What is GLG?
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 900,000 subject-matter experts on demand, empowering them to make better-informed business decisions.
The key 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 also offers qualitative and quantitative research insights gathered through surveys, focus group discussions, workshops, and discussion panels. Users can also access the GLG Library, which contains thousands of teleconference transcripts, on-demand webcasts, and other resources.
GLG Strengths:
- Access to over 900,000 experts
- Serves multiple types of clients, including law firms and a diverse range of businesses
- Offers both qualitative and quantitative insights
- Provides a massive library of expert calls and transcripts
GLG Weaknesses:
- 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
- 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.
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PitchBook Alternatives & Competitors
Best GLG Alternatives for 2023
Whether you are looking for a complement to GLG to help you unlock even more expert insights, or looking to replace GLG with a more full-scale research solution, here are some of the best options to consider:
AlphaSense
AlphaSense is a leading all-in-one market intelligence platform and smart search engine. It’s the ideal tool for research and business professionals—from analysts and financial researchers to corporate professionals—looking to implement a qualitative research strategy powered by proprietary AI technology and automation.
While GLG specializes exclusively in expert call services, there are many instances where you may benefit from a more robust and holistic market intelligence platform. Expert insights can be instrumental in gaining a deep and first-hand perspective into your industry, company, or topic of interest—and they provide backup to the quantitative data and numbers from your other research.
However, the value of expert insights really shines when combined with the other key perspectives that help you get the full scope of your research and make fully-informed business decisions.
AlphaSense’s extensive content universe provides access to private, public, premium, and proprietary content—indexed, searchable, and all in one place. That content is organized by the four key perspectives:
- Expert – Interviews conducted by experienced buy-side analysts with pre-vetted industry experts with direct operator experience. Stream in AlphaSense, the exclusive expert transcript library, is available as an add-on feature.
- Analyst – Equity research published by financial analysts from leading Wall Street firms, focusing on national and global issues. This proprietary content set is known as Wall Street Insights®.
- Company – Documents published by public and private companies, including SEC and company filings, earnings reports, presentations, transcripts, and ESG reports.
- Journalist – Content published in major news networks, trade journals, and government and NGO publications.
Product Features
Smart Synonyms™
Smart Synonyms™ technology is powered by AI search technology that recognizes both the keywords and search intent behind a query.
AlphaSense uses advanced algorithms to eliminate noise from your search (i.e., content with matching keywords but ultimately irrelevant to your search objective) and leverages variations in language (for example, “impact investing” vs. “ESG investing”) to pinpoint the exact information you need.
AI search functionality allows you to easily find the exact documents and snippets that are most relevant to your search, giving you back time and energy to spend on more high-level tasks, like analysis.
Sentiment Analysis
AlphaSense uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) in its sentiment analysis technology to identify nuances in the tone and subjective meaning of text. It then uses color coding to help readers identify the document’s positive, neutral, and negative sentiments.
With AlphaSense, you can add the expert transcript library, Stream in AlphaSense, to your aggregated research experience and hear directly from former employees, customers, channel partners, and competitors talking about company/competitor dynamics, reactions to service/product updates, and competitive perspectives on the market landscape.
Stream in AlphaSense also allows you to quickly pick up on sentiment shifts in the expert interviews that go beyond surface-level commentary.
This award-winning technology assigns each search term a numerical sentiment change score to help users track any slight change in market sentiments across time. Users can take advantage of it to make better-informed investment decisions and improve their risk management strategies.
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.
Integrations and APIs
API capabilities provided by your market intelligence platform allow you to build your own tools to get maximum ROI from the content sources you can now access. For example, AlphaSense offers the following APIs for users to leverage our proprietary technology and content across other parts of their strategies:
- Alert Feed API: Real-time data feed based on saved searches & alerts.
- Search API: Solution that provides real-time, programmatic access to AlphaSense search infrastructure to query and filter the database of documents from a third party domain.
- Ingestion API: Integration, processing, and enrichment capabilities for internal or custom content sets.
- AI API: Enrichment capabilities that enable company recognition, sentiment, themes and KPI services for internal content.
AlphaSense also provides integrations with commonly used programs like OneNote, Sharepoint, and Evernote, enabling streamlined collaboration with members across your organization and improving team productivity. It also allows you to search across all internal and external company content to find key insights, and the proprietary AI technology catches what other platforms miss in a secure and automated way.
Automated Monitoring
Instead of wasting hours on manually monitoring, AlphaSense offers real-time alerts to keep users updated with trending topics, companies, and industries of interest. Users can also take snapshots of multiple companies within the AlphaSense platform, staying on top of the most critical insights, news, and market changes they need to know.
Exceptional User Experience
AlphaSense is built to fit into a user’s processes and workflow seamlessly. In addition to an intuitive user-friendly interface to display data and information, it allows professionals to export crucial data to their mobile devices or PCs.
AlphaSense also boasts exceptional customer service—product specialists are readily available 24/7 to assist with putting together searches—which users find massively helpful in streamlining workflows.
AlphaSense Pros:
- Extensive content universe with 10,000+ premium sources of information
- All-in-one access to the four key perspectives of market research
- Smart AI-powered functionality that helps streamline the research process and ensures you never miss a critical insight
- Integration with commonly-used programs like OneNote, Sharepoint, and Evernote that enable better team collaboration and productivity
- User-friendly interface and exceptional customer service
AlphaSense Cons:
- Some broker reports may not be available for certain audiences
- The expert call library comes at an additional cost
- Limited private company data
Pricing
AlphaSense offers custom pricing based on your unique needs. Sign up for a free two-week trial today and experience the power of real-time search and market intelligence or talk to the AlphaSense Team for more information on pricing plans.
Stream
Stream is an industry-leading resource with over 28,000 expert interview transcripts that offer unique insights to professionals looking for a deeper understanding of new markets, competitors, and geographies. This call library adds 2,000 transcripts monthly to a growing library of first-hand perspectives from current and past customers, executives, competitors, and leading industry experts, spanning multiple companies and sectors.
Product Features
Cutting-Edge Experts
The team at Stream constantly recruits new experts to keep its database fresh and relevant, giving users unparalleled perspectives across the market. These experts are curated based on expertise and experience across industries, including healthcare, business, technology communications, and more.
Expert Call Services
Stream by AlphaSense helps users take advantage of critical perspectives that drive business decisions using expert calls. You can request one-on-one calls with experts on the Stream platform, or you can consult with Stream’s Research team and custom-source expert perspectives. Also available are transcripts to help prequalify experts and help you prepare for your calls.
AI Search Technology
Stream uses sentiment analysis and Smart Synonyms™ technology to give you smarter, more relevant results. With this search functionality, you can capture valuable insights from multiple transcripts and call summaries, without wasting time on conducting unnecessary manual searches.
Stream Pros:
- Massive library of expert calls and interviews
- Customizable dashboard for tracking relevant data
- Real-time alerts based on user preferences
- AI-powered features for better search results
- Transcripts comply with all industry standards before publication
Stream Cons:
- Stream can be overwhelming for new users due to the available data
Pricing
Stream by AlphaSense is available based on your unique needs, with custom pricing for enterprise customers. Sign up for a free two-week trial today and experience the power of real-time search and market intelligence or talk to the AlphaSense Team for more information on pricing plans.
Tegus
Tegus is another excellent consulting firm alternative to GLG that offers institutional investors valuable financial information through a searchable insight network and platform. There are over 40,000 expert call transcripts with information about private and public companies on the Tegus platform.
Moreover, users can annotate, analyze and explore multiple resources to understand company and market trends. Just like Stream and GLG, users can also request expert calls and transcripts from management consultants and other experts.
Product Features
Call Services
Tegus has a library of over 40,000 expert calls with insights across industries and market sectors. All experts on Tegus are prequalified and uniquely recruited to keep its platform updated and relevant.
Users can request custom calls from the right expert, ask specific questions, and receive unique insights at an average fee of $325/hour, with Tegus ensuring compliance and security.
Tegus For Experts
Industry experts and professionals can join the Tegus platform to expand their expert network, engage with others, and participate in expert calls at their chosen hourly rate.
BamSEC
Tegus uses its proprietary BamSEC platform to give users access to multiple SEC and company filings. This helps them perform due diligence and explore the performance of numerous companies.
Tegus Pros:
- Access to SEC and company filings
- Large library of experts and expert call transcripts
- Ability to set up monitoring tools and alerts
- Ability to annotate and comments to call transcripts
Tegus Cons:
- No advanced AI-powered smart search or Sentiment Analysis
- No broker research insights
- Cannot upload internal content
- No support for integrations
Pricing
According to Inex One, Tegus uses the value of hedge funds to determine its pricing. A Tegus subscription is estimated at $20,000 to $25,000 per user per year and about $375 to $500 per expert call.
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.
Product Features
Forum
This archive contains analyst-led investigative interviews to give global industry knowledge and full sector insights. Its library has over 30,000 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
Their Community feature gives clients access to anonymized interviews through their Forum. From the Third Bridge website, “Community connects our clients to the highest quality, relevant experts by leveraging our extensive global expert network, thorough pre-qualification processes and a robust compliance framework.”
Third Bridge Pros:
- Over 30,000 call transcripts in the Third Bridge Forum library
- One-on-one interviews with pre-qualified experts
- Uses a proprietary company ranking model
Third Bridge Cons:
- Cannot upload internal content
- No broker research insights
- No advanced AI-powered smart search or Sentiment Analysis
McKinsey & Company
McKinsey and Company offers consulting and strategic business advice to businesses and institutions worldwide. It provides professional services like strategy, operations, and organizational design consultations. McKinsey also helps organizations in digital transformation using advanced technology, proprietary information, and expert advice to help their clients grow and expand.
Product Features
Market Intelligence
McKinsey & Company uses various research methods to gain insight into supply and demand trends worldwide and to take advantage of multiple profit pools.
Diagnostics
Using this feature, McKinsey helps you benchmark your Company or business against your peers and best practice to improve your performance and operations.
Analytics
Using proprietary models and technology like Big Data, McKinsey helps you make better decisions and improve your outcomes.
McKinsey Pros:
- Use proprietary technology and models
- Serve multiple industries and business functions
- Offer numerous solutions, including expert calls
McKinsey Cons:
- Services are expensive and beyond the reach of small businesses.
AlphaSights
AlphaSights provides its clients with information services that help them make better business decisions and deliver outstanding results. It uses a combination of industry experts, technology, and compliance to provide business intelligence and analysis to investors, corporations, and consultants.
Product Features
With AlphaSights, you can gain access to the following:
Experts
You can consult multiple experts on AlphaSights and get access to intelligence from industries across 120+ countries. It facilitates over 350,000 unique expert client interactions annually and vets each expert for every project.
Services
Besides one-on-one phone calls with experts, you can access other AlphaSight services, including interviews, surveys, and meetings.
AlphaSights Pros:
- Serve multiple industries and business functions
- Offer multiple solutions, including expert calls
AlphaSights Cons:
- No advanced AI-powered smart search or Sentiment Analysis
- No broker research insights
- Cannot upload internal content
- No support for integrations
How to Choose 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.
