Best Alternative Data Providers of 2026: Complete Comparison

In this blog post, you will learn:

• What alternative data is and why it is so important, especially in finance.
• The main types of alternative data, with examples.
• A list of the top alternative data providers currently available on the market.
• A summary table for a quick comparison at a glance.

Let’s dive in!

What Alternative Data Is and Why It Matters

Alternative data, also known as “alt data,” refers to information sourced from non-traditional channels such as web scraping, app usage, social sentiment, geolocation, surveys, workforce analytics, and satellite or aerial imagery, among others.

What makes alternative data particularly valuable is its timeliness, granularity, and real-world signal. It reflects what is happening right now, rather than being largely backward-looking and self-reported (as is the case with most traditional data sources such as financial statements).

In detail, alt data can reveal early indicators of growth, decline, or structural change. For example, spikes in web traffic, hiring activity, or credit card spending can foreshadow revenue changes well before they appear in financial reports.

As a result, this type of data helps companies, market researchers, and investors build a more complete picture of economic activity. Thus, hedge funds, asset managers, private equity firms, economists, policymakers, and consultants harness alternative data for investment research, due diligence, market sizing, competitive analysis, risk monitoring, and many other reasons.

“Alt” Data: Types and Examples

Alternative data spans multiple data types, each serving different purposes and use cases. Let’s break down the most important categories, along with practical examples and suggested applications.

Transaction and Consumer Spending Data

Transaction data captures current consumer behavior through credit and debit card transactions, point-of-sale systems, and digital payment platforms. Because it reflects actual purchases, it is one of the most reliable alternative data sources for tracking demand and company performance in near real time.

Common use cases:

• Revenue and sales forecasting.
• Market share estimation.
• Consumer demand analysis by region or category.
• Early growth or slowdown detection.

Example: Aggregated credit card data showing increased spending at a retail chain weeks before earnings are reported.

Web Scraped Data

This data is collected directly from websites, marketplaces, and online portals via web scraping. It includes product listings, pricing, availability, reviews, job postings, company information, and much more.

Common use cases:

• Price intelligence and dynamic pricing.
• Product availability and assortment tracking.
• Job market and hiring analysis.
• Competitive intelligence.

Example: Scraping e-commerce listings daily to monitor competitor price changes and stock levels.

Social Media and Online Sentiment Data

Social data captures user-generated content, mentions, reviews, and sentiment across social networks, forums, and review platforms.

Common use cases:

• Brand perception and sentiment analysis.
• Product launch monitoring.
• Crisis and reputation management.
• Influencer impact measurement.

Example: Noticing a spike in negative sentiment on X and Reddit following a product outage.

Web Traffic and Digital Engagement Data

This category of alt data focuses on how users interact with websites and digital platforms, including visits, session duration, referral sources, and engagement metrics.

Common use cases:

• Demand and interest tracking.
• Go-to-market performance analysis.
• Channel effectiveness measurement.
• Early revenue signal detection.

Example: Rising organic traffic to a SaaS pricing page indicating increased purchase intent.

Workforce, Hiring, and Talent Flow Data

Workforce data covers job postings, hiring velocity, employee movement, and organizational changes, offering early signals of business expansion or contraction.

Common use cases:

• Company growth assessment.
• Industry skill demand analysis.
• M&A (Mergers & Acquisitions) and private equity due diligence.
• Economic cycle monitoring.

Example: An increase in data science job postings signaling investment in AI capabilities.

Public, Government, and Regulatory Data

This type of alternative data includes patents, government contracts, trade data, permits, regulatory filings, and court records that reveal long-term structural and policy-driven trends.

Common use cases:

• Innovation and R&D tracking.
• Supply chain and trade analysis.
• Regulatory risk assessment.
• Policy impact evaluation.

Example: Rising patent filings proving increased investment in renewable energy technologies.

Satellite, Aerial, and Geospatial Data

Geospatial data aggregates satellite imagery, aerial photos, and location intelligence to help you monitor physical-world activity that cannot be captured through digital data alone.

Common use cases:

• Supply chain and logistics monitoring.
• Retail foot traffic estimation.
• Industrial production tracking.
• Energy and commodity analysis.

Example: Analyzing parking lot occupancy to estimate retail store performance.

Mobile App Usage and Digital Behavior Data

App usage data tracks downloads, active users, retention, and in-app behavior across mobile and desktop applications, providing insight into digital-native businesses.

Common use cases:

• User growth and churn analysis.
• Feature adoption tracking.
• Competitive benchmarking.
• Subscription revenue forecasting.

Example: Sustained growth in daily active users for a fintech app ahead of reported revenue growth.

Geolocation and Mobility Data

This contains anonymized location and movement data from mobile devices, vehicles, and IoT sensors.

Common use cases:

• Foot traffic and store visitation analysis.
• Urban mobility and transportation planning.
• Trade area and catchment analysis.
• Event impact measurement.

Example: Measuring changes in mall visitation before and after a major store opening.

Survey, Panel, and Consumer Research Data

Survey and panel data provide direct insights into consumer preferences, expectations, and intentions through structured questionnaires and longitudinal studies.

Common use cases:

• Demand forecasting and market sizing.
• Brand awareness measurement.
• Product-market fit validation.
• Policy and economic sentiment analysis.

Example: Consumer surveys showing declining intent to purchase luxury goods during inflationary periods.

Top 12 Alternative Data Providers and Analytics Companies

Discover the top alternative data providers and analytics companies, each presented briefly with a highlight of their main strengths.

Bright Data

Bright Data began as a proxy provider and has since evolved into a leading web data platform. Today, it offers pre-collected datasets, scalable web scraping infrastructure, and analytics solutions that deliver actionable insights.

The platform combines continuously updated structured datasets and custom data acquisition services with scraping tools and proxy solutions. It gives you access to continuously updated data from more than 120+ domains. On top of that, you can scrape any web source directly, accessing the most up-to-date data precisely when you need it.

Additionally, Bright Data offers Bright Insights, a data analytics solution that transforms raw web data into AI-ready insights and recommendations. It supports use cases such as pricing analysis, assortment optimization, market share tracking, competitor benchmarking, and others.

Its enterprise-grade scraping and proxy infrastructure, rich datasets containing billions of records with flexible delivery options, and advanced analytics capabilities make Bright Data the best alternative data provider.

Strengths:

• Combines massive pre-built datasets with custom web scraping for maximum flexibility and coverage.
• Ready-to-use datasets and scrapers covering 120+ major domains, including e-commerce, social media, news, finance, and more.
• Access to 150M+ proxy IPs in 195 countries to bypass geo-restrictions and achieve high scalability.
• Structured, clean data formats optimized for AI, LLMs, chatbots, and agentic workflows.
• Bright Insights transforms raw data into AI-powered recommendations, boosting margins and guiding pricing decisions.
• SERP API to get insights from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and other search engines.
• Automated data delivery pipelines integrate with Snowflake, AWS, GCP, Azure, and Databricks for smooth workflows.
• Scalable scraping infrastructure that handles unlimited concurrent requests.
• Web Archive API solution to tap into petabytes of validated, historical, and enriched web data for longitudinal analysis.
• 24/7 expert support ensures uptime, troubleshooting, and professional assistance for critical data pipelines.

FactSet

FactSet provides alt data solutions that integrate non-traditional datasets into investment and corporate analysis. The company aggregates over 60 datasets, including ESG metrics, geographic revenue exposure, supply chain relationships, industry classifications, intellectual capital, sentiment, and shipping data.

Those datasets help investors, analysts, and corporate teams identify investment opportunities, evaluate company performance, monitor market trends, and improve decision-making with ML-driven insights. FactSet also supports workflow automation and programmatic data analysis.

Strengths:

• Access to a wide variety of 60+ alternative datasets globally.
• Coverage of ESG, revenue exposure, supply chains, and sentiment data.
• Integration of AI and ML analytics for enriched insights.
• Open, programmatic environment for automated workflows and analysis.
• Trusted integrator of multiple third-party alternative data providers.

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a market intelligence and alternative data platform that aggregates and analyzes non-traditional data to support investment and corporate decision-making. In particular, it gives access to alternative datasets including expert call transcripts, sentiment data, patent information, and other individual-, business-, and sensor-generated data.

The company relies on AI-powered search and analysis to extract insights from such datasets. That opens the door to scenarios like due diligence, portfolio management, competitive intelligence, deal sourcing, and risk forecasting.

Strengths:

• Combines fundamental and alternative data in a single platform.
• Patented AI technology for insight extraction.
• Extensive expert call transcript library for unique perspectives.
• Sentiment analysis for a nuanced understanding of market trends.
• Applicable across multiple industries, from finance to healthcare and tech.

Nasdaq

Nasdaq provides a rich alternative data and analytics platform. That was strengthened by its acquisition of Quandl in 2018, which expanded its breadth of structured financial and non-traditional datasets.

The Nasdaq data solution aggregates diverse alternative data sources, from anonymized consumer transactions to healthcare and retail insights. Plus, it integrates them with traditional market and financial data.

The resulting datasets can be accessed via Nasdaq Data Link. Supported use cases include alpha generation, revenue forecasting, market trend analysis, and investment decision-making for hedge funds, private equity, and corporate clients.

Strengths:

• Extensive and diverse alternative datasets across geographies, industries, and asset classes.
• Structured, productized feeds evaluated for predictive power, reliability, and compliance.
• Seamless integration with analytical tools and programming languages.
• Expanded capabilities and data offerings following the acquisition of Quandl.
• Supports stock market trend forecasting and the identification of trading models.

RavenPack

RavenPack is a big data firm that converts unstructured content into actionable insights using advanced AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing). The company processes news, social media, regulatory filings, and earnings transcripts for over 12 million entities.

It generates sentiment scores, event detection signals, and market impact indicators. RavenPack’s data supports use cases in alpha generation, risk management, quantitative research, and investment modeling, helping hedge funds, banks, and asset managers make data-driven decisions.

Strengths:

• Monitors over 40,000 sources to track market-moving events.
• Converts text into precise sentiment scores and detects 7,000+ business-oriented event categories.
• Provides exclusive access to premium archives like the Financial Times.
• Features solutions to allow you to build intelligent agents for automated, complex financial research.
• Delivers data with minimal latency via cloud-native infrastructure.

Thinknum

Thinknum is an alternative data provider offering datasets derived from publicly available web sources. The platform tracks corporate performance indicators, including job postings, employee movements, product pricing, store expansions, car inventories, and app engagement.

The datasets support investors, analysts, and corporate teams to generate actionable insights, monitor market trends, and evaluate company performance. Thinknum makes alternative data accessible thanks to tools for fast queries, data visualization, alerts, and dashboard customization.

Strengths:

• Extensive coverage of 450,000+ companies with historical datasets.
• Real-time tracking of corporate activity (hiring, layoffs, product movement).
• Pre-built visualizations, dashboards, and alerting for rapid insights.
• Supports quantamental investing, corporate strategy, HR analytics, and ESG analysis.
• Accessible interface helping non-technical users query and analyze data.

Exabel

Exabel is an alt data and analytics solution built for investors and financial professionals. It integrates over 75 alternative datasets alongside fundamental KPIs from sources (including FactSet), allowing for real-time analysis and comparison.

The platform can handle KPI forecasting, portfolio management, data discovery, and fundamental analysis. It also equips you with tools to onboard proprietary datasets, harmonize different data sources, and derive actionable insights to inform investment decisions, risk assessment, and strategy development.

Strengths:

• Simplified integration of alternative and fundamental data.
• Flexible onboarding of proprietary datasets.
• Live mapping and forecasting of company KPIs.
• Cohesive platform for harmonizing multiple data vendors.
• Supports diverse use cases: portfolio management, KPI analysis, and data discovery.

Dataminr

Dataminr is an alternative data analytics company that utilizes artificial intelligence to provide live event, threat, and risk intelligence. It processes billions of public data points every day from over one million sources, including social media, the deep and dark web, and IoT sensors.

The platform identifies high-impact events long before they appear in mainstream news. Dataminr helps organizations proactively manage market-moving news, cyber threats, and physical safety risks.

Strengths:

• Relies on multi-modal AI to synthesize disparate data formats.
• Known for an “early warning” capability that often detects breaking events.
• Monitors a vast array of over one million unique public sources, including specialized forums on the dark web.
• Uses generative AI to provide not just alerts, but deeper context and analysis on the potential impact of an event.
• Offers API support for simplified integration into existing corporate workflows.

Preqin

Preqin provides data and analytics specifically for alternative assets. In detail, it comes with datasets and analytics on private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, real estate, infrastructure, private debt, secondaries, and natural resources.

Its platforms, such as Preqin Pro, Insights+, and Allocator Hub, deliver structured data on fund performance, investors, deals, and market trends. Preqin supports capital raising, investment evaluation, portfolio monitoring, benchmarking fund terms, and spotting business opportunities.

Strengths:

• Extensive coverage of alternative assets for private markets.
• Accurate, timely, and structured datasets for informed decision-making.
• Integrated analytics tools for performance tracking, benchmarking, and forecasting.
• Specialized ESG and sustainability insights to support responsible investing.
• Flexible data delivery solutions tailored to organizational workflows and investment strategies.

Eagle Alpha

Eagle Alpha is an alternative data platform and advisory firm that connects data vendors with institutional data buyers. Its end goal is to facilitate the sourcing, assessment, and application of alternative datasets.

The company offers access to over 2,000 datasets, covering areas such as corporate performance, market signals, and compliance metrics. Its tools and services power investment analysis, portfolio optimization, alpha generation, and regulatory compliance.

Strengths:

• Broad aggregation of alternative datasets from diverse vendors.
• Simplify compliance and risk management through specialized tools.
• Supports actionable insights for investment and alpha generation strategies.
• Provides educational resources, reports, and industry events for market intelligence.
• Bridges data buyers and vendors efficiently, streamlining data monetization and access.

Consumer Edge

Consumer Edge, strengthened by its recent acquisition of Earnest Analytics, is an alt data and analytics platform providing granular consumer and healthcare insights. The integration of Earnest’s datasets enhances Consumer Edge’s capacity to deliver near real-time transaction, product, pharmacy, and medical claims data.

The solution supports use cases such as earnings predictions, market sizing, customer behavior analysis, and benchmarking for investors, corporates, and consultants. By combining multiple data types, the platform enables data-driven decision-making across sectors and geographies.

Strengths:

• Broad consumer transaction and product datasets covering thousands of brands.
• Detailed healthcare and medical claims data for tracking utilization and trends.
• Increased data options following Earnest Analytics acquisition.
• Privacy-compliant, enriched data spanning multiple regions and channels.
• Supports investor due diligence, market benchmarking, and corporate strategy optimization.

YipitData

YipitData is an alternative data and analytics provider that transforms large, non-traditional datasets into actionable market intelligence. The company aggregates and analyzes billions of data points, including web-scraped information, credit card transactions, and email receipts, to monitor real-time performance for over 1,000 companies.

Its datasets support scenarios such as predicting KPIs like revenue and subscriber growth, conducting competitive benchmarking, and tracking market share shifts for investors and corporations.

Strengths:

• Item-level and SKU-rich insights for deep analysis of product categories and brand performance.
• Can deliver estimates within 2% of company-reported metrics.
• Combines web data, transaction panels, and proprietary sources for a comprehensive performance view.
• Provides expert research and commentary alongside raw data for investment context.
• Advanced data lakehouse architecture ensures efficient processing of high-volume datasets and quick delivery.

Best Alternative Data Provider: Summary Table

Compare the 12 alternative data providers and analytics companies analyzed in this article through the summary table below:

Conclusion

In this guide, you learned what alternative data is and how it is shaping the future of finance and other major industries.

Choosing the right alternative data provider depends on your specific needs and use cases. Evaluating all providers on the market is challenging and time-consuming, so we have done the comparison for you to help you make an informed decision.

As highlighted, Bright Data emerged at the top. Why? Most companies sell only the “finished product” (i.e., packaged alternative datasets or analytics), while Bright Data also offers the infrastructure to build your own alternative data pipelines.

Explore Bright Data’s data solutions below:

• Pre-built datasets: Sourced from popular websites, these ensure hassle-free access with standardized data formats like JSON, CSV, and others.
• Managed data acquisition services: Get data tailored to your specific needs, offering maximum flexibility and endless possibilities.
• Web Scraping API: Retrieve structured web data from 120+ ready-made scrapers for popular platforms, while bypassing challenges like IP blocking, JavaScript rendering, and all scraping challenges.
• Bright Insights: Unlock real-time eCommerce insights and AI-powered recommendations. Enriched and harmonized data from as many websites as needed, built natively on top of the world’s most trusted web data collection infrastructure.

Create a Bright Data account today and start exploring AI-ready alternative data solutions!