AlphaSense vs. Crayon Intel Pro

AlphaSense is very well suited to investing teams that need a research management system that has a robust database behind and rich content management features for note-taking. AlphaSense may not be well-suited to individual investors who want data access but don't need to be sharing notes to a wider team. The sharing features are what make AlphaSense most useful.

Incentivized

Elsewhere in my review, I've talked about Crayon's incredible capabilities to track competitors, make ingesting intelligence about those competitors automatic, and how easily it incorporates that intelligence into dynamically and automatically-updated battlecards. I've also talked about their expanding use of AI to improve user experience and to improve the final work of CI professionals. All of which is to say that Crayon is the best tool I've ever used for intelligence analysis- it's incredible. Another area of consideration is analytics, particularly around win/loss data - Crayon's integration with Salesforce creates insightful analytics for understanding which competitors you're winning against, which you're losing against, which sellers are having a hard time, which are succeeding, and which sellers are utilizing the battlecards during the sales cycle. Proving ROI is simple with Crayon's analytics, as well, with a tool to show how much revenue you (as an individual) or your team have influenced with your battlecards.

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• Summarizing information across multiple company documents via their new Generative Grid tool.
• Aggregating the latest insights from diverse sources - broker research, expert insights, company documents, and news.
• Providing a repeatable way to query information.
• Smart keywords to help you search, e.g., car = auto = automotive.

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• Win/Loss Analysis
• Competitive Listening
• Battlecard Creation

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• The whole platform should be much faster with less lag.
• The layout of the document search isn't great. Often, I find it hard to expand sources or dates.
• Financials sections should be customisible, i.e. bolden certain ratios, remove others etc.
• "Error loading documents, please refresh the widget" should be seen fewer times than often.
• Why can't I export events dates to my Outlook calendar?

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• Crayon has been innovative in incorporating AI into the tool, both to enhance productivity and to enhance the outcomes of analysis. The fantastic thing is these features started rudimentary, have gotten better, and are set to get better still - I could recommend this to Crayon as an area for improvement (I suppose), but they're already working to take advantage of the latest AI features to make the user experience and our outputs even better.

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AlphaSense is a very useful tool and is reasonably priced for our organization. While I may not be a hyper-active user, it's a great resource when I need to quickly do a competitive landscape survey, review publicly available documents (transcripts, etc.), or review Wall Street research

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For my daily work AlphaSense is inevitable, as it holds a real added value compared to most of the CI platforms. It really makes my work more efficient and contributes to better strategy and decision making in the company. Datalog is
available up to 15 years, which is a real advantage compared to other CI platforms that can only start competitor monitoring following the signature of the agreement.

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Crayon is super easy to use - regardless of level in the organization. As a power user, it's easy to curate the most important information about competitors and then distribute it out to leadership and other teams so that they can stay informed on the most important competitor trends. It allows me to share out information via email or through Slack and our competitive intel channel

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The availability of Alphasense is great. I have used the software for multiple years and cannot remember ever having an outage issue. This is surprising actually, as I use other software applications that do not have regular outages, but still have outages periodically. Alphasense, on the other hand, never seems to have any outages. Good sign if I can't remember the software not working :).

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Loading or performing searches on AlphaSense platform is reasonably fast for most of the time. However, it is sometimes unacceptably long for me to load PDF files (earnings presentation, supplementary financial report) on AlphaSense. Certain features might also take very long time, such as loading for "similar tables" across EDGAR filings, or downloading tables from EDGAR filings

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Customer support is very prompt. I get personalized support for search recommendations and content that I could not find in my own search. Support checks in with me on a bi-monthly basis to keep me informed of the many different feature additions, I cannot find a more kind, understanding, and supportive team.

The person was prepared, attentive, understood the nature of my questions, was willing to work through any difficulties or misunderstandings, was patient, and super pleasant to work with. Great customer service.

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Trainers address the basics, and such training was meant for new users. Instructions are really helpful by providing scenarios that our team will face in our daily tasks. It will be more thoughtful if the training is conducted by case studies so as to allow new users to get first-hand experience during the training.

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seamless integration

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Compared to FactSet and PitchBook, AlphaSense is a good tool to fill my suite of financial analysis. PitchBook is superior for private company and transaction data, as well as screening for similar companies (the sourcing feature of the job). FactSet is superior for financial analysis for public companies, as well as charting data. AlphaSense is superior in research for documents and deep dive industry research (mostly qualitative) and grabbing data from financial documents

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The core features of all of these are essentially the same. Crayon Impact (the win/loss side) is what won us over compared to the other tools that we demoed.

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The sharing features provides by AlphaSense mean that it can be readily scaled for teams within an organization and, subject to compliance requirements, with client organizations. The ability to share annotations of transcripts and investor releases is valuable, and facilitates collaboration between analysts.

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• Research speed has now increased to a single day, allowing us to find everything we want about an industry, compared to 3-5 days before with Alphasense.
• Comps analysis, gathering detailed financial information, is now seamless and can be completed in less than 1 hour, compared to 1-2 days.
• Expert interview access, before Alphasense, we had no way of including this into our analysis. This has significantly improved the quality of our decisions and research.

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• Crayon has centralized what was previously a dispersed collection of competitive intelligence analysis, streamlined sharing of competitive insights, and allowed the CI Team unprecedented visibility into our impact on the business. This helps our business by: making sharing of analysis more efficient and creating a self-serve mechanism among our stakeholders, reducing the number of bespoke requests we receive; fostering competitive discussions among the wider workforce, which pulls in multiple perspective to ultimately shape and improve the quality of finished analysis; clarifying the impact of the CI Team's role on the business, which makes discussions around ROI with leadership much easier now that they're backed by hard numbers rather than a reliance on anecdotal evidence.

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