Best Competitive Intelligence Tools for Strategic Insights in 2025 and Beyond

Timely and valuable insights are essential to gain a competitive edge.

This is why intelligence tools are so helpful for virtually any business, with companies using these to study their competitors and the market prior to making high-impact decisions.

Before diving into what exactly competitive intelligence tools are and the different types and advantages, it is important to understand what competitive intelligence actually is.

Understanding Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of gathering, evaluating, and applying market and competitor data.

CI is information you can use to develop your own successful strategy by leveraging a detailed picture of each competitor and their niche within the market, their tactics and moves, and their strong and weak points, as well as an understanding of the target audience.

Possessing this knowledge enables you to identify opportunities and challenges and develop data-driven competitive strategies.

Competitive intelligence vs market research vs market intelligence

These three terms may sound the same, but each has its own goals. Market research entails collecting information on individual customer preferences, whereas market intelligence adopts a broader approach to understand the environment in which a business operates.

Competitive intelligence, in turn, focuses solely on understanding and learning about the moves, strategies, and results of direct competitors.

Why is competitive intelligence important?

To demonstrate the importance of CI, consider yourself to be the captain of a ship competing in a life-or-death race.

But here’s the catch: you have no radar, no map, no notion of the location of other ships, and little to no understanding of the weather forecast.

Every choice you make, including speed and direction, has the potential to either get you closer to your goal or move you further away from it.

In this context, CI is a multitool that can act as radar, a weather prediction device, and a map, as well as reporting about what other captains and their ships are doing. It converts uncertainty into foresight.

From a business point of view, CI helps in the achievement of two strategic objectives:

1. Offensive objectives involve taking daring new directions, shifting market positioning, and confidently allocating resources.
2. Defensive objectives are centered on avoiding potentially difficult situations by being aware of any changes, predicting what competitors will do and preparing for any eventualities that may lie ahead.

In terms of transactions and due diligence, CI plays a key role by helping investors to:

1. Spot promising investment opportunities early
2. Validate the market's size, trends, and possibilities for further growth
3. Assess a company’s competitive position and pinpoint potential risks
4. Make stronger, data-backed investment decisions.

What are CI tools?

Competitive intelligence tools are platforms and services that help companies to gather and analyze data on rivals, markets, and industry trends.

Until not so long ago, companies used to do this manually, but without technology, it wasn't easy to gather and analyze the vast amount of data available.

Modern competitive intelligence platforms can help to address this issue by allowing companies to combine data from numerous sources rapidly and make use of advanced analytics (often AI-powered) to cut through the noise and find out what is important.

Let’s analyze the different types of CI tools and dive into some of the most interesting and useful ones.

Choosing the right competitive intelligence tools: An in-depth review of the different types

We have grouped the different CI systems into various categories and listed some of the top platforms in each.

Expert networks and expert insight platforms

Businesses use expert networks to contact subject-matter professionals to ask them specific questions and their responses to these offer insights that can then be used to improve strategic research or due diligence.

Who uses these?

1. Hedge funds and private equity firms, which were the early adopters
2. Consulting firms
3. Corporate strategists
4. Small enterprises and start-ups.

Companies like Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG), Guidepoint, AlphaSights, Third Bridge, among others, have historically led the expert network field by setting up individual expert consultations for clients.

However, over the past few years, technology has made it possible for some expert networks, such as Tegus, to evolve.

Tegus

Expert transcript marketplace and financial research

Tegus, a digital expert platform, has created enormous libraries of expert call transcripts and provides on-demand services.

What can Tegus be used for?

In addition to arranging expert calls, Tegus allows dealmakers to search a rich archive of past expert conversations to gain relevant insights.

What makes it special?

Tegus has an expanding collection of 35,000+ expert interviews spanning tens of thousands of businesses. Clients can search their collection of Q&A-style interview transcripts by keyword or subject.

Note: In 2024, AlphaSense purchased Tegus, combining its AI search tools with Tegus's financial information and expert transcript collection.

Financial data terminals and analytics platforms

This category of CI tools includes all-in-one systems that can offer real-time market insights, historical financials, and analysis tools.

These terminals and platforms bring together tons of data, including financial reports, stock prices, and analyst insights, all in one place, which can help dealmakers to quickly check a competitor’s earnings, analyze how a merger might affect the market, or set alerts for important news.

Bloomberg Terminal

Real-time financial data and news platform

Bloomberg Terminal offers a vast database of company data, an integrated news service, and information on stocks, bonds, and commodities, among other information.

What can the Bloomberg Terminal be used for?

As a financial platform used by professionals to access real-time data, breaking news, in-depth research, and advanced analytics, it is an essential CI tool for traders, bankers, and analysts to monitor competitor stock performance or market-moving events.

What makes it special?

What sets the Bloomberg Terminal apart is its combination of real-time market coverage, proprietary research, sophisticated analytics, and integrated communication tools, all on one platform.

S&P Global Market Intelligence

S&P is a global supplier of financial information services. Its digital platform combines data, cutting-edge technology, and expert guidance to offer strategic advice, advanced corporate tools, and financial analytics.

What can S&P be used for?

It is a platform that delivers financial and industry-specific data, analytics, and insights to support decision-making in sectors such as capital markets, commodities, and the automotive industry.

What makes it special?

The tool brings together vast volumes of high-quality data, expert analysis, and cutting-edge technology such as machine learning.

FactSet

Investors use FactSet extensively to find opportunities and efficiently manage portfolios.

What can FactSet be used for?

FactSet offers seamless access to extensive financial data, allowing investors to make more informed and data-driven decisions.

It assists in advanced company and industry research via the FactSet Workstation, which provides real-time news, event calendars, and detailed public and private corporate data.

What makes it special?

This tool combines a strong data foundation with state-of-the-art technology such as generative AI, machine learning, and scalable SaaS solutions. Its platform is customizable, with the ability to integrate third-party tools.

Private market databases and deal tracking platforms

Another category of CI tools includes private market databases and deal tracking platforms. These platforms provide dealmakers with insight into private companies and start-ups, among others. They help users to keep track of what is happening in the business world by collecting information about aspects such as:

1. Funding rounds
2. Mergers and acquisitions
3. Investor profiles
4. What's going on in the start-up world.

PitchBook is one of the most popular tools used for this kind of research.

PitchBook

Private market data and deal flow intelligence

What can PitchBook be used for?

PitchBook is a financial data and research platform with an emphasis on venture capital (VC), private equity (PE), and mergers and acquisitions (M&A), offering data and tools to find, evaluate, and close deals. It features custom dashboards and fund performance metrics.

Through the suite of integrated tools available on the PitchBook platform, users can:

1. Undertake advanced searches across companies, investments, investors, and funds
2. Access in-depth data about funding rounds, financials, valuations, deal terms, M&A structures, and investor profiles, among other information.

What makes it special?

Users can leverage AI-powered tools to enable smarter workflows and faster insights, and to detect surfacing trends and signals hidden within the data.

It helps with private and public market intelligence by tracking VC, PE, M&A, and public equity trends, using advanced tools to help users to extract actionable insights.

Market intelligence and trend-tracking platforms

While CI focuses solely on a company’s competitors, market intelligence takes a broader approach to understand the environment in which a business operates, including competitor monitoring.

The purpose of market intelligence tools is to notify users of important signals and movements by sifting through all the available information from news and reports to expert opinions and social sentiments.

Market intelligence tools make use of advanced searches, AI, and big data to help dealmakers to discover trends and insights from a vast array of information.

AlphaSense

AI-powered market intelligence platform

AlphaSense enables financial and business experts to swiftly identify key information. It indexes millions of high-value documents, including SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, expert interviews, analyst research, and news articles.

What can AlphaSense be used for?

By leveraging cutting-edge generative AI models, AlphaSense provides real-time, sentence-level cited answers to complex questions.

What makes it special?

AlphaSense stands out by carrying out searches that are powered by natural language processing and generative AI technology to understand complex queries and return highly relevant, sentence-level insights.

GenAI capabilities allow users to compare documents at scale and extract key data points from earnings calls, industry reports, and investment memos with precision and speed.

Gartner

Research and advisory services

Gartner offers professional advice and actionable, unbiased insights to company executives and their teams.

What can Gartner be used for?

Gartner focuses on technology and business matters to offer industry-specific market reports, forecasts, and strategic recommendations to tech firms, financial companies, and governmental organizations.

Gartner offers community-driven insights that enable peer-to-peer learning and real-time advice. Clients also benefit from conferences, diagnostics, and one-on-one consulting that is tailored to their specific industry and region.

What makes it special?

It features a number of tools, including the Magic Quadrant which is a visual tool that evaluates and positions tech vendors in a specific market, helping companies to understand how technology providers are currently performing and how prepared they are for the future.

In addition, Gartner’s AI Use Case Insights Platform – a decision-support platform for choosing AI use cases with business impact – helps companies to quickly identify and prioritize high-impact AI opportunities that fit with their goals.

Expert Network Calls (ENC)

Flexible, Insight-Driven Expert Network Platform

Expert Network Calls (ENC) is an insight-driven CI tool that combines the customized expert access of traditional networks with a flexible marketplace model and then layers on technology to capture and summarize insights.

What can ENC be used for?

ENC is a marketplace and aggregator for expert networks, providing a one-stop point of access to the expertise of various expert providers.

What makes it special?

The platform connects clients to 19 reliable expert networks, which together comprise more than 2 million professionals from various industries.

The platform does not ask for an upfront retainer or membership. By using ENC, clients can start a project on demand, specify the expertise they require, and get in touch with many expert networks, including those that are not officially affiliated with ENC.

Here's what the ENC dashboard looks like:

Conclusion

Whether you are a management consultant conducting commercial due diligence or an investor looking for the next big opportunity, choosing the right CI tool could save you weeks of manual work and even prevent million-dollar mistakes. Follow ExpertNetworkCalls for more valuable industry information and insights to enhance your strategy and intelligence efforts.