AlphaSense vs Third Bridge

The expert network industry is constantly evolving — it has grown to $2.5 billion in the last few years and is set to continue expanding at an exponential rate. Expert networks can be used by financial firms, hedge funds, large corporations, or business individuals to gain in-depth perspectives and make more informed business decisions.

However, expert networks are not all created equal. Some offer only expert calls and services but no additional content, while others (like AlphaSense) offer a vast universe of content in addition to expert perspectives to provide crucial context and fill in information gaps. Additionally, some platforms are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, workflow tools, and customizable dashboards and alerts that enable you to accelerate and streamline your research process, while others are more traditional in their offerings.

This guide compares AlphaSense (also incorporating Tegus) and Third Bridge—analyzing their use cases, strengths, and weaknesses. We also discuss how you can choose the right expert network platform or market intelligence platform for your business needs.

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a leading enterprise-grade AI platform built for robust financial and market research. Unlike Third Bridge, which functions exclusively as an expert network, AlphaSense combines a vast content universe — that includes hundreds of thousands of expert calls, as well as broker research, company documents, news, and regulatory documents — for a full 360 degree view of the market.

AlphaSense also uses industry-leading AI capabilities to extract structured, digestible, actionable insights from all this content. And with integrated workflow support, as well as comprehensive monitoring and analysis tools, AlphaSense not only speeds up insight discovery, but enables you to take more confident strategic action.

Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also named for the second year in a row in Inc’s 2025 Best in Business list in the “Best AI Implementation” and “Best in Innovation” categories.

Key AlphaSense features include:

Curated, Premium Datasets

AlphaSense is the only tool that combines public and private financial data with expert call transcripts, broker research, and news in one place. This means you get all the numbers, as well as the qualitative narrative that provides context to those figures, so you can make smarter and better informed decisions.

Premium External Market Insights

Our library of qualitative content includes:

• Wall Street Insights® collection of equity research that features more than 1,000 broker sources, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Citi
• Expert calls, which includes over 240K interviews with pre-qualified experts and the ability to conduct your own 1:1 calls with 70% cost savings compared to traditional expert networks. This also includes Channel Checks, which are AI-led interviews with validated industry experts, which result in faster, more consistent, and more scalable insight extraction.
• Company documents and filings, including earnings transcripts, company presentations, SEC and global filings, ESG reports, and press releases
• Live transcripts that allow users to view past, current, and upcoming event transcripts in a calendar, as well as view event transcripts in real-time
• News, trade journals, and regulatory coverage

Company Perspectives

AlphaSense streamlines access to SEC filings, earnings and events transcripts, financial documents, and more. Users can easily search across multiple companies and SEC filings, as well as explore past filings, create models, and benchmark company performance, without needing to pull up individual filings to manually track a company’s metrics.

Internal Content Integration

With AlphaSense, you can integrate and query your own internal content alongside the premium external sources listed above. This includes:

• Internal research, notes, and presentations
• CIMs and investment memos
• VDRs
• Reports from industry and market intelligence providers
• Emails, newsletters, web pages, and RSS feeds

Internal content is easily and securely integrated through our Ingestion API or enterprise-grade connectors — like Egnyte, 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.

Financial Data

On the quantitative side, AlphaSense provides access to the following crucial insights:

• Historical Financials & Estimates: Standardized statements and consensus data across 19,000+ public companies
• Sector-Specific KPIs: Detailed operating metrics sourced from institutional-grade Canalyst models
• Transaction Intelligence: Nearly 1M M&A deals and 750K private funding rounds, enriched with AI-generated deal rationale and strategic context
• Dynamic Peer Sets: 125+ pre-built industry comparables with sector-specific metrics

AI Search & Summarization Technology

Our industry-leading generative AI tools are purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights, leaning on 10+ years of AI tech development. Our suite of tools currently includes:

Generative Search

Generative Search is a conversational search experience that allows users to ask natural-language questions and source intelligence at scale from across premium external content, internal knowledge, and quantitative data sources. Each answer provides citations to the exact snippet of text from where the information was sourced, so that it can always be referenced back.

With Deep Research mode, users can automate the creation of in-depth analysis about companies, trends, or industry topics. The model conducts dozens of searches, parses through thousands of potentially relevant results, and reasons over all of it to produce comprehensive, detailed analysis about any topic — in a fraction of the time it would take a human.

Generative Grid

Generative Grid applies multiple genAI prompts to 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.

Smart Summaries

Every earnings transcript in AlphaSense features an AI-generated Smart Summary, which creates a tearsheet of key takeaways, analyst Q&A, and the most critical topics discussed in each call. AlphaSense users leverage Smart Summaries during earnings season to extract the most crucial insights from each call in minutes, not hours, and ensure that nothing is missed.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis, a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature, parses content and identifies nuances in language such as tone and subjective meaning. It then uses color coding to help users identify instances of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment throughout the document.

Channel Checks

AlphaSense Channel Checks is a living channel intelligence system. Thousands of consistent conversations every month surface clean, comparable signals on demand and pricing from ground-level channel sources weeks before the market catches on. Our AI-led interviews surface demand trends, pricing movements, and competitive dynamics as they happen instead of in static postmortem reports.

AI-powered synthesis turns expert perspectives into actionable intelligence instantly, not over the course of weeks. You can simultaneously interrogate dozens of Channel Check interviews across peer sets to extract demand, inventory, and pricing insights in seconds. And with full transcript access, you can build conviction through source-level verification and defend investment recommendations with primary source evidence, eliminating the trust gap inherent in third-party research summaries.

Integrated Workflows

AlphaSense helps research professionals conduct key workflows with greater speed and confidence by incorporating the following features in the platform:

• AlphaSense Excel Add-In: Excel tool with custom formulas and simple syntax, analysis templates, and pre-built Industry Comps to quickly get you up and running.
• Canalyst Model Access: 4,500+ ready-to-use models with detailed financials, operating metrics, and segment breakdowns.
• Purpose-built automations: One-click agents that run full earnings workflows, from in-depth call analysis to tracking a company’s self-reported guidance to extracting key themes from analyst Q&As.
• Domain-Specific AI: Unlike generic AI tools, our financial AI is trained and benchmarked to understand sector dynamics, valuation methodologies, and market context just like an analyst would.

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 return data without reading through pages of documents.
• Snippet Explorer allows you to effortlessly assess any topic or theme and all its historical mentions in a single view.
• 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, and regulatory sites
• Extensive quantitative insights and financial data workflow and analysis tools
• AI and genAI tools that can be applied to external and integrated internal content
• 4,500+ 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 real-time alerts
• Mobile app that includes all platform content and AI search capabilities
• Internal note-taking, sharing, and collaboration features
• Support for APIs and integrations
• Enterprise-grade data production complying with global security standards: SOC2, ISO270001, FIPS 140-2, SAML 2.0
• Excellent customer support team, including 24/7 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

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.

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.

Third Bridge features include:

Forum

Forum is an archive of analyst-led investigative interviews, which provide global industry knowledge and full sector insights. The library has over 30,000 transcripts and conducts over 10,000 interviews annually.

Maps

Third Bridge keeps track of public and private company value chains to help users speed up their early research. It uses a proprietary market research model called Maps to rank, filter, and prioritize companies, enabling investors to make decisions faster.

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 a 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.

Pros of Third Bridge:

• Extensive library of expert interview transcripts
• Direct access to a large global network of industry experts
• Allows clients to conduct one-on-one interviews with experts
• Uses a proprietary company ranking model
• Fixed fee expert consultation options through Community

Cons of Third Bridge:

• Focused primarily on primary research rather than multi-source intelligence
• No ability to upload or analyze internal content
• Lacks integrated access to broker research, company filings, news, or earnings documents for holistic market research
• Limited AI-driven discovery, sentiment analysis, or generative research capabilities
• Expert call scheduling can be time-consuming
• Pricing is usage-based and can be expensive on a per-call basis

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 other innovative market intelligence platforms provide, like AlphaSense. This can lead to missed opportunities and blind spots in the research process.

For even more information on Third Bridge and how it compares to other solutions in the market, check out Third Bridge Alternatives & Competitors.

Choosing the Right Tool For Your Business Needs

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 insights through its extensive network of industry experts. However, its focus on qualitative data can be limiting for organizations that need a more comprehensive and holistic view of market dynamics. Without quantitative data and automated insights, Third Bridge may not fully meet the needs of teams needing a broader, data-driven approach.

In contrast, the combination of AlphaSense and Tegus offers a robust and comprehensive research solution that streamlines both qualitative and quantitative research in a single platform. With access to financial data, broker research, company documents, and real-time news, AlphaSense provides a holistic view of the market. And with advanced AI search technology and automation, agentic workflows, and customizable dashboards and alerts, researchers can accelerate their research and increase confidence in their findings.