The Forrester Wave™: Market And Competitive Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2024

Market And Competitive Intelligence Platforms Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

Key features and pros and cons of top Market And Competitive Intelligence Platforms products:

Evalueserve - Leaders

Pros:

Broad global organization with more than 5,000 domain experts and local support in multiple countries
AI-focused research center with enhanced genAI capabilities enabling higher levels of self-service
Platform includes variety of paywalled sources and broad sourcing capabilities
Roadmap differentiates as one of few vendors proactively working to incorporate structured data from internal and external sources
High willingness to partner in shaping features and functions

Cons:

Platform includes variety of paywalled sources, though customers wish it included more
Lacks sentiment analysis capability
Takes some time to learn to use the Insightsfirst platform
Innovation in the product has been improving but was previously more dependent on analyst services

Northern Light - Leaders

Pros:

Broad range of public sources curated into content collections packaged for specific audiences
Integrates with diverse internal systems (Salesforce, SharePoint) to support wide array of use cases
Ease of use in creating newsletters and dashboards with connectivity to Slack and other systems
No per-user fees enabling high user adoption rates across organizations
First-rate personalized support from customer success teams to CEO
Enterprise flat-fee pricing model considered competitive
Strong newsletter and dashboard capabilities for disseminating insights to hundreds or thousands of end users

Cons:

Has added AI summarizations and basic conversational AI capabilities but not as advanced as some competitors
Innovation has emphasized reliability, scalability, and flexibility over cutting-edge AI features

Valona Intelligence - Leaders

Pros:

Exceptional sourcing of public information across 150 countries and 115 languages
Monitors more than 300 paywalled sources
Global reach supported by nine offices in three continents
Ultra-reliable platform with early adoption of generative AI for summarization
Val assistant for query and response with ability to populate predefined frameworks like SWOT
More than 300 content partners and one exclusive geopolitical consultancy partner
Analyst and consulting support rounds out the offering
Customers value precise search results and level of service

Cons:

Lacks ability to transcript and tag audio or video files
Innovation roadmap similar to other vendors in AI investments

AlphaSense - Strong Performers

Pros:

Unique information sources including hundreds of exclusive broker reports and thousands of proprietary expert interviews
Strong technology platform with sophisticated AI tools
More than 4,000 customers globally with rapid adoption and revenue growth
GenAI summaries and conversational AI dramatically expanding capabilities beyond intelligence professionals
Customers rank platform highly for 'finding trusted insights easily and quickly'
Exceptional customer support teams
Integrations from internal client repositories such as SharePoint or OneNote

Cons:

Platform has similar look and feel to Bloomberg terminal requiring high level of user expertise
Lower user adoption rates within accounts due to focus on intelligence/strategy roles
Integrations with collaboration systems such as Slack for disseminating information are lacking
Some customers looking for more quantitative company information

Contify - Strong Performers

Pros:

Improved overall user interface over last year and a half
Added AI summaries and conversational capabilities
Users can quickly and easily create newsletters and dashboards to distribute insights
Customers impressed with ability to innovate quickly
Handles requirements of global companies
Embarked on ambitious program to store data points for key market intelligence questions
Works closely with customers and influencers on future innovation

Cons:

Vision clear but strategy on types of organizations it targets and is suited for is less apparent
Lacks unsupervised machine learning for topic clustering abilities
Lacks sentiment analysis for understanding positive or negative feelings about companies or products
Customers mention desire for more paywalled sources
Roadmap plans could be more clearly articulated

Crayon - Strong Performers

Pros:

Superior vision highly focused on providing competitive enablement capabilities to drive better sales outcomes
Cadre of partnerships enabling tight integrations with CRM, conversational intelligence, and collaboration systems
Comprehensive integrations with internal systems providing significant value
Ingests win/loss information, buyer conversations, and sales feedback
New conversational AI tools and Slack integration allows sellers to ask questions and get real-time answers
Focused rapid innovation in last year on leveraging genAI for summarizations and query/responses
Customers value strong integrations and ability to 'reach sales reps where they are'

Cons:

Broad array of publicly available sources but no integrated paywalled sources
Some noise in search results
Lacks sentiment analysis
Pricing primarily based on number of competitors tracked, a point of frustration for larger organizations with hundreds of competitors
Customers say 'the look and feel could be improved'

EPAM - Strong Performers

Pros:

Global resources with extensive sources including deep industry content
Ability to easily add new sources
More than 90 business and industry-specific taxonomies available out of the box with option for custom taxonomies
Natural language processing and semantic analysis available in 49 languages
More than half of client base works in languages other than English
Conversational genAI capabilities available with ability to select single or multiple sources
Customers happy with competitive pricing
Steady adoption with almost 150 customers and increasing average deal size

Cons:

Searches resulted in long list requiring significant filtering or Boolean operations
Limited graphical results make it less intuitive for users
Customers indicate some room for improvement for conducting analyses
Innovation often done in conjunction with lead clients but new functionality doesn't always translate well to broader market
Pricing based on power users and end users can sometimes stymie user adoption

Klue - Strong Performers

Pros:

Acquisition of Doublecheck enables central intelligence hub for market, competitive, and buyer intelligence across go-to-market stakeholders
Prebuilt connectors with CRM solutions, sales content, Slack, Teams, and conversational intelligence systems
Ingesting opportunity or win/loss information from Salesforce is straightforward
Uses genAI to summarize hundreds of user reviews for strengths, weaknesses, and sentiment
Ask Klue feature provides responses to queries
Smart applications of genAI and sentiment analysis
Customers value integrations and rapid release cycle
User growth has remained steady

Cons:

Ability to achieve expanded vision just starting to come to fruition as customers begin to adopt full range of services
Pricing varies by end users and number of final deliverables sent to them, which could dampen user adoption rates
Ask Klue reverts to general LLM if answer can't be found using only Klue's trusted sources
Customers acknowledge it can take time to fine-tune alerts

C5i - Contenders

Pros:

AI capabilities quite impressive including generative summarizations, clustering, and conversational content
Supervised and unsupervised models allow pattern and anomaly detection in both structured and unstructured data
Well-funded AI lab with traditionally solid innovation efforts
Utilizing powerful tools for digital shelf analytics for promotion, pricing, search, and other elements
Customers in the past have highly rated organization's expertise, support, and platform

Cons:

Vision for Compete platform has shifted in past few months to focus on digital shelf insights and analytics
Platform no longer focused on general market and competitive information
Pricing has historically been very high resulting in very large deal sizes
Not much broad user adoption despite high-touch service
Realigning efforts and resources toward CPG, retail, and e-commerce segments

EMIS - Contenders

Pros:

Information set especially unique including locally sourced information and more than 2,200 paywalled sources
Includes news, market research, reports, and public and private financials
Visualization and analysis superior to most vendors with trend and relationship graphs and tree maps
Ready-made reports such as SWOT or PESTEL available
Peer benchmarking can compare companies' financial performance or other attributes with automatic updates
Pricing model based on industries and geographies allows significant savings
Customers value paid and proprietary reports which are 'very informed and comprehensive'

Cons:

Doesn't have any internal integrations for ingesting information or distributing insights to users
GenAI generates news summaries but conversational AI capabilities still in development
Customer adoption has been fair with growing user adoption
Customers look forward to improved ability to remove duplicate news articles

InfoDesk - Contenders

Pros:

Merged entity has produced more scalable platform with more content and services available
More than 100 out-of-the-box integrated paywalled sources available for subscription
Integrations with internal systems can bring in wide variety of internal content
Has both keyword and AI search methodologies
Innovation has increased with more development resources due to Wide Narrow acquisition
Success gaining broader adoption in specialty use cases like risk, pharma regulations, and sustainability
Customers value increased efficiency in finding information

Cons:

Vision somewhat nondescript to be 'qualitative intelligence hub for global enterprises'
Public sources broad but missing company financial disclosures
Each taxonomy must be custom-built by customer
Search sometimes produces noise and duplications that 'take time to clean up'
Still working on fine-tuning genAI responses for accuracy
Pricing can result in deal sizes considered too high for many prospects
Roadmap mostly focused on advancing AI capabilities

FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2024?

A: Evalueserve, Northern Light, Valona Intelligence

Q: What does "Leader" mean in Forrester Wave terms?

A: Leaders in Forrester Wave evaluations are vendors that demonstrate the strongest current offering and strategy in the market. They show excellence across multiple criteria including product capabilities, market presence, customer satisfaction, and strategic vision. Leaders typically have: 1) Superior current offerings with comprehensive feature sets, 2) Strong strategic vision and innovation roadmaps, 3) High customer satisfaction scores, 4) Significant market presence and adoption, 5) Proven ability to execute on their strategy. In this M&CI Platforms evaluation, Leaders excel at providing broad up-to-date sources of information, enabling distribution of intelligence across organizations, and incorporating advanced AI capabilities for self-service insights.

Q: How do I interpret a Forrester Wave?

A: https://www.forrester.com/policies/forrester-wave-methodology/

Report:

Top Vendor Products for Market And Competitive Intelligence Platforms in 2024

Market And Competitive Intelligence Platforms Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

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FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2024?

Q: What does "Leader" mean in Forrester Wave terms?

Q: How do I interpret a Forrester Wave?

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