Guidepoint

Guidepoint is a leading expert network platform that provides expert consultations to business professionals seeking industry expertise and insights. Its global network of over one million industry experts offers valuable insights and advisory services to help its clients make more informed business decisions.

Guidepoint is ideal for organizations seeking expert insights and data-driven solutions for decision-making, as it provides expert consultations and access to a wide network of industry specialists.

Guidepoint is primarily used by finance, consulting, and corporate strategy professionals who require expert opinions and insights for primary research to research markets. Consulting firms leverage Guidepoint to gain access to high-level expertise for strategic planning, while private equity and venture capital firms use it to evaluate investments and conduct due diligence.

However, Guidepoint may not be the best fit for small businesses and startups with limited budgets, teams needing quantitative data, or organizations seeking automated insights. Moreover, the platform can be expensive and resource-intensive, making it less accessible for smaller companies.

Guidepoint Product Features

As an expert network, Guidepoint primarily provides access to qualitative insights through expert consultations, offering insights into market trends and competitive landscapes. Its key features include one-on-one and group consultations, custom research solutions like expert surveys, a global expert network, and industry-specific panels for comprehensive insights.

Guidepoint ensures compliance and privacy through confidentiality agreements and strict protocols for its expert consultations. Additionally, its platform features user-friendly tools for scheduling, appointment management, and collaboration. 

Guidepoint offers access to a vast network of experts across various industries, making it a go-to choice for those who need specialized knowledge quickly. However, its high cost, time-consuming consultation setup, and limitations to qualitative insights are significant drawbacks, particularly for organizations requiring a broader range of data types.

Pros of Guidepoint:

• Boasts a vast network of industry experts across various fields
• Streamlined processes for scheduling expert calls
• Offers tailored research services, allowing clients to receive insights specific to their needs
• Provides confidential consultations

Cons of Guidepoint:

• Lack of quantitative research for comprehensive market intelligence
• Research scope is limited to expert calls and consultations
• Expensive expert consultations are cost-prohibitive for businesses with limited budgets
• Relies heavily on human expertise and lacks automation features

While Guidepoint excels in providing direct access to industry experts, its focus on primary research through expert interactions can be limiting. It primarily offers qualitative insights, which might not be sufficient for users requiring a broader view of market trends. Additionally, scheduling expert consultations through third-party providers, like Guidepoint, can be time-consuming and laborious. 

For businesses needing comprehensive market intelligence, Guidepoint lacks secondary research capabilities, such as broker reports and real-time market data. Compared to Guidepoint, AlphaSense offers a more robust market intelligence solution by combining expert network access with a wide range of data sources, including company documents, news, and broker research.

This makes AlphaSense ideal for users who need a holistic view of market insights and trends beyond expert consultations. Additionally, the AlphaSense platform accelerates expert connections and market research with its expert transcript library and artificial intelligence (AI) search tools, making it a faster and more cost-effective solution than Guidepoint.

Below are five top alternatives to Guidepoint to consider.

Top Six Guidepoint Alternatives

AlphaSense and Tegus

AlphaSense is an industry-leading market intelligence and qualitative research platform for corporations, financial services, and consulting firms. Since its inception over a decade ago, AlphaSense has been at the forefront of comprehensive market research solutions, helping professionals make better business decisions. 

AlphaSense has an extensive universe of content, spanning the four critical perspectives of research, as well as industry-leading automation and AI search capabilities. With over 10+ years of investment in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, AlphaSense’s AI and natural language processing (NLP) accelerate the research process for professionals seeking quality insights into industries, companies, and markets.

Financial professionals use AlphaSense to access 10,000+ premium sources of information, including trade journals, SEC filings, company filings, financial reports, broker research, and news articles. Moreover, AlphaSense provides access to broker research and an expert call transcript library that facilitates deeper insight into companies and markets.

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. 

Content Sets and Product Features

AlphaSense provides access to multiple highly valuable content sets that empower comprehensive, data-driven market research. Additionally, unlike many other market research tools, AlphaSense incorporates smart search capabilities within its platform, empowering users to find the most crucial insights without manually toggling between multiple tabs or relying on CTRL+F.

Expert Insights

AlphaSense Expert Insights offers tens of thousands of transcripts of specialized interviews with industry experts, customers, professionals, competitors, and former and current executives, in addition to personalized one-on-one call services.

The expert transcript library offers on-demand access to expert interviews with timestamped audio across thousands of public and private companies. Additionally, Expert Call Services allows researchers to quickly connect with experts for customized interviews to fill any research gaps in their business or investment strategy.

Wall Street Insights®

Wall Street Insights® is 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. The best part? Research professionals can preview the contents of a broker report, saving them wasted time and money on potentially fruitless research. 

Tegus

For investors who spend too much time manually searching, parsing, and aggregating data from disparate sources, the Tegus platform reinvents the investment research process so you can compete on your unique ability to analyze data correctly and make significant investment decisions. The Tegus platform gives investors the fastest way to learn about public and private companies. It delivers the most critical content and data on a unified platform experience, all for a single software license.

Tegus offers 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.

For even more information on Tegus and how it compares to other solutions in the market, check out the following pages:

• AlphaSense and Tegus

• Top 7 Tegus Alternatives in 2024

• GLG vs. Tegus

Powerful AI Technology

Leveraging AlphaSense’s award-winning AI capabilities allows users to gain tens of millions of data points at the industry, watchlist, and document level to better track market landscape and industry trends, identify disruptive players, and discover competitors’ hidden strategies.

Researchers can save time on research and maximize their research budget with AlphaSense’s powerful AI-search capabilities:

• Smart Summaries – Enables users to glean expert insights instantly with generative AI (genAI) summaries that capture the gist of any expert call transcript, earnings call, or broker report found within the extensive AlphaSense library in seconds.
• Smart Synonyms™ – Empowers users to expand keyword and thematic searches to deliver the most relevant insights by including all synonyms, excluding irrelevant results, and filtering out the noise.
• Sentiment Analysis – Allows users to identify and quantify levels of emotion around specific topics within expert transcripts or earnings calls by using a boolean operator to search for mentions of a specific topic in a positive, negative, or neutral light.
• AI Assistant – Allows users to ask live questions and gain real-time answers with our AI-powered chatbot designed to summarize billions of data points to get you from question to answer faster.
• Enterprise Intelligence – Enables businesses to secure searches, summaries, and follow-up questions across their proprietary internal data and a vast repository of 300M+ premium external documents.

Automated Monitoring

Instead of wasting hours manually monitoring, AlphaSense allows users to create a customizable dashboard and company watchlist to stay updated on any relevant topics,  companies, or industries. Clients can also set real-time alerts to get notified immediately when any updates on those topics or companies occur. Users can also easily take snapshots of multiple companies within the AlphaSense platform, staying in touch with the most critical insights, news, and market changes they need to know.

Pros of AlphaSense and Tegus:

• Extensive content universe with 10,000+ premium sources of information
• Access to SEC and company filings
• Large library of experts and expert call transcripts
• Ability to set up monitoring tools and alerts
• Ability to annotate and comments to call transcripts
• All-in-one access to the four key perspectives of market research
• Smart AI-powered functionality that helps streamline the research process and ensures you never miss a critical insight
• Powered by generative AI features that accelerate and enhance research
• Integration with commonly-used programs like OneNote, Sharepoint, and Evernote that enable better team collaboration and productivity
• User-friendly interface and exceptional customer service

Cons of AlphaSense and Tegus:

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

Research professionals appreciate AlphaSense’s vast content universe and advanced search capabilities allowing users to conduct comprehensive research and uncover valuable insights. With a unified integration of various data sources and a seamless user experience, AlphaSense is a one-stop solution for market intelligence.

Third Bridge

Third Bridge is a private research expert network firm that offers unique insights and analysis to asset managers, corporations, and consultants, enabling them to make smarter decisions faster.

It primarily facilitates one-on-one consultations and interviews, offering direct access to industry-specific knowledge. These insights help investors make better decisions, assess market opportunities, and develop business strategies.

Third Bridge is largely utilized among investment professionals, consulting firms, and corporate decision-makers who rely on expert opinions for market insights. It’s best suited for those who need real-time access to specialized knowledge and expert calls.

Third Bridge Features

Third Bridge is an expert network, so while it can provide specialized insights, it does not offer comprehensive market intelligence for data-driven, holistic market research. However, it does provide various solutions for qualitative research, such as connections with experts and a forum.

Third Bridge Community connects its clients to relevant experts by leveraging its extensive global expert network, thorough pre-qualification processes, and compliance framework.

These interviews are then anonymized and made available via Forum so clients can get preferential fixed-rate pricing on one-on-one consultations versus traditional, more expensive one-on-one expert consultations.

Forum is an archive of analyst-led investigative interviews, which provide global industry knowledge and full sector insights. The library has over 30,000 transcripts and conducts over 10,000 interviews annually.

Third Bridge’s Community features investor-led content from fixed-rate one-on-one consultations and offers. Additionally, Third Bridge uses a proprietary market research model called Maps to rank, filter, and prioritize companies, enabling investors to make decisions faster.

Pros of Third Bridge:

• Over 30,000 call transcripts in the Third Bridge Forum library
• Offers clients to conduct one-on-one interviews with experts
• Extensive network of experts across various industries.
• Uses a proprietary company ranking model

Cons of Third Bridge:

• Cannot upload internal content
• Lacks broker research, company documents, and news for holistic market research
• No advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-powered smart search, sentiment analysis, or generative AI capabilities
• Can be cost-prohibitive for small businesses or startups

• Scheduling expert calls can be time-consuming

Overall, Third Bridge excels at providing expert calls and insights from industry specialists for investment researchers who rely solely on primary research to make business decisions. 

However, its specialization as an expert network means it lacks the breadth of data and research tools that other innovative market intelligence platforms have, like AlphaSense. This can lead to missed opportunities and blind spots in the research process.

GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group)

Touted as the “insight network for the whole world” by experts, GLG provides access to expert calls in their on-demand knowledge platform, primarily for investors and startup advisors. Their comprehensive expert database spans almost every geography, industry, and function, which enables the company to deliver a range of products, including phone consultations, surveys, live in-person and virtual events, packaged insights and reports, and more.

GLG serves leading technology, life science, and industrial companies, including 40% of the Fortune 100, seven of the top ten global technology companies, leading investment and financial firms, top professional services firms, and hundreds of nonprofits and social entrepreneurs worldwide.

GLG Features

GLG’s insight discovery works through a proprietary workflow of three solutions: GLG Direct, GLG Syndicated Insights, and GLG Research.

GLG works best for businesses and professionals seeking expert consultations globally across diverse industries. Entrepreneurs who have adequate time to perform self-service research can connect directly with subject matter experts via GLG Direct. Mid-sized and large business owners can leverage GLG Research, which allows clients to outsource all research needs for a new venture or opportunity to GLG.

GLG Syndicated Insights provides access to GLG’s library of reports, surveys, transcripts, webcasts, etc., which small business owners can use if they prefer to avoid conducting interviews themselves.

GLG also packages detailed quantitative and qualitative research data from workshops, focus groups, discussion panels, voice-of-customer data, and market research to ensure a well-rounded consumer outlook.

Pros of GLG:

• Access to over 900,000 experts
• Serves multiple types of clients, including law firms and a diverse range of businesses
• Offers both qualitative and quantitative insights
• Provides a massive library of expert calls and transcripts

Cons of GLG:

• Lack of broker research available 
• Scheduling and conducting expert calls can be time-consuming
• GLG does not use advanced AI search or sentiment analysis in its platform
• No real-time monitoring of markets to keep users updated
• Content is restricted to expert calls and conventional qualitative and quantitative research findings
• Premium pricing may be prohibitive for smaller organizations.

Research professionals value GLG for its extensive expert network and global reach. However, some mention the high costs and time required to leverage its services effectively. Additionally, GLG features may not be comprehensive enough for full-scale market research due to the lack of varied data resources and key market research perspectives.

AlphaSights

AlphaSights is a leading global expert network that connects businesses with industry experts to provide insights and advice for strategic decision-making. AlphaSights provides its clients with information services that help them make better business decisions and deliver outstanding results. 

The AlphaSights network of experts suits investment bankers, private investment firms, mutual funds, management consulting, corporations, and non-government organizations (NGOs). The platform combines expert network coverage, technology, and compliance to provide business intelligence and analysis to its clients.

The platform focuses primarily on expert consultations, which can be costly and less accessible for smaller companies. Therefore, AlphaSights may not be ideal for small businesses or startups with limited budgets, teams that require comprehensive quantitative data, or organizations seeking automated insights.

Additionally, AlphaSights is primarily geared towards qualitative insights, which may not meet the needs of teams that require detailed quantitative analysis and data-driven decision-making. Organizations seeking more automated insights may find that AlphaSights’ reliance on human expertise does not fully meet their needs.

AlphaSights Features

AlphaSights allows its clients to consult multiple experts and get access to intelligence from industries across 120+ countries. It facilitates over 350,000 unique expert client interactions annually and thoroughly vets each expert for every project. The company has recently expanded its service offering beyond just expert call transcripts and meetings and now offers surveys, insights projects (similar to GLG’s Strategic projects), and a small content library named AlphaView. AlphaView is similar to the Third Bridge Forum content library, although it is significantly smaller.

Pros of AlphaSights:

• Large network of industry specialists
• Serves multiple industries and business functions 

• Offers expert calls and consultations

Cons of AlphaSights:

• Limited to qualitative data
• No advanced AI-powered smart search or sentiment analysis
• No broker research, company documents, or news
• Cannot upload internal content
• No support for integrations or organizations

Researchers appreciate AlphaSights’s flexible research solutions and vast expert network but note the lack of more comprehensive data offerings and additional content sets beyond expert call transcripts, which are essential for comprehensive market research. Moreover, the lengthy scheduling process for expert consultations can be time-consuming.

Capvision

Capvision is a leading expert network and research platform that connects businesses with industry experts to provide strategic insights and advice. Capvision is particularly known for its expertise in connecting clients with experts in emerging markets. This platform is frequently used by professionals seeking insights for strategic decision-making and market analysis.

Capvision is best suited for consulting firms, investment firms, and multinational corporations that require expert insights, particularly in Asian markets. Consulting firms benefit from Capvision’s network by gaining industry-specific knowledge that enhances their strategic recommendations and client services. Multinational corporations rely on Capvision to understand market dynamics, regulatory environments, and consumer behavior, enabling them to make informed decisions for market entry and expansion.

Capvision may not be the best fit for small businesses or startups with limited budgets, teams needing comprehensive quantitative data, or organizations seeking automated insights.

Capvision Features

Capvision is designed for businesses needing expert insights and market intelligence across global markets. Capvision provides access to qualitative insights through expert consultations, interviews, and custom research reports.

The platform offers industry analysis, market trends, regulatory insights, and competitive intelligence via its network of experts who deliver tailored insights based on client needs.

Pros of Capvision:

• Robust network of experts with a strong presence 
• Large pool of experts with regional expertise
• Personalized research services

Cons of Capvision:

• Heavy focus on regional markets
• May not cover all industry sectors comprehensively
• Can be expensive, particularly for smaller organizations with limited budgets
• Lacking breadth of quantitative data 

Professionals value Capvision’s access to knowledgeable industry experts. However, its offerings lack quantitative resources and varied market research perspectives that are essential for full-scale market research. Additionally, the high cost and time required to set up consultations can be drawbacks.

Coleman Research

Coleman Research is a global expert network firm that connects businesses with industry experts for insights and consultations. It is widely used by professionals such as consulting firms, investment managers, and corporate strategy teams who need access to expert opinions for strategic decision-making and market analysis.

Consulting firms use Coleman’s network of experts to gain insights that support their strategic recommendations and client projects. Investment managers, including hedge funds and private equity firms, use Coleman to understand market dynamics and identify investment opportunities.

Coleman Research Features

Coleman Research primarily provides access to qualitative insights through expert consultations and interviews. The platform offers industry analysis, market trends, and competitive intelligence via its network of experts who deliver tailored insights to meet client needs.

Pros of Coleman Research:

• Access to a diverse range of industry experts
• Tailored insights specific to clients’ business needs
• International expert coverage across multiple sectors

Cons of Coleman Research:

• Primarily focuses on expert calls without additional data resources
• Arranging consultations with experts can take time, which can delay decision-making processes
• Pricing may be high for smaller enterprises
• No access to market research perspectives beyond industry experts

Research professionals appreciate Coleman Research’s ability to connect them with experts who can provide in-depth industry insights. However, some users express concerns about the cost and time required to set up consultations, which can be drawbacks for those needing quick access to information.

Additionally, Coleman Research’s features are not comprehensive enough for holistic market research due to the lack of varied data resources and key market research perspectives.

Choosing an Alternative to Guidepoint

Overall, Guidepoint is well-regarded for its vast expert network and ability to deliver personalized insights through direct consultations. As an expert network platform, it primarily focuses on primary research through expert interactions, which can be valuable for qualitative research needs.

However, Guidepoint’s limited scope of data sources creates blindspots for users who require comprehensive market intelligence and secondary research sources, such as market reports, financial data, and news. Without quantitative data and automated insights, Guidepoint may not fully meet the needs of teams looking for a broader, data-driven approach.

AlphaSense offers a broader market intelligence solution that includes not only expert calls but also a wide range of data sources. This includes broker research, company documents, and real-time news, making AlphaSense a more robust option for users seeking a comprehensive view of market trends and insights.