In the age of information and AI, conducting thorough market research is no longer about simply having access to information. Instead, it’s about being the fastest to analyze the data at hand, filter out the signal from the noise, and extract the most meaningful insights.
It is no longer enough to merely be informed of market-moving events as they occur — you need to stay ahead of emerging trends, so that you can implement proactive strategies and get an edge over the competition.
That’s where market research tools come in. The right tool will provide you with a holistic, all-encompassing view into every pertinent market, industry, or trend. It will provide access to all the content sets necessary for thorough research. It will also incorporate advanced search, monitoring, and analysis features that will maximize the value you get out of each piece of content and allow you to spend more of your time on high-value, strategic tasks rather than manual research.
How to Choose the Right Market Research Tool
When considering a market intelligence platform, every organization should be asking questions throughout the process.
What types of content are available through the platform? Is the content offered through a platform already publicly available? Does the platform provide you with access to exclusive information and insights? Are the intelligence tools customizable to meet your needs? Can the platform be easily integrated into existing systems? Does the tool give you the ability to export data into Excel or other usable formats? Does the vendor offer adequate customer service? How is their customer feedback? What about 24/7 tech support?
This guide will explain how professionals can make better, more confident decisions with market research tools. We’ll go over some of the best tools available today, and compare their features, strengths, limitations, cost, and see which types of organizations and use cases they’re best suited for. By the end, you’ll have a much better idea of which market research platform can address your needs and get your organization where it wants to go.
By the end of this guide, you’ll know:
- How to confidently navigate the market intelligence tool landscape
- How to identify which solution will be a good fit for your organization based on your specific market intelligence needs, priorities, and budget
- Ten market research platforms found on the market today (both paid and free)
- The capabilities, limitations, and price range of each tool
- A few of the ways organizations can use market intelligence to work more efficiently and effectively
AlphaSense
An all-in-one platform for holistic market intelligence, driven by smart AI search technology
AlphaSense is a leading all-in-one market intelligence and AI search platform built for robust financial and market research. This tool is designed for research and business professionals looking to implement a qualitative research strategy powered by automated features and proprietary AI technology.
Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also recently named one of Fortune’s Top 50 AI Innovators and was ranked #8 on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list.
Here’s how AlphaSense helps you extract insights and access both high-value internal and external content with the power of artificial intelligence — all in a single platform.
Extensive Out-of-the-Box Content Library
AlphaSense’s exclusive collection of 10,000+ private, public, premium, and proprietary data sources is unmatched. Our content includes:
- Company documents for both private and public companies, including earnings transcripts, company presentations, SEC and global filings, ESG reports, and press releases
- Wall Street Insights®, an exclusive collection of equity research covering more than 1,000 broker sources, including Goldman Sachs
- Expert call transcript library with over 200,000 vetted interviews (including with competitors, suppliers, customers, and KOLs). Learn more about the combined offering of AlphaSense and Tegus here
- News, industry reports, trade journals, and regulatory documents
Enterprise Intelligence
AlphaSense’s Enterprise Intelligence solution allows you to integrate and query your own internal content alongside the premium external sources listed above. That includes:
- Internal research, notes, and presentations
- CIMs, virtual data rooms and investment memos
- Reports from industry and market intelligence providers
- Emails, newsletters, web pages, and RSS feeds
In this way, AlphaSense centralizes all your internal and external knowledge in one place, and allows you to leverage our industry-leading search, summarization, and monitoring tools to enhance and accelerate your research.
Our genAI capabilities deliver instant, accurate, and secure summarizations with the ability to ask follow-up questions across both your proprietary internal data and hundreds of millions of premium external documents.
AI Search & Summarization Technology
AlphaSense has invested 10+ years into the development of our tech stack. Our industry-leading suite of AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights:
Generative Search
Generative Search, now with Deep Research capabilities, transforms how users can extract insights from our vast library of premium content sources. Generative Search is trained to think like an analyst, so it understands the market research intent behind your natural language queries.
When searching for insights, Generative Search helps you get up to speed on a company or topic by instantly surfacing the answers you need. You can dig deeper into topics by asking follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query. Each answer provides citations to the exact snippet of text from where the information was sourced, so that it can always be referenced back.
Generative Grid
Generative Grid applies multiple genAI prompts across 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 users to summarize documents using pre-built criteria to save time when executing repeatable workflows.
Generative Grid pulls data from both premium external documents in the AlphaSense platform and users’ internal content. From there, users can choose pre-built templates or create their own to automate routine workflows. Each summary provides a direct citation to the source material it was pulled from.
Users can leverage this tool to track earnings transcripts, compare competitors at a glance, parse through deal rooms in seconds, track macro event impacts, or analyze merger proxy filings, among many use cases.
Smart Summaries
This feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights (reducing time spent on research during earnings season), quickly capture company outlook and bull/bear cases from analyst research, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees. All Summaries provide you with citations to the exact snippets of text from where the summaries are sourced — combining high accuracy with easy verification.
Smart Synonyms™
This unique feature is proprietary to AlphaSense and has the ability to understand both the keyword and search intent behind any of your queries, factoring in search results that include variations in business language. For example, a search for “TAM” will also bring back results on “addressable market” and “market size.”
Relevancy Algorithm
AlphaSense’s advanced algorithm also eliminates noise (i.e., content with matching keywords but ultimately irrelevant to your specific search objective) and surfaces only the most relevant results based on market analysis workflows. This algorithm saves you precious time and energy, allowing you to get straight to analysis and other high-level tasks.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment Analysis, a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature, parses through content and identifies nuances in the tone and subjective meaning of text. It then uses color coding to help readers identify the document’s positive, negative, and neutral sentiments.
This technology assigns each search term a numerical sentiment change score to help users track any slight change in market sentiment over time. Users can take advantage of it to make better-informed investment decisions and improve risk management strategies.
Company Perspectives (BamSEC)
Make quantitative investment research easier by transforming how you work with public company data. By streamlining access to SEC filings, earnings and events transcripts, financial documents, and more, BamSEC enables analysts to focus on what matters, save time, and do better work.
BamSEC allows users to search across multiple companies and SEC filings. Customers can use these documents to perform due diligence on companies and explore performance metrics efficiently.
Using the tables on BamSEC, users can explore past filings, create models, and benchmark company performance, all in one place, without needing to pull up individual filings to manually track a company’s metrics.
Financials and Metrics (Canalyst)
Gain instant access to over 4,000 global fundamental models and over 60 industry dashboards, all hand-built and sourced by sector-focused analysts. Unlike building your own models and comp sheets, using our off-the-shelf models, dashboards, and data reduces your time spent on manual data sourcing, allowing you to focus your time on analyzing data, not aggregating it.
Integration Capabilities
Users can easily integrate content at enterprise scale through our Ingestion API or enterprise-grade connectors — like Microsoft 365/Sharepoint, Box, Google Drive, S3, Egnyte, and more.
Our integration capabilities allow for more streamlined collaboration with members across your organization and improve overall team productivity. Our proprietary AI technology allows you to search across all internal and external company content to find crucial insights, catching what other platforms miss in a secure and automated way.
AlphaSense also offers content processing and content management. Content processing allows company recognition within user documents, while content management features support custom tags, metadata and folder structures to better search through internal content.
Monitoring, Analysis, and Collaboration Tools
AlphaSense is designed to help users find insights faster. In order to do that, we offer a number of tools that extend beyond search and summarization to help users accelerate research tasks.
- Customizable dashboards create a centralized information hub for monitoring key companies and themes, while tailored alerts provide real-time updates.
- Powerful collaboration tools like Notebook+ and commenting features help teams manage and share insights more effectively.
- Table Tools allow you to move faster with spreadsheet-style visualizations directly from company filings, so you can chain together, edit, and optimize tables for analysis.
- Image Search allows you to discover insights buried in charts to quickly capture data without reading through pages of documents.
- Snippet Explorer allows you to effortlessly look at any topic or theme and all its historical mentions in a single view.
- 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:
- Exclusive content universe that spans key market perspectives, including broker research, expert calls, company documents, news & regulatory sites
- 10+ years of investment in AI
- Incorporates AI search technology, machine learning, and sentiment analysis
- Generative AI features like Deep Research, Generative Search, Smart Summaries, and Generative Grid for enhanced and streamlined workflow
- AI and genAI tools can be applied to integrated internal content
- 4,000+ 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 alerts
- All-in-one research platform
- Mobile app that includes all platform content and AI search capabilities
- User-friendly interface
- Internal note-taking, sharing and collaboration features
- Support for APIs and integrations
- Supports enterprise-level organizations and teams
- Enterprise-grade data production complying with global security standards: SOC2, ISO270001, FIPS 140-2, SAML 2.0
- Excellent customer support team, including 24/5 chat with product specialists, a Live Help button on the website, and regular live AlphaSense Education webinars
AlphaSense Cons:
- Visualization tools are limited at this time
- Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses
Pricing
Subscription prices vary based on the number of users (for small- and medium-sized companies) and are customized based on the organization (enterprise or company level subscription packages). Please contact the AlphaSense team to learn more.
Semrush
Search engine marketing, competitor keyword research, content marketing, and SEO
Semrush is a SaaS and content marketing tool enabling users to grow their online traffic organically using keyword research, analysis, and SEO techniques. It can help improve your rankings using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media management, content marketing, and ecommerce competitor analysis.
Digital marketers, SEO professionals, content creators, small businesses, and website owners often rely on Semrush to grow and improve their online presence. With Semrush, users can track and analyze their website's search engine rankings. On the competitive intelligence side, they can use Semrush to monitor competitors' online marketing activities, track their ranking, review keywords used, and identify new opportunities to improve their web presence.
However, Semrush is not a holistic, comprehensive market intelligence tool. It lacks access to premium or proprietary content not found on the public web; it also lacks AI and generative AI capabilities that enable you to extract crucial insights from unstructured data. Semrush is a CI tool, but it has a very narrow competitive scope, focusing on web visibility and content marketing strategies instead of product roadmaps, organizational shifts, and deep competitive insights.
Semrush features include:
Competitor Website Analysis
Semrush helps users benchmark competitors’ online visibility and overall market positioning. It provides a snapshot of any competitor’s total online traffic, traffic sources, top keywords, and backlinks.
Competitive Content Strategy
Semrush helps users identify what keywords their competitors are targeting, organically and with paid advertisements. It also audits competitors’ top ranking content by traffic, keyword performance, backlinks, and engagement. This allows users to get a sense of their competitors’ content strategies, as well as how they can shape their own strategy to better compete.
Alerts and Trend Monitoring
Semrush provides daily updates on keyword shifts, ranking volatility, and competitor domain changes. This enables early detection of competitor shifts or new marketing pushes.
AI Features
Semrush incorporates several AI features for competitive intelligence, which include:
- AI Toolkit – includes tools for writing content, summarizing long pieces of content, generating SEO metadata, and more
- Copilot – a personalized AI assistant that suggests tasks, generates reports, and provides optimizations automatically
Semrush Pros:
- Provides a wide range of digital marketing tools and services
- Offers detailed insights into competitors' online marketing activities
- User-friendly interface with easy-to-use features
- Provides in-depth analysis of website traffic and rankings
- Offers customized reports and recommendations for optimization
- Incorporates some AI search and content creation tools
Semrush Cons:
- No premium or proprietary content — only access to public web data
- Not purpose-built for full-scale competitive or market intelligence
- No AI or generative AI features for insight discovery or deep market research
- Some features are only available on higher-tier plans
- Keyword data accuracy is inconsistent
- No real-time data access
- Only sources data from search engines
Pricing
Semrush offers three pricing plans:
- Pro — $139.95/month — for individuals and small teams
- Guru — $249.95/month — for agencies and mid-size businesses
- Business — $499.95/month — for large agencies and enterprises
Each of the subscriptions is also customizable, and for additional cost, additional features can be unlocked. Semrush also offers a free trial. Contact Semrush directly for more details on pricing and customization.
Bloomberg Terminal
Vast repository of financial data and live financial news
Bloomberg Terminal is one of the oldest and most widely used market research and analysis tools in the financial services industry. Launched in 1981 — well before individual computers or the internet were common at firms — Bloomberg led the way in democratizing access to financial market data.
However, as a legacy solution, Bloomberg has struggled in recent years to keep up with modern research needs. In order to stay competitive, Bloomberg has slowly adopted genAI capabilities, though their lack of experience in the space is clear. Compared with competitors that have years of experience developing an AI tech stack, Bloomberg struggles with clunky UI, limited functionality, and an over-reliance on third-party tech.
Still, Bloomberg Terminal is a powerful research insights tool that has some top-notch features for financial research.
Related Reading: Bloomberg Terminal Alternatives
Real-Time Data
Bloomberg Terminal offers access to real-time financial market data for stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, and derivatives. It also offers real-time news coverage of companies, industries, and markets worldwide, along with real-time alerts for significant market events. Finally, Bloomberg provides access to equity research reports from leading analysts, a highly valuable content set that most competitors cannot offer.
Analytics and Modeling Tools
Bloomberg Terminal offers advanced charting, financial modeling, and analytics for equities, fixed income, and commodities. Additionally, tools for risk analytics, asset allocation, and portfolio optimization are available for asset managers and financial professionals.
Trading Platform
Bloomberg offers a complete trading solution, bringing together pricing, analytics, liquidity, automation, and execution in one place.
Generative AI
Bloomberg recently made its foray into genAI with its BloombergGPT large language model (LLM), which is purpose-built for finance and is trained on a vast range of financial data. Bloomberg’s model is safeguarded against hallucination since all genAI responses must be grounded in Bloomberg content. However, it is not clear how the LLM interprets and handles queries.
Bloomberg Pros:
- Proprietary news, research, and analytics from internal and external sources
- Tools for internal collaboration opportunities
- Market execution and order management tools
- Access to traditional markets and other asset classes
- Custom charts, monitors, and alerts for market information
- Purpose-built genAI functionality for finance
- Integrated platform for trading and executing orders across multiple asset classes
Bloomberg Cons:
- Limited genAI and advanced AI search capabilities
- A steep learning curve for new users
- No expert calls and transcripts
- Lack of broker research access for corporates
- Cannot ingest internal content
- Lack of transparency around how the LLM interprets and handles queries
Pricing
Bloomberg does not publicly disclose its pricing, but according to industry sources, Bloomberg Terminal is one of the higher-priced options in the market, with annual subscription fees at $31,980 for a single terminal and $28,320 per terminal per year for multiple terminals.
Bloomberg also bundles multiple services into its product, making it clunky and complex for the average user. Its highly technical user interface is ideal for financial services professionals, but is less user-friendly for corporate users, and there is a steep learning curve for new users.
Tableau
Data analytics and business intelligence platform
Tableau is a business intelligence tool and the undisputed leader in the end-to-end analytics space. Due to its internal research capabilities, Tableau is more of an organizational intelligence platform than it is a market analysis tool. By giving organizations a better way to store, organize, catalog, and leverage their own internal data, the Tableau platform elevates data prep, analysis, governance, and collaboration.
Tableau’s platform helps organizations work more efficiently to centralize data and provide easy access for team members in every department, regardless of their location. By ensuring all team members throughout an organization can see the same data at the same time, Tableau helps organizations streamline their internal communication and decision-making efforts.
However, Tableau does not offer access to any of the external content sets that are integral for market research, such as company documents, news, expert call transcripts, and broker research. Tableau does incorporate AI technology for streamlining internal data analysis, but it cannot be used to extract insights from external sources.
Tableau includes the following key features:
Data Visualization and Dashboards
Tableau incorporates easily buildable, customizable dashboards, as well as various types of charts. These are highly useful for visualizing and monitoring performance of the business, as well as daily operations and logistics.
AI Features
Tableau incorporates a natural language feature called “Ask Data” that allows users to get instant visual answers to natural language questions (for example, “Show me sales by segment”). Additionally, Tableau incorporates AI tools that provide automated trend explanations, predictive analytics, and anomaly detection in dashboards.
Integrations
Tableau integrates with various structured data sources (Excel, Salesforce, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, etc.) and is able to combine disparate internal data sets into a centralized view.
Tableau Pros:
- Advanced data visualization and graphing capabilities
- Incorporates AI features for streamlining internal data analysis
- Mobile support and responsive dashboard
- Able to handle large amounts of data
- Easy to implement
- Efficient collaboration with teammates through data-sharing capabilities
Tableau Cons:
- No external sources necessary for market intelligence, such as company documents, news, expert call transcripts, and broker research
- No AI search technology for extracting insights from external sources
Pricing:
For enterprises, Tableau offers the following tiered subscription options:
- Enterprise Viewer—at $35 per user per month, this is the base model and the cheapest subscription option available
- Enterprise Explorer—at $70 per user per month, the mid-level subscription gives users access to more features and functionality
- Enterprise Creator—at $115 per user per month, the top-shelf subscription gives you all the available feature options
If you want to make sure Tableau is a good fit for your organization before committing to an annual membership, they offer free trials for all of their products.
Answer the Public
Helps with generating content ideas
Answer the Public is a “search listening” tool that was designed with public relations teams in mind. Similar to Google Trends, Answer the Public analyzes search engine data to reveal the intent behind a search. The more you know about what people are searching for online, the easier it is to create customer-focused content that specifically addresses their biggest pain points.
Answer the Public is the platform for you when you're trying to generate new content ideas, collect market research data, create more effective marketing campaigns, or ensure your new product will address your target market’s biggest pain points.
However, Answer the Public is not a complete market analysis tool, as it lacks access to key content sets such as company documents, news, expert transcripts, and broker research. It also has no AI search technology capabilities and lacks any tools for deep analysis or theme detection.
Answer the Public includes the following key features:
Search Listening
Answer the Public helps users uncover what people are searching for online by scraping Google and Bing autocomplete suggestions. It also provides automatic notifications when patterns shift for selected topics.
Visual Topic Mapping
Answer the Public presents keyword data in intuitive visual formats, helping users quickly spot content gaps and emerging themes in customer searches.
Trend Comparison Tools
Answer the Public enables side-by-side comparison of keyword data across time periods to tracks shifts in public interest or consumer behavior.
Answer the Public Pros:
- Helps perform keyword research
- Helps track and monitor an organization’s brand reputation
- Provides content inspiration
- Offers comparative search behavior analysis tools
- Offers CSV data export capabilities
Answer the Public Cons:
- Not built for strategic decision-making
- Only offers high-level, publicly available data
- Lacks external content sets for holistic market research, such as company documents, news, expert transcripts, and broker research
- No AI search technology capabilities
- No ability to drill down further into data
- No qualitative or contextual details
Pricing:
Answer the Public offers three subscription options:
- Individual: $11/month, for individuals with limited search needs
- Pro: $57.75/month, for teams of up to 3 users who require unlimited searches
- Expert: $116.08/month, for teams who need an unlimited number of users and searches
Free Market Research Tools
If none of the tools above fit into your budget, there are plenty of free market research tools out there that offer valuable insights.
Google Trends – a keyword research tool that can help you uncover search trends, discover subtopics, or see whether search terms are rising or falling in popularity. Insights are high-level and not robust enough for deep qualitative analysis, but can be a good starting point.
Google Analytics – a free data analysis tool that uses machine learning to provide valuable consumer insights and digital behavior analytics. Does not serve as a comprehensive market analysis tool due to lack of external content sets and qualitative research capabilities.
TypeForm – a free market research survey tool you can use to create online surveys and questionnaires to gather customer feedback and improve your content marketing strategy. Has a user-generated data focus but does not provide access to broader external intelligence.
Pew Research Center – a nonpartisan fact tank that conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis, and social science research. Specializes in secondary, public-source research with no business or competitive focus and no real-time alerts.
Try AlphaSense For Free
With AlphaSense’s AI-based smart search functionality, customizable alerts, intuitive user interface, and extensive library of premium content, it is truly the only AI-powered market research solution your business needs to succeed.
If you’re interested to see how AlphaSense compares with other market analysis platforms — including Bloomberg Terminal, PitchBook, CB Insights, GLG, Third Bridge, and many more — don’t miss our AlphaSense Compares page.
For professionals looking to elevate their market research strategies and search capabilities, AlphaSense offers a free two-week trial of its platform. See how AlphaSense can level up your research and intelligence strategies today.
