Market And Competitive Intelligence Platforms

Ten providers, twenty nine criteria, one Leader.

The Forrester Wave: Market And Competitive Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2026 carries the smallest field and the smallest criteria set this category has had across the four editions Forrester has published, and for the first time the arithmetic underneath the placements is public. The report publishes the weight each criterion carries and the score every vendor received on every one of them, which means the result can be checked instead of accepted.

Checking it turns up a field whose two axes disagree about who belongs near the top, and one scorecard fact that puts a dent in the argument the previous version of this page made.

The count went down for the first time

The category has been scored four times. The Q4 2019 New Wave, led by Cinny Little, covered twelve providers against ten criteria and treated the market as emerging, which the New Wave format signals. The Q2 2023 Wave scored fourteen vendors against twenty four criteria. The Q4 2024 Wave scored eleven providers against thirty one. The Q3 2026 Wave scores ten against twenty nine.

Ten, then twenty four, then thirty one, then twenty nine. The count fell for the first time, and the provider list has moved in the same direction since 2023: fourteen, eleven, ten.

Part of that is the inclusion bar doing its job. A vendor needs at least USD 10 million in annual platform revenue across the trailing four quarters, a majority of that revenue from B2B organizations, a demonstrated record supporting large enterprises, and enough client mindshare that Forrester hears the name during purchase inquiries. A bar that high removes companies by design.

Part of it is acquisition, and the acquisitions are visible without a consolidation section. Wide Narrow, one of the twelve names in 2019, is in the 2026 field inside Infodesk, which acquired it in 2023. Bertin IT, Cipher, Comintelli, Digimind, Kompyte, Market Logic and Sharpr are not in the field at all. Valona Intelligence is the renamed M-Brain, which is the same company under a different name rather than a change in the market.

The third dimension has also settled. The Q2 2023 edition scored current offering, strategy and market presence. The Q4 2024 edition replaced market presence with customer feedback, and the Q3 2026 edition keeps that structure, with customer feedback carried as a halo on the graphic rather than as a score.

The scorecard behind The Forrester Wave: Market And Competitive Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2026

Beth Caplow led the evaluation, with three contributors. Vendors submitted materials by 2 June 2026, and the placements were public from 27 August 2026.

The report scores ten providers against twenty nine criteria: twenty one in current offering and eight in strategy. AlphaSense is the only Leader. Contify, Crayon, Evalueserve, Klue, Northern Light and Valona Intelligence are Strong Performers. EMIS, EPAM and Infodesk are Contenders.

Forrester's own guidance to buyers sets three requirements, in order. Provide access to comprehensive, relevant information sources. Invest in AI and agentic capabilities. Activate decisions and actions. The reasoning behind the first is stated plainly: without up-to-date and differentiated information, a platform "build[s] on the same raw materials available to general purpose LLMs and enterprise AI tools."

The vendor list in full: AlphaSense, Contify, Crayon, EMIS, EPAM, Evalueserve, Infodesk, Klue, Northern Light and Valona Intelligence. A companion Landscape, The Market And Competitive Intelligence Platforms Landscape, Q1 2026, covers the vendors that did not meet the inclusion bar.

Six criteria decide nine tenths of the strategy score

The horizontal axis of a Wave is the part buyers read as direction rather than product, and in this edition it is close to a six-part test. Vision, innovation, roadmap, adoption, pricing flexibility and transparency, and community carry 15 percent each. Together they are 90 percent of the strategy score. Partner ecosystem and supporting services and offerings carry 5 percent each, and that is the remaining tenth.

AlphaSense scores superior on five of those six. No other vendor scores superior on more than two. Klue takes vision and community, Crayon takes pricing and community, Northern Light takes vision and innovation, Contify takes pricing alone, and Evalueserve, Valona, EMIS and EPAM take none of them.

The criterion the sole Leader misses is the one about money. On pricing flexibility and transparency, AlphaSense scores at par, and the only two vendors scoring superior are Contify and Crayon. That is the single heaviest strategy criterion where the Leader is not the leader, and it sits alongside a related fact in the report: AlphaSense "has not invested in managed or other supporting services," which is why it scores 1.00 on the 5 percent criterion for them.

Infodesk shows the same structure from the other end. It scores 1.00 on all six of the 15 percent criteria, so 90 percent of its strategy score sits at the lowest rating Forrester gives, and its strategy total of 1.10 is the lowest in the field. A vendor does not reach 1.10 by being weak across the board. It reaches 1.10 by being weak exactly where the weights are.

The practical consequence is narrow and useful. When two vendors' strategy scores differ by a few tenths, the difference is usually vision, roadmap and adoption rather than anything about the product. Partner relationships and service wrappers are worth a tenth of the axis between them.

The two axes disagree about who comes second

The scorecard separates two questions the graphic merges. AlphaSense scores 3.78 on current offering and 4.50 on strategy, the highest on both. Behind it the ordering splits.

Evalueserve and Valona Intelligence tie at 3.72 on current offering, the second highest score in the field and above every other Strong Performer. Their strategy scores are 2.70 and 3.00, the two lowest among the six Strong Performers. Northern Light inverts it: strategy 3.70, second in the field behind only the Leader, and a current offering of 3.18 that places it sixth of ten. Crayon holds the third highest strategy score at 3.60 with the seventh highest current offering at 3.02.

The rest of the field, for reference. Contify scores 3.46 and 2.90. Klue scores 3.28 and 3.40. EPAM scores 2.42 and 1.40. EMIS and Infodesk tie at 1.88 on current offering, and their strategy scores are 2.00 and 1.10.

A buyer ranking on the offering axis gets a shortlist of AlphaSense, Evalueserve, Valona and Contify. A buyer ranking on the strategy axis gets AlphaSense, Northern Light, Crayon and Klue. The two lists share one name, and it is the same name on both because the Leader is the only vendor in this field that is strong on both. That is what the placement is claiming, and the numbers support it.

Northern Light is the clearest single illustration of how narrow an offering score can be. Eighteen of its twenty one current offering criteria are exactly 3.00, which is Forrester's rating for par with the others evaluated. It scores superior on three: information normalization and taxonomies, customer success and support, and security. It scores below par on none. That is a vendor with no visible weakness and no visible advantage in the product, reaching second place on strategy.

A vendor that owns the content finishes last equal

The previous version of this page argued that the category survived the arrival of cheap summarization because the scarce thing was licensed source access rather than analysis. That argument is now partly Forrester's. It is the first of the three requirements the report gives buyers, and the report's own description of the only Leader says the same thing: "AlphaSense's greatest differentiator is its vendor-owned content portfolio, including exclusive broker research and proprietary expert interviews."

The same scorecard also marks the limit of it. EMIS scores 5.00 on both criteria about owning content, vendor-owned or uniquely curated sources at 6 percent and paywalled sources at 5 percent, and finishes joint last on current offering at 1.88. Forrester describes its sources as "one of the strongest collections of proprietary and uniquely curated content" and "the broadest set of premium and paywalled content sources," then says in the next paragraph that EMIS "trails other vendors in AI capabilities, lacking advanced retrieval, knowledge graphs, mature LLM capabilities, and AI agents," and that its security practices "are not as robust as those of other vendors."

Owning the sources is necessary. It is no longer close to sufficient, and the weighting says so. Counting the five criteria that describe where information comes from, they carry 26 percent of current offering. Counting the five that describe what the platform does with it, they carry 27. That grouping is mine rather than Forrester's, and the margin is one point, so it is not an argument that AI has replaced content. It is an argument that they are now weighted almost identically, which is a different market from the one where access alone decided the outcome.

AlphaSense's own shape reflects that. It grew to roughly USD 600 million in annual recurring revenue partly by buying content, including Sentieo, Tegus and Carousel, and it pairs that portfolio with an AI assistant and agents rather than with a services arm. The contrast with the Contenders is a contrast between a content business that built software and a services business that added a platform. Evalueserve's Insightsfirst began as a way to centralize the company's research and consulting work. Infodesk and EPAM both arrived through acquisition, and both still carry service-shaped pricing and implementation models.

Two halos, and neither is on the Leader

Customer feedback is the third dimension, and in this edition it appears only as a halo on the graphic. A single halo means reference customers were more positive than average relative to the rest of the field, drawn from interviews with up to three customers per vendor. A double halo means Forrester considers the vendor a Customer Favorite.

Two vendors carry a halo: Contify and Klue. Neither carries a double halo, which means this edition names no Customer Favorite at all. The Leader does not have one, and neither do the three Contenders.

That is not a contradiction, because a halo is relative to the other nine vendors and not a product score. It is nevertheless worth knowing which vendors' customers were most enthusiastic, because it is the only part of the evaluation the vendors do not write themselves. Contify's customers cite ease of use and personalized support. Klue's cite the pace of AI and agentic innovation and the adoption it has produced inside sales teams. Northern Light, which announced its Q4 2024 result as a Leader and a Customer Favorite, carries no halo this time.

One score deserves a caveat attached to it. Klue scores 1.00 on adoption, a criterion worth 15 percent of strategy, and the report explains why in a sentence that reads as temporary: Klue's "adoption rates saw a slight slowdown due to the company's reset in 2025 to its AI-First platform, but these rates are bouncing back." A buyer comparing Klue's 3.40 strategy score against Crayon's 3.60 should know that a sixth of the gap is a transition the report says is already reversing.

What to ask before the next shortlist

Forrester's buying guidance has not changed its first question, and that question is still the right place to start. Which sources can this platform reach that you cannot reach otherwise, in which languages, and under what licensing. For a European buyer the last part matters more than it looks, because coverage of regional trade press and non-English regulatory material is a checkable fact rather than a claim.

Then decide which axis you are buying. If the need is this year, the current offering score is the one that describes what you will deploy, and reading it alone puts Evalueserve and Valona second rather than the Leader. If the need is a direction of travel, the strategy score is the right one, and reading it alone puts Northern Light second. The vendors that appear on one list and not the other are the ones to argue about internally.

Ask what the pricing criterion is measuring. It carries 15 percent of strategy, which is the same weight Forrester gives vision and roadmap, and the Leader only reaches par on it. A vendor that scores superior on pricing flexibility and transparency is telling you something about renewal terms at your data volume and entity count, not about the product.

And ask which of the six heaviest strategy criteria your organization can actually use. A vendor's community and its partner ecosystem are worth 20 percent of the axis between them, and a buyer who will never attend the conference or use the integration marketplace is paying for something else's priorities.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

A close neighbor in Forrester's own coverage is Content Creation And Optimization Solutions, where b2B organic traffic is down between ten and forty percent over the past year, and buyers researching via AI are a tenth as likely to click through. This planned category is being assembled around that changed question.

The neighboring coverage here is Answer Engine Visibility Tools. Nearly a third of buyers now research purchases through generative AI, while CMOs still park over a fifth of digital budget in traditional SEO, a gap this brand-new tool category exists to close.

The related category on this site is PR & Media Monitoring Tools. No Magic Quadrant exists for the category that started the whole media-intelligence industry; its analyst coverage has migrated to the social listening quadrant built on top of it, leaving the original layer to the peer reviews.