Financial LLM
CB Insights vs Pitchbook Detailed Comparison
Compare CB Insights vs Pitchbook to see which platform offers better data, pricing, and features for investors and startups.
Jul 11, 2025
In the world of financial analysis, having the right tools can make all the difference. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting, you've likely encountered the challenge of sifting through vast amounts of data to find the information you need. This is where CB Insights and Pitchbook come in.
These powerful platforms provide comprehensive data on private companies, investors, and deals, enabling you to make informed decisions. In this guide, we'll compare CB Insights and Pitchbook, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses to help you choose the best tool for your needs. And if you’re interested in writing and researching faster with AI, stick around till the end to discover how Otio’s AI research and writing partner can help you achieve your goals. We will also touch upon tools for Financial LLM.
Table Of Contents
What is CB Insights?
CB Insights is a market intelligence solution that provides data and insights for various industries, including investment banking, venture capital, corporate development, private equity, and more. The platform allows users to analyze market data and identify feasible project paths using predictive modeling and natural language processing (NLP) functionality.
It also provides mosaic scores that enable users to gain visibility into the progress rate of emerging organizations. This can help professionals explore promising investment opportunities by evaluating emerging trends. Otio also has web scraping capabilities that allow researchers to access a diverse array of information beyond traditional academic papers and search engines. This makes it a powerful tool for streamlining the research process and helping users transition from reading list to first draft more quickly.
What is Pitchbook?
PitchBook is a data and research platform designed to help professionals analyze private markets. It aggregates financial data from thousands of sources, offering a comprehensive database of private and public companies, investment rounds, and market trends. Put simply, Pitchbook provides a database of Private Market data. When you sign up, you get access to this data for market research. But PitchBook is indeed packed with features that make it a go-to tool for investors, analysts, and business development teams. Here are some of its key offerings:
Private Market Data
Extensive data on private companies, including valuations, revenue estimates, and funding history.
Investor & Company Profiles
Detailed investor database profiles of venture capital firms, private equity funds, and businesses across industries.
Deal Sourcing
Track mergers, acquisitions, and funding rounds in real time.
Market Trends & Analytics
Generate charts and reports to visualize industry trends and competitive landscapes.
Fundraising Insights
Research investment firms and their historical deal activity to identify potential funding sources.
Let Otio be your AI research and writing partner — try Otio for free today!
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• Financial Reporting Challenges
• Financial Forecasting Techniques
• Financial Data Extraction
• Financial Statement Analysis Techniques
• How to Forecast Budget
• Market Research Challenges
• How to Do a Cost Analysis
• AI Financial Modeling
CB Insights vs Pitchbook Detailed Comparison
1. Core Focus and Purpose
CB Insights is centered around innovation intelligence. Its primary goal is to assist companies in predicting technology trends, understanding startup ecosystems, and identifying disruptive competitors. The platform serves corporate strategists, innovation teams, and M&A professionals who need to stay ahead of market changes. PitchBook, in contrast, focuses on private market intelligence. It provides comprehensive data on venture capital (VC), private equity (PE), and mergers & acquisitions (M&A). The platform is used by investment professionals, financial advisors, and corporate development teams.
Summary
CB Insights is trend-forward and predictive, while PitchBook is investment-focused and historical.
2. Data Coverage and Strengths
CB Insights excels in tracking startups, emerging tech sectors, and innovation trends. It utilizes machine learning to analyze data from news, patents, regulatory filings, and other sources. The platform visualizes how technologies evolve and identifies which companies are leading these changes. PitchBook provides detailed financial and deal-level data, including funding rounds, valuations, investor profiles, LP/GP relationships, M&A terms, and fund performance. It provides more comprehensive financial metrics, including earnings, multiples, and historical ownership records.
Use-Case Difference
CB Insights is better for forecasting industry trends and monitoring competitors. PitchBook is superior for investment due diligence and deal analysis.
3. Types of Users and Industries Served
CB Insights is used by Fortune 500 strategy teams, product managers, consultants, and innovation leaders. The platform’s visuals are designed to cater to executive-level decision-making. PitchBook is preferred by venture capitalists, private equity professionals, and investment bankers. Financial analysts and M&A professionals use it for deal transparency and financial benchmarking.
Key Takeaway
CB Insights supports strategic, innovation-driven decisions, while PitchBook serves finance-heavy, transaction-driven users.
4. User Experience and Interface
CB Insights provides an intuitive, modern interface with clean data visualizations and interactive dashboards, enabling users to explore connections among startups, technologies, and investors without the need for spreadsheets. PitchBook can be data-dense and complex to navigate. It is feature-rich and offers Excel plugins for customizable exports. CB Insights prioritizes user-friendliness and visuals. PitchBook focuses on flexibility and depth.
5. Data Collection Methods
CB Insights utilizes machine learning and NLP to collect unstructured data, including press releases and patent applications, excelling in pattern recognition and trend detection. PitchBook employs a human-centric model, with data analysts verifying information through direct contacts to ensure accuracy for deal data and financials.
Difference
CB Insights is automated and scalable. PitchBook provides verified data for investment research.
6. Innovation and Future Focus
CB Insights is a forward-looking platform that publishes reports on market shifts and the probability of disruption. It helps companies decide whether to build, buy, or partner. PitchBook focuses on historical performance and current market structures. It traces investment trends and financial returns.
Bottom Line
CB Insights focuses on the future of business, while PitchBook concentrates on the past and present of private markets.
7. Pricing and Access
Both platforms are expensive and target enterprise clients. PitchBook is generally priced higher due to its detailed financial data and analysis. CB Insights offers more flexible pricing for strategic teams. Otio is an AI-native workspace explicitly designed for researchers. It helps them collect data from a wide range of sources, extract key takeaways with AI-generated notes and source-grounded Q&A chat, and create draft outputs using the sources they've collected. Let Otio be your AI research and writing partner — try Otio for free today!
8 Best CB Insights and Pitchbook Alternatives
1. Otio
Otio is an AI-native workspace designed to help researchers, knowledge workers, and students deal with content overload. It enables users to collect data from various sources, including bookmarks, tweets, books, and YouTube videos. Otio then extracts key takeaways from this data using AI-generated notes and source-grounded Q&A chat. Finally, it enables users to create draft outputs based on the collected information, thereby speeding up the research and writing process. The platform also offers web scraping capabilities, allowing access to a wide range of data sources beyond traditional academic papers and search engines.
2. AlphaSense
AlphaSense is an AI-powered market data and organizational research platform used by consultancies, asset management firms, pharmaceutical companies, and many S&P 100 companies. It simplifies and accelerates research across both financial and non-financial data, making it a strong choice for those seeking advanced AI capabilities in their research platform.
3. Dealroom
Dealroom specializes in European startup intelligence, offering a unique perspective on AI and deep tech startup ecosystems with a global reach. The platform offers comprehensive funding data, geographic and sector-specific intelligence, and interactive data visualization tools to help users gain a deeper understanding of the startup landscape.
4. S&P Global
S&P Global is a well-established provider of data for private and public companies, serving sectors including commercial banking, corporations, insurance, and government agencies. Their Market Intelligence platform offers extensive market data coverage, including insights into over 56,000 banks and 58,000 asset management companies.
5. FactSet
FactSet is a long-standing financial research tool used by investors, asset managers, traders, and investment bankers. Its Workstation feature combines thousands of data sources into one intuitive research solution, accessible via mobile, web, or desktop apps. Users can customize charts, conduct advanced screenings, and receive alerts on global topics, companies, and industries.
6. Verdion
Verdion is an AI-driven platform specializing in business data enrichment, with a focus on private companies. The platform uses advanced web scraping techniques to gather information from across the internet, often uncovering data that other platforms miss.
7. Tracxn
Tracxn offers in-depth insights into emerging technology landscapes, with a strong focus on AI and innovative startups. The platform provides comprehensive startup profiles, deep technology categorization, and global coverage, particularly in emerging markets.
8. AngelList
AngelList is primarily known as a startup hiring and investment platform, but it also offers valuable resources for researching the AI app ecosystem. Users can connect directly with AI startup founders, access startup funding data and trends, and gain insights into venture capital, angel investors, and the startup job market.
Related Reading
• How to Improve Finance Processes
• Financial Reporting Challenges
• Financial Forecasting Techniques
• Financial Data Extraction
• Financial Statement Analysis Techniques
• How to Forecast Budget
• Market Research Challenges
• How to Do a Cost Analysis
• AI Financial Modeling
Supercharge Your Researching Ability With Otio — Try Otio for Free Today
Knowledge workers, researchers, and students today suffer from content overload and are left to deal with it using fragmented, complex, and manual tooling. Too many of them settle for stitching together complicated bookmarking, read-it-late, and note-taking apps to get through their workflows. Now that anyone can create content with the click of a button, this problem is only likely to worsen. Otio solves this problem by providing one AI-native workspace for researchers. It helps them:
Collect: a wide range of data sources, from bookmarks, tweets, and extensive books to YouTube videos.
Extract key takeaways: with detailed AI-generated notes and source-grounded Q&A chat.
Create: draft outputs using the sources you’ve collected.
Otio helps you transition from reading list to first draft more quickly. Additionally, Otio enables you to write research papers and essays more efficiently. Here are our top features that researchers love: AI-generated notes on all bookmarks (YouTube videos, PDFs, articles, etc.). Otio enables you to chat with individual links or entire knowledge bases, just like you chat with ChatGPT, as well as AI-assisted writing.
Our tool features web scraping capabilities that enable you to access a broad range of data sources, extending beyond traditional academic papers and search engines. This feature enables researchers to collect diverse information from sources such as bookmarks, tweets, books, and YouTube videos, streamlining the process of curating and analyzing data for research purposes. Let Otio be your AI research and writing partner — try Otio for free today!
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