PitchBook Alternatives & Competitors

Overview

PitchBook

Best for: Private market financial data for fundraising, deal sourcing, and due diligence

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 offers insights into over 3.5 million private and public companies worldwide, with access to their financial histories, valuations, executives, and investors. However, the quality, breadth, and depth of data varies substantially, depending on the company’s size and domicile.

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. The depth of deal analytics is much more robust for North American and VC/PE transactions than something like global M&A or emerging markets.

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 identifying investors or potential targets, fundraising, benchmarking competitors, and allocating different asset classes across your investment portfolio.

PitchBook offers the following features:

Company Profiles and Financials

PitchBook provides detailed data on 3.5M+ public and private companies, including:

• Revenue estimates, EBITDA, valuations
• Cap tables and funding history
• Executive and board member bios
• Ownership and subsidiary structures

Deal Tracking and M&A Intelligence

PitchBook covers 1.9M+ business deals, including:

• Venture capital, private equity, M&A, LBOs, recapitalizations
• Deal size, stage, terms, lead investors, syndicate members
• Exit analysis (IPOs, acquisitions, SPACs)

Fund and Investor Data

PitchBook offers intelligence on 110K funds and 450K+ investors. This includes:

• Fundraising rounds and dry powder
• LP/GP relationships
• Portfolio company breakdowns
• Investment strategies

Advanced Search and Filtering

Though PitchBook does not offer advanced AI search technology, the platform incorporates powerful filters that segment data by industry, deal size, location, valuation, fund size, investor profiles, target sectors, and investment timelines. Users can also save searches and create custom lists and alerts.

Excel Plug-In and Data Exports

PitchBook’s Excel plug-in allows for live data pulls into models and templates, as well as bulk exports for comparative analysis. The platform also includes pre-built Excel templates that can support specific use cases, such as VC benchmarking or competitive sets.

PitchBook Pros:

• 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
• Supports integrations from third-party software
• High data reliability for US private markets
• Custom dashboards and alerts for efficient deal tracking and monitoring
• Robust Excel plug-in for live data pulls into financial models and bulk exports

PitchBook Cons:

• 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
• Less comprehensive coverage for emerging markets and international geographies

With PitchBook’s limitations in qualitative insights and AI capabilities, it’s not well-suited for holistic market intelligence. Many of PitchBook’s competitors discussed below offer a much more comprehensive view across various asset classes and sectors, as well as advanced AI technology that accelerates and enhances your research process.

Related Reading: PitchBook Alternatives

AlphaSense

Best for: Corporate, consulting, and financial services professionals looking to implement a comprehensive market research strategy powered by automated features and proprietary AI technology

AlphaSense is a leading enterprise-grade market intelligence and AI search platform built for robust market and investment research. 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.

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 content includes:

• Company documents, such as earnings transcripts, company presentations, SEC and global filings, ESG reports, and press releases
• Over 1,500 research providers including Wall Street Insights®, a premier analyst research collection for corporate professionals
• Expert call transcript library with over 200,000 vetted interviews (including with competitors, suppliers, customers, and KOLs). Learn more about the combined offering of AlphaSense and Tegus here.
• News, industry reports, trade journals, and regulatory documents

Enterprise Intelligence

AlphaSense’s Enterprise Intelligence solution allows you to integrate and query your own internal content alongside the premium external sources listed above. That includes: 

• Internal research, notes, and presentations
• CIMs, virtual data rooms and investment memos
• 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.

Our genAI capabilities deliver instant, accurate, and secure summarizations with the ability to ask follow-up questions across both your proprietary internal data and hundreds of millions of premium external documents.

AI Search & Summarization Technology

AlphaSense has invested 10+ years into the development of our tech stack. Our industry-leading suite of AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights:

Generative Search

Our generative AI chat experience transforms how users can extract insights from our vast library 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.

When searching for insights, 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 across 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 users 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 pre-built templates or create their own to automate routine workflows. Each summary provides a direct citation to the source material it was pulled from.

Users can leverage this tool to track earnings transcripts, compare competitors at a glance, parse through deal rooms in seconds, track macro event impacts, or analyze merger proxy filings, among many use cases.

Smart Summaries

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.

Smart Synonyms™

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 users 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 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.

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. Unlike building your own models and comp sheets, using our off-the-shelf models, dashboards, and data reduces your time spent on manual data sourcing, allowing you to focus your time on analyzing data, not aggregating it.

Integration Capabilities

Users can easily integrate content at enterprise scale through our Ingestion API or enterprise-grade connectors — like Microsoft 365/Sharepoint, Box, Google Drive, S3, Egnyte, 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 Pros:

• Vast 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 Cons:

• Visualization tools are limited at this time
• Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses

Related Reading: AlphaSense vs PitchBook

Bloomberg Terminal

Best for: Qualitative research for hedge funds and institutional investors

Bloomberg Terminal is one of the oldest and most widely used market research and analysis tools in the financial services industry. Launched in 1981 — well before individual computers or the internet were common at firms — Bloomberg led the way in democratizing access to financial market data. 

Since then, Bloomberg has become one of the highest-rated market research tools, giving users access to unique market data, news, and insights — enabling professionals to turn intelligence into a competitive advantage.

However, as a legacy solution, Bloomberg has struggled in recent years to keep up with modern research needs. Though they have traditionally been slow to adopt new technologies such as AI, it’s become increasingly apparent that competition is fierce, fast-moving, and highly adept with technology. In order to stay competitive, Bloomberg has slowly adopted genAI capabilities, though their lack of experience in the space is clear. Compared with competitors that have years of experience developing an AI tech stack, Bloomberg struggles with clunky UI, limited functionality, and an over-reliance on third-party tech.

Still, Bloomberg Terminal is a powerful research insights tool that has some top-notch features for financial research.

Related Reading: Bloomberg Terminal Alternatives

Real-Time Data

Bloomberg Terminal offers access to real-time financial market data for stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, and derivatives. It also offers real-time news coverage of companies, industries, and markets worldwide, along with real-time alerts for significant market events. Finally, Bloomberg provides access to equity research reports from leading analysts, a highly valuable content set that most competitors cannot offer.

Analytics and Modeling Tools

Bloomberg Terminal offers advanced charting, financial modeling, and analytics for equities, fixed income, and commodities. Additionally, tools for risk analytics, asset allocation, and portfolio optimization are available for asset managers and financial professionals.

Trading Platform

Bloomberg offers a complete trading solution, bringing together pricing, analytics, liquidity, automation, and execution in one place.

Generative AI

Bloomberg recently made its foray into genAI with its BloombergGPT large language model (LLM), which is purpose-built for finance and is trained on a vast range of financial data. Bloomberg’s model is safeguarded against hallucination since all genAI responses must be grounded in Bloomberg content. However, it is not clear how the LLM interprets and handles queries.

Bloomberg Pros:

• Proprietary news, research, and analytics from internal and external sources
• Tools for internal collaboration opportunities
• Market execution and order management tools
• Access to traditional markets and other asset classes
• Custom charts, monitors, and alerts for market information
• Purpose-built genAI functionality for finance
• Integrated platform for trading and executing orders across multiple asset classes

Bloomberg Cons:

• Limited genAI and advanced AI search capabilities
• A steep learning curve for new users
• No expert calls and transcripts
• Broker research access is entitlement-based and limited for non-financial users
• Cannot ingest internal content
• Lack of transparency around how the LLM interprets and handles queries

Related Reading:

Bloomberg Terminal Alternatives

AlphaSense vs Bloomberg

Koyfin vs Bloomberg

CB Insights

Best for: Institutional and enterprise-grade users who need to monitor existing and emerging market trends and key players, particularly in the tech sector

CB Insights is a market intelligence platform with a massive database for users seeking technology insights and analyses on companies, private capital, and angel investments. This platform is primarily used to support company monitoring, opportunity discovery and forecasting, and vendor research and evaluation.

It also provides insights into companies’ latest funding rounds, venture capital, proprietary company data, business relationships, patent analytics, and more. Much of the platform’s data is publicly available or scraped from the web. CB Insights’ machine learning engine ingests and structures this unstructured data, and then analysts validate and add proprietary data — which is a unique and key value offering from CB Insights.

CB Insights offers the following key features:

Market Intelligence and Trend Analysis

The platform identifies emerging industry trends, disruptive startups, and sector-specific developments by analyzing patent filings, earnings calls, news mentions, and investment patterns.

AI-Driven Insights

The platform applies predictive analytics and machine learning to forecast industry shifts, company trajectories, and investment trends. A key AI feature of CB Insights is their Mosaic Score, which helps predict the success or failure of a private company by analyzing their health and growth potential.

Deals and Funding Tracking

CB Insights monitors global venture capital, private equity, and M&A activity, offering granular insights into deal structures, funding rounds, and acquisition trends.

Research Reports and Proprietary Insights

CB Insights creates data-driven reports and generates proprietary research on various industries, including fintech, AI, healthcare, and enterprise technology.

API Access and Data Integration

For enterprise organizations, CB Insights offers API access, allowing integration with internal analytics systems and custom dashboards.

CB Insights Pros

• Excellent platform for tech space opportunities
• Reliable tool for venture capitalists, private equity firms, and corporate development teams
• Comprehensive private market data
• Uses predictive modeling and AI to identify trends, risks, and investment opportunities
• Access to in-depth data and research analytics
• Mosaic Score feature helps assess potential success of private companies
• Allows users to set alerts for industry trends, competitors, and funding news
• Supports APIs and integrations

CB Insights Cons

• Focuses primarily on private tech companies, with very limited public company coverage
• No access to global/SEC filings, ESG reports, newspapers, trade journals, expert calls, or broker research
• Platform’s dashboards and reporting features are less customizable than some competitors’
• No smart search functionality
• Leans toward technology market use cases; lack of breadth and depth in other markets

Related Reading:

AlphaSense vs CB Insights

PitchBook vs CB Insights

CB Insights vs Crayon

Top CB Insights Alternatives

Preqin

Best for: Institutional clients looking for in-depth private market and fundraising data

Like PitchBook, Preqin is a platform that specializes in private market coverage, fund performance data, and investor intelligence. Preqin has limited coverage of startups, compared to PitchBook, but it does offer much more robust global coverage. Overall, Preqin is a good option for institutional investors, consultants, or fund managers who are looking for in-depth data on LPs, fund performance, and alternative asset classes like real estate, infrastructure, and private debt.

Preqin is primarily a quantitative data platform for the alternative assets industry. It lacks the breadth and depth of qualitative content that is integral for holistic market intelligence — such as company documents, expert calls, or sell-side equity research. It also has very limited AI capabilities — no generative AI, semantic search, or sentiment analysis for accelerating and enhancing the research process.

Preqin offers the following features:

Fundraising and Performance Data

Preqin provides access to data on over 60,000 funds, including returns, vintage years, and benchmark comparisons.

Investor Intelligence

Preqin provides profiles and preferences of over 20,000 institutional investors, including mandates, allocation strategies, and contact information.

Manager Profiles

Preqin includes profiles of over 30,000 general partners (GPs) with funds managed and strategies followed, deal and exit activity, and track records.

Deals and Co-Investments

Preqin offers data on 300,000+ transactions including deal types, entry/exit valuations, co-investment partnerships, and portfolio company details and outcomes.

Portfolio Company Insights

While Preqin has limited data on startups, it still offers robust coverage for companies involved in major private capital transactions. Users can track portfolio companies by ownership type, industry sector, geography, deal involvement, and exit strategies.

In-House Research and Reports

One of Preqin’s key value offerings are the research and reports produced by its dedicated team of analysts and economists, which provide actionable insights and data-driven perspectives on alternative assets. This is not the same thing as sell-side research — they may not include real-time coverage, and they offer no coverage of public equities or macroeconomic trends outside what is relevant for alternative assets.

Customizable Workflow Tools

Though limited in AI capabilities, Preqin offers advanced filtering and search tools that allow users to search by region, strategy, AUM, performance, vintage, and more. Users can also save searches, create customizable dashboards, and alerts. Preqin also offers Excel and API integrations for custom modeling and reporting.

Preqin Pros

• Robust alternative asset performance and LP/GP data
• Strong in fund-level analysis
• Robust global coverage for alternative assets
• Data is continuously updated to maintain relevance and accuracy
• Access to high-quality research and reports, published in-house
• Advanced search and filtering tools
• Customizable dashboards, alerts, and saved searches
• Excel and API integrations for custom modeling and reporting

Preqin Cons

• Limited qualitative insights; not ideal for holistic market intelligence
• Limited to alternative asset and fundraising intelligence
• Limited public data; not useful for tracking public market activity
• Limited AI capabilities; no generative AI, sentiment analysis, or semantic search

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. But with no broker research or expert calls, as well as limited access to company documents, the coverage is much less broad than a platform like AlphaSense provides. 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, broker research reports, expert calls, generative AI, and smart search functionality. Value-added services like these can help you make more informed investment decisions.