What is PitchBook?
Founded in 2007, PitchBook is an award-winning private equity, venture capital, and M&A database with over 70,000 individual users across its client base. It is most known for its private market database, as well as its reporting and data visualization features that are primarily used by finance, investment, and sales professionals. The platform contains profound insights into over 3.5 million private and public companies worldwide, with access to their financial histories, valuations, executives, and investors.
PitchBook also maintains an ever-expanding set of facts and records from over 1.9 million business deals worldwide, involving more than 450,000 investors and 110,000 funds.
PitchBook is a valuable platform if you’re looking for business intelligence, venture capital, deal sourcing, private market intelligence, or performing due diligence on startups and other businesses. It’s also an ideal platform for networking, fundraising, benchmarking competitors, and allocating different asset classes across your investment portfolio.
Like all market intelligence platforms, PitchBook has its benefits and drawbacks. Let’s explore them below:
PitchBook Strengths
- Provides access to a wide array of information, including company patents, financial analysis, information on former and current company investors and more
- Advanced search filters help investors access deep insights into companies
- Emerging spaces for investors looking to capitalize on new and alternative markets
- You can create custom alerts and monitor your dashboard for news
- Supports integrations from third-party software
PitchBook Weaknesses
- Lacks access to an expert call library
- Limited access to earning transcripts, and no SEC and global filings
- No access to advanced AI search functionality or sentiment analysis
- Users cannot upload internal content to the platform
- Lacks trade journals and access to broker research
The Best PitchBook Alternatives
Exploring other alternatives to GLG? Here are some options to consider.
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AlphaSense
G2 rates AlphaSense as a market-leading all-in-one market intelligence platform for organizations and professionals looking for a full-scale research solution with AI search technoloy and automative features.
Today Alphasense is used by 85% of the S&P 100 companies, 80% of the top U.S. consultancies, 75% of the leading asset management firms, and 20 of the largest pharmaceutical companies.
AlphaSense provides access to 10,000+ content sources, including news journals, trade journals, broker research, expert call transcripts, and SEC and company filings. Users can also take advantage of two unique content offerings:
- Wall Street Insights® – A leading collection of equity research covering global sector themes, industries, and companies from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms—indexed, searchable, and all in one place.
- Stream by AlphaSense – Over 30,000+ expert call transcripts with professionals, competitors, industry experts, customers, and former and current executives.
Also unique to AlphaSense are smart search capabilities that enable platform users to find deeper research insights. They include:
Automated Monitoring
AlphaSense offers real-time alerts that update users on emerging news, markets, trending topics, and companies. Using regular snapshots of multiple companies, AlphaSense helps users stay on top of critical information, insights, and market changes they need to know.
Instant Company Insights
AlphaSense Search Analytics and Company Tearsheets help you quickly get informed on any public or private company, so you can understand the reach of your search across document types, industries, and regions. AlphaSense helps focus and ground your research, surfacing the most crucial insights you need to accelerate and uplevel your market analysis.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis, powered by natural language processing (NLP), is a feature on the platform that identifies shifts in a text’s tone and subjective meaning. It then uses color coding to help readers identify the document’s positive, neutral, and negative sentiments.
This 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 this feature to catch the subtle inflection points in language that move markets and provide early indicators of shifting corporate performance.
Smart Synonyms™
Smart Synonyms™ technology—an AI-supported capability that recognizes the keywords and intent behind your search engine queries—is an exclusive AlphaSense feature backed by proprietary AI technology.
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.
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
It’s now becoming industry standard for many market intelligence platforms to offer integration of internal content containing both structured and unstructured data, but it’s key that this content is indexed and immediately available. A market intelligence platform should also offer the ability to upload new external content sources (such as RSS or web content), so that you can leverage the platform’s analysis tools to pull relevant insights.
AlphaSense provides integration 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.
Pricing
AlphaSense offers its tools at unique prices based on your business requirements . 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.
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Bloomberg Terminal
Bloomberg Terminal is an excellent alternative to PitchBook, especially for qualitative research. It’s a pioneer in the financial market data space as it was one of the first software solutions launched before computers and the internet were common in business.
For investment banks, asset managers, traders and hedge fund managers worldwide, Bloomberg Terminal is a reliable source of :
- Proprietary research and analytics from internal and external sources
- Collaboration opportunities with over 325,000 experts and decision makers.
- Market execution and order management tools.
- Pre and post-trade analyses
- Access to capital markets
- Custom charts, monitors and alerts for market information
Much like PitchBook, Bloomberg Terminal is a costly solution that charges about $2,000 a month or $24,000 annually, way beyond the budget of most small and medium-sized businesses. Moreover, it has a steep learning curve with a more complex and clunky user interface geared toward financial service users.
Read our 1:1 comparison of AlphaSense vs Bloomberg here.
Discover the top 10 alternatives to Bloomberg Terminal in 2023.
Factset
Factset is one of the most long-standing financial research tools in the market today, as it has been in operation since the 1970s. Therefore, it also has a massive buy and sell-side user base, with over 7000 firms and 180,000 individual subscribers. It is a reliable platform for investors, asset managers, traders and investment bankers worldwide.
One of its most outstanding features as a PitchBook competitor is a massive data library with over 30 different datasets. Of these, 24 are proprietary. It’s an ideal platform for:
- Investment research
- Portfolio analysis
- Data solution
- Professional services
- Quantitative research
- ESG investing
Although Factset has one of the world’s most remarkable customer support and experience, it still lags behind some competitors, especially with qualitative analysis. Moreover, it does not encompass other forms of research, like broker analysis and expert calls.
S&P Capital IQ
S&P Capital IQ is one of the world’s leading financial information service providers. It is a comprehensive research platform that targets all types of corporations, governments, private equity, and academia. As part of its offering, users get deep insights into:
- Public company financial data
- Private company and private market data access
- ESG scores, reports news and analytics
- Supply chain intelligence
- Breaking news
- Real-time market prices
This tool is available across platforms, and can be set up real-time alerts, watchlists, notifications, and analysis across industries. You can also integrate it with Microsoft tools, including Excel, which makes it a platform that seamlessly integrates into your workflow.
Like Bloomberg Terminal, S&P Capital IQ is quite price-restrictive, charging about $13,000 per seat per year with a minimum of three users. It also has a steep learning curve, making it tough for new users to draw value from it.
Crunchbase
Crunchbase is a sales intelligence platform with over 75 million users, free and paid accounts combined. Holding data sourced from their investor network, contributor community, and company self-submissions, Crunchbase is a popular option for:
- Identifying key contacts within companies, particularly within the startup ecosystem
- Prospecting for new business opportunities, particularly for individual consumers or small businesses
- Outreach and deal sourcing
While users appreciate that the platform easily integrates with most sales tools like CRMs and outreach platforms, the market intelligence scope and depth is much more limited than with most competitors.
Additionally, Crunchbase lacks advanced search capabilities, such as synonym recognition, and their data sets do not include expert calls, earnings transcripts, or brokerage reports. Duplicate entries and outdated information have also been ongoing issues, even for company overviews and organization charts that Crunchbase is known for.
Overall, Crunchbase works well for individual consumers or small businesses—salespeople, entrepreneurs, investors, and market researchers use it to prospect for new business opportunities—but it falls short for enterprise users and individual users looking to research markets and companies more deeply.
Don’t miss our 1:1 comparison of PitchBook vs Crunchbase (and how the two compare to AlphaSense).
How to Choose an Alternative to PitchBook
PitchBook is a comprehensive solution for most market intelligence. While it may meet some expectations, it has its shortcomings. If you’re looking for an alternative consider these features:
- Pricing: PitchBook is an expensive solution for many businesses, so consider your budget when choosing an alternative. Choose a platform with a pricing plan that falls within your budget limits or offers flexible subscriptions.
- User interface and user experience: PitchBook offers an intuitive customer experience, compared to many competitors. Ensure you opt for a navigable platform with a user-friendly interface that can filter and customize data.
- Data coverage: PitchBook offers plenty of data points on various markets, including private equity, venture capital, and M&A. Ensure your chosen alternative has access to markets you’re interested in and has comprehensive data coverage in those areas.
- Data quality: Find a platform with accurate, up-to-date, and reliable data. User reviews and ratings will help you make better decisions here.
- Additional features: Make sure to opt for a platform that offers extra features that make a difference, such as analytics, news, research reports, and smart search functionality. Value-added services like these can help you make more informed investment decisions.
