GLG
Best for: Professionals and organizations seeking on-demand consultations with a vast network of subject-matter experts across various industries to inform strategic, financial, or market decisions
The Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) is a professional insight company, also known as an expert network company, that connects business professionals to experts from a variety of industries for insights, advice, and mentorship.
On the GLG platform, users can access a network of more than one million subject-matter experts on demand, empowering them to make better-informed business decisions.
Some of GLG’s key features include:
GLG Direct
GLG’s flagship product, GLG Direct focuses on offering expert consultations. These are typically one-on-one sessions between clients and subject-matter experts, where clients ask questions and receive direct answers and advice on topics of interest, businesses, or industries. These consultations occur via phone and video calls, private meetings, placements, and in some cases, expert witness services.
GLG Surveys
Users get access to quantitative and qualitative research conducted by GLG, including surveys, focus groups, and workshops.
GLG Library
Users receive access to a vast repository of event transcripts, replays, and other content covering various research needs, including market trends and company-specific explorations.
GLG Events
The platform organizes virtual and live events such as roundtables, webcasts, and teleconferences, bringing together leading experts to discuss industry trends and perspectives.
Integrated Insights
Combining various offerings, GLG provides market assessments, company research studies, and competitive landscape analyses, led by professionals with deep industry knowledge.
GLG Pros:
- Access to over one million subject matter experts
- Serves multiple types of clients, including Fortune 100 companies, law firms, investment firms, and more
- Offers both qualitative and quantitative insights
- Provides a massive library of expert calls and transcripts
GLG Cons:
- No broker research available
- GLG does not use advanced AI search or sentiment analysis in their platform
- No real-time monitoring of markets to keep users updated
- Users report that scheduling and conducting expert calls can be time-consuming
- Users report occasional inconsistencies in quality of experts in the platform
- Content is restricted to expert calls and conventional qualitative and quantitative research findings
GLG operates primarily as an expert network. So if expert insights are all you are looking for, you may find it valuable to combine several expert networks in your workflow. That way, you have access to even more unique and insightful insights, enabling you to stay on top of the market and maintain an edge over your competition. And if you are looking for a platform that encompasses more than just expert insights and offers a more holistic approach to market research, read on for some alternative solutions.
AlphaSense and Tegus
Best for: All-in-one market intelligence platform — including an expert network and expert transcript library — 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. 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.
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.
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 1,500+ 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 – 200K+ 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.
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:
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.
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.
Our newest generative AI tool, Generative Grid, applies multiple genAI prompts on 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.
Generative Grid pulls data from both premium external documents in the AlphaSense platform and users’ internal content. From there, users can choose preset templates or create their own to automate routine workflows. Each summary provides a direct citation to the source material it was pulled from.
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 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.
Company Perspectives (BamSEC)
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, BamSEC enables analysts to focus on what matters, save time, and do better work.
BamSEC enables 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.
Financials and Metrics (Canalyst)
Gain instant access to over 4,000 global fundamental models and over 60 industry dashboards, all hand-built and sourced by sector-focused analysts in Vancouver. 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.
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 and Tegus Pros:
- Extensive content database that spans key market perspectives, including broker research, expert calls, company documents, news & regulatory sites
- 10+ years of investment in AI
- Incorporates AI search technology, machine learning, and sentiment analysis
- Generative AI features like Generative Search, Smart Summaries, and Generative Grid for enhanced and streamlined workflow
- AI and genAI tools can be applied to integrated internal content
- 4,000+ 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 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 24/5 chat with product specialists, a Live Help button on the website, and regular live AlphaSense Education webinars
AlphaSense and Tegus Cons:
- Visualization tools are limited at this time
- Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses
Third Bridge
Another GLG alternative is Third Bridge, a private research firm that offers unique insights and analysis to asset managers, corporations, and consultants, enabling them to make smarter decisions faster.
Third Bridge uses primary research techniques in its business model, including interviews with industry experts and professionals, to gather information on various companies, industries, and topics. These insights help investors make better decisions, assess market opportunities, and develop business strategies.
However, Third Bridge lacks certain critical content sets — such as broker research, company documents, and news — that are necessary for full-scale market research. The platform also does not have advanced AI search capabilities, which are key for accurate and comprehensive market intelligence.
Related Reading:
Third Bridge vs Tegus (and AlphaSense)
Third Bridge offers the following features:
Forum
This archive contains analyst-led investigative interviews to give global industry knowledge and full sector insights. Its library has over 60,000 transcripts and conducts over 10,000 interviews annually.
Maps
Third Bridge keeps track of public and private company value chains to help users speed up their early research. It uses a proprietary market research model to rank, filter and prioritize companies to enable investors to make decisions fast.
Connections
Investors can gain direct access to prequalified industry experts in one-on-one consultations for better insights into the market.
Community
Third Bridge connects clients to relevant experts through a global network, leveraging thorough pre-qualification processes and a compliance framework.
Primers and Tearsheets
Third Bridge provides fundamental information on privately held companies, enabling quick understanding during early-stage research.
Surveys
Surveys empower clients to source large volumes of high-quality insights and to validate their hypotheses with ease. Third Bridge provides responses from hard-to-find experts across all major sectors, pre-screened to meet clients’ project-
specific needs.
Advisory Solutions
Third Bridge Advisory Solutions facilitates high-quality deal collaborations between top-tier industry advisors and leading PE firms. Third Bridge helps private equity teams gain an edge by carefully identifying and sourcing bespoke senior advisors with high-impact potential to lend their expertise across the entire deal cycle.
Third Bridge Pros:
- Over 60,000 call transcripts in the Third Bridge Forum library
- Enables clients to conduct one-on-one interviews with pre-qualified experts
- Uses a proprietary company ranking model
- Extensive network of experts across various industries
Third Bridge Cons:
- Cannot upload internal content
- Lacks broker research, company documents, and news for holistic market research
- No advanced AI-powered smart search or sentiment analysis
- Scheduling expert calls can be time-consuming
Guidepoint
Best for: Organizations seeking qualitative insights and direct access to a global network of subject matter experts
Guidepoint is an expert network platform that provides expert consultations to business professionals seeking industry expertise and insights. Its global network of over one million industry experts offers valuable insights and advisory services to help its clients make more informed business decisions. Guidepoint is ideal for organizations seeking expert insights and data-driven solutions for decision-making, as it provides expert consultations and access to a wide network of industry specialists.
Guidepoint is primarily used by finance, consulting, and corporate strategy professionals who require expert opinions and insights for primary research to research markets. Consulting firms leverage Guidepoint to gain access to high-level expertise for strategic planning, while private equity and venture capital firms use it to evaluate investments and conduct due diligence.
While Guidepoint excels in providing direct access to industry experts, it does not offer access to crucial qualitative market research sources such as company documents, external news sources, and broker research. Guidepoint’s quantitative insights are also only limited to the healthcare sector, according to their website.
Finally, Guidepoint does not publicly advertise AI-driven search tools on its platform.
Guidepoint offers the following features:
One-on-One Expert Consultations
Guidepoint arranges direct, confidential conversations between clients and prequalified experts from its vast network. These consultations can often be scheduled within hours, providing rapid access to specialized knowledge.
Global Expert Network
With over 1.4 million experts across more than 150 industries, Guidepoint facilitates over 1,000 interactions daily, serving a diverse clientele that includes institutional investors, multinational investment banks, consulting firms, corporations, and professional services.
Expert Surveys
Clients can gather insights from up to 100 experts through scalable surveys and comprehensive questionnaires, typically delivered within 36 hours.
Guidepoint Insights
This service offers moderated research sessions, including teleconferences, group meetings, and roundtables, focusing on essential topics and industry overviews. Users can also access audio and transcripts from these sessions in an online content library.
Compliance Framework
Guidepoint ensures compliance and privacy through confidentiality agreements and strict protocols for all its expert consultations.
User-Friendly Tools
Guidepoint’s platform offers user-friendly AI and automation tools for scheduling consultations, managing appointments, and accessing transcripts and audio recordings, enhancing the efficiency of research workflows.
Guidepoint Pros:
- Vast network of industry experts across various industries
- Provides quick access to relevant expertise, often within hours
- Offers tailored research services, allowing clients to receive insights specific to their needs
- Provides confidential consultations
- Offers various ways to connect with experts, including calls, surveys, and events
- User-friendly platform
- Ability to access expertise at any time, across different time zones
Guidepoint Cons:
- Limited quantitative research beyond the healthcare industry
- Lack of crucial market research content, such as broker reports and company documents
- Quality and relevance of experts provided can vary
- Expensive expert consultations are cost-prohibitive for businesses with limited budgets
- Relies heavily on human expertise and lacks AI search technology
AlphaSights
Best for: Professionals at investment firms, consultancies, and corporations who need fast, tailored access to expert insights for due diligence, market research, and strategic decision-making
AlphaSights is a leading global expert network that connects businesses with industry experts to provide insights and advice for strategic decision-making. AlphaSights provides its clients with information services that help them make better business decisions and deliver outstanding results.
The AlphaSights network of experts is suitable for investment bankers, private investment firms, mutual funds, management consulting firms, corporations, and non-government organizations (NGOs). The platform combines expert network coverage, technology, and compliance to provide business intelligence and analysis to its clients.
AlphaSights is primarily geared towards qualitative insights, which may not meet the needs of teams that require detailed quantitative analysis and data-driven decision-making. Organizations seeking more automated insights may find that AlphaSights’ reliance on human expertise does not fully meet their needs.
Finally, due to AlphaSights’ lack of critical content sets — such as broker research, company documents, and news — as well as a lack of AI-powered search capabilities or sentiment analysis, the platform is not sufficient for conducting full-scale market or investment research.
Related Reading: AlphaSights vs Third Bridge (vs AlphaSense)
AlphaSights Pros:
- Large network of industry specialists
- Serves multiple industries and business functions
- Offers expert calls and consultations
AlphaSights Cons:
- Limited to qualitative data
- No advanced AI-powered smart search or sentiment analysis
- No broker research, company documents, or news
- Cannot upload internal content
- No support for integrations or organizations
- Scheduling process for expert consultations can be time-consuming
Choosing an Alternative to GLG
Beyond the above companies, there are plenty of additional alternatives to GLG, including Coleman Research Group, Capvision, and Guidepoint. In order to decide which platform is right for your business and research needs, consider the following questions:
- What is your budget? Quickly eliminate any options outside of your price range.
- How do you work? Do you work solo, or do you collaborate with other teams or team members? Do you need a tool that integrates with other programs and allows you to search across internal and external company content? Make sure the tool you choose matches your research workflow.
- What are your goals? For some, getting access to proprietary expert insights from a few different sources is enough. For others, a more full-scale and robust research solution that provides access to a variety of voices, from journalists and companies to analysts and industry experts is instrumental in gaining a full picture of the market landscape. Choose a platform that is aligned with your unique business needs and goals.
- What additional features do you require? Some platforms are equipped with features like AI search technology, generative AI, customizable dashboards, real-time monitoring tools, and more. All these capabilities can enhance and accelerate your workflow, giving you the competitive edge. Consider what features would make the biggest difference in your process and output.
