10 Top Alternative Data Providers in 2026

For investment and strategy professionals, critical data comes from a myriad of different sources, from company filings to broker research to earnings calls to news. And while these formal disclosures and secondary sources can provide valuable perspectives that directly influence business decisions, they don’t tell the entire story.

Alternative data sources, including expert interviews and channel checks, web traffic, sentiment, foot traffic, and workforce trends, reflect what is happening in the market before it becomes common knowledge. Teams with access to this type of data can spot shifts in demand, pricing, or competitive positioning long before their competitors do and while there is still time to act.

This utility is precisely why alternative data has gone from a niche input to a core part of the research process for investment and strategy teams. Investors use it to validate a thesis between earnings reports and catch risks early. Corporate strategy teams use it to fill gaps that traditional sources leave in competitive and market research.

However, not all alternative data is created equal. Signal quality varies widely by data type and provider, unstructured data takes analytical judgement to interpret, and privacy and regulatory considerations shape what a team can safely use. The edge comes not from simply having alternative data but choosing the right sources and accurately connecting them to the fundamentals.

Below, we cover 10 of the top alternative data providers, grouped by the data type they supply: expert and channel check intelligence, web and app behavior, consumer transactions, workforce signals, foot traffic, and sentiment. For each one, we outline the key features, strengths and weaknesses, and pricing where available. We also break down how to choose the right alternative data provider for your specific research and business needs.

Expert and Channel Check Intelligence Tools

AlphaSense

Best for: Investment and strategy teams that need alternative data, such as expert insights, channel checks, and sentiment, alongside fundamental research and financial data, with AI that searches, synthesizes, and automates workflows across all of it

AlphaSense is an AI platform that combines alternative data with traditional research. Its alternative data is built around proprietary primary research: expert transcripts and channel checks that provide first-hand perspectives directly from former executives, industry operators, suppliers, distributors, and customers. This research is available alongside premium sources like company filings, broker research, and structured financial data — all in one platform.

When used together, alternative and traditional data offer a view that goes far beyond what companies choose to disclose. A channel signal is far more valuable when you can check it against management guidance, consensus, and competitor disclosures. AlphaSense’s AI reasons across all of this data at once, so you can test that signal in a single search.

Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also named a Leader in the inaugural Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Competitive and Market Intelligence (CMI) Platforms, and a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Market And Competitive Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2026.

How Alternative and Fundamental Data Work Together

Alternative data tells you what is changing. Fundamental data tells you whether it matters and what the market already expects. Because both live in AlphaSense, each research question can be answered end to end:

AlphaSense’s alternative data includes:

Tegus Expert Insights

The Tegus Expert Insights library includes 300,000+ expert call transcripts covering companies across public and private markets, with thousands of transcripts added each quarter. Experts include former executives, industry operators, competitors, and customers, which makes this some of the most differentiated alternative data available — and some of the hardest to access at scale.

Instead of scheduling calls one at a time, teams can search thousands of structured conversations instantly, with access to AI-generated summaries, key takeaways, and sentiment analysis for each. Period-over-period sentiment tracking shows how expert opinion on a company or theme is shifting from one quarter to the next, before it surfaces in public filings.

Expert Call Services and AI-Led Expert Calls

Tegus Expert Call Services connects teams live with the experts most relevant to their question, including former executives, industry operators, competitors, and customers. Live calls are a way to go deep on topics such as competitive dynamics, channel strategy, pricing moves, and industry headwinds, and to follow up on what the transcript library already surfaces.

Additionally, in lieu of conducting their own interview, teams can utilize our AI interviewer to gather expert perspective at scale. The AI interviewer autonomously runs live 1:1 conversations with validated industry experts, and these AI-led interviews are also what power Channel Checks.

Channel Checks and Channel Check Intelligence

AlphaSense’s channel check library of 20K+ transcripts (with 8.5K added quarterly) covers 750+ tickers across over 100 industries, capturing what suppliers, distributors, and customers are seeing before it shows up in financials. Channel Check Intelligence turns those interviews into a verdict-first read on each covered company, leading with expert sentiment, quarter-over-quarter direction, and a breakdown across demand, supply, competition, and pricing.

Reads refresh daily, and every claim links back to the verbatim expert quote and full transcript for total auditability. For modeling, Aggregated Metrics roll up the KPIs experts cite (means, medians, and ranges) alongside the question asked and the quote behind each figure. These figures reflect what experts said instead of company-reported financials.

Sentiment Analysis and Sentiment Indices

Sentiment analysis, a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature, flags positive, neutral, and negative tone inline across earnings transcripts, filings, and expert calls. Sentiment Indices add sector-level indicators across 15+ sectors, aggregating sentiment across earnings transcripts on a -100 to +100 scale, updated every reporting cycle. Together, these alternative data sources show where confidence is rising or falling across a peer set, not just in a single document. The platform then uses color coding to help users identify instances of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment throughout the document.

AlphaSense’s alternative data sits alongside the following fundamental data:

Premium External Content

AlphaSense’s library of 500M+ premium documents includes earnings transcripts, company presentations, SEC and global filings, ESG reports, press releases, news, trade journals, and regulatory coverage. Wall Street Insights adds equity research from 1,700+ broker sources, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Citi.

Financial Data

AlphaSense provides access to the following crucial quantitative 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: Details on nearly 1 million M&A deals and 750,000 private funding rounds, enriched with AI-generated deal rationale and strategic context
• Dynamic Peer Sets: 125+ pre-built industry comparables with sector-specific metrics

Internal Content Integration

Teams can query their own research, notes, memos, and data room documents alongside AlphaSense’s external content through an Ingestion API or enterprise connectors (Egnyte, Microsoft 365/SharePoint, Box, Google Drive, S3), under AlphaSense’s enterprise security controls.

AI Search, Synthesis, and Execution

AlphaSense’s decision-grade AI is built to work across all this content at once.

• Generative Search answers natural-language questions across external content, internal knowledge, and financial data, with citations to the exact source snippet. Asking “What drove revenue growth last quarter?” returns the financial figures and the relevant management commentary or expert insights together.
• Deep Research automates in-depth analysis of companies, trends, and industry topics. It runs dozens of searches, reasons over thousands of potentially relevant results, and produces a comprehensive written analysis in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually.
• Workflow Agents automate recurring work such as earnings analysis and sector updates, and can be scheduled to run on their own.
• SuperAnalyst, AlphaSense’s AI agent, works across the full set of content. It monitors signals, runs your workflows, and delivers briefs, models, memos, and decks with every claim cited to its source. For competitive and market work, it maps the landscape across broker research, expert interviews, and your own documents.
• SuperAnalyst MCP and Agent API: Bring AlphaSense into the AI assistants and agents your team already uses. The SuperAnalyst MCP is an agent MCP: Give it an objective instead of a sequence of tool calls, and it plans the research, draws on expert calls, channel checks, filings, transcripts, news, and financial models through a single connection, and returns cited answers, evidence packs, or files like Excel workbooks. The Agent API delivers cited, machine-readable answers into internal apps and custom workflows.

AlphaSense Pros:

• Combines expert insights, channel checks, and sentiment analysis with filings, broker research, financial data, and internal content in one searchable platform
• Channel Check Intelligence delivers a daily-refreshed, source-traceable read on 750+ tickers
• Every AI output always links to the original document, transcript, or quote for total auditability and traceability
• Supports investment workflows (due diligence, portfolio monitoring, forecasting) as well as corporate strategy use cases like competitive intelligence
• AI and generative AI tools that can be applied to internal and external content together
• Reduces the number of separate vendor relationships needed for qualitative alternative data and fundamental research
• SuperAnalyst MCP brings cited AlphaSense research into the AI assistants and agents your team already uses
• Enterprise-grade data production complying with global security standards (SOC2, ISO270001, FIPS 140-2, SAML 2.0) suited to handling proprietary research
• SuperAnalyst runs in a private, per-user sandbox, and your data is never used to train models
• 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:

• Not a raw data feed provider. Teams that need card transactions, foot traffic, or web traffic datasets will need to source those separately but can use AlphaSense to place them in context
• Channel check coverage is concentrated in covered public companies, so niche or private company questions may require a live expert call

Pricing

Subscription prices vary based on the number of users (for small- and medium-sized companies) and are customized by organization. Contact the AlphaSense team to learn more, or start a free two-week trial today.

Third Bridge

Best for: Teams that want analyst-led expert interview transcripts and live expert calls, particularly for private company and value-chain research

Third Bridge is an expert insights and primary research firm serving investors, corporations, and consultants. Its two core offerings are a library of analyst-led expert interview transcripts and Connections, live calls with experts matched to a client’s question. Third Bridge reports that most of its transcripts are produced by an in-house team of roughly 60 to 65 sector-specialist analysts, which gives the content a structured, easily comparable format.

Third Bridge also distributes its content through other platforms, including Bloomberg, FactSet, Capital IQ, and LSEG Workspace, so it fits into clients’ existing research stacks. Outside expert transcripts, Third Bridge lacks qualitative content like company filings, broker research, news, and financial data that are necessary for full-scale market research. As a result, users will likely need to supplement with a separate qualitative research tool.

Related Reading: AlphaSense vs Third Bridge // Third Bridge Alternatives

Third Bridge offers the following features:

Library

This archive contains analyst-led investigative interviews to give global industry knowledge and full sector insights. The library has over 100,000 transcripts, all searchable and queryable with AI.

Connections

Third Bridge connects clients to relevant experts through a global network, leveraging thorough pre-qualification processes and a compliance framework. Clients are able to conduct live one-on-one calls with experts matching their specific research question, and follow-up calls are included once a client has engaged with a Library expert.

Value-Chain Maps and Primers

Third Bridge offers value-chain maps and primers that give teams quick context on companies, especially private ones, early in the research process.

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.

MCP Server

Launched in March 2026, Third Bridge’s MCP server gives permissioned clients access to its transcript library inside partner AI tools.

Third Bridge Pros:

• Over 100,000 call transcripts in the Third Bridge library
• Analyst-led interview format produces structured, comparable content
• Enables clients to conduct one-on-one interviews with pre-qualified experts
• MCP server allows permissioned clients to query all expert transcripts in natural language from compatible AI tools
• Library content is distributed through several third-party research platforms
• Available through several widely used financial data platforms and AI tools
• Strong fit for private company and value-chain research

Third Bridge Cons:

• Interviews are led by Third Bridge analysts rather than the client, so teams that want to steer the questions use Connections calls
• Coverage depth reflects the sectors its analysts focus on; some sectors may have more limited coverage
• Lacks broker research, company documents, and news needed for holistic market research
• No quantitative data, such as company fundamentals and financial data

Pricing

Third Bridge does not publicly disclose its pricing. For more details, contact Third Bridge directly.

Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG)

Best for: Teams that run expert calls at scale and want named, compliance-reviewed expert content, available inside the AI and data tools they already use

GLG is one of the longest-standing players in the expert network industry, founded in 1998. Today, it offers a network of more than 1 million vetted professionals, and its clients include financial services firms, management consultancies, law firms, and corporations.

GLG’s core business is connecting clients with experts through calls, research, and events. In recent years, it has added AI to that model: AI-moderated calls, a library of expert transcripts with built-in AI, and an MCP connector that brings its content into clients’ AI tools. Teams that also need filings, broker research, and structured financial data will typically pair GLG with a broader research platform.

Related Reading:

AlphaSense vs GLG

GLG Alternatives & Competitors

GLG offers the following features:

Expert Calls

GLG allows clients to have one-on-one calls and meetings with experts across industries, supported by GLG’s compliance framework. GLG also offers advisory and placement services, including deal advisors, board placements, fractional placements, and expert witnesses.

AI-Moderated Calls

GLG’s AI Moderator runs structured expert interviews from a client’s discussion guide, asking follow-up questions based on what the expert says. Calls can run in 10 languages and be scheduled around the clock, and the AI Moderator can include multiple-choice, scale, and matrix questions, with responses exported to Excel. GLG also ensures the same questions are asked across many experts to produce comparable data quarter over quarter.

Expert Content Library and Feed

GLG offers a library of original expert transcripts from GLG’s network, each tied to a named expert and reviewed against GLG’s compliance standards before being added. New transcripts are added daily, and the library is available through myGLG, Bloomberg, FactSet, or a data feed. Built-in AI lets users ask questions of a transcript and generate summaries, and Bloomberg users can query GLG content alongside Bloomberg data, filings, and news through ASKB.

GLG Events

GLG Events connects you with live and on-demand content that will augment your research journey, including conversations with experts and industry peers on trends, professional development, and company-specific exploration.

myGLG and GLG MCP

myGLG is GLG’s client portal for finding experts, managing projects, and synthesizing insights across calls. In July 2026, GLG launched an MCP connector that lets clients query their complete call history and the Expert Content Library from their AI tools, with every output traceable to the expert conversation or content behind it, and with compliance officers controlling what enters those tools.

GLG Pros:

• Access to over 1 million experts across industries and seniority levels
• Compliance-reviewed expert transcripts, refreshed daily
• AI throughout the entire workflow: AI-moderated calls, AI summaries in the library, and an MCP connector for external AI tools
• Available inside third-party platforms like Bloomberg and FactSet
• Combines expert calls with surveys and quantitative research

GLG Cons:

• Centered on expert content and primary research; does not offer company filings, broker research, and financial data
• AI-moderated calls follow a preset discussion guide, so for highly nuanced topics or more custom discussions, live calls are necessary

Pricing

GLG does not publicly disclose pricing, but it offers free trials of its expert content library on request. Contact GLG directly for more details.

Guidepoint

Best for: Teams that need expert interviews, surveys, and a large compliance-reviewed transcript library in one AI-enabled workspace

Guidepoint provides access to expert insights for institutional investors, consulting firms, and corporations. In May 2026, Guidepoint announced a repositioning from expert network to “AI-powered access to real-time expert insights,” bringing together live expert consultations, on-demand content through the Guidepoint Library, AI-enabled synthesis, and integration tools.

While Guidepoint excels in providing direct access to industry experts, its focus on primary research through expert interactions can be limiting. The platform primarily offers qualitative insights, which might not be sufficient for users requiring a broader view of market trends. Guidepoint also lacks crucial secondary research capabilities, such as broker reports and real-time market data.

In 2026, Guidepoint expanded its AI offering, with MCP connections to Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini Enterprise. These integrations are built around its expert transcript library, so teams that need AI that reasons across filings, broker research, quantitative data, and expert content should consider a broader market research platform.

Related Reading:

Guidepoint vs GLG (vs AlphaSense)

Guidepoint Alternatives and Competitors

Guidepoint offers the following features:

Expert Network and Consultations

Guidepoint arranges direct, confidential conversations between clients and prequalified experts from its vast network of more than 2 million experts across over 300 industries and 150 countries.

Surveys and Live Teleconferences

Teams can launch surveys or join live teleconferences with experts, alongside one-on-one calls.

Guidepoint Library

Guidepoint offers a library of over 100,000 proprietary, compliance-reviewed transcripts and expert interviews. It reports adding 1,400 live interviews and 5,000 new transcripts each month.

AskGp and Guidepoint360

AskGp is an AI tool that helps clients search, summarize, and synthesize proprietary expert content, outputting source-cited answers. Guidepoint360 is a single workspace that centralizes consultations, transcripts, AI tools, and project organization, allowing teams to trace all findings back to the expert source.

Guidepoint Qsight

For healthcare and medtech clients, Guidepoint offers Qsight, a data product built to complement its expert network. Qsight combines traditional research with proprietary datasets and survey panels to deliver recurring insights into procedure trends, purchasing behavior, and brand performance.

Integrations

Guidepoint supports client workflows through APIs, an MCP, and other integration tools that bring expert knowledge into existing research and enterprise AI environments.

Guidepoint Pros:

• One of the largest expert networks, with 2M+ experts across 300+ industries
• A library of 100,000 compliance-reviewed transcripts, growing each month
• Multiple engagement formats, including interviews, surveys, teleconferences, and AI-moderated research
• AI search and synthesis with source-cited answers
• APIs and MCP for enterprise AI workflows
• Healthcare-specific data available through Qsight

Guidepoint Cons:

• Limited quantitative research for comprehensive market intelligence
• Lacks market research content such as broker reports and real-time market data
• AI integrations center on the expert transcript library, not filings, broker research, or financial data
• Research scope is limited to expert calls, transcripts, surveys, and moderated sessions

Pricing

Guidepoint does not publicly disclose pricing. Contact Guidepoint directly for more details.

AlphaSights

Best for: Deal teams and consultants who want service-led expert matching, backed by an expert content library and AI-assisted research tools

AlphaSights is a global expert network that connects investors, consultants, and corporations with industry experts. It combines a client-service model, in which account teams source and manage expert calls, with a research platform that includes an expert content library, a private transcript library, and AI tools for searching and summarizing expert content.

AlphaSights is primarily geared toward primary research, which may not meet the needs of teams that require detailed quantitative analysis and data-driven decision-making. The platform also lacks certain critical qualitative content sets, such as broker research, company documents, and news. For this reason, most teams will need to supplement with a broader research platform to perform holistic market and investment research.

Related Reading: AlphaSights vs Third Bridge

Top AlphaSights Alternatives

AlphaSense vs AlphaSights

AlphaSights includes the following key features:

Expert Calls and Scheduling

Clients review and select matched experts in the platform and schedule calls with automatic availability matching. AlphaSights’ AlphaGraph, a proprietary knowledge graph built on more than 25 million expert-to-company relationships, helps surface experts matched to a project. Clients can also follow up with experts using in-project messaging.

AlphaNow Content Library

AlphaSights features a searchable archive of previously conducted expert interviews, transcripts, and insights — allowing clients to access curated intelligence on demand.

AI Capabilities

AlphaSights offers AlphaGPT, a conversational interface that gives natural-language answers synthesized from insights across AlphaSights’ expert research library. Additionally, every expert transcript is delivered to clients with an AI call summary.

Private Library and Transcription

Transcripts are produced with NLP technology and human quality assurance, with call records delivered within hours. A private library feature lets clients host their own transcripts securely in one central resource.

Surveys and Custom Insights Projects

Clients can request quantitative surveys or qualitative insight collection across specific expert audiences. This is especially useful for hypothesis testing, market validation, or structured data gathering efforts from a targeted group of experts.

AlphaSights Pros:

• Service-led model, with account teams available inside each project
• AI-assisted search and synthesis via AlphaGPT, plus AI call and project summaries
• Serves multiple industries and business functions
• Offers expert calls and consultations, as well as a robust expert transcript library
• Offers a private library for hosting a team’s own transcripts

AlphaSights Cons:

• Focused on expert content; company filings, broker research, news, and financial data are not offered
• AI answers are drawn from AlphaSights’ own expert research library, so coverage depends on what the library contains

Web and App Behavior

Similarweb

Best for: Investment and strategy teams tracking digital demand, through traffic, engagement, and app usage, for public and private companies

Similarweb is a digital intelligence platform that estimates web and app traffic, engagement, audience behavior, and marketing channel mix. It primarily serves customers across financial services, retail, media, and B2B, and is organized around the following product lines: Web Intelligence, App Intelligence, Retail Intelligence, Sales Intelligence, Stock Intelligence, and AI Search Intelligence.

Similarweb offers extensive data coverage, but it only covers digital behavior. Teams wanting to conduct full-scale market and investment research will need to supplement with another platform that offers fundamental data and qualitative sources that can explain the “why” behind each trend.

Similarweb offers the following key features:

Web and App Traffic and Engagement

Through Similarweb, users can access web visits, visit duration, and bounce rate for websites, plus app metrics such as daily, weekly, and monthly active users, install penetration, and store downloads. Data is available at daily, weekly, and monthly granularity, and Similarweb says signals are surfaced with a 48 to 72 hour lag. Coverage spans over 1 billion websites and 4.7 million apps.

Stock Intelligence

This product maps domains and apps to stock tickers, with views by parent company and by subsidiary. This includes marketing channel data (organic search, paid search, display, email, referrals, and social), earnings updates, and forecasting models built on web traffic metrics aligned with company-reported KPIs.

Competitive Benchmarking and Audience Insights

Similarweb offers side-by-side comparisons of traffic, engagement, and audience demographics interests, and behavior across competitors and 200+ industries, plus keyword, SEO, and paid search analysis for competitive analysis.

AI Search Intelligence

Similarweb also offers visibility and citation tracking for brands inside AI assistants like ChatGPT, which is valuable for strategy and marketing teams.

Similarweb Pros:

• Comprehensive view of digital demand and engagement, including for private companies
• Daily, weekly, and monthly granularity for tracking trends between earnings reports
• Web and app data in one platform
• Data feeds and APIs for teams that want to build the data into their own models
• Available inside Bloomberg for Terminal users

Similarweb Cons:

• Traffic figures are estimates modeled from a contributor panel and public data, not company-reported counts, and accuracy is typically lower for smaller sites
• Measures digital behavior only; shows engagement but not revenue or the why behind a change
• Less valuable for companies whose online activity is a small share of their business
• No real-time data on competitors; data is not always up to date
• Products are sold separately, and total cost can rise as teams add product lines
• Simply a web listening tool; lacks data coverage and content sets that are needed for in-depth competitive research, such as broker research and expert calls
• Limited qualitative insights that are necessary for full-scale competitive analysis

Pricing

Similarweb offers several self-serve plans for individuals, ranging from $125 to $540 per month billed annually. Business and enterprise plans are custom-priced through sales. Contact Similarweb for specific pricing information.

Consumer Transactions

YipitData

Best for: Investment and strategy teams that want to estimate revenue, bookings, and customer behavior between earnings reports, using research, dashboards, and data feeds

YipitData is a market intelligence company that provides alternative data research for brands, retailers, and investors. For its data, it draws on mostly consumer transaction data sources, such as credit and debit card transactions, physical and email receipts, business purchasing records, cloud-spending data, web activity, and app usage.

According to third-party sources, YipitData provides coverage of over 2,000 public companies and hundreds of thousands of private companies across the retail, consumer goods, technology, and services industries. This tool primarily focuses on spending and KPI signal, so teams typically need to pair it with external qualitative sources that explain the why behind a particular trend.

YipitData offers the following key features:

Research and Analysis

YipitData offers analyst-led research products for institutional investors to help them track public and private company performance, consumer behavior, and industry trends. Reports include chart-backing data, a Key Metrics Grid, and a forward publishing calendar.

Dashboards and Data Feeds

YipitData delivers data in three formats: research and analysis reports, interactive dashboards, and raw data feeds.

AI Access

YipitData’s AI Research & Metrics MCP server embeds the tool’s reports, time series, and screens into AI assistant tools such as Claude and ChatGPT Enterprise. YipitData has also added an “AI Insight Agent” that lets clients query the underlying transaction data directly.

YipitData Pros:

• Draws from more than 40 data sources spanning card, receipt, web, app, and business-spend data
• Data delivery available in the form of reports, dashboards, and raw data feeds to support various team workflows
• Data is accessible inside existing AI tools through an MCP server
• Serves both investors and corporate customers

YipitData Cons:

• Figures are estimates of company performance built from panels and feeds, not verified company-reported results
• Data access depends on owned panels, licensed card and receipt data, email receipts, and web collection, any of which are subject to privacy constraints, platform restrictions, or partner changes
• Freshness varies by dataset
• Lacks key qualitative sources that explain the why behind the data
• No expert interviews, channel checks, or broker research of the kind found in holistic research platforms

Pricing

YipitData does not publicly disclose its pricing. Contact the platform directly for a custom quote.

Foot Traffic

Placer.ai

Best for: Investment and strategy teams that want to understand offline activity at physical locations

Placer.ai is a location intelligence and foot traffic analytics platform that estimates visits to physical points of interest across the United States. It models visitation, trade areas, capture rates, audience demographics, and migration patterns. These estimates are built from an anonymized panel of tens of millions of mobile devices, and are delivered through a web-based dashboard. Its users include professionals in retail, commercial real estate, hospitality, and economic development, and it reports more than 5,000 paying customers across industries.

Foot traffic data is a valuable source of information about how many people visit physical location, but cannot shed light on the reason behind traffic changes or other alternative data sources like expert calls, transaction data, or workforce signals. For teams who need a holistic view, they will need to pair any foot traffic tool with qualitative sources that explain why traffic changed, as well as additional alternative data providers.

Placer.ai includes the following key features:

Data Entitlements and Bloomberg ALTD

In 2023, Bloomberg introduced ALTD to provide access to alternative data from other platforms, and Placer.ai was the first external dataset included. Then, in 2026 Bloomberg expanded ALTD to Alternative Data Entitlements, providing near real-time insights from alternative data, with metrics such as same-store visits.

Placer.ai says that the expansion adds metrics such as same-store visits, described as a proxy for same-store sales, and also cuts lag time from two weeks to a few days. Bloomberg’s ALTD page reports that its foot traffic data comes from a panel of 25 million average monthly users in the U.S. Bloomberg clients can use Bloomberg Query Language to retrieve ALTD datasets, including Placer.ai, in their own models, Excel spreadsheets, or BQuant.

Data Collection and Privacy

According to Placer.ai’s data documentation, the panel is a representative sample of the U.S. population that is sourced from vetted mobile app providers and stripped of personal identifiers such as names and mobile advertising IDs, with aggregated results reported only once a panel clears a minimum-device threshold.

Partnerships and Expansion

Placer.ai partners with major data platforms, real estate firms, and analytics providers to integrate foot traffic and location intelligence across industries. This includes The Retail Strategy, Green Street, Cuebiq, Esri, Colliers, Urban Libraries Council, and several data and technology providers like Synergos, Spatial.ai, and BuildCentral.

Placer.ai Pros:

• Self-service platform with more than 10 verticals, serving investors and corporate, real estate, and public sector users
• Has a panel of tens of millions of mobile devices covering venues across the U.S.
• Offers same-store visit metrics, positioned as a proxy for same-store sales, useful for retail and restaurant coverage
• Available inside the Bloomberg Terminal and retrievable through BQL for use in Excel and BQuant
• Integrates foot traffic and location intelligence across industries via partnerships

Placer.ai Cons:

• Estimates are modeled from anonymized mobile data, not measured by physical sensors, which may introduce statistical uncertainty
• Coverage is mostly focused on the US; limited international coverage
• Results are reported only once a location clears a minimum-device threshold, so very low-traffic sites may not be covered

Pricing

Placer.ai does not publicly disclose its pricing, but it offers customized subscription packages. Contact Placer.ai for specific pricing details.

Workforce Signals

Revelio Labs

Best for: Institutional investors tracking human capital signals, corporate strategists benchmarking competitors, HR leaders optimizing talent strategy, and government agencies monitoring labor market dynamics

Founded in 2021, Revelio Labs is a workforce intelligence company that collects unstructured workforce data from billions of public employment records and transforms it into clean, reliable, standardized data.

Through Revelio Labs, users get a direct view into hiring trends, talent flows, compensation benchmarks, headcount changes, and organizational structures across millions of companies worldwide. Revelio Labs’ workforce data is also built to seamlessly integrate with AI-driven research workflows, LLMs, and automated analytics pipelines.

Because Revelio Labs is limited to workforce data and does not provide access to qualitative sources that are integral for providing context to alternative data, teams will likely need to supplement with a broad market research platform, as well as additional alternative data providers.

Revelio Labs includes the following key features:

Revelio Terminal

The Terminal unifies professional profiles, job postings, employee sentiment, and layoff data, allowing users to track headcount, hiring, attrition, and skills for any public or private company. It also includes corporate hierarchies mapped from subsidiary to parent so every comparison is made on consistent terms. The Terminal is designed for teams who want to explore workforce data in a browser, with no engineering required.

Job Postings

Revelio offers a daily-updated job postings dataset called COSMOS, with each posting mapped to occupation, seniority level, and geography.

Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS)

RPLS is a freely available macroeconomic labor market dataset built from over 100 million U.S. profiles. It includes employment, job openings, hiring and attrition rates, and salaries for new openings, by occupation, sector, and state. Revelio releases this data on a monthly basis.

AI and MCP Access

Revelio Labs integrates AI and an MCP into its workforce intelligence ecosystem to let users query labor market data using natural language and connect external AI tools directly to standardized employment data.

Revelio Labs Pros

• Company data is mapped to tickers, covering public and private companies, with history dating back to 2008
• Offers multiple delivery options, including data feeds, API, Terminal, and MCP connector
• Job postings update daily
• Offers a free macro labor dataset built from over 100 million U.S. profiles
• CCPA and GDPR compliant
• Serves both investors and corporate strategy clients

Revelio Labs Cons

• Built from online public profiles and job postings; gaps are possible
• Hiring and attrition figures often don’t match the government’s JOLTS data, due to Revelio’s focus on permanent professional hiring versus JOLTS’s seasonal and temporary hire inclusions
• Coverage can vary by dataset
• Users need to pay additional fees for data feeds, API access, MCP, and individual-level records
• Limited alternative data outside workforce data
• No premium qualitative sources, such as expert calls, channel checks, broker research, and company filings, which are necessary for market and investment research

Pricing

The Revelio Terminal for single-name research in the browser starts from $1,250 per month. For users who also need access to data feeds, API access, and MCP, this requires a separate fee, which is larger than the cost of a Terminal seat. For a custom quote, contact Revelio Labs directly.

News and Sentiment Tools

Bigdata.com

Best for: Teams that want sentiment, news, and event monitoring across public and private companies, delivered through an app, API, or the AI tools they already use

Bigdata.com is a financial research and AI grounding platform launched by RavenPack, a global financial data analytics company with over 20 years of experience serving hedge funds, banks, and asset managers.

Launched publicly in October 2024, Bigdata.com was built to extend RavenPack’s data infrastructure into a conversational, agentic research surface — its API and real-time research assistant let users converse directly with billions of financial documents, create custom research tools, automate tasks, and access real-time data.

For alternative data buyers, Bigdata.com’s core strength is text-derived signals: sentiment, events, and media attention measured across millions of documents. Bigdata.com is built for monitoring and signal generation, but unlike most other providers on this list, it does not generate its own primary research. It also does not offer native access to qualitative sources like company filings, broker research, or earnings transcripts that are necessary for holistic market or investment research.

Bigdata.com’s key features include:

Real-Time Sentiment and Event Monitoring

The platform includes tools that track executive sentiment on the U.S. economy from earnings calls and conference transcripts; monitor 40,000+ news sources for negative news impacting millions of companies; capture sentiment momentum from thousands of daily news stories on public companies; and unify earnings signals from news, transcripts, insider transactions, and earnings dates. Some key tools include a daily sentiment trend signal available through its API, as well as a real-time sentiment tearsheet that works inside external AI assistant tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot.

Research Assistant, API, and MCP

Bigdata.com’s capabilities are available through desktop and mobile apps, APIs, and an MCP connection to Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot, with answers linked to their sources.

Content and Knowledge Graph

Bigdata.com searches billions of documents spanning over 25 years, including news, filings, fundamentals, expert interviews, and podcasts. Underlying this is a finance-specific taxonomy built from scratch and a Financial Knowledge Graph with over 12 million entities, helping users filter and discover relevant information with precise financial terminology.

Bigdata.com Pros:

• Daily and real-time sentiment signals that cover public and private companies
• Event monitoring and watchlist agents for ongoing, between-earnings tracking
• Full source traceability on every insight, supporting compliance and audit requirements
• Finance-specific knowledge graph built over 20 years
• Available as an app, an API, and an MCP connection to major AI assistants

Bigdata.com Cons:

• Shorter track record than RavenPack’s underlying data business; only launched in 2024, which makes it a much newer product than others on this list
• Content is largely aggregated from third-party providers, so coverage depends on those licensing arrangements
• No publicly documented access to expert calls or channel checks

Pricing

Bigdata.com does not publicly disclose its pricing. Contact RavenPack directly for a quote.

Choosing the Right Alternative Data Provider

Because there are so many different types of alternative data, no single provider covers every source. And as valuable as alternative data is, its value multiplies when it’s combined with traditional and fundamental sources that provide context and help answer the “why” behind what you see. Most teams will benefit from combining several different alternative data providers and will also need to supplement with a qualitative research platform, or a platform like AlphaSense that brings expert, channel check, and sentiment data together with fundamental research.

Here are the top questions to answer when choosing the right tool or stack of tools for your research needs:

1. What decisions are you trying to support, and what questions do you need answered? Rather than starting with the dataset, start with the question. An investor testing a thesis before earnings needs very different evidence than a strategy team assessing a competitor’s expansion or a deal team conducting due diligence on a private target. Once you know your main questions, choose the tool that will most closely answer them.
2. What gaps does your current stack have? Map what you already have against the questions you still can’t answer. If you can see what is happening, such as spending, traffic, visits, or hiring, but not why, you likely need expert calls and channel check intelligence. If you already have the “why” but nothing to test it against, you need quantitative data. A spending signal can tell you sales are slowing, but only a conversation with a distributor or customer can clarify whether the cause is pricing, competition, or demand. That “why” layer is what AlphaSense’s library of 500M+ premium sources, including 300,000+ expert call transcripts and channel checks, is built to supply.
3. How fresh does the signal need to be? Consider each provider’s refresh cadence and delivery lag, and how that might affect your decision cycle. A signal that arrives after the earnings call has little value, so ask what you will actually receive and when. AlphaSense’s Channel Check Intelligence, for example, refreshes daily, with every read linked back to the interviews behind it.
4. Does the provider cover the companies you follow, and how is the data built? Check coverage against your own universe, including private companies if you follow them. Then make sure you understand exactly where the data is coming from. Foot traffic estimates, for example, are modeled from anonymized mobile data rather than measured by physical sensors, and Revelio Labs’ hiring data focuses on permanent, full-time professional workers. Neither is a flaw, but each shapes what the data can tell you. Expert and channel check data is unique because it offers first-hand perspectives, and each insight is always linked back to the verbatim expert quote and full transcript, so you can examine and judge the evidence for yourself.
5. What level of compliance and auditability does your team require? For consumer and location data, always make sure you ask how consent and privacy are handled. For expert content, the central risk is material nonpublic information (MNPI): a current or former employee can share details that haven’t been made public, and trading on them creates serious legal and regulatory risk. Ask how a provider vets and trains experts, what restrictions apply on each call, whether transcripts are screened for MNPI before they’re published, and whether your compliance team can see and approve activity.
   
   AlphaSense, for example, requires experts to agree to its terms, complete compliance training on insider trading, and fill out a pre-call compliance questionnaire, and each expert follows call-specific protocols that define what can and cannot be discussed. Every transcript then goes through a multi-layered review, using AI and human review by compliance specialists, to identify potential MNPI or other confidential information before it is published, and AI-led interviews are held to the same standards. If you plan to upload internal research, confirm compliance and end-to-end data security standards, such as SOC 2/ISO 27001-equivalent certifications and data residency controls. Finally, ask whether you can trace each figure back to its source or methodology to ensure full auditability and verifiability.

6. Will the alternative data signal sit alongside your fundamental research, or on its own? A data point is easier to trust when you can check it against management guidance, consensus estimates, and competitor disclosures. If your team has to export alternative data and reconcile it by hand with filings and research, much of the speed advantage is lost. Consider whether you need a platform that connects expert, channel check, and sentiment signals directly to your fundamental research and your own internal content (like AlphaSense does), or whether a standalone feed is enough.

Try AlphaSense for Free

AlphaSense brings expert insights, channel checks, and sentiment analysis together with filings, broker research, financial data, and your team’s own internal content in one AI-powered platform. A signal from the channel can be checked against management guidance and consensus in a single search, with every output cited to its source.

AlphaSense doesn’t replace a card transaction feed, a foot traffic panel, or a web traffic dataset. If your team uses those, AlphaSense is the layer where they meet expert perspective and fundamental research, so you can see not just what changed but why.

If your team needs alternative data alongside fundamental research, expert insights, and market intelligence, try AlphaSense today.

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