PitchBook vs Crunchbase (vs AlphaSense)

What’s the Best Market Intelligence Software? 

When choosing a market intelligence solution, it is important to consider your unique business needs and research workflow. What supports and drives success for one team may barely move the needle for another. What is too great an expense for a small business may be the most worthwhile investment for a firm that values speed to insights and proactive research. 

The bottom line is: choosing the best market intelligence platform for your business and research needs requires taking inventory of your firm’s goals, priorities, and resources. After establishing those baseline needs, you need to find the tool that has the features, capabilities, and pricing that most aligns with them.

In this post, we compare PitchBook with Crunchbase, exploring who each platform works best for and where each falls short. We also contrast them both against our all-in-one market intelligence platform to show how AlphaSense fills in the gaps and meets your business and research needs better.

The platform comparisons are based around the following criteria: 

• Features and data types
• Usability 
• Customer service & support
• Reviews and ratings
• Pricing

Here’s a quick overview of each one:

PitchBook 

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

PitchBook is a powerful investment research and intelligence platform for venture capitalists, M&A investors, hedge funds, and private equity holders. It has access to valuations, financial histories, investors, and executives on over 4.7 million private companies and around 108,000 public companies worldwide. It also keeps expanding factsets and meticulous records of over 1.9 million deals with over 450,000 investors and 110,000 funds.

PitchBook also gives you access to information like:

• Company patents
• Financial analysis
• Non-financial metrics like employee counts and social media following
• Company leadership teams and management
• Deal history, including deal sizes and pre-and post-money valuations
• Former and current company investors
• Financial data charting and infographics
• Networking through executives’ LinkedIn profiles, contact and messaging details

PitchBook is most beneficial for private market intelligence, venture capital, deal sourcing, due diligence, fundraising, networking, benchmarking companies, and asset allocation across your portfolio. 

Some of PitchBook’s key features include:

Advanced Search Filters

Using PitchBook’s advanced search tools, users can find deep insights on companies, deals, investors, debts, and lenders. Users can search industries by name, location, age, investors, lenders, and funding stage. 

Emerging Spaces

PitchBook uses the Emerging Spaces feature to introduce investors and financial experts to new and emerging spaces. That helps investors learn about trending markets and explore alternative investment opportunities.

High-Quality User Interface

Much like AlphaSense, PitchBook has an intuitive user interface that allows professional and industry experts to integrate the tool into their workflows. It’s easy to navigate, search, and explore different companies and their detailed profiles from the PitchBook Interface.

Moreover, users can also access PitchBook from their PCs or smartphones, allowing them to carry and access insights on the go.

Integrations and APIs

PitchBook supports integrations and APIs that allow you to import and export data to other applications. Also, they offer a Google Chrome extension that enables you to access their services directly from your browser. 

PitchBook Pros:

• Great private market coverage, including company patents, financial analysis, information on former and current company investors, and more 
• Real-time data and proprietary research reports
• Provides access to broker research through integration of third-party equity research reports for an additional fee
• Advanced search filters help investors get deep insights into companies
• Emerging spaces for investors looking to capitalize on new and alternative markets
• Custom, real-time alerts are available
• Users can upload internal content into the platform
• Supports integrations from third-party software

PitchBook Cons:

• Limited public market coverage
• 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
• Equity research is only available for an additional fee
• Lacks trade journals

Related Reading: PitchBook Alternatives & Competitors

AlphaSense vs PitchBook

PitchBook vs CB Insights

Crunchbase 

Best for: identifying key contacts for outreach and deal sourcing

Founded in 2007, Crunchbase is a business intelligence platform that provides company data, funding information, and industry insights. It’s a popular option with investors and VCs for tracking startups, funding rounds, and investment information — on the other side, entrepreneurs and startups use Crunchbase to find investors and for competitive research. Sales teams can also use Crunchbase to find high-growth leads and company contacts. 

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. Since Crunchbase lacks key content sources like expert calls, earnings transcripts, and broker reports, it cannot be used for full-scale, holistic market research. Additionally, Crunchbase lacks the advanced AI search technology that is integral in a market intelligence platform in today’s age to facilitate faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive research. 

Crunchbase offers the following key features:

Company Profiles

Crunchbase maintains extensive profiles for millions of companies, with details on funding rounds, key personnel, market categories, acquisitions, and industry trends. 

Funding and Investment Tracking

Users can access historical and real-time funding data, including investor details, funding amounts and rounds, and more — which is particularly valuable for venture capitalists or investors, as well as startup founders doing competitor research.

Advanced Search Filters

Crunchbase allows users to create custom queries using multiple criteria for a precise search experience. Users can filter results based on company filters  — such as industry, location, founding date, and number of employees; investor filters — type of investor and portfolio size; funding round filters — stage and total funding amount; people and leadership filters — key executives, founders, and board members; and acquisitions and IPOs filters — acquisition price and IPO valuation.

API and Data Export

Users can integrate Crunchbase data into their workflows using APIs or export company lists for further analysis. 

Crunchbase Pros:

• Comprehensive startup and funding data, particularly for early-stage startups
• Valuable data for sales prospecting
• Ability to export the data or integrate Crunchbase insights into workflows via API access
• Ease of use and intuitive interface 
• Real-time alerts and saved searches
• Ability to filter by several categories including industry, funding stage, location, investor, leadership, and more

Crunchbase Cons:

• Issues with data accuracy and recency
• Limited coverage of large public companies
• Limited investor and M&A insights, compared to certain competitors
• CRM integration isn’t seamless
• Database isn’t comprehensive, even for private companies
• No advanced search capabilities including synonym recognition
• Lack of crucial market research content sources such as expert calls, earnings transcripts, and brokerage reports

Related Reading: Crunchbase Alternatives and Competitors

CB Insights vs Crunchbase

AlphaSense

Best for: conducting comprehensive qualitative research and analysis, with an emphasis on 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.

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 – 175K+ 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.

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.

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:

Generative Search

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.

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. 

Generative Grid

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.

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 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. 

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 Pros:

• Extensive content database that spans key market perspectives, including broker research, expert calls, company documents, news & regulatory sites
• Incorporates AI search technology, machine learning, and sentiment analysis
• Generative AI features like Generative Search and Smart Summaries for enhanced and streamlined workflow
• GenAI tools can be applied to integrated internal content
• Automated and customizable alerts
• All-in-one research platform
• 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

Feature Comparison

Ratings & Reviews

PitchBook

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 on G2, 8.6 out of 10 on TrustRadius 

Popular positives

• Comprehensive data on private market financials, deal flow, and market transactions
• Great tools for data analysis, idea generation, and workflow management
• Easy access to trust-worthy news, data, analytics, and insights

Popular negatives

• Public market data can be improved
• Daunting interface for new users with features not synced with typical market research workflow
• Hard to drill down and isolate insights due to incomplete data and delayed updates
• Cost-prohibitive for smaller organizations

Crunchbase

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 on G2, 7.7 out of 10 on TrustRadius

Popular positives

• Good for identifying core people and getting contact information for networking
• Intuitive and user-friendly interface
• Great resource for information on startups, funding rounds, and company financials

Popular negatives

• More sales intelligence than market research
• Limited company analysis
• Not enough global data
• Sometimes inaccurate data

AlphaSense

Rating: 4.7 out of 5 on G2, 9.5 out of 10 on TrustRadius

Popular positives

• Comprehensive data and analysis on public and private markets
• Real-time data availability
• Easy-to-find relevant and high-quality results
• Intuitive interface and great customer support
• Centralized platform with all necessary content sets, including expert calls and broker reports
• AI tools lead to quicker, more accurate, more comprehensive insights

Popular negatives

• Visualization tools are limited to financial data at this time
• Lack of collaborative tools for knowledge management

Pricing & Billing

PitchBook

PitchBook does not publicly disclose its pricing, though reports suggest that a standard plan costs around $25K for three users per year. Pricing comes down as seat numbers go up, so PitchBook makes the most sense for enterprise organizations. Access to equity research requires an additional fee. 

Crunchbase

Crunchbase offers several pricing tiers to suit various users’ needs:

• Free tier
• Starter: $29/user per month — Enables users to track and monitor up to 1,000 companies, import company lists for prospecting, and access comprehensive company, investor, and funding data
• Pro: $49/user per month — All Starter features, plus access to verified contact data, integrations with Salesforce and Outreach, monitoring of up to 100K companies, and expanded export capabilities
• Enterprise: Starts at $2K/user per year, though pricing is customized based on specific requirements — All Pro features, plus unlimited contact access, CRM-enriched search filters, real-time updates, API access, bulk data exports, and dedicated customer support.

AlphaSense

An AlphaSense user can access smarter features, a better user experience, and an extensive content universe at a more reasonable price. With AlphaSense, you’ll either pay by the enterprise or per seat. Contact us for more information on pricing options, or start a free 2-week trial here.

AlphaSense: A Better Alternative to Crunchbase and PitchBook?

Both PitchBook and Crunchbase are known for providing private company data that’s often hard to find, challenging to validate, or is otherwise siloed to a point where it’s unusable. 

Overall, Crunchbase works well for individual consumers or small businesses — particularly for identifying key contacts for outreach and deal sourcing — but it falls short for enterprise users and individual users looking to research markets and companies more deeply. This is mostly due to its lack of a comprehensive database and lack of valuable content sources such as expert calls, earnings transcripts, and brokerage reports.

Meanwhile, PitchBook markets itself as a more enterprise-grade platform. It’s primarily designed 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.

However, PitchBook has no expert call library, limited access to earnings transcripts, and no SEC or global filings. It provides access to broker reports, but only for an additional fee. And without advanced AI search functionality or sentiment analysis, research takes longer and is more likely to introduce blind spots.

Though both solutions claim to supply comprehensive, accurate data for startups and private companies, users have noted objective concerns about both databases, including questions about exactly how comprehensive and accurate their data is. 

AlphaSense is the best choice for modern research and corporate professionals who are ready to level up their market intelligence strategies. With its comprehensive content universe of private, public, premium, and proprietary content sources, real-time insights, and advanced AI and generative AI search technology, AlphaSense helps you uncover the crucial insights you need to make well-informed business decisions, stay ahead of market-moving trends, and get the competitive edge.