PitchBook vs CB Insights (vs AlphaSense)

What’s the Best Market Intelligence Software?

When choosing between market research platforms, your search must begin with identifying your organization's specific needs and challenges. This critical step helps you determine the essential features and benefits that will be a good fit in your workflow and result in improvements in your research process.

Note that the optimal market intelligence solution will vary depending on your organization’s resources and needs. The right research platform should enable you to execute on analysis and strategy with greater efficiency and ease, improve decision-making, and put you in the best position to gain a competitive advantage in your market.

In this article, we will cover two popular market intelligence solutions — CB Insights and PitchBook — to determine how they might suit your business needs. We also compare both with AlphaSense to demonstrate how our platform can fill in the gaps and take your market research to the next level.

For each platform, we discuss:

• Features, data types, and content sets
• Key use cases
• Pros and cons
• Reviews and ratings
• Pricing

PitchBook

Best for: private market financial data for deal sourcing, fundraising, and due diligence

PitchBook is a powerful investment research and intelligence platform for venture capitalists, M&A investors, hedge funds, and private equity holders. It has access to valuations, financial histories, investors, and executives on over 4.7 million private companies and around 108,000 public companies worldwide. It also keeps expanding factsets and meticulous records of over 1.9 million deals with over 450,000 investors and 110,000 funds.

PitchBook also gives you access to information like:

• Company patents
• Financial analysis
• Non-financial metrics like employee counts and social media following
• Company leadership teams and management
• Deal history, including deal sizes and pre-and post-money valuations
• Former and current company investors
• Financial data charting and infographics
• Networking through executives’ LinkedIn profiles, contact and messaging details

PitchBook is most beneficial for private market intelligence, venture capital, deal sourcing, due diligence, fundraising, networking, benchmarking companies, and asset allocation across your portfolio.

Some of PitchBook’s key features include:

Advanced Search Filters

Using PitchBook’s advanced search tools, users can find deep insights on companies, deals, investors, debts, and lenders. Users can search industries by name, location, age, investors, lenders, and funding stage.

Emerging Spaces

PitchBook uses the Emerging Spaces feature to introduce investors and financial experts to new and emerging spaces. That helps investors learn about trending markets and explore alternative investment opportunities.

High-Quality User Interface

Much like AlphaSense, PitchBook has an intuitive user interface that allows professional and industry experts to integrate the tool into their workflows. It’s easy to navigate, search, and explore different companies and their detailed profiles from the PitchBook Interface.

Moreover, users can also access PitchBook from their PCs or smartphones, allowing them to carry and access insights on the go.

Integrations and APIs

PitchBook supports integrations and APIs that allow you to import and export data to other applications. Also, they offer a Google Chrome extension that enables you to access their services directly from your browser.

PitchBook Pros:

• Great private market coverage, including company patents, financial analysis, information on former and current company investors, and more
• Real-time data and proprietary research reports
• Provides access to broker research through integration of third-party equity research reports for an additional fee
• Advanced search filters help investors get deep insights into companies
• Emerging spaces for investors looking to capitalize on new and alternative markets
• Custom, real-time alerts are available
• Users can upload internal content into the platform
• Supports integrations from third-party software

PitchBook Cons:

• Limited public market coverage
• Lacks access to an expert call library
• Limited access to earning transcripts, and no SEC and global filings
• No access to advanced AI search functionality or sentiment analysis
• Equity research is only available for an additional fee
• Lacks trade journals

Related Reading:PitchBook Alternatives & Competitors

AlphaSense vs PitchBook

PitchBook vs CB Insights

CB Insights

Best for: Institutional and enterprise-grade users who need to monitor existing and emerging market trends and key players, particularly in the tech sector

CB Insights is a market intelligence platform with a massive database for users seeking technology insights and analyses on companies, private capital, and angel investments. This platform is primarily used to support company monitoring, opportunity discovery and forecasting, and vendor research and evaluation.

It also provides insights into companies’ latest funding rounds, venture capital, proprietary company data, business relationships, patent analytics, earnings transcripts, and more. This data is primarily acquired through machine learning and analyst briefings, a feature unique to CB Insights.

CB Insights offers the following key features:

Market Intelligence and Trend Analysis

The platform identifies emerging industry trends, disruptive startups, and sector-specific developments by analyzing patent filings, earnings calls, news mentions, and investment patterns.

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.

Deals and Funding Tracking

CB Insights monitors global venture capital, private equity, and M&A activity, offering granular insights into deal structures, funding rounds, and acquisition trends.

Research Reports and Proprietary Insights

CB Insights creates data-driven reports and generates proprietary research on various industries, including fintech, AI, healthcare, and enterprise technology.

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 data and research analytics
• Mosaic Score feature helps assess potential success of private companies
• Allows users to set 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
• Not suitable for small-scale firms

AlphaSense

Best for: Conducting comprehensive qualitative research and analysis, with an emphasis on speed, accuracy, and scope

AlphaSense is a leading enterprise-grade market intelligence and AI search platform built for robust financial and market research. This platform is designed for research and business professionals looking to implement a comprehensive research strategy powered by automated features and proprietary AI technology.

Consistentlyranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also recently named one ofFortune’s Top 50 AI Innovators.

Here’s how AlphaSense enables you to extract insights and answers 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 allows you to combine valuable internal content with 10,000+ private, public, premium, and proprietary external data sources into one platform.

Our external content sources include trade journals, news, regulatory documents, earnings transcripts, investor presentations and other company documents, and SEC and global filings. AlphaSense users also have access to two premium and proprietary content offerings. These are:

• Wall Street Insights®– A collection ofbroker research covering global sector themes, industries, and companies from 1,500+ 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 Transcript Library– 185K+ proprietary one-on-one call transcripts with industry experts, competitors, customers, partners, and former and current executives, with the ability toconduct your own 1:1 expert calls for less.

In July 2024, AlphaSense acquired expert network company Tegus, bringing unparalleled access to even more insights, and covering more industries and companies than ever before. Learn more about the combined offering at AlphaSense and Tegus.

Enterprise Intelligence

In addition to the external content sources listed above, AlphaSense’s Enterprise Intelligence solution allows you to upload and search through your own internal content. That includes:

• Internal research, notes, and presentations
• CIMs and investment memos
• Reports from industry and market intelligence providers
• Emails, newsletters, web pages, and RSS feeds

In this way, AlphaSense centralizes all your knowledge in one place—the internal and external—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 content and hundreds of millions of premium external documents.

AlphaSense meets the highest industry standards—including SOC2 and ISO27001 compliance, regular, accredited third-party penetration testing, FIPS 140-2 standard encryption on all content, and SAML 2.0 integration.

AI Search & Summarization Technology

Our industry-leading suite of generative AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights:

Generative Search

Our generative AI 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.

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.

Generative Grid

Our newest generative AI tool, Generative Grid, applies multiple genAI prompts on 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.

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 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.

Integration Capabilities

Customers can easily integrate content at enterprise scale through our Ingestion API or enterprise-grade connectors—like Microsoft 365/Sharepoint, Box, Google Drive, S3, 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 featureshelp teams manage and share insights more effectively.
• Table Toolsallow you to move faster with spreadsheet-style visualizationsdirectly from company filings, so you can chain together, edit, and optimize tables for analysis.
• Image Searchallows you to discover insights buried in charts to quickly capture data without reading through pages of documents.
• Snippet Explorerallows you to effortlessly look at any topic or theme and all its historical mentions in a single view.
• Our Black-liningfeature allows you to automatically identify any QoQ changes in SEC filings.
• Automated Monitoringallows you to set up real-time alertsthat 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 & regulatory sites
• Incorporates AI search technology, machine learning, and sentiment analysis
• Generative AI features like Generative Search and Smart Summaries for enhanced and streamlined workflow
• GenAI tools can be applied to integrated internal content
• Automated and customizable alerts
• All-in-one research platform
• 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

Feature Comparison

Ratings & Reviews

PitchBook

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 on G2, 8.6 out of 10 on TrustRadius

Popular Positives

• Comprehensive data on private market financials, deal flow, and market transactions
• User-friendly interface
• Quarterly reports and data analyses are insightful and beneficial for investors and financial professionals

Popular Negatives

• Public market data can be improved
• Occasional concerns about data not being up-to-date, particularly regarding valuations and quarterly financial numbers
• Limited mobile functionality

CB Insights

4.3 out of 5 on G2, 7.4 out of 10 on TrustRadius

Popular Positives

• Great resource for monitoring market trends and company profiles in the tech sector
• Detailed private company data
• Responsive customer support

Popular Negatives

• Not a comprehensive market research tool: limited data and primary source discovery
• Limited integrations; lacks plugins and has fewer integrations than alternatives
• Occasional concerns about accuracy and timeliness of data provided
• Platform’s interface is less intuitive than some alternatives

AlphaSense

Rating: 4.7 out of 5 on G2, 9.5 out of 10 on TrustRadius

Popular Positives

• Advanced search functionality, allowing for quick and efficient retrieval of relevant documents and insights
• Comprehensive data and analysis on public and private markets
• Real-time data availability and information updates
• Intuitive interface and great customer support
• Provides the ability to upload, index, and search through internal content
• Robust document annotation capabilities, facilitating improved productivity and collaboration

Popular Negatives

• Visualization tools are limited to financial data at this time
• Lack of collaborative tools for knowledge management

Pricing & Billing

PitchBook

PitchBook does not publicly disclose pricing information. However, according to third-party reports, the platform is priced at an average of $12K/user or $25K/3 users per year, with an additional $7K for every subsequent user. Prices go down as seat numbers go up, and a free trial may be available upon request. Equity research is available but comes at an additional fee.

CB Insights

CB Insights does not publicly disclose pricing information. However, according to third-party sources, the core offering starts at $60,000 per year. Additional feature upgrades such as Market Map Maker, Mosaic Scores, Expert Collections, and proprietary data and analytics offerings are available, with corresponding price increases per tier ranging from a couple to tens of thousands.

According to CEO Anand Sanwal, CB Insights’ pricing demonstrates how it's geared toward institutional customers and may not be affordable for startups, angels, and similar organizations.

AlphaSense

AlphaSense users can access the all-in-one market research platform including unparalleled access to market data and expert analysis, proprietary AI search features, and a better, customer-centric user experience at a competitive price point. AlphaSense users have the option between enterprise and per-seat pricing, making it more accessible for businesses of all sizes.

Contact us for more information on pricing options, or start a free 2-week trial here.

AlphaSense: A Better Alternative to CB Insights and PitchBook?

Both PitchBook and CB Insights position their platforms for enterprise users, offering dedicated customer success managers, and a fully personalized experience from onboarding to implementation.

PitchBook is a valuable tool for those seeking market data for venture capital research, including deal sourcing and due diligence on startups and other businesses. The platform is also ideal for networking, fundraising, benchmarking competitors, and for those looking for more data to inform investment allocation across different asset classes.

However, it lacks certain features such as an extensive expert call library, and it provides limited access to earnings transcripts. The platform does not provide access to regulatory content such as SEC or global filings. Its research capabilities may also be hindered by a lack of advanced AI search functionality or sentiment analysis.

CB Insights, on the other hand, is a market intelligence platform that specializes in tech. It leverages in-house analysts and machine learning algorithms to provide predictive analytics on private companies across specific industries, with a heavy focus on trending markets in the tech sector. It is a valuable resource for investors seeking insight into emerging trends in the tech space, but not so much in the financial space. CB Insights offers various plans for different user groups, but certain features are heavily gated, only accessible by paying more.

For those needing a market intelligence tool with access to both private and public company data across various industries, CB Insights falls short. Additionally, lack of broker research and expert calls, as well as advanced search capabilities, make the high price of CB Insights hard to justify.

Both CB Insights and PitchBook serve their purposes for market research, but for professionals and firms looking to be more proactive, confident, and comprehensive in their research process, AlphaSense is a better option.

AlphaSense is the smart choice for those who seek an all-in-one solution that eliminates the need for off-platform search or tedious manual research tasks. With AlphaSense, users have access to a vast content universe that encompasses private, public, premium, and proprietary sources. AI search technology separates the signal from the noise and eliminates research blind spots to help you uncover crucial information faster, make data-informed business decisions, and outpace the competition.