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AlphaSense vs Perplexity

AlphaSense is the industry leader in market intelligence and qualitative research for corporations and financial services. For over 10 years, AlphaSense has been at the forefront of comprehensive research solutions, leveraging the power of AI, NLP, and generative AI to provide analysts and researchers with quality insights into companies, industries, and markets.

Here’s how AlphaSense compares with the generative AI tool, Perplexity.

AlphaSense clients include respected leaders in every sector:

FAQs

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 recognized by Forbes as a top 50 AI company in 2023.

Here’s how our platform 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.

Features and Capabilities

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 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 Transcript Library – Tens of thousands of proprietary one-on-one call transcripts with industry experts, competitors, customers, partners, and former and current executives, with the ability to conduct your own 1:1 expert calls for less.

AlphaSense and Tegus

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

Both platforms come with extensive libraries of high-quality research, as well as data and AI tools that allow users to extract the most value from the insights they find.

Tegus has an extensive and fast-growing library of high-quality expert research, which includes coverage of 35,000+ public and private companies across TMT, consumer goods, energy, and life sciences sectors. Additionally, Tegus’ financial data offering, which includes financials, KPIs, and fully drivable models on more than 4,000 public companies, as well as its BamSEC self-serve solution to search and access securities filings, adds new and unique offerings to AlphaSense’s extensive product suite and datasets.

Additionally, Tegus’s Canalyst feature provides instant access to over 4,000 global fundamental models and over 60 industry dashboards, all hand-built and sourced by sector-focused analysts in Vancouver. Unlike building your own models and comp sheets, using Tegus’s 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.

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, ISO27001 compliant, 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, leaning on 10+ years of AI tech development. This includes our RAG approach and our proprietary AlphaSense Large Language Model (ASLLM)—trained specifically on business and financial data—which matches or beats the leading third-party LLMs over 90% of the time.

Our suite of tools currently includes:

Smart Summaries

This feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights (reducing time spent on research during earnings season), quickly capture company outlook, bull/bear cases, 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. We also apply this same technology to our collection of expert calls.

Generative Search

Our generative AI chat experience transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources. Our chatbot 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 AI is there to help 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 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 sentiments across 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 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.
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 Strengths

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 Smart Summaries for earnings, expert calls, and broker reports
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 Weaknesses

Visualization tools are limited at this time
Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses

Perplexity

Perplexity is an advanced generative AI tool designed to assist users in extracting and synthesizing information from various public sources. Its primary purpose is to streamline the research process by generating detailed, contextually relevant responses to complex queries. The platform leverages sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand and analyze vast amounts of text data, making it a useful asset for professionals who need to quickly gather and interpret information.

Their main offering is a consumer-grade AI-powered answer engine, similar to ChatGPT. However, Perplexity has also recently added the Enterprise Pro version of its platform, specifically designed for teams. This platform has added data privacy, enhanced security, and SOC2 certification, so that teams can safely upload their internal organizational data and use the tool for better knowledge discovery and collaboration.

Additionally, Perplexity has recently introduced a brand-new feature called Internal Knowledge Search, exclusively for Pro and Enterprise Pro users, that lets them search for information across the web and their internal databases, all in one place. Internal knowledge bases will be limited to files users upload to Perplexity.

Features and Capabilities

Natural Language Search

Perplexity allows users to input queries in natural language and receive detailed, accurate responses. This makes it easy for users to gather insights from highly complex and unstructured data sets without needing to know specific technical commands.

Real-Time Web Results

Perplexity provides real-time data from the web, ensuring users have access to the most current public information available. This is especially useful for research or queries that are more timely or that are likely to change on a frequent basis.

Source Attribution

One of Perplexity’s strengths is its ability to provide clear source attribution for its answers. This feature allows researchers to verify the accuracy of the information and trace it back to original sources, adding a layer of reliability to market research findings. However, Perplexity is not able to link to exact snippets of information in the sources.

Quick Summaries

Perplexity offers the ability to summarize large volumes of information quickly, which helps users save time and can turn complex datasets into digestible insights.

Conversational AI Interface

Perplexity operates through a conversational AI interface, enabling users to ask follow-up questions and refine their queries. This interactive capability makes it easier to dig deeper into research topics and uncover more specific insights during the research process.

The Enterprise Pro version offers the following features in addition to those listed above:

Unlimited file uploads
Greater customization options
Enhanced search capabilities, relative to the consumer-grade version
Enterprise-grade data privacy and security
Internal knowledge search, which allows users to search across internal documents they uploaded into Perplexity, as well as the public web—all in one place

Perplexity Strengths

Utilizes real-time data from the web in its answers, ensuring relevant and timely responses
Handles complex queries and generates responses that are contextually rich and highly relevant
Great at integrating diverse data sources
Cites source documents for generated responses, though does not cite snippets
Can analyze and extract insights from an uploaded document
Ability to create charts and tables summarizing data
Most useful features are only available for the higher-cost subscription tiers

Perplexity Weaknesses

Trained on publicly available data, rather than business-grade or financial data
Output is only as good as the data the model is trained on, so hallucination and inaccuracy are highly likely
The tool struggles with highly complex or technical queries, leading to longer response times and incomplete answers
Unable to integrate content at Enterprise scale due to lack of support for Enterprise-Grade connectors
Internal Knowledge Search only searches across uploaded documents, not the user’s entire internal knowledge database

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the key differences between AlphaSense and Perplexity?

Enterprise vs Consumer-Grade

The main difference between Perplexity and AlphaSense is that AlphaSense is an enterprise-grade tool, designed for financial and business research, while Perplexity is first and foremost a consumer-grade tool. While this means Perplexity is cheaper and accessible to a wider range of use cases outside of business contexts, it also means that the tool is severely limited in its ability to serve enterprises and meet financial and business research needs. While Perplexity has an Enterprise Pro version, it’s much more limited—in terms of content, customization, analytical features—and more general than AlphaSense.

Financial and Business Data vs General Information Retrieval

Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro version is better-suited for larger organizations, but it is not specialized to financial and business use cases. Instead, Perplexity is designed for broad, enterprise-level knowledge search and general information retrieval across industries.

Perplexity does not offer its own content sets to help enterprises with full-scale market research—it only helps organizations better discover and manage their own content. Otherwise, all other data Perplexity pulls from to generate queries is from the public web, which means the insights it provides are more general and less differentiated.

AlphaSense does both—provides access to premium, proprietary content sources with some of the most differentiated insights you can find anywhere, along with the ability to integrate your internal data seamlessly into the platform.

AlphaSense’s extensive content universe, purpose-built for financial and corporate professionals, provides access to over 10,000 public, private, and premium content sources. These include company documents, news, regulatory documents, broker reports, and expert call transcripts—everything you need for full-scale market research.

In addition to this, AlphaSense’s Enterprise Intelligence feature enables secure searches, summaries, and follow-up questions across your organization’s proprietary internal data. Every AI search feature in the platform can be applied to both external and internal content for enhanced, accelerated research.

AI Capabilities and Customization

Both AlphaSense and Perplexity use advanced AI technology—including natural language search, genAI summaries, and a conversational AI interface. However, AlphaSense’s AI has 10+ years of training on specifically financial and business data, and its genAI model is trained to think like an analyst. The platform also employs guardrails against genAI hallucination, and all answers generated by genAI are citable and verifiable.

On the other hand, Perplexity’s AI technology is trained on public web data, is susceptible to hallucination and disinformation, and also lacks the security and privacy protections that high-profile companies require in a genAI tool (the Enterprise Pro version does offer the security and privacy protections necessary).

AlphaSense also offers advanced analytical features like sentiment analysis and trend detection for deeper and more streamlined research; Perplexity lacks advanced features like these.

Finally, AlphaSense allows for more customization—with its customizable dashboards, watchlists, and real-time alerts. Perplexity offers very limited customization; its main strength lies in providing quick, conversational responses to a wide range of queries.

Overall, AlphaSense is a much better option for organizations looking for a powerful market and investment research tool. Perplexity is better-suited for individual consumers looking for an effective generative AI tool that is trained on web data, or enterprises that don’t need financial or business insights but are looking for more general and broad answers.

Why do companies choose AlphaSense for market intelligence?

Compared to Perplexity, AlphaSense offers diverse content options for professionals using the key market research perspectives. Giving a more well-rounded, holistic view of any market, these perspectives allow users to make confident business and investment decisions:

Analyst – Equity research from leading Wall Street banks, that covers global and regional sector themes and industries
Expert – Interviews done with top buy-side analysts and vetted experts with direct industry experience, including past executives, customers, and former and current business partners
Journalist – Content published in major news cables, trade journals, and top government publications
Regulatory – Regulatory updates from major regulatory bodies and leading global health and energy organizations, such as OPEC, FDA, SEC, FTC, and more
Company – Reports published by private and public companies, including earnings reports, SEC and company filings, transcripts, presentations, and ESG reports
Internal – All of your organization’s internal knowledge, housed conveniently in our all-in-one platform, and easily searchable with our AI tools

Layered over this content is AlphaSense’s leading AI search technology, with features like synonym recognition, generative AI, sentiment analysis, and advanced filtering. This technology can also be applied to the customer’s internal organizational content for faster, deeper, more holistic market intelligence.

Companies appreciate that AlphaSense creates a centralized place for all their knowledge, while also helping unlock differentiated insights and accelerating the pace of research.

For a deep, comprehensive, smart market intelligence tool that provides a 360-degree view of the companies, industries, and markets of interest, look no farther than AlphaSense.

How do financial services firms use AlphaSense?

Financial services firms can use AlphaSense to make accurate and timely investment decisions with confidence.

Access to exclusive content sources (like broker research and expert call transcripts) can give institutional investors deep insights into competitors and market trends, keeping them ahead of the pack when it comes to investment opportunities and strategies.

Our clients range from asset management companies and hedge funds to venture capital firms and private equity. Here’s how they use AlphaSense to get ahead:

Fundamental Research – Conduct both top-down and bottom up research with both keyword and company searches.
Origination – Uncover unique investment ideas by using AI to surface companies not on your radar.
Due Diligence – Quickly determine the viability of a deal with the ability to map markets, identify segment-specific drivers, and uncover potential red flags.
Earnings Analysis – Accelerate earnings and company analysis by recognizing sentiment shifts and important market events earlier.

“AlphaSense helps us go mile-wide a lot faster, easier, and more flexibly—and then helps us figure out when to zero in.”

– Portfolio Manager, Financial Services Firm

How do corporate strategy, corporate development, and/or competitive intelligence teams use AlphaSense?

AlphaSense is a crucial market intelligence tool for 88% of the S&P 100 and 20 of the largest pharmaceutical companies. One of the biggest differentiators for corporations that AlphaSense provides is Wall Street Insights®—a leading collection of equity research from the world’s leading brokerage firms. This offering allows corporations to conduct more comprehensive competitive analysis, improve client interactions, enhance internal research and strategy, and save their organization time and money with AI and automation.

Here’s how top global corporations use AlphaSense to succeed:

Strategic Planning – Identify growth opportunities with insight from top analysts.
Competitive Intelligence – Maintain a clear understanding of the competitive landscape and monitor specific competitor performance as needed.
Trend Tracking – Stay ahead of emerging trends to capitalize on revenue opportunities.
Market Monitoring – Confidently navigate market shifts by being the first to know of important news and updates.

“AlphaSense gives us information we can’t get anywhere else.”

– VP Competitive Intelligence, Salesforce

How do IR teams use AlphaSense?

Earnings season has always been demanding—and advancements in technology have only increased expectations for speed, accuracy, and real-time insight. IR teams use AlphaSense to craft stronger narratives and efficiently prep the C-suite for successful calls.

With tools like sentiment analysis, Snippet Explorer (instantly showing the quarter-over-quarter history of keywords and KPIs), and Topic Modules (summarizing key trends from earnings at the company and industry level), earnings analysis becomes faster and more accurate and streamlined than ever before.

AlphaSense helps IR teams to:

Craft Earnings Narratives – Easily access and scan previous earnings call transcripts and other company documents to maintain consistent narratives quarter over quarter.
Monitor Sentiment Shifts – Recognize significant sentiment changes when they occur and frame them in the most effective way to stakeholders.
Track Market Trends – Monitor trends and understand how they impact your market.
Q&A Prep – Be prepared to answer the questions that are top of mind for analysts.

“The time saved by using AlphaSense is enormous. It easily saves us several hours a week. Requested information can be prepared in a timely, precise and efficient manner. For our daily work, this is essential.”

– Michael Otto, Director of Investor Relations and Sustainability

How do consultants use AlphaSense?

95% of the world’s consultancies use AlphaSense to access the insights they need to deliver smart strategic services and win more business. Using the AlphaSense platform, consultants across industries can:

Achieve Stronger Proposal Alignment – Quickly gain an understanding of a company’s strategy and performance with access to broker research, expert call transcripts, earnings transcripts, and more.
Deliver Higher-Quality Market Research – Easily analyze 10 years’ worth of earnings transcripts and get the full picture faster with advanced AI capabilities.
Build Deeper Client Relationships — Act as a confident thought leader with insights easily surfaced for you.
Discover Great M&A Opportunities – Get smart on companies and the market landscape quickly, so you can deliver the very best recommendations to your clients.

“AlphaSense [and Expert Insights] help me align the challenges companies are dealing with to the services that FTI offers. I just love AlphaSense. For my market research, it’s brilliant.”

– Fabiano Lopes, Managing Director of Business Transformation at FTI Consulting

How much does Perplexity cost?

Perplexity offers several different pricing tiers meant to fit different user needs. Their lowest-priced tier, for $20 per month, is designed for individual users or small teams who need occasional access to advanced genAI features for personal research or small-scale projects. This tier is ideal for users who primarily require general information retrieval and basic synthesis capabilities without extensive customization.

The next tier is the Self-Serve Enterprise Pro tier, priced at $40 per month, and is designed for mid-sized businesses and professionals who need more frequent access to the genAI tool. This tier is a good fit for users who require more robust features, such as enhanced data integration, advanced query handling, and higher usage limits.

The final tier is Custom Enterprise Pro, the price of which depends on the size of the organization and specific use cases. This tier is meant for large organizations and corporations that require extensive usage, custom integrations, and dedicated support. Contact Perplexity for more details on pricing and customization options.

How much does AlphaSense cost?

An AlphaSense user can access smarter features, a better user experience, and an extensive content universe at a more reasonable price. With AlphaSense, you’ll either pay by the enterprise or per seat. Click here for more information on pricing options.

For even more options, don’t miss our Generative AI Tools for Market Research Buyer’s Guide.

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Experience the AlphaSense Difference

Ready to explore a massive content universe that goes beyond public web sources? Curious to see how artificial intelligence and automation can elevate your research and analysis process?

Regardless of your professional role, industry, or business goals, AlphaSense offers features that can help you make better financial and strategic decisions while eliminating research blind spots.

See how your research and intelligence will transform when you use a centralized, all-in-one platform that combines premium, proprietary content with your own internal data, as well as leading AI technology that enables you to maximize the value you get from this content.

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