CB Insights vs Crayon: How to Choose the Right Tool For You

AlphaSense is trusted by the world's leading corporations:

85%

of the S&P 100

75%

of the top asset management firms

80%

of the top consultancies

20

of the largest pharmaceutical companies

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 the right 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:

Overview

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—specifically for the technology markets.

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.

Through CB Insights, you can find:

In-depth market research and analytics on a company
Emerging and trending topics in the tech market and tech companies
A mosaic score that predicts the success or failure of a company

CB Insights Pros

Excellent platform for tech space opportunities
Access to private companies, their partnerships, and valuation
Access to in-depth data and research analytics
Supports APIs and integrations
Uses machine learning and analyst briefings to collect data on companies

CB Insights Cons

Pricing necessitates having a team of five members with no flexibility for smaller teams
Focuses primarily on private tech companies, ignoring public companies unless they partner with startups
No access to global/SEC filings, ESG reports, newspapers, trade journals, expert calls, or broker research
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. Businesses and professionals can use Crayon to track their top competitors’ digital footprints based on their marketing, product launches, pricing, and other features.

Crayon uses unique machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to fetch essential business information from online and offline sources, including news, events, social media, customer reviews, and competitor website content.

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

Go-to-market strategy
Product packaging and pricing strategies
News, events, and public relations
Teams and human resources
Content, media, social media presence and strategies, and more.

Crayon Pros

Supports integrations with other software
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 battlecards

Crayon Cons

No industry-specific reports or thought leadership
Less scalable and modifiable than similar tools
Lacks expert call network
No broker research reports
Does not host content on its platform
No advanced search capabilities
No company documents, SEC filings, earnings estimates, financial reports, or modeling

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is an all-in-one market intelligence platform for corporate and financial services professionals who are looking to implement a full-scale research solution, rooted in AI technology and smart automation capabilities. This award-winning platform is consistently rated by G2 and TrustRadius as the market leader in both financial research and market intelligence.

AlphaSense provides access to more than 10,000 premium, private, public, and proprietary content sources, including news and trade journals, global and SEC filings, ESG reports, earnings transcripts, company presentations, and press releases.

AlphaSense also offers two unique content offerings that create a massive competitive advantage for users:

AlphaSense Expert Insights – A 40,000+ expert call library with transcripts of interviews with former and current executives, professionals, industry experts, competitors, and customers.
Wall Street Insights® – A curated collection of indexed and searchable equity research covering companies, industries, and global sector themes, from more than 1,000 sell-side and independent firms.

AlphaSense is also powered by smart search capabilities that ensure users can find the exact insights they need for their research, allowing you to always be the first to know. They include:

Smart Synonyms™

Smart Synonyms™ technology is an AI-based feature exclusive to AlphaSense, which recognizes the user intent behind every search and delivers results for both the exact search terms and related keywords.

At the same time, this technology recognizes when results are not relevant to the search intent and automatically filters them out, removing unnecessary noise and eliminating hours wasted combing through potentially fruitless sources.

Automated Monitoring

With AlphaSense, users can access real-time notifications and alerts that keep them updated on new trends, emerging news, and market and company movements. Alphasense generates and sends frequent snapshots of companies, keeping users abreast on intelligence, critical insights, and market changes.

Instant Company Insights

Using Search Analytics and Company Tearsheets, users get quick and in-depth information on public or private companies of interest. That way, users enhance the reach of their search queries across multiple industries, regions, and document types. AlphaSense focuses on and anchors users’ research capabilities, providing critical insights needed to level up market analysis and decision-making.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature that mines content and identifies the sentiment behind the language in earnings and expert calls. The text is then color-coded for users to indicate positive, neutral, and negative sentiments.

AlphaSense also gives each search term and document a sentiment score, illustrating how positively or negatively a company or the market at large feels about a particular topic, as well as how sentiment has evolved over time. Sentiment analysis enables users to pick up on shifts in tone that could signal upcoming market movements and gain a deeper understanding of an industry or trend.

Smart Summaries™

Unlike other generative AI (genAI) tools that are focused on consumer users and trained on publicly available content across the web, AlphaSense takes an entirely different approach. As a platform purpose-built to drive the world’s biggest business and financial decisions, our newest Smart Summaries™ feature leverages our 10+ years of AI tech development and draws from a curated collection of high-quality business content.

With Smart Summaries™, you can glean instant earnings insights, quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees.

AlphaSense Pros

All-in-one research and intelligence platform
Extensive content database that spans the four key perspectives of market research, including broker research and expert calls
Incorporates sentiment analysis, NLP, generative AI, and AI search technology
Automated and customizable alerts
User-friendly interface
Internal messaging and collaboration features
Support for APIs and integrations

AlphaSense Cons

Access to the expert call library comes at an additional cost
Private company data access is limited
Broker reports are not available to all users

Features

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