When making cutting-edge investment decisions or conducting in-depth market research, the right intelligence tool can make all the difference. Most business professionals are inundated with information. 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.
Market intelligence tools are designed to shorten the time to insight and expedite the research process without sacrificing quality or comprehensiveness. Ideally, they should provide both the data you need and the technology to analyze that data, eliminating the need to toggle between multiple platforms and making the entire research process more streamlined.
However, 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 features and capabilities align with your unique business needs and budget are all important factors in selecting the right platform.
Below, we compare Koyfin with Bloomberg, 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 shortens time to insight and meets research and business needs in a more comprehensive, robust way.
The platform comparisons are based around the following criteria:
- Features
- Customer service & support
- Ratings and reviews
- Pricing
Here is an overview of each platform:
Bloomberg
Bloomberg Terminal is one of the oldest and most widely used market research and analysis tools in the financial services industry. Launched in 1981—well before individual computers or the internet were common at firms—Bloomberg led the way in democratizing access to financial market data.
Since then, Bloomberg has become one of the highest-rated market research tools, giving users access to unique market data, news, and insights and enabling professionals to turn intelligence into a competitive advantage. It’s considered to be a tool that is primarily geared toward financial services users and is less suitable for corporate or consulting users.
Many hedge funds and institutional investors consider Bloomberg Terminal a top choice for qualitative research. However, the market has changed, and plenty of competitors have emerged over the past few decades.
Multiple platforms with comparable features are now available to users at more affordable prices. These tools are web-based platforms with cloud-native features and intuitive user interfaces. Initially a part-hardware solution, Bloomberg now has to play catch-up with modern user needs.
Bloomberg Terminal itself is a powerful research insights tool that has some top-notch features, including:
Real-Time Financial Data
Bloomberg provides independent and sell-side research from over 1,600 sources. Its financial data spans across global asset classes, including equities, commodities, currencies, fixed income, derivatives, and more. Bloomberg provides high-quality financial news, sourced by Bloomberg’s own reporters, as well as reputable third-party sources.
Advanced Analytical Tools
Bloomberg Terminal offers sophisticated tools for data analysis, including charting, technical analysis, and financial modeling. These tools allow professionals to conduct in-depth financial analysis on companies, sectors, and markets.
Research and Reports
Bloomberg Terminal provides access to proprietary research reports, as well as third-party research. This includes information on earnings, market trends, and detailed sector reports.
Collaboration Features
Bloomberg offers tools like Bloomberg Chat and an integrated email system to facilitate communication and collaboration with peers, clients, and partners. Users can easily share files, notes, and annotations to exchange insights. Users can also create group chats and channels tailored to specific teams, projects, or topics. Finally, teams can create shared alerts for specific market events, assets, or economic indicators.
Customizable Alerts
Users can set real-time alerts on specific assets, news events, and financial indicators. These alerts can be personalized based on the user’s interests, allowing for timely and informed decision-making.
Generative AI
Bloomberg has recently released BloombergGPT, its generative AI tool. This tool is capable of summarizing financial data in seconds and pulling out key insights from structured data for expedited research. The tool can also provide draft content for investment analyses, client memos, and internal reports.
Bloomberg Pros:
- Comprehensive global coverage across multiple asset classes and financial instruments
- Access to proprietary financial news and real-time high quality financial data
- Tools for internal collaboration
- Advanced charting, financial modeling, and risk analysis tools for investment analysts and portfolio managers
- Customizable real-time alerts
- Includes AI and generative AI capabilities, such as natural language processing and BloombergGPT
Bloomberg Cons:
- An expensive option, costing about $2,000 a month per user
- A steep learning curve for new users
- Geared more toward financial services users, not as much for corporate or consulting
- No sentiment analysis or synonym recognition
- No expert calls and transcripts
- Lack of broker research access for corporate users
Related Reading: Bloomberg Terminal Alternatives
Koyfin
Koyfin is a solution built for investors at every experience level—professional, individual, and student. Known for its user-friendly features and in-depth qualitative data, the Koyfin platform is a great budget alternative to Bloomberg Terminal. While the qualitative research access is relatively basic, the platform makes investing more accessible without sacrificing the sophistication and accuracy needed by firms managing real client portfolios.
Koyfin offers several tiers of membership, and the majority are geared toward individual investors, not enterprise organizations. Overall, Koyfin lacks the depth and enterprise-level capabilities of some of its competitors, but it is a powerful tool for financial professionals who value affordability and are primarily looking for a stock research tool.
Koyfin’s features include:
Comprehensive Market Data
Koyfin provides access to data on markets worldwide, with in-depth coverage of U.S. and international stocks. Their data spans asset classes and includes equities, ETFs, mutual funds, fixed income, commodities, and cryptocurrency.
Advanced Charting Tools
Users can customize charts with multiple data overlays, annotations, and time frames. The charts also enable side-by-side comparison of assets, indices, and custom metrics, which is key for equity and portfolio analysis. These charts can then be seamlessly exported for presentations or reports.
Financial Analysis Tools
Koyfin provides financial statements, historical overviews, valuation, and viability analyses to enable in-depth analyses of company metrics. Customizable market dashboard templates provide a complete overview of the markets over a given period. Additionally, custom watchlists help users live-track market trends, companies, stocks, and other assets. Users can also use a stock screener and charting tools to find and match with companies that best fit their trading style, and then Koyfin’s portfolio tools help them track all their investments from one place.
Koyfin Pros:
- Excellent graphs and charting features
- Offers multiple tools for financial data visualization and fundamental analysis
- Access to high-quality data points from multiple sources
- Affordable for small businesses and individual investors, compared to legacy platforms like Bloomberg
- Highly accessible platform with a free tier option and no installation required
- Access to the web and mobile apps
- Access to expert call transcripts
- Access to global macro insights
- Intuitive and user-friendly interface
Koyfin Cons:
- Basic qualitative search functionality, with no AI search features
- Data lacks depth, compared to many competitor platforms, especially for niche or alternative datasets
- No APIs
- Limited technical analysis tools
- Limited historical data, compared to legacy platforms
- Significant feature limitations in lower-tier versions of the platform
- Lacks certain advanced features necessary for large institutional clients with complex needs
AlphaSense
As the top alternative to both Koyfin and Bloomberg, AlphaSense is one of the most comprehensive market intelligence tools on the market.
AlphaSense is a leading enterprise-grade 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 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.
AlphaSense’s features include:
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 1,000+ 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 – 150K+ 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.
As of July 2024, AlphaSense has 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.
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.”
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 minute changes in market sentiment over time. Users can take advantage of it to make better-informed investment decisions and enhance 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 Generative Search, for enhanced and accelerated research and analysis
- 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
| Koyfin | Bloomberg Terminal | AlphaSense | |
| Advanced AI search that picks up on relevant synonyms and tone/sentiment | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Access to expert call library and
broker research |
❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Seamless user interface, with cloud functionality and intuitive UX design | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Ability to upload your own internal content | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Integrations | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Ability to search by industry and by region | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Ability to find data and KPIs within structured and unstructured formats | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Ability to search by topic or theme | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Capacity to search through varied content sources across companies, industries, and topics | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Ability to add annotations and comments | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Ability to set up monitoring tools (like alerts, and dashboards) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Customer Service & Support
Bloomberg
Bloomberg has top-notch customer support teams available at all times. Users can access customer support via phone or live chat through the Bloomberg Professional app or the terminal.
Customers can also contact their dedicated account representatives and receive professional assistance for their platform-related issues.
Koyfin
Koyfin takes a slightly different approach to customer support, prioritizing customer self-help through its knowledge base. From here, users can read through multiple guides and articles to get up to speed with the platform and troubleshoot themselves.
Although there are no dedicated customer support agents or open lines to call, Koyfin allows users to leave support tickets through its contact page. Users that prefer personalized customer support may find Koyfin’s approach unsatisfactory.
AlphaSense
AlphaSense has dedicated customer support and education teams that offer hands-on training and demonstrations for new users. Additionally, users can contact AlphaSense through a dedicated account representative. AlphaSense’s product specialist team provides guidance and helps professionals create searches and custom tabs to streamline workflows.
For users who prefer live chat, AlphaSense has a Help button on its website, through which users can access 24/5 chat with product specialists and receive instant support as needed.
Ratings & Reviews
Bloomberg Terminal
Rating: 4.3 out of 5 on G2, 8.8 out of 10 on TrustRadius
Popular positives:
- Availability of financial market data from multiple high-quality sources
- Ability to export data to Microsoft Excel
- Excellent support, available at most hours of the day
- Multifunctionality
- Ideal for multiple use cases, including portfolio management, risk analysis and trading
Popular negatives:
- Automatic logoff can be a problem
- Too expensive and outdated
- Poor user interface
Koyfin
Rating: 4.8 out of 5 on G2, 10 out of 10 on TrustRadius (based on one review)
Popular positives:
- Easy setup and intuitive user interface
- Useful dashboards, charting, and watchlist features
- Specializes in equities and ETF data
- Useful charts for understanding stock trends
Popular negatives:
- Limited search functionality
- Limited depth of company-specific data
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
- Access to exclusive and premium data, only available on the platform
- 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
Pricing
Bloomberg Terminal
Bloomberg Terminal is quite costly, available for about $2000 per user per month or about $24,000 annually.
Koyfin
Koyfin markets itself as the affordable Bloomberg Terminal alternative. They offer several pricing tiers, depending on your specific business needs:
- $0: For beginner investors
- $39/month: For investors needing advanced functionality to manage their portfolios and research stocks
- $79/month: For investors wanting to unlock more advanced features, such as ETF valuation, model portfolios, and mutual fund data
- $179/month: For financial advisors who need even more advanced functionality for professional use
AlphaSense
An AlphaSense user can access smarter features, a better user experience, and an extensive content universe, eliminating the need for multiple tools. With AlphaSense, you get an all-in-one platform that is guaranteed to enhance, speed up, and streamline your research process. You can pay by enterprise or by seat, depending on your unique business needs. Contact us for more information on pricing options, or start a free two-week trial here.
A Better Alternative to Bloomberg Terminal and Koyfin?
For market intelligence, research, and analysis, Bloomberg Terminal and Koyfin are excellent options for business and professional use. You can use both to gain a competitive market advantage and enhance your research workflow.
However, both Bloomberg and Koyfin have limitations. They lack essential features and data sets that could prove crucial to your business strategy and decision-making. And neither possess the advanced AI search technology of AlphaSense.
AlphaSense is the best choice for you if:
- You are looking for a platform that can be utilized across your organization for various strategic goals, not just market research and intelligence.
- You need a platform that removes the tedious, manual parts of research and surfaces relevant, real-time insights, saving you precious time for deeper analysis and strategy.
- You are interested in accessing an expansive content universe of proprietary, premium, private, and public content inaccessible to the general public and many of your peers.
- You need a platform that integrates with all your company’s internal data, so you can extract both internal and external insights in one place.
- You need a platform that applies advanced AI and generative AI capabilities to both external and internal data to enhance and accelerate your research.
- You want a platform that will work behind the scenes to ensure you stay caught up and get all critical information, with customizable real-time alerts, watchlists, and dashboards.
- You want a platform that will replace all your other research avenues and be the one-stop shop for all your market intelligence needs.
