Best Market Intelligence Software Shortlist
Here is the list of tools I researched after considering their ability to understand the nuances of your market intelligence.
- Klue - Best for identifying competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
- Brandwatch - Best for consumer intelligence
- Owler - Best company profile database
- NetBase Quid - Best for monitoring consumer perspective
- Meltwater - Best for media monitoring and analysis
- Talkwalker - Best for social data intelligence
- Crayon - Best for monitoring competitors’ activities
- SEMrush - Best for market research
- 6Sense - Best for B2B companies
- Similar Web - Best for website analytics
- Viral Launch - Best for Amazon sellers
- AlphaSense - Best for AI-based market intelligence’
Market intelligence is critical for any business’s success. Your business needs to stay up-to-date with industry news to maintain a competitive edge - and that’s where market intelligence software comes in. Market intelligence tools are essential for highlighting the market reception of your products or services and other vital information impacting your revenue. In this article, I’ll explore some of the top market intelligence software that can help enhance your organization’s growth.
What Is Market Intelligence Software
Market intelligence software refers to specialized tools and applications designed to gather, analyze, and interpret relevant data from various sources to provide businesses with valuable insights into market trends, customer behavior, competitor activities, and industry developments. By utilizing data mining, data visualization, and advanced analytics techniques, this software enables companies to make well-informed strategic decisions, identify potential opportunities and threats, optimize marketing strategies, and gain a competitive edge in their respective markets. It empowers businesses to understand their market landscape better and enhances their ability to respond effectively to changing market dynamics and customer preferences.
Overviews of the 12 Best Market Intelligence Software
Here are my assessments of the best market intelligence software that helps businesses understand markets and what their competitors do to stay profitable.
1. Klue - Best for identifying competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
Klue is designed to provide teams with a comprehensive understanding of their competition’s strengths and weaknesses. It enables departments across any industry to gain a competitive advantage through market intelligence with insight into the competitive environment.
Why I picked Klue: This market intelligence platform stands out because it allows you to gather and analyze data from multiple sources, like websites, news articles, social media networks, and more. The details you receive from Klue will help you identify your competition’s strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to make effective strategic decisions. By leveraging Klue’s artificial intelligence algorithms, you’ll automatically identify data patterns and trends from the information it collects, empowering you to gain actionable insights quickly without having to search through significant amounts of data manually.
Klue Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include a collaborative workspace area teams can share notes, insights, and documentation related to their competitors, promoting cross-functional collaboration and ensuring everyone is updated on new developments in the industry. Klue also offers customizable battlecards that help teams understand the competition and how to effectively position products and services against them, tailored to suit a company’s specific needs.
Integrations include connections with the tools you likely use daily, simplifying access to content and contributing information without constantly changing platforms. These integrations include systems such as Gong, Highspot, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Teams, Okta, Salesforce, Seismic, Showpad, Slack, and other software options.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- Provides comprehensive competitor insights
- Real-time competitor alerts
- No tracking limit
Cons
- Setting up the system is time-consuming
- User interface isn’t intuitive
2. Brandwatch - Best for consumer intelligence
Brandwatch is a consumer intelligence tool many global brands use to gain powerful consumer information.
Why I picked Brandwatch: The platform is a digital consumer intelligence software that provides you with access to social media data and insights about various business organizations. Brandwatch uses advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to analyze data, find patterns, and create insights on aspects such as competitor activity, market trends, and consumer behavior. By utilizing the information from Brandwatch, you can make more intelligent, data-driven decisions that help you adapt to changes faster and easier in your consumer market.
Brandwatch Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include social listening and analytics tools that allow you to monitor social media networks and analyze conversations about your industry, competitors, or brand, tracking keywords in real time and providing valuable insights into consumer sentiment, trends, and possible growth opportunities. Brandwatch also provides in-depth data visualization capabilities that enable businesses to see their data in various formats, like graphs, charts, and word clouds, empowering organizations to discover patterns and trends within their data while allowing simple sharing capabilities with colleagues or stakeholders.
Integrations include connections with various business systems such as BuzzSumo, Converseon, Conversocial, Hootsuite, Khoros, Neurons, Percolate, QBank, Sociuu, StoryStream, and other software options. You can also use the platform’s API to connect Brandwatch with your current systems.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- Extensive platform data coverage
- Powerful, flexible dashboards
- Regular platform updates
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Leaves out some social networks
3. Owler - Best company profile database
Owler provides a comprehensive database of enterprise information of more than 15 million companies. The platform uses a unique crowdsourcing approach to collecting and delivering business details to users.
Why I picked Owler: I wanted to add Owler to this list because it provides businesses with a comprehensive list of over 15 million international brands created from multiple sources and communities. The platform sources this business information and delivers them to users as news alerts, company profiles, and community polls. With these details, you can get competitive information about an organization’s earnings, employee count, and likely business outcomes.
Owler Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include real-time, curated insights delivered to your inbox that detail the latest information about your competitors. Owler also allows users to track the market and industry trends most relevant to their business by enabling simple media coverage, allowing them to act quickly on crucial news.
Integrations include connections with various business tools that allow you to share valuable company details without leaving the applications, such as ChatGPT, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and Slack. Owler also offers an API so that you can make custom integrations with your toolset.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- User-friendly platform
- Accurate competitor information
- Real-time news alerts
Cons
- Executive information can use more details
- Custom list creation is available at an extra cost
4. NetBase Quid - Best for monitoring consumer perspective
NetBase Quid helps businesses focus on the perception consumers have about their organization. It provides a robust AI-powered analytics tool that offers businesses extensive flexibility to meet their intelligence requirements.
Why I picked NetBase Quid: As you likely know, you can’t control your business's perception; your consumers do, so I added NetBase Quid to help your organization uncover how your audience feels about your brand. You will have access to data from multiple sources, such as news and blog websites, social media networks, patents, forums, and more. NetBase Quid will provide you with sentiment analysis with the information it collects on your behalf, allowing you to extract the most accurate insights from each data source.
NetBase Quid Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include tools to help you identify how your organization measures against your competition, helping you understand what consumers like, dislike, or love about a brand. The platform can also help you discover the vital factors that impact brand passion among your target audience and see what excites them most to increase their loyalty to your company.
Integrations include connections with hundreds of systems through a paid Zapier account, such as ActiveCampaign, Airtable, Asana, Help Scout, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Microsoft Teams, monday.com, Slack, Zendesk, and other software options. You can also use the platform’s API to create more customer integrations with your business’s applications.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- Excellent analytics details
- Great data filtering options
- Solid data source foundation
Cons
- Slow load times
- User interface needs work
5. Meltwater - Best for media monitoring and analysis
Meltwater is a robust market intelligence software that provides extensive information through media monitoring and analysis features.
Why I picked Meltwater: The platform excels in monitoring multiple media channels, including social media, broadcast outlets, online news, and print publications. Meltwater helps you monitor these sources, allowing you to track your business’s mentions, identify industry trends, and analyze customer sentiment. With customizable dashboards and real-time alerts, Meltwater can easily update you on relevant information.
Meltwater Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include competitive intelligence tools that empower you to monitor your competition’s activities across multiple channels while giving you actionable insights regarding their strategies. Meltwater also offers social listening and engagement capabilities that help you understand what your audiences say about your brand across multiple social media channels - and you can directly engage with your audience from the platform.
Integrations include connections with various systems and platforms that allow you to share and centralize data according to your needs, such as Audiense, Data Virtuality, Desktop.com, Intelligence2day, Netino, Rippling, and Semeon Analytics. Meltwater also offers an API you can use to make custom integrations with your company’s tools.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- Excellent customer support
- Simple user interface
- Broad range of media sources
Cons
- Database needs more regular updates
- No clear pricing
6. Talkwalker - Best for social data intelligence
Talkwalker helps businesses collect social data intelligence across all social media channels and measure their impact against the competition. The information derived from the platform allows companies to monitor their online presence, analyze data, and make smarter decisions.
Why I picked Talkwalker: One of the key strengths that makes Talkwalker a relevant option for this list is its real-time social data intelligence. Tracking conversations across multiple platforms through Talkwalker enable you to identify trends measure consumer sentiment, and get an overview of your campaigns’ effectiveness. The platform can also help you identify your industry's critical players, influencers, followers, and fans for a specific brand or topic.
Talkwalker Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include AI-powered analytics that provides in-depth details about your data, helping you identify insights by analyzing components such as text, images, and videos from various sources. Talkwalker also provides customer feedback analytics tools that help you get actionable insights to improve customer retention, loyalty, and satisfaction.
Integrations include connections with a wide range of business applications, such as Adverity, Audiense, Domo, Google Data Studio, Hootsuite, Khoros, Medalia, Onclusive, Salesforce, Zendesk, and other software options. You can also use Talkwalker’s API or a paid Zapier account to make custom integrations.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- In-depth social media data
- Excellent brand presence monitoring
- High-quality data visualizations
Cons
- Updating tags is slow
- Customer support needs work
7. Crayon - Best for monitoring competitors’ activities
Crayon is a comprehensive market intelligence tool that enables businesses to track their competitors’ activities. The platform allows companies to analyze activities surrounding their performance and their launched marketing campaigns.
Why I picked Crayon: The platform allows you to keep tabs on your competitors’ every move and monitor more than 100 data types associated with them. Crayon combines human and artificial intelligence to give you insights to help your teams create winning strategies. Crayon enables you to monitor and assess everything from pricing changes to marketing campaigns.
Crayon Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include a collaborative workspace that allows your team members to discuss findings, share details, and work together. Crayon also offers customizable alerts, reports, and digests to help activate competitive intelligence throughout your company.
Integrations include connections with popular third-party systems that help your teams get more information without changing their work, such as ClickUp, Freshsales, Gong, Highspot, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, Notion, Salesforce, Showpad, Slack, and other software options.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- Digestible automated insights
- Easy to gather information on competitors’ activities
- Dedicated customer success reps
Cons
- Doesn’t track LinkedIn
- Bit of a learning curve
8. SEMrush - Best for market research
SEMrush offers a Market Explorer tool that allows companies to research entire markets by entering a single domain. Afterward, the system assembles a list of subsequent industry enterprises and organic competitors.
Why I picked SEMrush: Understanding the landscape of your market will help your business succeed, so I wanted to add SEMrush to this list because it can help you discover information such as market share ownership, market demographics, top keywords, and market traffic trends. SEMrush’s Market Explorer tool provides you with comprehensive insights to help you optimize your marketing strategies and stay ahead of your competition. The platform also lets you see what your competitors are doing to help you understand what’s working and what’s not.
SEMrush Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include competitor analysis tools that provide a robust overview of your competition’s online presence, allowing you to identify their top-performing content, keywords, and backlinks. The platform also helps with keyword research and analysis to help you understand search volume, keyword difficulty, and competitors’ rankings.
Integrations include connections with applications such as AIOSEO, Bramework, Kontent.ai, LongShot, Outranking, PageCloud, Plerdy, QuickBlog, Renderforest, Zoho, and other software options. If you need to make custom integrations, you can use SEMrush’s API or a paid Zapier account.
Pricing: From $108.33/month.
Free Trial: Free plan available with limited features.
Pros
- Extensive free training
- Excellent support staff
- Significant number of competitor analysis tools
Cons
- Interface is complicated
- Some information is hard to find
9. 6sense - Best for B2B companies
6sense helps B2B businesses collect predictive intelligence about prospective buyers, analyze their needs, and predict their actions across different stages of their buying journey.
Why I picked 6sense: If you’re operating in a B2B organization, I added 6sense to this article because I believe it’s worth consideration. 6sense offers a predictive intelligence engine that gives your marketing team the details everyone needs regarding where your prospects are in their buying journey, identifies which accounts and contacts to target, and understands which campaign activities encourage prospects down sales cycles. The high-qualified leads you generate can be assigned to sales teams, allowing them to offer valuable products or services to these prospects.
6sense Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include intent data to help you discover hidden demand and identify who’s ready to buy. 6sense also uses artificial intelligence and real-time data to eliminate the guesswork from developing quality marketing pipelines.
Integrations include connections with multiple business tools, such as Alyce, Bombora, Bound, Clari, Drift, HubSpot CRM, LeanData, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, and other software options. You can also use 6sense’s API to create custom integrations with your systems.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- Significant predictive insights
- Fits B2B businesses
- Excellent customer support
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Reporting could be more granular
10. SimilarWeb - Best for website analytics
SimialrWeb is a trusted market intelligence tool that helps businesses get information regarding the top websites in their industry. The software helps analyze websites to view their ranking, traffic, demographic targeting, and other vital details.
Why I picked SimilarWeb: With SimilarWeb, your business can analyze competitors’ websites and understand how they acquire customers. The information from SimilarWeb will help you know who your competitors are, what their customers look for, and how you compare to them. You can also get a lot of customer insight you can use to enhance marketing strategies and find out what niche your competitors are attracting.
SimilarWeb Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include behavioral analysis and audience insights tools that help you uncover where your target audience is spending their time online. The platform’s consumer journey analysis tools help you understand complete customer journeys and provide information about competitors’ strategies.
Integrations include connections with popular organizational tools, such as Adverity, Biscience, Data Virtuality, Desktop.com, EXADS, Google Analytics, Netpeak Checker, Salesforce, Shift, Syfter, and other software options. SimilarWeb provides an API that allows you to make custom integrations if necessary.
Pricing: From $125/user/month.
Free Trial: 7-day free trial.
Pros
- Provides significant website intelligence
- Assesses consumers' usage pattern information
- Comprehensive market intelligence
Cons
- Pricing isn’t suitable for small businesses
- Steep learning curve
11. Viral Launch - Best for Amazon sellers
Viral Launch helps businesses selling products on Amazon confidently discover items that are selling well.
Why I picked Viral Launch: The platform provides significant product data to help your business find what items are selling well on the Amazon marketplace. Viral Launch enables you to validate your product ideas by helping you source money-makers through its custom algorithm. The information you can get from the Viral launch platform will help you better understand your market and where it’s going so you can take advantage of new opportunities.
Viral Launch Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include competitor intelligence tools that empower you to reverse engineer your competition’s success for your success. The platform also offers keyword research tools that provide historical search volume trends to show you what’s gaining or losing popularity, helping you see what to target.
Integrations include the ability to connect with your tools through the platform’s API.
Pricing: From $58/month.
Free Trial: 14-day free trial.
Pros
- Simple setup
- Many intelligence tools for Amazon
- Helpful customer service
Cons
- Lowest tier has limited features
- Can be more intuitive
12. AlphaSense - Best for AI-based market intelligence’
AlphaSense is an enterprise market intelligence software that uses artificial intelligence to help businesses scan public and private data sources.
Why I picked AlphaSense: You might be used to researching markets and competition on Google, but using AlphaSense AI can enhance your research process and get you better results. You can efficiently perform a keyword or company search on AlphaSense to find premium data from sources such as SEC filings, industry journals, earnings transcripts, broker research, and regulatory content. The platform’s AI can also help you identify sentiment and key mentions inside call recording transcripts.
AlphaSense Standout Features
Standout features include intelligence workflow tools that help you turn your research into action and share it with your team. The platform also provides a visual dashboard to help you monitor insights effectively.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free trial available.
Pros
- Easy-to-use interface
- Responsive customer support
- Significant AI-powered search analysis
Cons
- The amount of data provided can be overwhelming
- Some search results can be irrelevant
Other Options
Market intelligence is a vital function for any business, and many software vendors recognize the need for implementing tools that will help you get the information you need to be successful. However, this means there are many options to consider - and I added more options worth considering to help ensure you find the best fit for your needs.
- Kompyte - Best for competitive intelligence automation.
- CI Radar - Best for competitive intelligence accuracy.
- Contify - Best for tracking key intelligence topics.
- Intelligence2day - Best for creating digestible information.
- ZoomInfo SalesOS - Best up-to-date corporate information database.
- Crunchbase - Best for private-company prospecting.
- Databook - Best for uncovering future pipelines.
- Foundry Intent - Best for buyer intent intelligence.
- Boardfy - Best for price tracking intelligence.
- Brand24 - Best for social listening.
- Google Looker - Best for website audience analytics.
- Moz - Best for SEO keyword intelligence.
- Ahrefs - Best for competitor website analytics.
- Sensor Tower - Best for mobile app marketing.
- Geopointe - Best for geographic market data.
- Critical Mention - Best for monitoring broadcast media.
Selection Criteria For Market Intelligence Software
Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best market intelligence software for this article:
Core Functionality
Although the various market intelligence software options have unique features compared to everything else available, these tools offer the same foundation. To make it on this list, I focused on market intelligence solutions that serve the following core functionality:
- Collects data from various sources such as websites, social media, industry reports, customer feedback, competitor information, and more. It automates the process of data collection
- Employs advanced analytics and data processing techniques to analyze and interpret the information
Key Features
Market intelligence software can offer specific features, some are common, and the rest are unique to the platform. However, since market intelligence technology is constantly evolving, I added options to this article that at least have the following features.
- Real-Time Alerts and Updates: These tools provide real-time alerts and updates on recent market trends, competitors’ actions, regulation changes, and more; using this information is critical for staying ahead in a fast-paced industry.
- Customization and Personalization: Customizing and personalizing aspects of market intelligence software, such as filters, taxonomies, and tags, is crucial - and you can also use these solutions to tailor personalized alerts and data presentations.
- Collaboration Tools: Market intelligence tools providing collaboration features support employee teamwork by implementing capabilities such as newsletter generation and management, shared dashboards, information dissemination, and commenting.
- Advanced Search: Sophisticated search tools are essential for digging deeper into your data, finding specific information, and exploring different market and competition aspects.
- Data Visualization: Market intelligence software offers data visualization capabilities, such as dashboards and widgets, to help your teams understand complex data patterns, trends, and correlations.
Usability
An intuitive platform that’s easy to use is essential. I looked for software that enables your teams to easily navigate the tool, understand the data it presents, and create reports. Your teams will be able to accomplish these tasks without needing extensive training.
Software Integrations
Any tool you implement in your business should easily integrate with your existing systems and workflows; market intelligence software is no different. For example, if you’re currently using Salesforce for customer relationship management, market intelligence solutions that offer simple integration with the platform will prevent your teams from experiencing data silos and ensure straightforward operation. I look for software that offers multiple native integrations or allows you to make custom creations through an API or tools like Zapier.
Scalability
As your business grows, your market intelligence needs to evolve too. I look for solutions that are capable of scaling alongside your company. For example, small businesses might initially need fundamental market trend analysis. As the company expands, it’ll need more comprehensive capabilities, such as predictive modeling and customer behavior analysis.
People Also Ask
Searching for new market intelligence software for your business can be a challenging process – and you might have some questions that need answering before narrowing down your choices. I did some extra research to find the most common questions people have when looking for market intelligence tools and provided some answers to help.
How much does market intelligence software cost?
What are the 4 types of market intelligence?
What are the benefits of market intelligence software?
Other Marketing Intelligence Software Reviews
During your search for market intelligence software, you might discover you may need a more specific intelligence tool. So you can check out the following software reviews to help you find something that better fits your needs.
- Marketing Analytics Tools
- Marketing Measurement Tools
- Marketing Planning Tools
- Social Media Analytics Software
- Marketing Attribution Software
- Marketing Account Intelligence Software
- Email Marketing Analytics Tools
- Content Analytics Software
- Social Listening Tools
The Takeaway
Regardless of your industry, market intelligence is essential for your business. This article will give you the information you need to implement market intelligence software in your business. With the amount of data generated and analyzed for your needs, you can create an accurate picture of your competitive landscape detailing what’s happening and how to bring your business to the top. Whether you’re just getting started with market intelligence or have used it for a while, make sure to keep this article in mind.
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