and enhanced collaboration.

Customizable Dashboards and Reports

Users can create tailored dashboards and reports to track specific competitors, industries, or key trends.

Crayon Pros:

• Centralized competitive intelligence repository
• Supports integrations with other software
• Strong sales enablement features
• Offers automated monitoring and alerts
• Uses cutting-edge AI and ML capabilities to source valuable data on competitors
• User-friendly platform
• Ideal for in-depth analytics and metrics
• Supports customizable reports and dashboards
• Supports team collaboration

Crayon Cons:

• Does not host content on its platform; only provides links to URLs
• No company documents, SEC filings, earnings estimates, financial reports, or modeling
• No industry-specific reports or thought leadership
• Lacks expert call network
• Limited depth compared to other tools
• No broker research reports
• No advanced search capabilities, such as keyword and synonym recognition or thematic search
• Less scalable and modifiable than similar tools

Pricing

Crayon does not publicly disclose its pricing. Contact Crayon directly to receive a personalized quote based on your organization’s size and business needs.

Related Reading: Crayon Alternatives & Competitors

CB Insights vs Crayon

Crayon vs Klue

Feedly

Feedly is a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed reader and web-based news aggregator for users tracking insights across the internet. Feedly users can track the latest news, WordPress blogs, podcasts, newsletters, websites, YouTube channels, LinkedIn, and other social media accounts to stay updated on local, national, and global events.

Users can create personalized news and RSS feeds from multiple sources at once. These feeds are collected and presented in a unified format, depending on topics and user interests. It also offers access to news from certain premium content sites (for an additional fee).

Feedly’s biggest value offering is that it allows users to easily track insights across the web without needing to read through everything. Feedly also incorporates AI capabilities, which automate the curation process by cutting out the noise and flagging relevant insights for your business from all over the web.

Feedly is geared primarily toward individual users who need to track various news sources. While it does have an Enterprise version that is more geared for enterprise organizations, it lacks premium content, and it’s not purpose-built to support complex research workflows. Therefore, users looking for a comprehensive, all-in-one market intelligence platform would need to supplement Feedly with an additional tool.

Feedly’s key features include:

Content Aggregation and Feed Organization

Feedly lets you bring together articles, blogs, news sites, RSS feeds, Youtube channels, and more into one unified feed. You can also categorize them into folders or feeds by topic, project, or industry.

AI Capabilities

Feedly’s AI assistant “Leo” helps filter out noise, surface high-relevance content, and highlight key insights based on your preferences.

Monitoring and Alerts

Users can set up custom alerts to track mentions of competitors, brands, or topics that are relevant to their competitive research.

Enterprise Version

While Feedly is not by default an enterprise-grade tool, it does offer an Enterprise version that is more geared toward teams and larger organizations. This version includes collaboration features, enterprise-level administrative features, and more specialized intelligence modules — such as Threat Intelligence, Market Intelligence, Biopharma Research, and Competitive Intelligence. However, there is limited documentation beyond these features, and Feedly lacks the content, customization, and analytical features that are required for financial and business use cases.

Feedly Pros:

• Aggregates news posts from hundreds of sources
• Teams can collaborate and share insights
• AI features search and flags critical insights for you
• Available on multiple platforms
• Supports subscriptions to favorite content
• Offers email alerts and push notifications

Feedly Cons:

• Duplicate information from multiple sources
• Information overload risks
• No access to broker research or expert calls
• No proprietary content sources, company filings, or research
• AI is a newer feature and not yet as robust as competing platforms
• Premium content features are only available for an extra upgrade cost
• Only Enterprise version is suitable for enterprises

Pricing

Feedly offers several pricing plans based on users’ business needs and organizational size.

• Standard – $1600/month
• Advanced – $2400/month
• Enterprise – Custom quotes are available when you contact Feedly directly

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a leading enterprise-grade market intelligence and AI search platform built for robust financial and market research. This platform is designed for investment and strategy teams 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.

Qualitative and Quantitative Content Universe

AlphaSense is the only tool that combines public and private financial data with expert call transcripts, broker research, news, and AI search in one place. This means you get all the numbers, as well as the qualitative narrative that provides context to those figures, so you can make smarter and better informed decisions.

Premium External Market Insights

Our library of qualitative content includes:

• Wall Street Insights® collection of equity research that features more than 1,000 broker sources, including Goldman Sachs
• Expert calls, which includes over 220K interviews with pre-qualified experts and the ability to conduct your own 1:1 calls with 70% cost savings compared to traditional expert networks
• Company documents, such as earnings transcripts, company presentations, SEC and global filings, ESG reports, and press releases
• News, trade journals, and regulatory coverage

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.

Internal Content Integration

With AlphaSense, you can integrate and query your own internal content 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

In this way, AlphaSense centralizes all your internal and external knowledge in one place, and allows you to leverage our industry-leading search, summarization, and monitoring tools to enhance and accelerate your research.

Financial Data

On the quantitative side, AlphaSense provides access to the following crucial insights:

• Historical Financials & Estimates: Standardized statements and consensus data across 17,000+ public companies
• Sector-Specific KPIs: Detailed operating metrics sourced from institutional-grade Canalyst models
• Transaction Intelligence: Nearly 1M M&A deals and 680K private funding rounds, enriched with AI-generated deal rationale and strategic context
• Dynamic Peer Sets: 125+ pre-built industry comparables with sector-specific metrics

AI Search & 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, now with Deep Research capabilities, transforms how users can extract insights from our vast library of premium content sources. Generative Search helps you get up to speed on a company or topic by instantly surfacing the answers you need. You can dig deeper into topics by asking follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query. Each answer provides citations to the exact snippet of text from where the information was sourced, so that it can always be referenced back.

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

This feature allows users 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 links to the exact location in the text from where the summaries pull — combining high accuracy with easy verification.

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

AlphaSense helps research professionals conduct key workflows with greater speed and confidence by incorporating the following features in the platform:

• Generative Search: Surface insights across structured data and qualitative content with full source citations, producing more complete research capabilities.
• Natural Language Screener: Use simple prompts to discover equities, funding rounds, and M&A transactions.
• 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 workflows: One-click agents that run full investment workflows, from company and deal screening to performing early due diligence.
• Domain-Specific AI: Unlike generic AI tools, our financial AI understands sector dynamics, valuation methodologies, and market context.

Company Perspectives

Make quantitative investment research easier by transforming how you work with public company data. By streamlining access to SEC filings, earnings and events transcripts, financial documents, and more, our BamSEC offering enables analysts to focus on what matters, save time, and do better work.

BamSEC allows users to search across multiple companies and SEC filings. Customers can use these documents to perform due diligence on companies and explore performance metrics efficiently. Using the tables on BamSEC, users can explore past filings, create models, and benchmark company performance, all in one place, without needing to pull up individual filings to manually track a company’s metrics.

Financial Modeling

Gain instant access to over 4,500 global fundamental models and over 60 industry dashboards, all hand-built and sourced by sector-focused analysts. Unlike building your own models and comp sheets, using our off-the-shelf models, dashboards, and data reduces your time spent on undifferentiated work, allowing you to compete on your ability to analyze the data, not aggregate it.

Data Integration Capabilities

Customers can easily and securely integrate content at enterprise scale through our Ingestion API or enterprise-grade connectors — like Egnyte, 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.

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 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.
• 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 can be applied to integrated internal 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
• Mobile app that includes all platform content and AI search capabilities
• 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 24/7 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

Get Started for Free

Pricing

For AlphaSense, you can pay by the enterprise or seat, depending on your unique business needs. Contact us for more information on pricing options, or start a free 2-week trial here.

A Better Alternative to Crayon and Feedly?

Crayon and Feedly are excellent research tools for users looking for a web listening tool, or who only need a tool for competitive intelligence.

But for deeper research and analysis, both Crayon and Feedly fall short. Crayon serves very limited use cases beyond competitive intelligence and does not provide access to the quantitative and qualitative insights that are crucial for full-scale market research. Feedly is primarily a web-based news aggregator, so it lacks the deep, premium insights, AI features, and workflow tools that are necessary for comprehensive market intelligence.

If you are looking for a platform that provides access to proprietary and premium content sets, that’s equipped with powerful AI search functionality, and that supports complex research and business workflows, AlphaSense is the clear choice.

Only AlphaSense curates content from all key perspectives of market research — indexed, searchable, and available all in one place. AlphaSense’s AI is significantly more robust, with features such as generative AI, Deep Research, sentiment analysis, synonym recognition, and more.

When considering a tool for your market intelligence needs, AlphaSense may be the best choice for you if:

• You want a platform that enables your entire organization to meet various strategic goals, not just competitive intelligence and web listening.
• You prefer a platform that eliminates tedious and manual research techniques while surfacing real-time insights relevant to your needs.
• You want to save precious research time and dedicate it to deeper analysis and strategic planning.
• You want access to an expansive content universe of proprietary, premium, private, and public content unavailable to many of your peers.
• You want a platform that keeps you updated on all critical information, with customizable real-time alerts, watchlists, and dashboards.
• You are looking for a platform purpose-built for an enterprise-level organization.