When considering the most integral points of view of market intelligence, expert perspectives undoubtedly make the top of the list. Expert call transcripts provide a window into unique insights from thought leaders, former company executives, customers, partners, and competitors—from a specific industry or company.
These firsthand perspectives are a critical addition to secondary research. They transform your research process from reactive to proactive and ensure you outpace your peers by giving you the competitive edge.
The expert network industry is constantly evolving—it has grown to $1.5 billion in the last few years and is set to continue expanding. Among the expert network companies, there are some that serve specific industry needs, some that are better-suited for large corporations, and others that work best for small businesses or individuals. Some are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that enable you to maximize and streamline your research, while others are more conservative in their approach.
In this guide, we compare two popular expert transcript companies—Tegus and GLG—analyzing their use cases, strengths, and weaknesses. We then compare the two with AlphaSense, an AI-based market intelligence research solution that offers content spanning all four key perspectives of market research, including expert calls.
We use the following comparison criteria:
- Features
- Ease of use
- Customer support
- Ratings and reviews
Overview
Here is an overview of each platform:
Tegus
Tegus is a financial research platform that offers critical financial insights to buy-side institutional investors through its database of 55,000+ searchable expert call transcripts. These call transcripts give users insight into private and public companies, collected from consultants, current and former C-level executives, and employees.
Tegus is a significantly newer platform than GLG, founded in 2016 by a former AlphaSights associate. After undergoing a successful Series B funding round in 2021, Tegus expanded its client offering by acquiring BamSEC, which provides access to SEC filings and earnings transcripts.
Besides allowing users to search, analyze, annotate, and explore research materials, users can also request and access custom expert calls from industry professionals and consulting firms. Tegus is committed to compliance, utilizing over 40 experts to ensure all calls and transcripts meet SEC, FINRA, and EU regulations without creating conflicts of interest or other potential violations.
Tegus offers the following key products on its platform:
- Tegus Call Services – Aside from the already-existing database of consulting calls and transcripts, users can request niche or tailored expert interviews and transcripts. Customers with questions that require expert insights can access professional advice at an average rate of $325 per hour. Tegus prequalifies all experts, and communications are secure and compliant with industry information standards and regulations.
- Tegus for Experts – Tegus enables industry experts and professionals to make an extra income by giving insights that may increase innovation, improve decision-making, and generate new ideas. Pre-qualified experts can consult on Tegus at their chosen hourly rate, which poses a lucrative incentive for their participation on the platform. They can also build and join an expert network, engage with new companies, and explore new opportunities through Tegus on a secure platform.
- BamSEC – Tegus BamSEC enables users to search the SEC filings of multiple corporations. Users can easily perform due diligence, benchmark, and create new business models within Tegus.
Tegus Pros:
- Massive database of over 55,000 expert call transcripts
- Access to the expert network industry
- Experts and industry professionals are prequalified before joining the platform
- Users can request custom calls with experts
- Tegus follows multiple compliance regulations across the US and Europe
- Access to SEC filings of multiple private and public companies
Tegus Cons:
- No advanced AI search and smart synonym feature
- No sentiment analysis
- No access to broker research or other high-value content sets
- Little access to resources outside of expert calls and SEC filings
- No support for internal content
GLG
The Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) is an expert network company that offers intelligence on corporations and connects professional users to experts from multiple industries for advice, insights, and mentorship.
GLG has access to a network of 900,000+ subject-matter experts on demand, who empower users with advice, research, and insights for better-informed business decisions.
GLG’s essential product, GLG Direct, focuses on expert consultations, which are one-on-one sessions between clients and subject-matter experts. Clients with relevant questions and issues receive direct answers and insights on business topics, regulations, legal advice, and intelligence on industries and businesses.
Consultations are often private meetings, placements, and phone or video calls. Many GLG consultants also work as expert witnesses in legal proceedings.
GLG also gathers qualitative and quantitative research insights. To that end, it uses primary research methods like focus group discussions, surveys, discussion panels, and workshops. The GLG Library is another rich user resource, with thousands of on-demand webcasts, teleconference transcripts, and other documents.
GLG Pros:
- Access to over 900,000 experts
- A massive library of expert calls and transcripts
- Offers consultations with experts using various methods, including expert calls
- Serves multiple types of clients, including law firms and a diverse range of businesses
- Offers both qualitative and quantitative insights
- Provides expert network services
GLG Cons:
- No AI search features or smart synonyms
- Content is restricted to expert calls and conventional qualitative and quantitative research findings
- No broker research or other high-value content sets available
- No sentiment analysis feature
- No real-time monitoring of markets
AlphaSense
AlphaSense is an all-in-one market intelligence platform with over 4,000 enterprise clients, including 75% of the top asset management firms, 80% of the top consultancies, 85% of the S&P 100, and 20 of the largest pharmaceutical companies.
Multiple leading corporations use AlphaSense for competitive intelligence, market landscaping, and strategy, while IR and financial professionals rely on AlphaSense for due diligence, market monitoring, messaging research, and deal sourcing.
AlphaSense sources information from over 10,000+ different content sources, including company documents and regulatory filings, news and trade journals, broker research, and expert call transcripts. Coupled with this vast universe of content, AlphaSense’s smart search and AI capabilities help shorten the time to insight and eliminate research blind spots.
In addition, AlphaSense features two proprietary content sets:
- Wall Street Insights® – A collection of leading equity research from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms, covering global industries, sector themes, and companies. These resources are indexed, searchable, and available from the AlphaSense platform.
- Expert Insights – Expert Insights solutions includes the Expert Transcript Library—an ever-expanding library that currently hosts 40,000+ expert call transcripts with competitors, industry experts, professionals, customers, and former and current executives—as well as Expert Call Services. Expert Insights prioritizes compliance throughout the content development process and has a team of trained compliance reviewers who ensure research safety for clients.
Some additional features you’ll experience in the AlphaSense platform include:
Automated Monitoring
With real-time alerts, AlphaSense allows you to set up automated updates on the emerging trends, news, topics, markets, and companies you are most concerned with. Automated monitoring takes regular snapshots of your companies and topics of interest and sends notifications, keeping you on top of critical competitor information, insights, and market changes.
Instant Company Insights
If you’re keeping tabs on a single company, AlphaSense offers Search Analytics and Company Tearsheets that provide updates on the companies currently on your radar, giving you an in-depth reach across document types, industries, and regions. Using company insights, you can also focus and ground your research into a particular competitor, discovering critical insights that can propel your market analysis to the next level.
Sentiment Analysis
Using sentiment analysis, a feature built with natural language processing (NLP), AlphaSense identifies changes in a text’s tone and subjective meaning. Then, using different color codes, it helps you identify if the document has positive, negative, or neutral sentiments.
Each search term gets a sentiment change score that helps you track any slight change in market sentiments over time. With this feature, you can catch subtle inflection points in language that move markets and provide early indicators of shifting corporate performance.
Smart Synonyms™
Another AI-based feature is the Smart Synonyms™ technology—a capability that studies keywords and intent behind your search engine queries. Using advanced algorithms, AlphaSense eliminates noise from your search, including content with matching keywords that are irrelevant to search objectives. Advanced AI search functionality lets you find the exact documents and snippets most relevant to your search, saving time and energy for more high-level tasks like analysis.
AlphaSense Pros
- Extensive content universe organized around the four key perspectives
- Proprietary content sets like Wall Street Insights® and Expert Insights
- NLP and AI-based search technology and sentiment analysis
- All-in-one research platform
- Intuitive user interface
- Collaboration and integration features
- Automated and customizable alerts
AlphaSense Cons
- Visualization tools are limited to financial data at this time
- Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses
Ease of Use
Tegus
Tegus is an easy-to-use platform that many users can navigate. Its search features allow you to find expert calls and transcripts instantly. However, it lacks AI search and sentiment analysis to help better fine-tune results.
The BamSEC platform hastens the user document research process, reducing time spent tracking individual companies simultaneously. Text search across BamSEC takes seconds, and users can set up alerts for new documents.
However, Tegus does not offer content beyond expert calls and SEC filings, which could be a deterrent for users looking for deeper insights.
GLG
The GLG platform is accessible and user-friendly, making it easy for new users to onboard and use. The expansive network of users worldwide makes GLG a resourceful platform for a global overview of topics of interest.
AlphaSense
The AlphaSense platform is navigable and intuitive by design. Unlike its competitors, AlphaSense is an all-in-one solution for market intelligence, going beyond just expert calls. It also offers in-depth access to company documents, regulatory filings, trade journals, news, and broker research.
With AlphaSense, users can cut out cumbersome manual research tasks like combing through multiple tabs of research reports and CTRL+F’ing through documents with limited keywords. The AlphaSense UI works seamlessly with competitive research workflows and is customizable for further fine-tuning.
AlphaSense’s AI search technology, pre-set search feeds, synonym recognition, and smart keyword suggestions make the research process streamlined and efficient for clients across multiple verticals, from healthcare and technology to hedge funds and private equity.
The key reasons users stick to AlphaSense are the speed of surfacing valuable insights, the unparalleled accuracy of smart AI functionalities, and access to premium content like broker research and expert call transcripts.
Support
Tegus
Tegus offers a web form that users can fill out to contact its customer support team. Users can also call or visit any of the three office locations in Ireland, Canada, and New York. Additionally, Tegus has a blog with information that can help users understand the product and other offerings.
GLG
First, GLG identifies a topic based around your business need and then builds a plan with you and your team. Their team of professionals work with you to create the approach that best identifies, assesses, and answers your questions on your timeline. Then, based on your needs and the identified approach, they work with you to design a detailed plan, choosing from their distinct research offerings.
GLG boasts exceptional customer support. Users can contact the support team directly from the platform, or they can reach out by call or email. GLG also sends frequent follow-up emails to experts regarding projects they have been invited to in order to ensure faster response time for clients.
AlphaSense
AlphaSense’s product and customer education teams provide ramp-up and learning sessions with hands-on training and demonstrations. Additionally, all AlphaSense users have a dedicated account representative available for questions and guidance. The product specialist team is also available to put together searches for research professionals to streamline their workflows.
AlphaSense maintains a regular training calendar for live, virtual, instructor-led AlphaSense Education webinars, and the website has a live Help button, where users can chat with product specialists 24/7 and receive instant support for any issues or queries.
Reviews and Ratings
Tegus
There are insufficient Tegus reviews on G2 and TrustRadius.
GLG
Rating: 4.3 out of 5 on G2
Popular positives
- Extensive expert network
- Exceptional rewards for pre-qualified experts
- Intuitive user platform
- High-quality expert insights
- Excellent response time
- Good resource for due diligence and market research
Popular negatives
- Poor fit and skill mismatches for some industry experts
- Poor response times before consults
- Some rewards may be less than expected
AlphaSense
Rating: 4.8 out of 5 on G2, 9.4 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
- Smart AI-powered search leads to quicker, more accurate insights
Popular negatives
- Visualization tools are limited to financial data at this time
- Lack of collaborative tools for knowledge management
A Better Alternative to Tegus and GLG?
Tegus and GLG are two exceptional platforms if all you need are expert call transcripts or a consultation with an industry expert.
However, because of their content limitations, neither platform offers a holistic view of the market, and it may be necessary to invest in a secondary platform for additional insights. Further, neither platform offers advanced AI search capabilities or sentiment analysis that eliminate research blind spots and improve the scope, accuracy, and speed of your market research.
If you are looking for a platform that will be your one-stop-shop for all your market intelligence needs, both from a content and an advanced search perspective, AlphaSense is the right tool for you.
AlphaSense is the best choice for you if:
- You want a platform that fits your organization and can serve multiple strategic uses beyond expert consultations and advice.
- You need a platform that offers precise research tools and surfaces relevant data and real-time insights faster.
- You want access to a massive content universe of proprietary, premium, private, and public content inaccessible through consumer-grade search tools and many of your peers.
- You want to consolidate all your disparate research tools into an all-in-one solution.
- You want a platform that keeps you updated on every piece of critical information as the markets evolve, with customizable real-time alerts, watchlists, and dashboards.
