Valona Alternatives & Competitors

Overview

Valona (formerly M-Brain) is a competitive and market intelligence platform that combines proprietary technology and human intelligence to collect, filter, and analyze information. Businesses use this platform to perform tasks that include market analysis, research, strategic planning, and decision-making.

Like several other advanced market intelligence platforms, Valona utilizes artificial intelligence to streamline the research process and ensure maximum efficiency and accuracy in its results. Additionally, Valona has user-friendly visual dashboards that display the latest content and comments relevant to any theme of interest.

Valona offers three key solutions:

• Intelligence Plaza: Intelligence Plaza is a comprehensive intelligence tool that collects market information from multiple sources and stores it in one central location. This includes data from field intelligence, social media, market reports, and daily news feeds. Valona helps you translate this data into battlecards, dashboards, insight discovery and commentary for your organization.
• Market and Competitive Intelligence Monitoring and Analysis: This solution allows you to keep track of your competitors, customers, and key market movements.
• Research and Advisory Services: This solution helps with decision-making, strategy, research, forecasting, due diligence, and benchmarking.

Trusted by over 500 global enterprises, Valona is a great option for corporations looking for a web and social media listening tool for competitive intelligence purposes. It would most benefit companies that require classified content, as it pertains to social media, as well as companies that need quick and accurate summarization of news, trade articles, and industry databases for their competitive research.

However, Valona has limitations and is not suitable for all businesses. Its content sets and features are designed to serve corporations, but financial services clients may find the platform inefficient for their workflows due to a lack of premium content sets and key functionalities.

Even for corporations, Valona is only relevant and useful for competitive intelligence roles. It does not hold premium market research content sets, such as broker research or expert calls. Despite the AI and machine learning elements, the search engine is not robust or advanced enough to truly surface all the important and valuable insights necessary for a complete picture of a trend, industry, or market.

Corporations and financial institutions that want to move the needle and gain a true competitive advantage need a platform that aggregates premium, proprietary, private, and public content sets — such as broker reports, expert insights, and company documents — and uses advanced search technology that helps eliminate research blind spots and maximizes efficiency and accuracy.

Valona Pros:

• Contains features that enhance multiple functions in your business, including decision-making and market awareness
• Visual dashboard shows the latest content and comments relevant to a theme
• Supports collaboration and data sharing within an organization
• Advanced search features for relevant information
• Performs both competitor and market analysis
• Uses generative AI to produce business summaries

Valona Cons:

• Lack of content relevant to financial services professionals
• No expert call library or company filings
• No access to broker research
• Lacks sentiment analysis
• Steep learning curve for new users
• Lacks sophisticated search technology
• Only provides access to publicly available, low-value content
• Provides little to no value outside competitive intelligence roles

Below, we walk through some of the top alternatives to Valona, as well as who would benefit most from each solution.

AlphaSense

Best for: Conducting comprehensive competitive research and analysis with advanced AI features for added speed, accuracy, and scope—all in one place

AlphaSense is a leading enterprise-grade market intelligence and AI search platform built for robust market and investment research. 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 enables you to extract insights and intelligence from both high-value internal and external content with the power of artificial intelligence and generative AI — all on 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 in the industry. Our content includes:

• Company documents for both private and public firms, 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, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo
• 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. With AlphaSense, enterprise users can leverage 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, purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights, includes:

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.

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 simultaneously 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, saving 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

Smart Summaries can instantly surface 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, proprietary to AlphaSense, 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 time and energy, allowing you to get straight to analysis and other high-level tasks.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis, a natural language processing-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 passages in the document that have positive, negative, and neutral sentiment.

Additionally, 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 this feature to make better-informed investment decisions and improve risk management strategies.

Company Perspectives (BamSEC)

BamSEC effectively makes 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)

Users 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 — including Microsoft 365/Sharepoint, Box, Google Drive, S3, Egnyte, and more.

Our integration capabilities allow for more streamlined collaboration with members across your organization, improving overall team productivity. Our proprietary AI technology surfaces crucial insights across both internal and external company content, 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 enable 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, and 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

Klue

Best for: Sales enablement and tracking unlimited competitors

Another alternative to Valona is Klue, a competitive intelligence platform used by companies to streamline competitor analysis. Klue enables product marketers and other users to plan, collect, analyze and distribute competitive intelligence information across organizational departments.

Similarly to Valona, Klue is an automated web crawler which searches across the internet and online for competitor information. Klue gathers insights about competitor product offerings, launches, changes in marketing and price strategies, and other relevant data.

Klue sources this information from publicly available sources like newsletters, press briefings, releases, social media, and customer reviews.. Klue users can also upload their own research insights or notes into the platform.

To help you gain a competitive advantage with the intelligence collected, Klue:

• Collects and curates data collected about competitors from multiple public sources
• Uses AI to filter, tag, and surface insights, helping teams build and maintain accurate competitor profiles and battlecards
• Helps you generate exceptional content for your business and marketing strategies. That includes enhancing pre-existing battlecards and boards around competitors and new market trends
• Allows you to share your curated findings across multiple business departments, leading to better company-wide decision-making, planning and strategy execution.
• Enables you to set targets measure your success against your competitors

Klue supports collaboration, enabling you to share insights across the organization using pre-existing tools. Klue connects to Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft Sharepoint, which can streamline your workflow.

Despite its exceptional features, Klue falls short in several key areas, most notably access to premium content sources and advanced AI search technology. Ultimately, Klue has limited use outside of competitive intelligence roles, since it’s primarily a web listening tool that only gives access to public data, and its AI is not built for advanced predictive analytics.

Klue Pros:

• Comprehensive competitive research and tracking features
• Incorporates AI for better filtering and categorization of insights
• High-quality battlecard options
• Navigable, intuitive, and scalable platform
• Supports collaboration and integrations
• Supports integrations with plenty of tools, including Slack, Salesforce, and other CRMs
• Offers high company data security
• Has a community forum for collaboration with other users

Klue Cons:

• Limited data sources — only public data
• No expert call library
• No SEC filings, earnings estimates, or financial reports
• No broker research
• No trade journals or newspapers
• No advanced search capabilities or sentiment analysis
• AI not built for advanced predictive analytics or deep research
• Best for competitive intelligence but limited usability for other roles

Kompyte

Best for: Enabling go-to market teams with the insights they need to beat the competition

Kompyte is a subsidiary of Semrush and provides a more generalized approach to competitive intelligence. The platform aims to offer real-time competitive intelligence at scale, automatically tracking competitor updates across hundreds of sources that include websites, social media, published content, ads, review sites, and job portals.

Its intuitive user dashboard displays real-time updates about competitors' activities from diverse digital sources, including websites, ads, content platforms, and social media.

This platform is ideal for businesses looking to stay competitive in their respective industries. It can be especially useful for marketing teams, sales teams, and executives who want to monitor their competitors' activities and adjust their strategies accordingly. Kompyte incorporates AI search and analysis technology that filters out noise and delivers the insights most relevant to each client, though the technology is less robust than AlphaSense’s.

Kompyte can perform the following tasks:

• Automates the tracking of competitors’ online activity across multiple digital channels
• Generates unlimited battlecards to help users make better sales and marketing strategies
• Offers tools for win/loss analysis, helping teams understand why deals are won or lost against competitors
• Instantly detects changes on competitor websites, social media, blog posts, and whitepapers
• Tracks competitors’ organic search and paid search performance

Like many other tools on this list, including Valona, Kompyte lacks premium or proprietary content sources that are integral for holistic, comprehensive market or investment research. It also does not always provide the most accurate or up-to-date data, which is an important drawback for financial and business professionals.

Kompyte Pros:

• Highly visual, user-friendly interface
• Customizable dashboards for tracking competitors, KPIs, and market trends
• Automatically updated battlecards and win/loss reports
• Features to aid sales training and onboarding
• Real-time monitoring and alerts about competitors' activities
• Includes AI-powered insights
• Integrates with CRM platforms like Salesforce, Hubspot, and other sales enablement tools, as well as communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams

Kompyte Cons:

• Limited to publicly available data sources
• Limited qualitative insights that are necessary for comprehensive research
• Some users have reported issues with data accuracy
• Steep learning curve for new users
• Lacks broker research
• Lacks expert call transcripts

Contify

Best for: Competitive intelligence across multiple functions, including supplier, risk, media, and opportunity intelligence

Contify is a competitive and market intelligence platform serving customers primarily in the BFSI, pharmaceutical, IT, and consulting industries. Its platform is built on strong AI search and analysis capabilities, and it pulls data from 500,000+ sources including company websites, press releases, social media, regulators, job portals, and news media. However, like Valona, it does not provide access to proprietary data sources, such as broker research or expert calls.

Contify comes with a variety of features that include: news tracking, market intelligence, competitor tracking, and customer insights. Users can collaborate and share knowledge using the news API, which enables teams and co-workers to collaborate more effectively and make better data-driven decisions.

Contify serves businesses of all sizes and across various industries, including financial services, pharmaceuticals, technology, consulting, and manufacturing. It can track multiple companies at once, making it particularly useful for companies looking to expand their market presence, launch new products, or stay ahead of the competition.

Key areas of search focus by Contify users include patents, innovation, regulatory, M&A deals, supplier, and risk. Contify’s customers operate in highly-technical and highly-regulated sectors, meaning the accuracy, relevance, and reliability of data insights is paramount.

Some key competitive analysis features Contify offers include:

• Customizable competitive and market intelligence, gathering insights on specific competitors from public sources, such as news articles, social media, press releases, blogs, websites, and more
• AI-powered data collection and analysis, which processes large amounts of information, filters out the noise, and delivers the most relevant insights
• 360-degree competitor tracking across multiple domains, such as product launches, marketing campaigns, executive movements, financial updates, partnerships, and M&A activities
• Pre-built and customizable reports that summarize competitive insights for easy consumption

Due to Contify’s lack of premium or proprietary content sets — such as broker reports and expert calls — as well as some important limitations in data accuracy and customization, this platform cannot function as a holistic comprehensive market intelligence tool.

Contify Pros:

• Real-time alerts and customizable newsfeed with industry developments, competitor activities, and customer behavior
• Uses AI and NLP to collect and analyze data from various sources
• Provides a centralized platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing
• Offers a user-friendly interface with easy-to-use features
• Offers intelligence on multiple functions, including regulations, innovations, M&A, industry themes and patents
• Features smart translation feature for over 100+ languages
• Integrates with Microsoft Teams, Slack, SharePoint, CRMs, and other enterprise tools

Contify Cons:

• Some users have reported issues with data accuracy and customization options
• Lacks access to broker research
• Lacks expert call transcripts
• Users report steep learning curve due to wide range of features and customization options
• No free version or free trial option

Crayon

Best for: Tracking a small number of competitors and streamlining product marketing operations

Crayon is a competitive intelligence platform company that enables users to track their competitor’s’ digital footprints by studying their marketing, product launches, and pricing.

Using Crayon’s advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, businesses can collect critical information from their competitors, both online and offline. Some data sources used by Crayon are news, events, competitor website content, social media, forums, and customer reviews.

From one platform, you can access the following competitor information:

• Go-to-market strategy
• Web presence and positioning, including website copy and branding
• Product packaging and pricing strategies
• News, events, and public relations
• Teams and human resources
• Content, media, and social media presence and strategies
• Customer reviews and support
• Partners and investors
• Sales enablement

Crayon’s platform is used by businesses in a variety of sectors, including financial services, retail, healthcare, technology, and SaaS, for competitive intelligence from public digital signals.

However, Crayon is not the right tool for deep market or investment research, due to its lack of premium external content, analytics and modeling tools, and advanced AI search capabilities. Even though Crayon offers certain AI summarization and generative AI chat features, it lacks the robust AI search features that help users separate the signal from the noise and eliminate blind spots.

Crayon Pros:

• Uses cutting-edge AI and ML capabilities to source useful data on competitors
• User-friendly platform
• Supports multiple integrations with other software
• Supports automated alerts and newsletters
• Offers thought leadership and industry-specific reports
• Offers in-depth analytics and metrics for CI
• Supports customizable reports and battlecards
• Ability to tag or like relevant items, which then leads to more personalized competitor insights

Crayon Cons:

• Crayon is relatively pricey, at $15,000 per year
• Less scalable and modifiable than similar tools
• Some users complain of irrelevant noise
• Some users complain of inaccurate or stale data
• Not designed for holistic, comprehensive market or investment research
• Does not host content on its platform; only provides links to URLs
• Does not have an expert call library
• No financial modeling tools
• No broker research reports
• No advanced search capabilities, such as keyword and synonym recognition, thematic search, and sentiment analysis

How to Choose an Alternative to Valona

Valona is a great option for corporations looking for a web and social media listening tool for competitive intelligence purposes. However, due to its lack of certain premium and proprietary content sets and search features, this platform cannot function on its own as a full-scale market intelligence solution, especially for enterprise-level firms. Those looking for a platform that goes beyond just competitive intelligence insights will need to consider other options.

When choosing an alternative, consider the following criteria in your search:

• Data coverage: What kind of data do you need access to in order to gain a complete picture in your research? Some platforms will come with premium content sets like broker research and expert calls, while others may only come with lower-value public data. Consider what type and volume of data is necessary for your goals.
• Data quality: When choosing an alternative to Valona, opt for one with accurate, up-to-date, and reliable data. User ratings and reviews from websites like G2 and TrustRadius can help you make better decisions here.
• Pricing: Consider your competitive analysis budget when choosing an alternative. Some tools are more expensive than others, although they serve identical functions. Choose a platform with flexible subscriptions or one that falls within your budgetary limitations.
• User interface and user experience: A market intelligence platform should streamline your workflow and enhance your research process. Make sure that the solution you select is truly benefiting you, whether by saving time, increasing confidence, widening the breadth of your research, or all of the above.
• Additional features: Consider what additional features, other than content sets, are paramount to your process and workflow. Might you benefit from advanced AI search features like synonym recognition and sentiment analysis? Or maybe you need automated monitoring, company tearsheets, or customer analytics? Make sure the platform you choose supports your unique business needs and makes your job easier.