Third Bridge
Third Bridge is a private research expert network 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.
It primarily facilitates one-on-one consultations and interviews, offering direct access to industry-specific knowledge. These insights help investors make better decisions, assess market opportunities, and develop business strategies.
Third Bridge is largely utilized among investment professionals, consulting firms, and corporate decision-makers who rely on expert opinions for market insights. It’s best suited for those who need real-time access to specialized knowledge and expert calls.
Offering an extensive library of high-quality content for business, investments, and consulting purposes, Third Bridge’s extensive collection is regularly curated so that you get the latest data and can make informed business decisions with the help of the most trusted perspectives.
Third Bridge Product Features
Third Bridge is an expert network, so while it can provide specialized insights, it does not offer comprehensive market intelligence for data-driven, holistic market research. Third Bridges recognizes this shortcoming with its features—if you’re facing a unique business problem and there is no relevant existing content in the platform, you can take advantage of Third Bridge Connections.
Forum
Forum is an archive of analyst-led investigative interviews, which provide global industry knowledge and full sector insights. The library has over 50,000 transcripts and conducts over 10,000 interviews annually.
Maps
Third Bridge’s Maps product is the result of in-depth specialist profiling sessions conducted by Third Bridge’s analyst team. A Map visualizes the specialist’s individual insights about a company, the ecosystem in which it operates, and its wider value chain.
Connections
Investors can gain direct access to prequalified industry experts in one-on-one consultations for better insights into the market.
Community
Community connects Third Bridge clients to relevant experts by leveraging its extensive global expert network, thorough pre-qualification processes, and compliance framework.
These interviews are then anonymized and made available via Forum, so clients can get preferential fixed-rate pricing on one-on-one consultations versus traditional more expensive one-on-one expert consultations.
Community’s investor-led content, generated from fixed-rate one-on-one consultations, offers clients unique insights into companies, markets and investor sentiment.
Primers
Primers content is generated from 1-hour expert interviews focused on gathering fundamental information on PE and VC-backed companies. Each Primer interview is moderated by a Third Bridge analyst and covers standardized questions with a former company executive who has had P&L responsibilities.
Tearsheets
A Tearsheet is a condensed summary of the Primer transcript, which extracts the specialist’s crucial quotes and data estimates. Third Bridge also overlays company information, such as deal history and senior management, and presents it all in an easy-to-read, downloadable format.
Surveys
Surveys empower clients to source large volumes of high-quality insights and to validate their hypotheses with ease. Third Bridge provides responses from hard-to-find experts across all major sectors, pre-screened to meet clients’ project-
specific needs.
Advisory Solutions
Third Bridge Advisory Solutions facilitates high-quality deal collaborations between top-tier industry advisors and leading PE firms. Third Bridge helps private equity teams gain an edge by carefully identifying and sourcing bespoke senior advisors with high-impact potential to lend their expertise across the entire deal cycle.
Pros of Third Bridge:
- Over 50,000 call transcripts in the Third Bridge Forum library
- Offers clients to conduct one-on-one interviews with experts
- Extensive network of experts across various industries.
- Uses a proprietary company ranking model
Cons of Third Bridge:
- Cannot upload internal content
- Lacks broker research, company documents, and news for holistic market research
- Can be cost-prohibitive for small businesses or startups
- Scheduling expert calls can be time-consuming
Overall, Third Bridge excels at providing expert calls and real-time insights from industry specialists for investment researchers who rely solely on primary research to make business decisions.
However, its specialization as an expert network means it lacks the breadth of data and research tools that other innovative market intelligence platforms, like AlphaSense. This can lead to missed opportunities and blind spots in the research process.
Below are five top alternatives to Third Bridge to consider.
AlphaSense and Tegus
AlphaSense is an industry-leading market intelligence and qualitative research platform for corporations, financial services, and consulting firms. Since its inception over a decade ago, AlphaSense has been at the forefront of comprehensive market research solutions, helping professionals make better business decisions.
AlphaSense has an extensive universe of content, spanning the four key perspectives of research, as well as industry-leading automation and AI search capabilities. With over 10+ years of investment in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, AlphaSense’s AI and natural language processing (NLP) accelerate the research process for professionals seeking quality insights into industries, companies, and markets.
Financial professionals use AlphaSense to access 10,000+ premium sources of information, including trade journals, SEC filings, company filings, financial reports, broker research, and news articles. Moreover, AlphaSense provides access to broker research and an expert call transcript library that facilitates deeper insight into companies and markets.
As of July 2024, AlphaSense and Tegus have joined forces, bringing unparalleled access to even more insights and covering more industries and companies than ever before. Both platforms come with extensive libraries of high-quality research, as well as data and AI tools that allow users to extract the most value from the insights they find.
Tegus has an extensive and fast-growing library of high-quality expert research, which includes coverage of 35,000+ public and private companies across TMT, consumer goods, energy, and life sciences sectors. Additionally, Tegus’ financial data offering, which includes financials, KPIs, and fully drivable models on more than 4,000 public companies, as well as its BamSEC self-serve solution to search and access securities filings, adds new and unique offerings to AlphaSense’s extensive product suite and datasets.
Content Sets and Product Features
AlphaSense provides access to multiple highly valuable content sets that empower comprehensive, data-driven market research. Additionally, unlike many other market research tools, AlphaSense incorporates smart search capabilities within its platform, empowering users to find the most crucial insights without manually toggling between multiple tabs or having to rely on CTRL+F.
Expert Insights
AlphaSense Expert Insights offers tens of thousands of transcripts of specialized interviews with industry experts, customers, professionals, competitors, and former and current executives, in addition to personalized one-on-one call services.
The expert transcript library offers on-demand access to expert interviews with timestamped audio across thousands of public and private companies. Additionally, Expert Call Services allows researchers to quickly connect with experts for customized interviews to fill in any research gaps in their business or investment strategy.
Wall Street Insights®
Wall Street Insights® is a collection of broker research from Wall Street’s leading firms, covering global sector themes, industries, and companies from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms, available within the AlphaSense platform. The best part? Research professionals can preview the contents of a broker report, saving them wasted time and money on potentially fruitless research.
Tegus
For investors who spend too much time manually searching, parsing, and aggregating data from disparate sources, the Tegus platform reinvents the investment research process so you can compete on your unique ability to analyze data correctly and make great investment decisions. The Tegus platform gives investors the fastest way to learn about public and private companies, and delivers the most critical content and data on a unified platform experience, all for a single software license.
Tegus offers instant access to over 4,000 global fundamental models and over 60 industry dashboards, all hand-built and sourced by sector-focused analysts in Vancouver. Unlike building your own models and comp sheets, using Tegus’s off-the-shelf models, dashboards, and data reduces your time spent on undifferentiated work, allowing you to compete on your ability to analyze the data, not aggregate it.
For even more information on Tegus and how it compares to other solutions in the market, check out the following pages:
Top 7 Tegus Alternatives in 2024
Powerful AI Technology
Leveraging AlphaSense’s award-winning AI capabilities allows users to gain tens of millions of data points at the industry, watchlist, and document level to better track market landscape and industry trends, identify disruptive players, and discover competitors’ hidden strategies.
Researchers can save time on research and maximize their research budget with AlphaSense’s powerful AI-search capabilities:
- Smart Summaries – Enables users to glean expert insights in an instant with generative AI (genAI) summaries that capture the gist of any expert call transcript, earnings call, or broker report found within the extensive AlphaSense library in seconds.
- Smart Synonyms™ – Empowers users to expand keyword and thematic searches to deliver the most relevant insights by including all synonyms, excluding irrelevant results, and filtering out the noise.
- Sentiment Analysis – Allows users to identify and quantify levels of emotion around specific topics within expert transcripts or earnings calls by using a boolean operator to search for mentions of a specific topic in a positive, negative, or neutral light.
- AI Assistant – Allows users to ask live questions and gain real-time answers with our AI-powered chatbot designed to summarize billions of data points to get you from question to answer faster.
- Enterprise Intelligence – Enables businesses to secure searches, summaries, and follow-up questions across their proprietary internal data and a vast repository of 300M+ premium external documents.
Automated Monitoring
Instead of wasting hours manually monitoring, AlphaSense allows users to create a customizable dashboard and company watchlist to stay updated on any relevant topics, companies, or industries. Clients can also set real-time alerts to get notified immediately when any updates on those topics or companies occur. Users can also easily take snapshots of multiple companies within the AlphaSense platform, staying in touch with the most critical insights, news, and market changes they need to know.
Pros of AlphaSense and Tegus:
- Extensive content universe with 10,000+ premium sources of information
- 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
- 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
- Powered by generative AI features that accelerate and enhance research
- Integration with commonly-used programs like OneNote, Sharepoint, and Evernote that enable better team collaboration and productivity
- User-friendly interface and exceptional customer service
Cons of AlphaSense and Tegus:
- Visualization tools are limited at this time
- Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses
Research professionals appreciate AlphaSense for its vast content universe and advanced search capabilities that allow users to conduct comprehensive research and uncover valuable insights. With a unified integration of various data sources and a seamless user experience, AlphaSense is a one-stop solution for market intelligence.
GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group)
Touted as the “insight network for the whole world” by experts, GLG provides access to expert calls in their on-demand knowledge platform, primarily for investors and startup advisors. Their comprehensive expert database spans almost every geography, industry, and function, which enables the company to deliver a range of products, including phone consultations, surveys, live in-person and virtual events, packaged insights and reports, and more.
GLG serves leading technology, life science, and industrial companies, including 40% of the Fortune 100, seven of the top ten global technology companies, leading investment and financial firms, top professional services firms, and hundreds of nonprofits and social entrepreneurs around the world.
GLG Features
GLG’s insight discovery works through a proprietary workflow of three solutions: GLG Direct, GLG Syndicated Insights, and GLG Research.
GLG works best for businesses and professionals seeking expert consultations globally across diverse industries. Entrepreneurs who have adequate time to perform self-service research can connect directly with subject matter experts via GLG Direct. Mid-sized and large business owners can leverage GLG Research, which allows clients to outsource all research needs for a new venture or opportunity to GLG.
GLG Syndicated Insights provides access to GLG’s library of reports, surveys, transcripts, webcasts, etc., which small business owners can take advantage of if they would rather avoid conducting an interview themselves.
GLG also packages detailed quantitative and qualitative research data from workshops, focus groups, discussion panels, voice-of-customer data, and market research to ensure a well-rounded outlook for consumers.
Pros of GLG:
- 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
Cons of GLG:
- No broker research available
- Scheduling and conducting expert calls can be time-consuming
- GLG does not use advanced AI search or sentiment analysis in its platform
- No real-time monitoring of markets to keep users updated
- Content is restricted to expert calls and conventional qualitative and quantitative research findings
- Premium pricing may be prohibitive for smaller organizations.
Research professionals value GLG for its extensive expert network and global reach. However, some mention the high costs and time required to leverage its services effectively. Additionally, GLG features may not be comprehensive enough for full-scale market research due to the lack of varied data resources and key market research perspectives.
Guidepoint
Guidepoint is a leading expert network platform designed to connect business professionals with industry experts, offering valuable insights and advisory services. It is widely recognized for its role in facilitating market research, consulting, and investment strategies.
Guidepoint is ideal for organizations seeking expert insights and data-driven solutions for decision-making, as it provides expert consultations and access to a wide network of industry specialists.
Consulting firms use Guidepoint to gain quick access to high-level expertise for strategic planning, while private equity and venture capital firms leverage it for evaluating investments and conducting due diligence.
However, Guidepoint may not be the best fit for small businesses and startups with limited budgets, teams needing quantitative data, or organizations seeking automated insights. The platform can be expensive and resource-intensive, making it less accessible for smaller companies.
Guidepoint Features
Guidepoint primarily provides access to qualitative insights through expert consultations and surveys, offering insights into market trends and competitive landscapes. It also delivers custom research reports tailored to client-specific questions and research needs. Notable offerings include expert consultations, tailored research services, a global expert network, and confidential consultations.
However, its high cost, time-consuming consultation setup, and limitations to qualitative insights are significant drawbacks, particularly for organizations needing a broader range of data types.
Pros of Guidepoint:
- Boasts a vast network of industry experts across various fields
- Offers tailored research services, allowing clients to receive insights specific to their needs
- Provides confidential consultations
Cons of Guidepoint:
- Cost-prohibitive for smaller businesses with limited budgets
- Lack of quantitative data research necessary for comprehensive market intelligence
- Relies heavily on human expertise and lacks automation features
Research professionals value the vast expert network, quantity of available experts, and tailored services offered by Guidepoint. However its high service cost and time required to arrange consultations may be drawbacks, and since Guidepoint does not provide access to company documents, news, or broker research, it cannot function as a comprehensive one-stop-shop research solution.
Coleman Research
Coleman Research is a global expert network firm that connects businesses with industry experts for insights and consultations. It is widely used by professionals who need access to expert opinions for strategic decision-making and market analysis, such as consulting firms, investment managers, and corporate strategy teams.
Consulting firms use Coleman’s network of experts to gain insights that support their strategic recommendations and client projects. Investment managers, including hedge funds and private equity firms, use Coleman to understand market dynamics and identify investment opportunities.
Coleman Research Features
Coleman Research primarily provides access to qualitative insights through expert consultations and interviews. The platform offers industry analysis, market trends, and competitive intelligence via its network of experts who deliver tailored insights to meet client needs.
Pros of Coleman Research:
- Access to a diverse range of industry experts
- Tailored insights specific to clients’ business needs
- International expert coverage across multiple sectors
Cons of Coleman Research:
- Primarily focuses on expert calls without additional data resources
- Arranging consultations with experts can take time, which can delay decision-making processes
- Pricing may be high for smaller enterprises
- No access to market research perspectives beyond industry experts
Research professionals appreciate Coleman Research’s ability to connect them with knowledgeable experts who can provide in-depth industry insights. However, some users express concerns about the cost and time required to set up consultations, which can be drawbacks for those needing quick access to information.
Additionally, the features of Coleman Research are not comprehensive enough for holistic market research due to the lack of varied data resources and key market research perspectives.
Capvision
Capvision is a leading expert network and research platform that connects businesses with industry experts to provide strategic insights and advice. Capvision is particularly known for its expertise in connecting clients with experts in emerging markets. This platform is frequently used by professionals seeking insights for strategic decision-making and market analysis.
Capvision is best suited for consulting firms, investment firms, and multinational corporations that require expert insights, particularly in Asian markets. Consulting firms benefit from Capvision’s network by gaining industry-specific knowledge that enhances their strategic recommendations and client services. Multinational corporations rely on Capvision to understand market dynamics, regulatory environments, and consumer behavior, enabling them to make informed decisions for market entry and expansion.
Capvision may not be the best fit for small businesses or startups with limited budgets, teams needing comprehensive quantitative data, or organizations seeking automated insights.
Capvision Features
Capvision is designed for businesses needing expert insights and market intelligence across global markets. Capvision primarily provides access to qualitative insights through expert consultations, interviews, and custom research reports.
The platform offers industry analysis, market trends, regulatory insights, and competitive intelligence via its network of experts who deliver tailored insights based on client needs.
Pros of Capvision:
- Robust network of experts with a strong presence
- Large pool of experts with regional expertise
- Personalized research services
Cons of Capvision:
- Heavy focus on regional markets
- May not cover all industry sectors comprehensively
- Can be expensive, particularly for smaller organizations with limited budgets
- Lacking breadth of quantitative data
Professionals value the access to knowledgeable industry experts provided by Capvision however, its offerings lack quantitative resources and varied market research perspectives that are essential for full-scale market research. Additionally, the high cost and time required to set up consultations can be drawbacks.
AlphaSights
AlphaSights is a leading global expert network that connects businesses with industry experts to provide insights and advice for strategic decision-making. AlphaSights provides its clients with information services that help them make better business decisions and deliver outstanding results.
The AlphaSights network of experts is suitable for investment bankers, private investment firms, mutual funds, management consulting, corporations, and non-government organizations (NGOs). The platform combines expert network coverage, technology, and compliance to provide business intelligence and analysis to its clients.
The platform focuses primarily on expert consultations, which can be costly and less accessible for smaller companies. Therefore, AlphaSights may not be ideal for small businesses or startups with limited budgets, teams that require comprehensive quantitative data, or organizations seeking automated insights.
Additionally, AlphaSights is primarily geared towards qualitative insights, which may not meet the needs of teams that require detailed quantitative analysis and data-driven decision-making. Organizations seeking more automated insights may find that AlphaSights’ reliance on human expertise does not fully meet their needs.
AlphaSights Features
AlphaSights allows its clients to consult multiple experts and get access to intelligence from industries across 120+ countries. It facilitates over 350,000 unique expert client interactions annually and thoroughly vets each expert for every project. The company has recently expanded its service offering beyond just expert call transcripts and meetings and now offers surveys, insights projects (similar to GLG’s Strategic projects), and a small content library named AlphaView. AlphaView is similar to the Third Bridge Forum content library, although it is significantly smaller.
Pros of AlphaSights:
- Large network of industry specialists
- Serves multiple industries and business functions
- Offers expert calls and consultations
Cons of AlphaSights:
- Limited to qualitative data
- No advanced AI-powered smart search or sentiment analysis
- No broker research, company documents, or news
- Cannot upload internal content
- No support for integrations or organizations
Researchers appreciate AlphaSights’s flexible research solutions and vast expert network but note the lack of more comprehensive data offerings and additional content sets beyond expert call transcripts, which are essential for comprehensive market research. Moreover, the lengthy scheduling process for expert consultations can be time-consuming.
Choosing an Alternative to Third Bridge
When selecting a platform for effective market intelligence, buyers should consider platforms that offer both qualitative and quantitative data analysis, AI-driven insights, and real-time access to an extensive content universe. These valuable offerings enable organizations to analyze diverse data sets and make informed decisions quickly and efficiently.
Third Bridge excels in providing high-quality, qualitative and quantitative insights through its extensive network of industry experts and suite of products.
In contrast, AlphaSense offers a robust and comprehensive research solution that combines both qualitative and quantitative data on a single platform. With access to financial data, broker research, company documents, and real-time news, AlphaSense provides a holistic view of the market.
