AlphaSense vs GLG

AlphaSense

Founded in 2011, AlphaSense has thousands of enterprise clients, including 88% of the S&P 100, 95% of the top consultancies, 80% of the top asset management firms, and 20 of the largest pharmaceutical companies. This platform is used by corporations for strategy, competitive intelligence, and market landscaping, as well as by IR and financial professionals for messaging research, due diligence, market monitoring, and deal sourcing.

AlphaSense sources information from over 10,000+ different content sources, including company documents and regulatory filings, news and trade journals, broker research, and expert calls. Coupled with this vast universe of content, AlphaSense’s smart search and generative AI capabilities help shorten the time to insight and take your research process from reactive to proactive.

In July 2024, AlphaSense and Tegus joined forces, bringing unparalleled access to even more insights and covering more industries and companies than ever before.

For more on how the two platforms complement each other, check out our page AlphaSense and Tegus.

AlphaSense includes the following key features:

Extensive Out-of-the-Box Content Library

AlphaSense allows you to combine valuable internal content with our out-of-the-box content library that includes earnings transcripts and other company documents, SEC and global filings, trade journals, news, and regulatory documents. AlphaSense users also have access to two premium and proprietary content offerings. These are:

• Wall Street Insights® – A collection of broker research from Wall Street’s leading firms, covering global sector themes, industries, and companies from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms, available within the AlphaSense platform. Research professionals can even preview the contents of a broker report, saving them wasted time and money on potentially fruitless research.
• Expert Calls – 200K+ proprietary transcripts with industry experts, competitors, customers, professionals, and former and current executives, with the ability to conduct your own 1:1 expert calls, with 70% cost savings compared to competitor expert networks.

In addition to these sources, you can upload and search through your own internal knowledge base, including:

• Internal research, notes, and presentations
• Investment memos
• Reports from industry and market intelligence providers
• Newsletters, web pages, and RSS feeds

Generative Search

Our genAI chat experience transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions 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. 

Whenever you search for information, Generative Search helps you get up to speed on a company or topic by instantly getting you the answers you need. You can dig deeper into topics by asking follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query. Each answer will always provide citations to the exact snippet of text from where the information was sourced. Generative Search is constantly evolving and incorporates a variety of reasoning models and agentic workflows.

Smart Summaries

Smart Summaries allows users 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 links to the exact location in the text from where the summaries pull — combining high accuracy with easy verification. 

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.

Generative Grid pulls data from both premium external documents in the AlphaSense platform and users’ internal content. From there, users can choose preset templates or create their own to automate routine workflows. Each summary provides a direct citation to the source material it was pulled from.

Sentiment Analysis

Using sentiment analysis, a feature built with natural language processing (NLP), AlphaSense identifies changes in a text’s tone and subjective meaning. Then, using different color codes, it helps you identify if the document has positive, negative, or neutral sentiments.

Each search term gets a sentiment change score that helps you track any slight change in market sentiments across time. With this feature, you can catch subtle inflection points in language that move markets and provide early indicators of shifting corporate performance.

Smart Synonyms™

Another feature is the AI-based Smart Synonyms™ technology—a capability that studies keywords and intent behind your search engine queries. Using advanced algorithms, AlphaSense eliminates noise from your search, including content with matching keywords that is irrelevant to search objectives. AI search functionality lets you find the exact documents and snippets most relevant to your search, saving time and energy for more high-level tasks like analysis.

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 undifferentiated work, allowing you to compete on your ability to analyze the data, not aggregate it.

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.
• Our Black-lining feature allows you to automatically identify any QoQ changes in SEC filings.
• 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
• 10+ years of investment in AI
• Incorporates AI search technology, machine learning, and sentiment analysis
• GenAI features like Generative Search, Smart Summaries, and Generative Grid for enhanced and streamlined workflows
• AI and genAI tools that 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

GLG

The Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) is one of the world’s largest expert network companies, connecting business professionals with experts from multiple industries for intelligence insights, advice, and mentorship.

GLG provides users access to a massive global network of over one million subject-matter experts on demand, empowering them to make better-informed business decisions.

The platform offers the following products and services to clients:

GLG Direct

The key product, GLG Direct, focuses on offering expert consultations. These are typically one-on-one sessions between clients and subject-matter experts, where clients ask questions and receive direct answers and advice on topics of interest, businesses, or industries. These consultations occur via phone and video calls, private meetings, placements, and in some cases, expert witness services.

Users can get one-on-one consultations, have calls translated, enlist additional experts and stakeholders, and receive a full audio recording or transcript of the call.

GLG Library

The GLG Library gives you access to over 20,000 expert interview transcripts, webcasts, and other premium content on demand — all of which can be downloaded for offline consumption. It also recommends trending and popular content based on your interests.

Content is hyperlinked and indexed for easy accessibility, enabling you to skip ahead to insights that matter to you. It also features AI-powered search and personalized recommendations. Additionally, GLG has a trained team to assess expert interviews for legal compliance and quality, ensuring reliability and adherence to professional standards.

GLG Integrated Insights

GLG draws from the expertise of research professionals to produce market assessments, company research reports, and competitive analyses. These insights can help you identify and take advantage of market opportunities before your competitors do.

GLG Events

The platform also creates events that bring together the world’s leading voices on global markets to discuss trends and perspectives. GLG events are often conducted as virtual webinars or live roundtables, teleconferences, and webcasts.

GLG Pros:

• Access to over one million experts
• Serves multiple types of clients, including law firms, businesses, and investors
• Offers both qualitative and quantitative insights
• Provides a massive library of expert interviews and event replays
• Integrates some AI-powered search features in Library

GLG Cons:

• No broker research is available
• AI tools are limited at this time
• No real-time monitoring of markets to keep users updated
• Content is restricted to expert calls and conventional qualitative and quantitative research findings

AlphaSense vs GLG: Features Comparison