When making investment decisions or conducting in-depth market research, the right intelligence tool can make all the difference. Most business professionals are inundated with information overload. Even if they have access to all the right data, the task of analyzing it and extracting all the relevant insights is often a manual one, fraught with fragmented data from consumer grade search engines.
The right market intelligence tool can shorten time to insight and expedite the research process—without sacrificing quality or comprehensiveness. But market intelligence platforms are not all made equal, and not every platform will work for every business. The breadth and depth of content, how advanced the search technology is, and how the capabilities align with your unique business needs and budget are all important factors in selecting the right platform.
Below, we compare CB Insights with Crayon, exploring who each platform works best for and where each falls short. We also compare the two with our all-in-one market intelligence platform to show how AlphaSense meets research and business needs in a more comprehensive, robust way.
The platform comparisons are based around the following criteria:
- Features
- Ratings and reviews
- Pricing
Here is an overview of each platform:
CB Insights
Founded in 2008, 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
Crayon
Unlike CB Insights, Crayon is exclusively a competitive intelligence platform.
Crayon aggregates data from various sources — including websites, social media, customer reviews, and sales insights — to provide real-time updates on competitor movements, product changes, pricing shifts, and market trends. This platform is primarily used by marketing, sales, and strategy teams to maintain their competitive edge.
Many businesses across a number of industries use Crayon’s platform to keep up with market trends, including finance, retail, pharmaceutical, and technology companies. However, Crayon may not be right for companies that track a large number of competitors, or who need to frequently modify the competitors they are monitoring.
Crayon offers the following key features:
Competitive Intelligence Tracking
Crayon continuously monitors competitors’ websites, social media, job postings, and news mentions to provide real-time updates on key company developments.
Sales Battlecards
Battlecards provide sales teams with up-to-date, digestible competitor comparisons, with key differentiators, objections handling, and talk tracks.
Automated Market Monitoring
The platform uses AI capabilities to filter and analyze large volumes of data, in order to highlight significant competitor updates such as product launches, pricing changes, and executive shifts.
Collaboration and Workflow Integration
The platform integrates with CRMs, messaging tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, and sales enablement tools for more streamlined workflows and enhanced collaboration.
Customizable Dashboards and Reports
Users can create tailored dashboards and reports to track specific competitors, industries, or key trends.
Crayon Pros
- Supports integrations with other software
- Strong sales enablement features
- Offers automated alerts
- Uses cutting-edge AI and ML capabilities to source valuable data on competitors
- User-friendly platform
- Ideal for in-depth analytics and metrics
- Supports customizable reports and dashboards
- Supports team collaboration
Crayon Cons
- Does not host content on its platform; only provides links to URLs
- No company documents, SEC filings, earnings estimates, financial reports, or modeling
- No industry-specific reports or thought leadership
- Lacks expert call network
- No broker research reports
- No advanced search capabilities, such as keyword and synonym recognition, thematic search, and sentiment analysis
- Less scalable and modifiable than similar tools
AlphaSense
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.
Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also recently named one of Fortune’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 of broker 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 – 175K+ 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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 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 Weaknesses
- Visualization tools are limited at this time
- Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses
Features Comparison
Ratings & Reviews
CB Insights
Rating: 4.3 out of 5 on G2, 7.4 out of 10 on TrustRadius
Popular positives:
- Access to updated data on venture capital funding
- Excellent customer support and backend teams
- Access to critical private company data
- Access to data on emerging technologies like AI and Climate tech
Popular negatives:
- Lacks plug-ins and extra functionality and integrations with Excel, Salesforce, and others
- Refining searches can be hectic, especially for hyper-specific results
- Some data can be repetitive
- Free version has multiple limitations
Crayon
Rating: 4.6 out of 5 on G2, 6.3 out of 10 on TrustRadius
Popular positives:
- Insights are up-to-date and automated
- Sharing boards across team members is a valuable feature
- Responsive customer support
- Supports multiple integrations
- Makes competitive data consolidation easy
Popular negatives:
- Crayon doesn’t track all social media, missing LinkedIn and Twitter
- A learning curve for new users
- Data from curated content can be overwhelming
- Data may need better refining to be actionable
AlphaSense
Rating: 4.7 out of 5 on G2, 9.5 out of 10 on TrustRadius
Popular positives:
- Comprehensive data and analysis on public and private markets
- Generative AI capabilities enhance and accelerate research
- Rapid access to relevant broker information and analyses
- Customizable dashboards and real-time alerts
- Real-time data availability
- Easy-to-find relevant and high-quality results
- Intuitive interface and great customer support
- Smart AI-powered search leads to quicker, more accurate insights
Popular negatives:
- Visualization tools are limited to financial data at this time
- Lack of collaborative tools for knowledge management
