AlphaSense vs CB Insights

Overview

AlphaSense

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 research 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

CB Insights

CB Insights offers market and technology insights and intelligence on venture capital firms, private companies, and angel investments to its clients. Its massive information database gives users the ability to track industries, investors, and private companies based on their use of technology.

The CB Insights platform focuses on tech market intelligence in particular. Users get a chance to preview emerging technologies, track and anticipate competitor strategy, support digital innovation and transformation, and connect with multiple tech stakeholders. Much of the platform’s data is publicly available or scraped from the web. CB Insights’ machine learning engine ingests and structures this unstructured data, and then analysts validate and add proprietary data — which is a unique and key value offering from CB Insights..

Although CB insights provides deep, comprehensive access to information in the tech space and competitive intelligence, it lacks content sets that can give you a more holistic market outlook, such as broker research, global and SEC filings, and expert calls. Additionally, though it utilizes machine learning to track trends and topics, it has no generative AI and very limited smart search capabilities, which limits the scope and speed of research.

​​Through its platform, you can find:

• Emerging and trending tech companies
• A mosaic score that predicts the success or failure of a company
• In-depth data and analytics on a company

Additional features of the CB Insights platform include:

Company Profiles

CB Insights provides in-depth profiles of companies, including startups and established firms, particularly in the tech space. These profiles include information on funding history, key investors, business models, product offerings, and more.

Venture Capital and M&A Tracking

Users can monitor venture capital investments, private equity deals, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity, particularly in the tech space. This feature helps in understanding where investors are placing their bets and identifying potential investment opportunities.

AI-Driven Insights

The platform applies predictive analytics and machine learning to forecast industry shifts, company trajectories, and investment trends. A key AI feature of CB Insights is their Mosaic Score, which helps predict the success or failure of a private company by analyzing their health and growth potential.

Research Reports

The platform provides a library of in-depth research reports on various industries, technologies, and market trends. These reports offer qualitative and quantitative insights, including market forecasts, growth drivers, and key challenges.

Data Visualizations

CB Insights features interactive data visualizations, such as market maps and trend graphs, to make complex market data more accessible and actionable for users.

Customizable Dashboards and Real-Time Alerts

The platform allows users to create tailored dashboards to monitor key metrics, trends, and market movements relevant to their research needs. Users can also set up real-time alerts for specific companies, industries, or market events, ensuring they stay informed about the latest developments.

API Access and Data Integration

For enterprise organizations, CB Insights offers API access, allowing integration with internal analytics systems and custom dashboards.

CB Insights Pros

• Excellent platform for tech space opportunities
• Reliable tool for venture capitalists, private equity firms, and corporate development teams
• Comprehensive private market data
• Uses predictive modeling and AI to identify trends, risks, and investment opportunities
• Access to in-depth industry reports and research analytics
• Mosaic Score feature helps assess potential success of private companies
• Allows users to set up dashboards and alerts for industry trends, competitors, and funding news
• Supports APIs and integrations

CB Insights Cons

• Focuses primarily on private tech companies, with very limited public company coverage
• No access to global/SEC filings, ESG reports, newspapers, trade journals, expert calls, or broker research
• Platform’s dashboards and reporting features are less customizable than some competitors’
• No smart search functionality
• Leans toward technology market use cases; lack of breadth and depth in other markets