When making investment decisions or conducting in-depth market research, the right intelligence tool can help a business enhance its sales, create stronger marketing campaigns, and deliver better products. In the age of information overload, simply having access to the right data is no longer enough. You also need a tool that will help you filter through the information and extract the most critical and valuable insights.
Modern market intelligence platforms are purpose-built to do just that—speeding up time to insight, increasing research confidence, and surfacing the precise insights that matter most for strategic goals.
Factiva and Klue are two business and competitive intelligence platforms that are designed to streamline your research process by providing access to relevant content and unlocking the most relevant insights faster. Each has unique strengths and shortcomings that may make it a better fit for certain businesses over others.
Below, we examine Factiva and Klue, exploring what each platform works best for and where each falls short. We also compare them both with our all-in-one market intelligence platform to show how AlphaSense fills in the gaps and meets your business and research needs better.
We will use the following criteria for our comparison:
- Features
- Customer support
- Reviews and ratings
- Pricing
First, here’s a quick overview of each platform:
Factiva
Factiva is a global news search engine that monitors companies and gives users access to business intelligence and research insights. It’s owned by Dow Jones & Company, a subsidiary company of News Corp.
Access to Factiva gives users a massive archive of over 33,000 premium global newspapers, magazines, reports, publications, and sources (including The New York Times, The Financial Times, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal).
Factiva is a rich source of business news, trade reports, press releases, historical equity stock quotes, market indexes, and journals. Moreover, it can provide users with government data, information on potential global trends, politics, and events.
Factiva users can take advantage of the database to perform business functions such as:
- Conducting competitive intelligence
- Data mining and advanced analytics
- Corporate communications and media monitoring
- Sales intelligence and business development
- Application development
- Customer engagement and marketing
- Conducting research and strategy
Factiva provides access to public and private company profiles, financial data, and documents—while making it easy for users to share this information internally. The platform also allows users to perform advanced searches and filter information using smart indexing tools.
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.
Due to limitations in content sets outside news and company information, this platform may not be suitable for users looking for a full-scale research solution. Without access to premium and proprietary content sets like broker reports or expert transcripts, it can be challenging to gain a complete view of a market, industry, or trend.
Additionally, Factiva does not utilize artificial intelligence (AI) in its platform, features that are often instrumental in saving time and money and accelerating research practices.
Factiva Pros:
- Access to over 33,000 premium global sources of news and information
- Supports APIs and third-party integrations
- Offers both simple and advanced search functions
- Supports a wide variety of business functions, including competitive intelligence, data mining, and research and strategy
- Dynamic user dashboard with customizable alerts for users to track real-time news
- Supports sharing functionalities and newsletters
Factiva Cons:
- Sometimes displays duplicate news and report entries
- Does not support simultaneous logins
- Links created inside the Factiva platform cannot be accessed outside of it
- Lacks AI search capability to optimize searches
- No broker research, expert calls, or ESG reports available
- Data is not always accurate
- Functions more as a media intelligence tool, not a robust market intelligence tool
Klue
Klue is a competitive intelligence software solution that helps users perform in-depth competitor analysis and distribute insights across their organization.
Klue uses an automated web crawler to keep track of your competitors’ product launches, pricing changes, and marketing campaigns. It then uses AI to verify and deliver key insights from the findings, helping users make data-conscious decisions. However, Klue’s AI does not deliver insights in real time, often generating noise and missing certain insights entirely.
Related Reading: Top 7 Klue Alternatives for Competitive Intelligence
Klue users can enjoy seamless collaboration across an organization using current tools including Microsoft Office, Slack, Salesforce, and more.
Klue can be used to:
- Collect data on competitors from multiple online and offline sources
- Set targets and benchmark the success and impact of marketing against a competitor
- Use its AI algorithm to process insights faster and add useful information and contexts to multiple data points that expose a competitor’s overall strategy
- Build battlecards, boards, and competitive content for your product marketing strategies.
- Share competitor insights across multiple departments in an organization for better market planning and execution.
Klue’s biggest shortcoming is that it is mainly a web listening tool and can only access public data. This means it does not provide access to valuable content sets like global and SEC filings, broker research, and expert transcripts—all of which are necessary for holistic market research. This, coupled with a lack of internal data storage capabilities, means Klue offers little use outside of competitive intelligence.
Klue Pros:
- Excellent competitive research and tracking features
- Offers high company data security
- High-quality battlecard templates
- User-friendly, intuitive, and scalable platform
- Supports collaboration and integrations with existing organizational tools
- Has a community forum for user collaboration across organizations
Klue Cons:
- May be harder to learn and use than other tools
- Limited data storage capacity with most of its information stored outside the platform
- Uses only publicly available data
- Focuses only on competitive intelligence, with no access to expert calls and transcripts, SEC filings, earnings estimates, or financial reports
- No advanced search capabilities or sentiment analysis
- No third-party (broker) research insights
- AI does not deliver insights in real time
AlphaSense
AlphaSense is an all-in-one market intelligence platform that consistently ranks as an industry leader on TrustRadius and G2. Forbes also recently recognized AlphaSense as one of the top 50 AI companies in 2023.
Unlike Factiva or Klue, AlphaSense offers robust AI search technology and a vast content universe to make faster and more accurate decisions with deeper market and competitor intelligence insights.
AlphaSense has close to 4,000 enterprise clients, including 85% of the S&P 100, 80% of the top consultancies, 75% of the top asset management firms, and 20 of the largest pharmaceutical companies. This platform is used by corporations for strategy, competitive intelligence, and market landscaping, as well as by IR and financial professionals for messaging research, due diligence, market monitoring, and deal sourcing.
AlphaSense sources information from over 10,000+ different content sources, including company documents and regulatory filings, news and trade journals, broker research, and expert call transcripts. Coupled with this vast universe of content, AlphaSense’s smart search and AI capabilities help shorten the time to insight and take your research process from reactive to proactive.
In addition, AlphaSense features two proprietary and premium content sets:
- Wall Street Insights® – A collection of leading equity research from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms, covering global industries, sector themes, and companies. These resources are indexed, searchable, and available from the AlphaSense platform.
- AlphaSense Expert Insights – Includes the Expert Transcript Library—an ever-expanding library that currently hosts 40,000+ expert call transcripts with competitors, industry experts, professionals, customers, and former and current executives—as well as Expert Call Services. AlphaSense Expert Insights prioritizes compliance throughout the content development process and has a team of trained compliance reviewers who ensure research safety for clients.
AlphaSense also comes packed with other unique features that enhance your research process including:
Automated Monitoring
With the AlphaSense platform, users can set up automatic updates on key topics, news, market movements, emerging trends, industries, and competitor companies. For your competitive intelligence needs, AlphaSense can snapshot companies and topics of interest regularly and send you actionable insights.
Instant Company Insights
If you’re keeping tabs on a single company, AlphaSense offers Search Analytics and Company Tearsheets that provide updates on the companies currently on your radar, giving you an in-depth reach across industries, regions, document types, and more. Using company insights, you can also focus and ground your research into a particular competitor, discovering critical insights that propel your market analysis to the next level.
Smart Synonyms™
AlphaSense features an AI-based Smart Synonyms™ technology that understands your search intent and surfaces results that reflect all relevant synonyms of your initial query. Using advanced algorithms, this feature eliminates noise from your search by cutting out irrelevant content, including matching keywords that don’t meet search objectives. This dramatically cuts down noise in your research, decreases information overload, and saves valuable time.
Sentiment Analysis
AlphaSense’s sentiment analysis is a natural language processing (NLP) feature that identifies changes in a text’s tone and subjective meaning. Then, using different color codes, it helps you determine if the document has positive, negative, or neutral sentiments.
Each search term also gets a sentiment change score, which helps you track slight market sentiment changes over time. This enables you to catch subtle inflection points in earnings calls and expert transcripts that move markets and provide early indicators of shifting corporate performance.
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—reducing time spent on research during earnings season, quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees.
AlphaSense Pros:
- Extensive content database organized around the four key perspectives of market research
- Utilizes NLP, AI-based search technology, and sentiment analysis
- Features proprietary content sets like Wall Street Insights® and the AlphaSense Expert Insights
- Automated and customizable alerts
- All-in-one research platform
- User-friendly and intuitive interface
- Collaboration and integration features
AlphaSense Cons
- Visualization tools are limited to financial data at this time
- Lack of collaborative tools for knowledge management
Features
Support
Factiva
Factiva offers great customer support with dedicated lines for the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Each region also has dedicated sales teams and customer support staff that keep open lines for Factiva users between Sunday, 9 p.m., and Saturday 1 a.m. UTC.
Besides that, users can get up to speed on the platform using dedicated online learning sessions on request.
Klue
Klue offers live chat and dedicated customer support agents to assist users with issue resolution during standard office hours. They also have dedicated customer support agents who assist with onboarding and ensure a seamless transition into Klue’s Customer Intelligence Platform.
AlphaSense
AlphaSense’s product and customer education teams provide ramp-up and learning sessions with hands-on training and demonstrations. Additionally, all AlphaSense users have a dedicated account representative available for questions and guidance. The product specialist team is also available to put together searches for research professionals to streamline their workflows.
AlphaSense maintains a regular training calendar for live, virtual, instructor-led AlphaSense Education webinars, and the website has a live Help button, where users can chat with product specialists day or night (24/5) and receive instant support for any issues or queries.
Ratings and Reviews
Factiva
Rating: 4.1 out of 5 on G2, 8.2 out of 10 on TrustRadius
Popular positives:
- Over 33,000 premium data sources
- Real-time data access
- Supports web design and app development features
- User-friendly interface and excellent customer support
Popular negatives:
- Potential duplicate news sources
- No direct links to some data source outside platform
- Potential for outdated data sources
- May be slower than other similar solutions
Klue
Rating: 4.8 out of 5 on G2, 7.8 out of 10 on TrustRadius
Popular positives
- Excellent customer support team
- Functions as a centralized, curated repository of competitive intelligence info, easily accessible in one place and simple to update and share out across the organization
Popular negatives
- There is a learning curve for new users
- No data storage function
- Limited battlecard templates
AlphaSense
Rating: 4.8 out of 5 on G2, 9.4 out of 10 on TrustRadius
Popular positives:
- Comprehensive data and analysis on public and private markets
- Real-time data availability and notifications
- Easy-to-find relevant and high-quality results
- Intuitive interface and great customer support
- Smart AI-powered search leads to quicker, more accurate insights
Popular negatives:
- Visualization tools are limited to financial data at this time
- Lack of collaborative tools for knowledge management
Pricing
Factiva
As per third-party sources, Factiva plans start at about $3,000-5,000.
Klue
Third-party sources estimate the starting price of Klue at about $1000 per user, but may also charge a setup fee.
AlphaSense
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 Factiva and Klue?
Factiva and Klue are excellent platforms for users in search of web listening tools that track various news sources and publicly available documents. Klue, in particular, is a great option for users who are exclusively interested in competitive intelligence.
However, neither of these options is an all-in-one research solution. For corporate and financial professionals who need deeper research insights and analysis, as well as access to proprietary intelligence and content sets, AlphaSense is a clear choice.
In addition to aggregating content from all the main research perspectives—indexed, searchable, and all in one place—AlphaSense uses advanced AI search technology that cuts down research time, increases confidence, and gives you a clear competitive edge.
AlphaSense is your best option if:
- You want access to a massive content universe of proprietary, premium, private, and public content unavailable to the general public and competitors
- You want an efficient platform that uses AI to surface relevant, real-time insights, saving you precious time for deeper analysis and strategy
- You want a platform that replaces all your other research avenues and meets all your market intelligence needs
- You want a platform that works in the background to keep you updated on all critical information, with customizable real-time alerts, watchlists, and dashboards
- You want a platform your entire organization can use for various strategic goals beyond just competitive intelligence and web listening
