Magic Quadrant for Competitive and Market Intelligence Platforms
21 April 2026 - ID G00841540 - 49 min read
By Rahim Kaba, Dan Tolan, and 2 more
Competitive and market intelligence platforms activate insights from diverse internal and external data sources to drive corporate, product, GTM and enablement decisions. Use this Magic Quadrant to identify vendors best aligned to your use cases, workflows and strategic decision-making needs.
Market Definition/Description
Gartner defines competitive and market intelligence (C&MI) platforms as solutions that enable organizations to systematically gather, analyze and act on actionable insights about industries, companies, products, competitors and topics from diverse internal and external sources. This includes news, social media, websites, independent and broker research, company filings, financial data, internal proprietary knowledge bases and other relevant sources. Delivered primarily as SaaS, these platforms leverage AI to empower confident, high-stakes business decisions.
Organizations across various industries face challenges in collecting and analyzing vast amounts of structured and unstructured data related to industries, companies, products, competitors, and new and emerging topics. Identifying relevant sources, extracting meaningful information and making insights consumable across the enterprise are persistent obstacles, often resulting in wasted effort and limited business impact.
C&MI platforms address these challenges by aggregating and triangulating data from trusted sources and transforming it into actionable insights. These platforms contextualize information, deliver real-time alerts and surface key insights tailored to strategic business needs. Collaboration features enable distributed teams to share findings, coordinate responses and embed insights directly into corporate, product, go-to-market and enablement decision workflows.
The outputs — ranging from AI-generated reports and battle cards to personalized newsletters and real-time alerts — empower users to confidently make critical business decisions based on authoritative sources. By converting raw data and intelligence into actionable insights, these platforms help organizations mitigate risk, seize opportunities and maintain a competitive advantage with trusted, domain-specific knowledge.
Mandatory Features
At a minimum, the mandatory features of C&MI platforms include the ability to automate the following three-step process:
- Gather — Collect and organize data: Curate structured and unstructured data from trusted public and proprietary data sources (e.g., news, websites, social media, peer review sites, job boards, trade publications, expert transcripts, independent and broker research, company filings, financial data, CRM, sales calls, win/loss analysis, employee insights, customer surveys). Store, organize, tag, maintain, update and share market and competitive intelligence in a centralized repository with role-based access and permissions.
- Analyze — Translate data into insights: Automate the analysis and triangulation of data gathered on specific industries, companies, products, competitors and topics to reveal insights about threats, opportunities and trends. AI assistants enable users to use natural language queries to search, analyze and summarize vast amounts of information across data sources and review cited sources. Built-in fact-checking mechanisms and automated validation workflows ensure AI-generated insights are accurate, traceable and trustworthy, and offer explanations of detected hallucinations.
- Act — Empower decision making and action: Develop automated alerts, real-time content feeds, newsletters, executive reports, TAM and SWOT analyses, battle cards and other intelligence deliverables to empower users to act on insights. Integration with common business applications (e.g., CRM, business intelligence, collaboration tools) enables the dissemination of insights across the enterprise.
Common Features
Common capabilities of C&MI platforms include:
- Embedded agents and agent-building capabilities to automate research, summarize findings, answer natural language queries and proactively deliver relevant insights to users
- API/SDKs that provide programmatic access to structured and unstructured data on specific industries, companies, products, competitors and topics curated from internal and external data sources; API/SDKs feed intelligence directly into custom workflows, dashboards and applications to democratize insights across the enterprise
- Preconfigured templates and export capabilities for executive presentations, reports, battle cards and other C&MI outputs
- Benchmarking and comparison tools for side-by-side comparisons (e.g., competitors, products, pricing)
- Collaboration features (e.g., annotations, commenting, workflow management)
- Sales enablement modules and integration with CRM opportunity workflows
- Dashboards that monitor platform usage across licensed users and help demonstrate the impact of insights on high-stakes business decisions and revenue-generating activities
- Dedicated analyst support (e.g., curation, daily briefings, custom research), offered either as an add-on or as part of the standard offering
Magic Quadrant
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
AlphaSense
AlphaSense is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its platform leverages AI and natural language processing to deliver market and competitive insights from a vast array of public and private content. Its target use cases are corporate strategy and product strategy. The solution includes capabilities such as semantic search, automated trend detection and real-time alerts to help users uncover actionable insights, monitor market movements and inform strategic decisions.
AlphaSense operates in North America with a global presence. It primarily serves medium-to-large organizations, particularly in financial services, life sciences, healthcare and technology. Its roadmap prioritizes expanding the library of premium content/data sources, enhancing its API suite for integrating AI-powered intelligence into enterprise workflows and improving enterprise collaboration features.
- Business investment and performance: AlphaSense maintains the largest team fully dedicated to competitive and market intelligence (C&MI) in this Magic Quadrant and has ongoing heavy investment in R&D and product development. In addition to strong ARR growth, it has gained significant funding and has acquired Sentieo in 2022, Tegus in 2024 and Carousel in 2025, demonstrating its long-term commitment to the C&MI space.
- Premium and industry content: AlphaSense includes access to proprietary and premium content (e.g., expert transcripts, broker research, financial data and premium news outlets) in its pricing. The company also offers industry-specific modules for life sciences, corporate and financial services, some of which require an extra fee.
- Regional hosting flexibility: AlphaSense allows customers in the EU the option to have their internal content stored within the EU, supporting compliance with regional data regulations. The company is also exploring additional regional hosting options based on customer demand.
- Integrated sales tools: AlphaSense lacks out-of-the-box integrations with common tools in the revenue tech stack, limiting the ability to seamlessly push insights and deliverables into seller workflows. Buyers focused on revenue enablement may need to invest additional effort in manual processes or custom integrations to operationalize competitive intelligence within sales teams.
- Marketing focus: AlphaSense’s platform and marketing efforts are concentrated on financial services and corporate strategy customers, which may result in fewer targeted resources, references and community engagement for organizations outside these areas. Buyers in other industries could encounter limited support or relevant materials during their evaluation and adoption process.
- AI pricing: Currently, AlphaSense can only be purchased through seat-based licensing, which may be cost prohibitive for enterprisewide deployments. Usage-based pricing with AI credits could allow for larger enterprises to adopt their services at scale; however, buyers should evaluate the ability to accurately forecast future AI usage.
ChapsVision
ChapsVision is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its ChapsMind platform transforms raw data into actionable C&MI by autonomously collecting, analyzing and contextualizing signals from diverse internal and external data sources. Its target use cases include corporate strategy and GTM strategy. The platform has a strong focus on data sovereignty, offering a “sovereign agentic suite” built on autonomous AI agents and nonpublic LLMs hosted in Europe.
ChapsVision primarily serves large European enterprises, particularly in the manufacturing sector. Its roadmap features new AI agents dedicated to deliverables creation and the upcoming GraphRAG technology to enable deep reasoning across complex and fragmented data.
- Agentic AI strategy: ChapsVision demonstrates commitment to agentic AI, investing in autonomous agents that streamline intelligence workflows, insight generation and strategic alerting. This approach aims to reduce manual effort and accelerate decision making for customers.
- European focus: ChapsVision emphasizes its commitment to European data sovereignty, positioning the platform as a good choice for organizations with stringent regulatory and compliance requirements. This focus will appeal to European buyers who prioritize secure, locally hosted AI solutions.
- Intelligence innovation: ChapsVision intends to address highly fragmented knowledge in customer datasets with its upcoming GraphRAG technology and client-specific thesaurus. These features are expected to provide customers with accurate, domain-specific intelligence and reveal valuable connections across diverse data sources.
- Manual data updates: ChapsMind’s “company cards” feature, which provides at-a-glance profiles of organizations, requires users to manually trigger a refresh of data to ensure accuracy, rather than updating automatically. This may increase user workload and delay access to the most current intelligence compared to platforms with real-time or automated updates.
- Third-party partnerships: ChapsVision’s partner, reseller and OEM ecosystem are still developing and may not offer mature or comprehensive coverage in all regions. Buyers requiring local implementation or ongoing support through third-party partners should closely assess the depth and availability of these relationships to ensure they meet regional and operational requirements.
- AI pricing: While projects are scoped upfront with expert support to align spending with predefined budgets, ChapsVision uses a unified credit system to meter AI-powered actions, which may still make it challenging for customers to accurately forecast usage. Buyers should assess their anticipated AI workloads to ensure spending aligns with their budget.
Cikisi
Cikisi is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its Cikisi Intelligence platform is a real-time web monitoring and automated information gathering platform and targets corporate strategy and product strategy use cases. It features a customizable data collection engine and flexible alerting, enabling customers to configure, monitor and analyze web-based sources without advanced technical skills.
Cikisi operates mainly in Europe, serving a range of industries and organization sizes. It has a particularly strong presence in manufacturing, with more than half its customers being medium-to-large organizations. Its roadmap emphasizes expanding integration options for third-party tools and enhancing user experience through workflow automation and improved dashboards.
- Strong European market support: Cikisi’s regional focus ensures tailored support and ensures compliance with EU data privacy requirements, which is critical for organizations operating in the EU and nearby markets.
- Flexible licensing options: Cikisi offers a range of licensing models — including on-premises solutions for government and unlimited user SaaS offerings for enterprises — providing customers with tailored choices to meet diverse organizational needs and data sovereignty requirements.
- Target-market understanding: Cikisi demonstrates a strong grasp of the intelligence needs of prospective customers, addressing requirements related to customizable workflows, alerting and reporting that help organizations monitor market trends, competitor activities and regulatory changes.
- Enterprise capabilities: While the platform offers a suite of APIs to integrate intelligence with enterprise systems, it has fewer off-the-shelf integration capabilities than the Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. This may limit its suitability for enterprise organizations with complex, large-scale or highly automated requirements.
- Global awareness: Cikisi’s limited brand awareness and market reach outside Europe may require buyers to conduct additional due diligence when evaluating the platform, as there may be less peer feedback and fewer customer references available compared to more widely recognized vendors.
- Vertical specialization: Cikisi’s solution lacks industry-specific modules or add-ons. Buyers in highly specialized verticals, such as life sciences, may find the platform’s general capabilities and taxonomy too broad, especially compared to vendors that provide specialized services in these sectors.
Comintelli
Comintelli is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its Intelligence2day platform automates the collection, analysis and distribution of market and competitive intelligence, with target use cases in corporate strategy and product strategy. The platform features advanced search, AI-powered content categorization, and customizable dashboards that streamline intelligence workflows and enable actionable insights.
Based in Europe, Comintelli primarily serves medium-to-large enterprises in manufacturing, energy/utilities and life sciences. The company’s roadmap focuses on expanding its strong integration options, embedding AI agents in workflows, enhancing UX, and improving deployment flexibility to meet the needs of its customers.
- API strategy: Comintelli’s growing library of APIs enables deep integration with enterprise systems like CRM, BI and knowledge management platforms. This extensive connectivity allows customers to ingest data from diverse sources and export insights to tools where their stakeholders already work.
- Deliverables and organization-wide access: Intelligence2day supports a comprehensive set of intelligence deliverables, including battle cards, newsletters, SWOT analyses and visual analytics (e.g., heat maps). The platform enables distribution of insights and integration with existing decision-making workflows to increase operational efficiency and ensure intelligence is accessible and actionable throughout the organization.
- Customer understanding: Comintelli has a deliberate focus on driving customer success and increasing the value within existing accounts. This suggests a deep understanding of its current customer base and a commitment to long-term relationship building and value delivery.
- AI-usage costs: While its AI features are included in the base license, usage is limited by a set number of AI credits, with additional credits available for purchase as add-ons. Buyers with high or unpredictable AI usage should closely evaluate their anticipated needs to avoid unexpected costs.
- Global awareness: Comintelli has limited brand visibility and market reach compared to the Leaders in this Magic Quadrant, restricting awareness outside core regions. Buyers in noncore segments or geographies may find fewer local events, partner integrations or resources.
- Vertical specialization: Intelligence2day lacks extensive out-of-the-box industry-specific modules or templates. Buyers seeking out-of-the-box solutions tailored for specialized verticals may need to invest additional effort in customization to meet unique requirements.
Contify
Contify is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its Contify platform helps businesses track information on competitors, customers, partners, key accounts and industry segments, and activate it across the organization. Its target use cases include corporate strategy and revenue enablement. The platform includes a configurable taxonomy, automated relevance scoring and collaborative workflow tools, which ensure that insights are delivered to the right stakeholders.
Headquartered in the U.S. with operations in India, Contify primarily serves clients in the technology and IT services, manufacturing and healthcare sectors. Its AI assistant, Athena AI, enables customers to extract insights from diverse data sources and supports advanced analysis for decision making.
- AI roadmap: Contify’s roadmap emphasizes agentic AI capabilities, including a custom agent builder that enables teams to configure automated intelligence workflows for their specific objectives and criteria. This will allow customers to streamline competitive intelligence processes and generate outputs for their specific use cases.
- Market understanding: Contify actively adapts its platform in response to evolving customer requirements. This includes plans to license more premium content, expand social media monitoring, and optimize the UX for new users. These initiatives demonstrate a deep understanding of customer needs and a commitment to improved customer experiences.
- Deal intelligence innovation: Contify demonstrates innovation with its planned deal intelligence offering, which will generate deal-specific sales pitches by triangulating buyer, sales and competitor intelligence. This innovation will support revenue teams with actionable, context-aware insights, including red flags and effective sales talk tracks.
- Vertical specialization: Contify does not provide prebuilt industry-specific modules or add-ons. This lack of out-of-the-box vertical solutions means organizations with specialized industry requirements may need to invest additional effort in curating industry-specific content sets and predefining taxonomies to align the platform with their unique needs.
- Language support: While the platform ingests content in a wide range of languages, data outputs and the product UI are available only in English. Buyers with multilingual teams or requirements for localized reporting should consider whether this limitation aligns with their organizational needs.
- Brand recognition: Contify mainly focuses on C&MI and strategy teams, and while its brand recognition among these professionals is strong, buyers outside these functions may need to conduct additional due diligence due to limited familiarity and references in their broader professional networks.
Crayon
Crayon is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Crayon platform focuses primarily on providing a competitive enablement solution that turns intelligence into sales-ready content and in-workflow decision support for revenue teams. The platform’s target use cases include revenue enablement and GTM strategy. It offers a proprietary approach to AI by using a selection of commercially available LLMs, customized for specific competitive intelligence and enablement needs.
Crayon operates primarily in North America and serves the technology and IT services sector. Its clients tend to be B2B companies with sales teams seeking to improve sales performance and win rates. Its roadmap is focused on expanding AI capabilities for sales enablement and research/analysis, and increasing out-of-the-box value through prebuilt content and automation for less mature competitive intelligence teams.
- Enterprisewide integration: Crayon’s MCP server and APIs enable deep integration into enterprise AI solutions, allowing customers to connect their competitive intelligence data to their internal AI platforms. This capability is a key differentiator for those looking to centralize competitive insights within their existing enterprise data and workflow ecosystem.
- New customer growth: Crayon has demonstrated strong customer acquisition in 2025 relative to other vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant. This growth indicates a successful sales and marketing execution that resonates with its B2B buyers who are focused on competitive enablement.
- Customer experience: Crayon maintains both a dedicated Customer Advisory Board (CAB) and a growing Slack-based user community. This is beneficial for customers as these structures provide established channels for direct feedback, ensuring the platform’s development remains closely aligned with current user needs and future requirements.
- Vertical strategy: Crayon’s customers are mostly within the technology and IT services sector, using the solution for revenue enablement. Buyers seeking an enterprisewide market intelligence solution for additional verticals should specifically ask the vendor about industry-specific data integrations and success stories.
- Geographic strategy: The provider’s primary sales and support presence is concentrated in North America, which could present challenges for organizations in other regions seeking comprehensive on-the-ground support from local staff.
- Data center options: Crayon currently does not offer customers the ability to select data centers or regions where their data resides, which may pose a challenge for organizations that have strict data residency or data sovereignty compliance requirements. Buyers with data governance mandates should evaluate other vendors if the choice of data center is a critical requirement.
EMIS
EMIS is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. The EMIS for Market Intelligence & Strategic Planning platform provides company and industry insights from local intelligence in emerging geographic markets. It generates insights for stakeholders tasked with strategic, risk and investment decisions in high-opportunity, information-scarce markets. The vendor provides full financials and a multisector research catalog. Its target use cases include corporate strategy and GTM strategy.
EMIS operates globally as a solution for emerging markets such as Eastern Europe, LATAM and ASEAN, with plans to expand market coverage. It has plans to further enhance its AskEMIS conversational AI for unified search and analysis.
- Emerging-market data: EMIS’ product strategy centers on providing high-quality, local intelligence, with particularly deep private company data and financials in emerging markets. This makes it a critical resource for customers focused on high-growth, underserved regions.
- Flexible pricing model: The company offers tiered pricing based on the scope of geographic content access, allowing customers to select a cost-effective plan that is closely aligned with their specific content needs and budget. This clear and flexible model helps customers manage costs while ensuring they have access to the necessary market intelligence for their target regions.
- Geographic strategy: EMIS successfully targets emerging markets, with depth of local data as a differentiator, while the roadmap outlines a commitment to further integrate company intelligence in key emerging markets and enhance industry-specific research.
- Vertical strategy: While EMIS’ platform provides structured geographic intelligence modules, it does not currently offer industry-specific modules. This may limit the depth of highly specialized data or industry-specific workflows required by buyers in niche sectors.
- AI capabilities: While leveraging multimodel GenAI internally, the platform currently lacks some key AI capabilities, such as customer-defined LLM models, deep research, predictive analytics/forecasting and embedded AI agents. This may limit the efficiency of highly complex research workflows compared to many other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
- New offering: While EMIS itself is not a new vendor, it launched its next-generation platform in 2024. Therefore, buyers should anticipate fewer customer references for this new platform compared to other vendors.
Evalueserve
Evalueserve is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its Insightsfirst platform provides an integrated solution for competitive and market intelligence, combining automated data collection, advanced analytics and human expertise to deliver tailored insights. With target use cases in corporate strategy and GTM strategy, the platform offers domain-trained agentic AI to support complex, multistep workflows and analyses across both public and proprietary data sources.
Evalueserve is positioned as a tech-enabled managed services firm that operates mainly in North America and Europe, primarily serving medium-to-large enterprises in technology and IT services, manufacturing and life sciences. The company is investing in enhancing its domain-trained, agentic AI approach and has a roadmap centered on improving UX and insights delivery and activation.
- Agentic AI workflows: Insightsfirst leverages domain-trained, purpose-built AI agents to deliver actionable intelligence and support for complex, multistep workflows. This approach enables customers to move beyond basic search and chat, providing context-aware decision support for enterprise users.
- Professional services: Evalueserve’s hybrid approach combines proprietary technology with a global team of domain experts, delivering a flexible service model that integrates automation with custom-made research, validation and ongoing support, enabling customers to scale intelligence operations efficiently.
- Comprehensive data sources: The platform provides comprehensive access to both public and proprietary/paywalled data sources and has industry-specific modules, such as pharmaceuticals and professional services, included in its pricing.
- Partner ecosystem: Evalueserve relies primarily on a direct global sales model, which may present challenges for organizations seeking local partners or implementation support. Buyers in regions or segments where channel presence is important should assess whether Evalueserve can provide the necessary resources for deployment and ongoing service.
- Large-enterprise focus: Evalueserve’s sales efforts are heavily concentrated on expanding within existing large enterprise clients, which could impact the onboarding and engagement experience for new or smaller customers seeking more tailored support.
- Data center options: Customers are unable to select data centers or regions where their data resides without incurring extra costs, which may be a barrier for some. Buyers with data governance mandates should evaluate other vendors if the choice of data center is a critical requirement.
Klue
Klue is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Klue platform specializes in competitive enablement for GTM teams and offers a Compete Agent, which autonomously generates sales-ready competitive intelligence. With target use cases in revenue enablement and GTM strategy, the platform provides a comprehensive set of out-of-the-box connectors that integrate directly into CRM, revenue enablement, revenue action orchestration and collaboration platforms.
Klue operates mainly in North America, primarily serving midmarket enterprises in the technology and IT services sector. Upcoming enhancements include a coachable agentic teammate that delivers proactive, deal-specific intelligence and closed-loop enablement features that dynamically adjust recommendations based on buyer and seller feedback.
- Agile development and delivery: Klue demonstrates a strong ability to rapidly develop and launch new features, such as its Compete Agent and Deal Tips, enabling customers to quickly benefit from innovative, AI-driven capabilities that address evolving sales and competitive intelligence needs.
- Integrated win/loss analysis: Klue offers its own win/loss analysis solution, fully integrated with its platform, allowing customers to systematically capture, analyze, and act on deal outcome data. This helps organizations identify patterns, refine sales strategies and drive continuous improvement in competitive performance.
- Customer resources: Klue effectively targets product marketing and CI leaders, providing clear messaging and educational resources that address customer challenges. This helps prospective clients quickly understand the platform’s value and supports the technology evaluation and selection process.
- Vertical strategy: Klue’s platform is primarily optimized for the technology and IT services sector, which may limit its applicability for buyers in regulated or niche industries. Organizations outside this sector should ensure the platform’s capabilities address their unique competitive intelligence and compliance requirements.
- Operations: Klue experienced a reduction in workforce over the past year, which may signal challenges in scaling operations. Buyers should assess the vendor’s capacity to deliver ongoing support as part of their overall vendor evaluation.
- Use case emphasis and support: Klue’s focus on competitive enablement may not fully support broader organizational needs. Buyers seeking an enterprisewide market intelligence solution should evaluate Klue’s ability to scale insights across multiple use cases.
Market Logic
Market Logic is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. DeepSights is an enterprise and AI-driven insights platform for consumer competitive and market intelligence. It uncovers relationships and insights among customers’ internal data and expert sources within the platform, allowing customers to identify and act on risks and opportunities. Its target use cases include GTM strategy and product strategy.
Market Logic primarily serves medium-to-large enterprises in CPG, manufacturing and healthcare across North America and Europe. The roadmap focuses on deploying and scaling domain-specific agentic AI in customer workflows.
- Business stability and growth: Market Logic is a privately owned company that reports profitability and demonstrated strong customer acquisition growth in 2025 relative to other vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant. This indicates that it could be a viable long-term partner for buyers.
- Market responsiveness: The launch of its DeepSights Innovation Studio addresses customers’ needs for efficient R&D and innovation workflows. They include specialized AI agents and structured processes to help identify whitespace and generate product concepts, improving the likelihood of successful outcomes.
- Traceability capabilities: Market Logic delivers a traceable platform using proprietary RAG, ensuring outputs are fully sourced. Governance and access controls further limit GenAI to licensed content, so customers can rely on both the integrity and transparency of the information provided.
- AI integration: DeepSights does not yet provide a dedicated MCP server to complement its API solutions for seamless integration with all third-party LLM ecosystems. This may limit operational flexibility for buyers seeking broad interoperability with their existing AI infrastructure.
- Human analyst services: Market Logic does not currently offer human analyst services, unlike other vendors evaluated in this research. Buyers seeking a solution that offers dedicated, human-led research and analysis to support the intelligence life cycle will need to supplement the platform with their own in-house staff or use a third-party service provider.
- Licensing costs: The platform offers key proprietary data sources as add-on features. While this approach avoids paying for unused data sources, it may lead to a higher total cost of ownership compared to other vendors that offer bundled services.
Northern Light
Northern Light is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its SinglePoint platform focuses primarily on delivering high-quality, aggregated intelligence, and targets product strategy and GTM strategy use cases. Its GenAI capabilities include document‑level insight extraction, automated executive summaries for every search result, and deep research.
Northern Light operates primarily in North America, though it serves global multinationals across knowledge‑intensive sectors such as life sciences, technology and IT services, and financial services. Its clients tend to be large enterprises that require deep research aggregation to inform strategic planning. Its roadmap is centered on improving workflow integration and UX, including a new Teams/Copilot app and a fully conversational AI front end.
- Content breadth and curation: Northern Light differentiates itself through extensive aggregation and curation of both public and proprietary third‑party intelligence. The platform integrates syndicated market research and a wide range of vetted industry news sources, giving customers centralized access to a broad range of authoritative content for strategic intelligence.
- Flexible AI deployment: The vendor offers highly adaptable GenAI capabilities, enabling clients to either use their own approved commercial LLMs or rely on Northern Light’s default OpenAI models through a secure enterprise API. This flexibility supports complex governance requirements and allows organizations to tailor AI performance to their internal standards.
- Alignment to CI use cases: SinglePoint is well‑aligned to high‑value C&MI workflows, particularly product strategy and corporate strategy. Out‑of‑the‑box templates for deliverables such as SWOT and PESTEL analyses, executive-ready briefings and role-based dashboards further embed intelligence into decision workflows.
- Impact measurement: Northern Light’s reporting capabilities focus primarily on usage‑based metrics such as the number of sessions, views and downloads, which may make it difficult for clients to assess the platform’s direct impact on business outcomes. Organizations seeking clear attribution to impact-related KPIs may need to supplement these activity metrics with their own impact‑tracking frameworks or work with the vendor’s client services team for additional assistance.
- Vertical specialization: Its core platform remains largely horizontal, even though it has a large number of clients in the life sciences sector. Buyers seeking out-of-the-box solutions tailored for specialized verticals may need to invest additional effort in customization to meet unique requirements.
- Use case emphasis and support: Although GTM strategy is an identified use case for Northern Light, this area is not strongly emphasized in the platform’s external messaging. Buyers with this need should assess the depth of related features and postsales support when evaluating the platform.
Stravito
Stravito is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its Stravito platform focuses on the synthesis and secure distribution of proprietary enterprise research and paid third-party content. Its target use cases include GTM strategy and product strategy. It leverages a multimodel GenAI architecture for its AI assistant, selected for accuracy and enterprise compliance.
Stravito primarily serves enterprise companies in the manufacturing, retail and communications/media industries. It operates in Europe and North America. Its roadmap focuses on introducing a deep research agent for autonomous cited research and structured data analysis, and a set of multistep investigatory AI agents for more efficient planning and execution of research workflows.
- Vertical specialization: Stravito focuses its strategy on large enterprises (with CPG and FMCG organizations well represented), ensuring that its workflow capabilities and content integrations are aligned with the unique needs of these sectors. This focused approach makes the platform a strong choice for GTM strategy and product positioning use cases in consumer-focused industries.
- Interactive AI personas: Stravito has responded to a market need to address rapidly changing consumer preferences by introducing AI Personas — interactive consumer profiles that update dynamically based on the latest research to inform innovation and marketing stakeholders.
- AI-focused roadmap: Stravito’s 2026 AI roadmap includes a confidence assessment of data sufficiency for early stage innovation decision support, further enhancing the research value of its AI Personas capability. The company also plans to add AI analytics for spreadsheet content, enabling more efficient insights into quantitative data.
- Geographic strategy: Coverage in APAC and LATAM is currently limited. Buyers in these regions should consider whether Stravito has the local resources necessary to support them.
- Public data coverage: The platform does not prioritize automated public data crawling, focusing instead on internal data and proprietary content synthesis. Currently, it enables public data feeds only via RSS and a browser plug-in, which may not meet the needs of buyers seeking broad, automated public web content gathering.
- Deliverable generation tools: Native support for generating polished deliverables such as executive reports or formatted slide decks is currently limited. While this is on the roadmap for 2026, the current gap may increase the time-to-delivery for marketing and innovation teams who need to quickly socialize synthesized competitive intelligence.
Valona Intelligence
Valona Intelligence is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Valona platform focuses primarily on delivering timely, contextualized insights from a large proprietary data ecosystem to support competitive and market intelligence decisions. Its target use cases include corporate strategy and product strategy.
Valona Intelligence operates in North America and Europe, serving primarily medium-to-large global manufacturing organizations that rely on structured intelligence to guide strategic planning and product‑related decisions. Its roadmap centers on advancing workflow automation and developing deep research capabilities that combine qualitative and quantitative datasets to enhance research quality and accelerate time‑to‑value for new customers.
- Content breadth and curation: Valona Intelligence’s platform is distinguished by its wide-ranging aggregation of public and licensed intelligence, bringing together both qualitative and quantitative market, financial and operational content into a centralized environment. This breadth provides clients with a structured, authoritative foundation for C&MI activities without requiring separate sourcing or stitching across multiple tools.
- Automation roadmap: Valona Intelligence is strengthening its workflow automation capabilities through new AI agents and a report‑building experience designed to streamline the creation of presentation‑ready deliverables. These enhancements reduce the manual work typically required of CI and strategy teams and support faster turnaround for executive‑facing outputs.
- Industry-specific modules: Valona Intelligence offers specialized modules for industries such as automotive, heavy industrial manufacturing, food and chemicals. These tailored solutions provide buyers with deep, vertical-specific intelligence and workflows, supporting more relevant and actionable insights for sector-focused teams.
- Language support: Although the platform can ingest and analyze content across more than 115 languages, its user interface and generated outputs are primarily supported in English. Buyers requiring multilingual delivery or global team adoption may face usability constraints.
- Implementation effort: Valona Intelligence acknowledges that onboarding and configuration can be too manual, potentially slowing onboarding. Prospective buyers should ask about access to upcoming templated content and packaged data elements designed to streamline deployment.
- Sales execution: Valona Intelligence’s sales performance metrics suggest slower momentum than many vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant, with modest net‑new customer growth and predominantly shorter‑term contracts, which buyers should consider when evaluating partnership potential.
WatchMyCompetitor
WatchMyCompetitor is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its WatchMyCompetitor platform focuses primarily on delivering continuously updated competitive intelligence by monitoring the full digital footprint of competitors across markets. Its target use cases include GTM strategy and product strategy. It offers proprietary, role‑specific AI agents that generate tailored insights.
Based in Europe, WatchMyCompetitor supports data ingestion and intelligence output in more than 20 languages. Its clients tend to be medium-to-large enterprises across B2B, B2B2C and B2C segments. Its roadmap centers on expanding sales enablement capabilities with the introduction of native battle cards and Salesforce-native integration, deploying an MCP connector and extending intelligence delivery through its desktop agent and mobile app.
- Role‑specific AI assistants: WatchMyCompetitor’s proprietary AI agents function as assistants for specialized roles such as product, finance and promotions, delivering tailored intelligence outputs aligned to departmental needs. The planned MCP connector will further enable organizations to integrate competitive intelligence directly into their internal AI ecosystems.
- Analyst validation: The platform automatically monitors competitors’ public‑facing digital activity across markets and channels, with human-in-the-loop analyst validation to improve accuracy and relevance before insights reach end users.
- Customer-role-based alignment: WatchMyCompetitor effectively targets distinct executive and operational personas (CMOs, CPOs, CI leaders) with tailored value propositions for daily alerting, monitoring and research. This alignment helps customers quickly understand the platform’s organizational impact, facilitating the integration of intelligence outputs into decision workflows and securing adoption among strategic and operational stakeholders within the customer’s organization.
- Geographic strategy: WatchMyCompetitor’s planned North American expansion is focused on strengthening direct commercial presence, but the company did not provide detail on how its presence, support structure or market approach will evolve in other regions. Buyers operating across multiple geographies may find the provider’s regional strategy less developed than competitors with more targeted investment plans.
- Industry strategy: While clients can incorporate their own proprietary and paywalled content via direct upload into the platform, the platform does not centrally license paywalled data sources, often critical for buyers operating in highly specialized industries. Organizations requiring deeper vertical intelligence may need to supplement the platform with their existing premium content subscriptions.
- Revenue enablement integrations: The absence of native, formalized sales battle card functionality and out-of-the-box integrations with key revenue enablement and revenue action orchestration platforms represents a gap in the current product offering. Buyers should evaluate the vendor’s roadmap and in-development capabilities for creating and activating sales-ready content.
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
To qualify for inclusion, vendors needed to meet the following criteria:
- Market and sell a distinct competitive and market intelligence platform, available for purchase independently from other core application suites (e.g., knowledge management). The platform must natively provide generally available capabilities across all mandatory feature areas defined by Gartner for this market. Vendors that provide C&MI capabilities as add-on modules or features, but do not package these capabilities as a stand-alone offering, are not eligible for inclusion in this research.
- The C&MI platform version being evaluated must be generally available (GA) for purchase and implementation as of 31 December 2025.
- The vendor must demonstrate a solid track record of successful sales and deployments supporting C&MI use cases, with at least 10 referenceable customers.
- Customers must span at least two major geographic regions (defined as North America, Latin America, EMEA, Asia/Pacific) and at least two industry verticals. The vendor’s customer list must also include B2B customers.
- The C&MI platform must not require the purchase of a separate, non-C&MI platform from the vendor or other third-party to obtain all the relevant C&MI functionalities.
- The vendor must have at least $8 million or equivalent in revenue from the C&MI platform, or at least 30 full-time employees dedicated to its C&MI platform (as defined in the Market Definition) in the calendar year 2025.
Honorable Mentions
This market includes a range of platforms beyond those evaluated in this Magic Quadrant. The following vendors meet the market definition but did not meet the inclusion criteria for this year’s analysis. Gartner clients are encouraged to schedule inquiries with the authors to discuss these and other notable vendors.
- C5i: The C5i Compete platform offers centralized C&MI capabilities, including AI-based personalization, automated insights, federated search and GenAI-powered chat for natural language queries. C5i primarily serves technology and IT services, CPG and life sciences sectors. The company did not meet inclusion criteria due to its inability to provide referenceable customers.
- CI Radar: CI Radar provides a C&MI solution with a focus on news and media monitoring, document intelligence, marketing intelligence, email briefing tools, and capabilities to enable the proactive delivery of intelligence to stakeholders across the business. This includes native support for battle cards within Salesforce. CI Radar primarily serves technology and IT services, life sciences and manufacturing sectors. The company did not meet the inclusion criteria for minimum thresholds related to revenue or full-time employees dedicated to its C&MI platform.
- CompeteIQ: CompeteIQ targets C&MI, marketing, and product management teams, offering AI summarization, sentiment analysis, automated workflows and win/loss analysis. The platform is available via Salesforce AppExchange and integrates with multiple enterprise applications. CompeteIQ primarily serves technology and manufacturing clients. The company did not meet inclusion criteria for minimum thresholds related to revenue or full-time employees dedicated to its C&MI platform.
- Semrush: Semrush, through its Kompyte offering, automates competitive intelligence for marketing and sales enablement, with a focus on battle card creation and distribution. Kompyte integrates with tools such as Google Drive, Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Teams. The company did not meet inclusion criteria for minimum thresholds related to revenue or full-time employees dedicated to its C&MI platform.
Evaluation Criteria
The evaluation criteria and weights describe the specific characteristics and their relative importance that contribute to Gartner’s view of the market. These criteria are used to comparatively evaluate C&MI platform providers in this research.
Ability to Execute
Product/Service: The capabilities, features and overall quality of the core goods and services that compete in and/or serve the defined market. This includes the assessment of use case coverage, data integrations, AI-powered search and analysis, source validation and fact-checking, knowledge management and access, deliverable creation, language support and usage dashboards.
Overall Viability: The organization’s overall financial health, as well as the financial and practical success of the relevant business unit. This includes the likelihood that the organization can continue to offer and invest in the product, as well as the product’s position in the organization’s portfolio, specifically financial health and transparency, customer base composition and market reach, and organizational size and investment.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The organization’s capabilities in all presales activities and the structures that support these activities. This includes the overall effectiveness of the sales channel, specifically new customer acquisition and growth performance, sales and pricing strategies, and revenue distribution and channel performance.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: The ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This includes the provider’s history of responsiveness to changing market demands, specifically market responsiveness capabilities and demonstrated real-world impact.
Marketing Execution: The ability to deliver clear, high-quality, creative and effective messaging and differentiation. This also includes the rationale for year-over-year changes to marketing strategy and the organization’s ability to influence the market, promote the brand, increase awareness of products and establish a positive reputation among customers.
Customer Experience: The degree to which a vendor’s products, services and programs enable customers to achieve their desired results. This includes ancillary services, customer support programs and the presence of customer engagement channels (e.g., customer advisory board, online user community, customer conferences). This also includes the assessment of the number of active users, customer experience measurement and how the vendor addresses product adoption barriers.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. This includes the quality of its organizational structure, skills, experiences, programs and systems that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently. This also includes the ability of customers to select where data resides (e.g., regional data centers) and the quality of organizational and compliance certifications.
Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
| Evaluation Criteria | Weighting |
|---|---|
Product or Service | High |
Overall Viability | High |
Sales Execution/Pricing | Medium |
Market Responsiveness/Record | Low |
Marketing Execution | Medium |
Customer Experience | Medium |
Operations | Medium |
Source: Gartner (April 2026)
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: The vendor’s understanding of the broader market, including buyers, customers, competitors, reasons for winning and losing deals, disruption potential and the near- and long-term evolution of the category. Specifically, this criterion evaluates self-awareness and transparency, market foresight and strategic outlook, and forward-looking differentiation.
Marketing Strategy: The ability to clearly communicate differentiated messaging across a diverse set of buyers and channels. This criterion focuses on marketing strategy evolution and rationale, as well as buyer persona focus and messaging.
Sales Strategy: The ability to create a sound strategy for selling that uses the appropriate networks, including direct and indirect sales, marketing and customer support/service. This criterion focuses on sales strategy evolution and rationale, pricing and licensing strategy, regional and channel sales strategy, as well as ideal customer profile focus.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The ability to approach product development and delivery in a way that meets current and future requirements, with an emphasis on market differentiation, functionality, methodology and features. This criterion assesses planned product/AI enhancements and customer value, product strategy focus and customer-centric product development.
Business Model: The design, logic and execution of the organization’s business proposition. Evaluation focuses on adaptability to external market forces and the value proposition to stakeholders (e.g., owners, investors, shareholders).
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The ability to strategically direct resources (e.g., sales, product, development), skills and products to meet the specific needs of verticals and market segments. This criterion examines vertical/industry strategy adjustments, the availability of industry-specific modules or add-ons and vertical execution readiness.
Innovation: Marshaling of resources, expertise or capital for competitive advantage, investment, consolidation or defense against acquisition. The evaluation considers recent and future innovation delivery, vision for market-defining innovation and commitment to innovation investment.
Geographic Strategy: The ability to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of regions outside the providers’ home region, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries. Key areas of assessment include geographic/regional strategy adjustments and strategic rationale, and geographic execution readiness.
Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria
| Evaluation Criteria | Weighting |
|---|---|
Market Understanding | Medium |
Marketing Strategy | Medium |
Sales Strategy | Medium |
Offering (Product) Strategy | High |
Business Model | Low |
Vertical/Industry Strategy | Medium |
Innovation | High |
Geographic Strategy | Low |
Source: Gartner (April 2026)
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders demonstrate broad support for all critical capabilities across multiple C&MI use cases (corporate strategy, product strategy, GTM strategy and revenue enablement). They have high market awareness, high market penetration, good market momentum and a clear, long-term strategic vision and roadmap for growing their C&MI platform business. They are distinguished by their ability to innovate rapidly and consistently invest in expanding both content coverage and workflow automation to support enterprises with diverse intelligence needs.
Challengers
Challengers offer solid core C&MI functionality but may lack the breadth and depth of Leaders, particularly when it comes to advanced AI capabilities and seamless integrations with enterprise applications. They focus on established clients’ needs for C&MI and strategic direction rather than on setting a visionary pace with noncustomer or competitive requirements. In addition, they may lack the marketing efforts, sales channels, geographic presence, industry-specific content or market awareness of the vendors in the Leaders quadrant.
Visionaries
Visionaries may set a strategic direction or demonstrate specific innovative capabilities in one or more functional areas, such as agentic AI, configurable automation, advanced API ecosystems, bring-your-own-model (BYOM) support or industry-specific modules. Although Visionaries show promise in enabling C&MI, they may have gaps in broader functionality requirements or may be lacking in some aspects of their service and support resources and/or business and partner ecosystems, which impairs their ability to execute. These gaps may limit their ability to execute at scale, limiting market presence and growth potential.
Niche Players
Niche Players provide a foundational set of C&MI capabilities, typically to a narrow segment of the market. They may be focused on organizations of a particular size, specific geographies or industries. C&MI platform vendors in this quadrant may lack the breadth and depth of capabilities offered by Leaders. Vendors in this quadrant also may lack execution potential (such as insufficient resources in a key area or an underdeveloped market strategy), resulting in more limited market visibility and market presence relative to vendors in other quadrants.
Context
This research is Gartner’s first C&MI platform Magic Quadrant. It reflects the growth of this product category and growing momentum for C&MI practices by insights, corporate strategy, product marketing and product management leaders. This Magic Quadrant focuses exclusively on stand-alone C&MI solutions and does not include vendors that offer C&MI capabilities as part of a knowledge management, content repository or other technology platform. Observations about vendors and their capabilities are valid as of the publication of this research, noting that both vendors and the market continue to evolve.
It is important to note the emergence of custom “vibe-coded” AI agents, which some organizations are experimenting with to automate intelligence workflows. While these agents can offer tailored automation, they are not the focus of this Magic Quadrant, and often require significant effort to ensure transparency, data quality and governance, capabilities that are typically delivered out-of-the-box by purpose-built C&MI platforms.
To that end, as leaders responsible for leading C&MI practices, you should:
- Study and understand the evaluation criteria by which we determined each vendor’s Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.
- Evaluate the vendors’ Strengths and Cautions.
- Assess vendors in any of the four quadrants, with a focus on those that align with your requirements and goals.
- Use this Magic Quadrant research in conjunction with our companion Critical Capabilities for Competitive and Market Intelligence Platforms research, other publications related to C&MI best practices and our analyst inquiry service.
Readers should be careful not to ascribe their own definitions of Completeness of Vision or Ability to Execute to this Magic Quadrant, which they often incorrectly map narrowly to product vision and market share, respectively. The Magic Quadrant methodology factors in a wide range of criteria in determining position, as shown by the extensive Evaluation Criteria section.
As you build your business case and requests for proposals, factor in the time, cost and complexity of integrating your C&MI platform with other core systems. Annual subscription-based pricing is standard in this market. Pricing models vary but are primarily based on the number of users (including administrators and content curators) and the number of companies/competitors/industries/topics tracked. Pricing can also be impacted by other factors, such as the need for add-on features (e.g., AI credits, access to premium data sources behind a paywall, custom third-party integrations and dedicated C&MI analyst services).
Ensure that your organization develops a comprehensive plan to upskill the end users of your C&MI solution on key functionality to maximize value. Explore vendor-managed services, as well as third-party managed service providers and vendor support packages to help with onboarding, training and ongoing education.
Market Overview
The C&MI platforms market is undergoing rapid transformation due to advances in AI and autonomous AI agents, as well as the growing complexity and volume of data that organizations must process. As businesses face mounting pressure to make confident, high-stakes decisions in dynamic markets, C&MI platforms have become essential tools for automating the gathering, analysis and activation of intelligence from diverse authoritative sources.
The Rise of Domain-Specific C&MI Solutions
This shift is driven by the limitations of general-purpose AI tools, which often lack the transparency, accuracy and traceability required for strategic business decisions, and primarily rely on publicly available data (see Tech FutureSight: A Value Paradox Makes Public LLMs Unfit for Business Solutions). Organizations are turning to specialized C&MI platforms that deliver trustworthy, actionable insights, with a particular emphasis on proprietary and private data to build a holistic view of the market and competitive landscape. While the majority of vendors in the research have been around for over a decade, adoption is accelerating across industries as buyers invest in AI-powered tools that streamline intelligence workflows and embed insights into decision-making processes across the enterprise. Among product marketers in the technology/IT services sector, 49% are currently using a C&MI tool, while an additional 14% are planning to purchase one within the next 12 months.1
Vendors are responding with rapid innovation, launching new capabilities such as GenAI-powered research agents, authoritative data integrations, machine-embedded fact-checking and verification, data governance, impact assessment and seamless connectivity with business applications. These advancements address end-user demands for reliable intelligence, explainable AI outputs and real-time delivery of insights tailored to strategic business needs.
Trends Shaping C&MI Platforms
- Geographic and vertical expansion: While North America and EMEA remain the primary markets for C&MI platforms, vendors are investing in localization, industry-specific features and multilingual support to broaden adoption. Tailored integrations and specialized data sources are emerging to address the needs of global enterprises and verticals such as financial services, manufacturing, life sciences and technology/IT services. However, adoption outside core regions and industries remains modest, with vendors continuing to refine their offerings to drive broader uptake.
- Use-case specialization: Vendors are differentiating through their focus on specific use cases, among other things. While all vendors provide baseline “gather, analyze and act” capabilities, their direct capabilities are often tailored to the needs of particular functional teams. For example, use cases such as corporate strategy may require access to comprehensive paywalled data sources, while revenue enablement use cases demand robust integrations with the revenue tech stack to activate intelligence across GTM teams. As a result, buyers must carefully assess each vendor’s strengths in the use cases that matter most to their organizations.
- Active orchestration: The market is shifting from passive monitoring to active orchestration of insights. Modern platforms are evolving from tools that simply summarize data to agentic solutions that act as autonomous strategic partners — proactively monitoring, triaging and delivering stakeholder-ready insights. These AI-powered agents enable organizations to anticipate market shifts and respond with greater speed and precision, moving beyond static information feeds to dynamic, output-centric decision enablement.
- Proprietary content and internal data as differentiators: With public data increasingly commoditized, proprietary content and the ability to blend internal data with external signals are now key differentiators. Leading platforms ingest, contextualize and activate enterprise-specific knowledge, providing relevant insights that are closely aligned to the organization’s strategic priorities.
- Democratization of insights across the enterprise: As organizations seek to embed insights into core decision workflows, platforms are expanding integrations with common business applications such as CRM platforms, business intelligence platforms and collaboration tools. APIs support further democratized access, enabling insights to flow seamlessly to diverse stakeholders and into custom dashboards and workflows. Innovations such as AI plugins for productivity tools and deep integration with enterprise AI assistants (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot) are making it possible for users to access and act on intelligence without leaving their daily workflow. Moreover, these platforms are increasingly evaluated as foundational intelligence layers that complement adjacent AI‑driven monitoring and research capabilities.
- Dynamic output-centric workflows: The value of static deliverables — such as battle cards and long-form reports — is declining. The market is shifting toward dynamic, personalized and role-specific outputs, delivered in real-time and continuously updated as new information emerges. AI-powered agents are replacing manual content creation, pushing deal-specific talk tracks, win stories and competitive differentiators directly into sales and strategy workflows. This transition is maximizing the consumption and impact of insights and shifting C&MI teams from content producers to curators and orchestrators of AI-driven knowledge.
- ROI-based measurement and pricing: As adoption accelerates, buyers are demanding clear evidence of value and business impact. Platforms must demonstrate measurable ROI — such as saved analyst hours, faster time to insight, and C&MI-influenced improvements in revenue and retention, such as win rates. Usage dashboards, value attribution and out-of-the-box adoption metrics are becoming standard features, enabling organizations to track how intelligence is used and its influence on outcomes. Pricing models are evolving toward value-based structures, reflecting the expectation that investment in C&MI platforms must translate into tangible business results.
As the market matures, organizations should focus on evaluating vendors based on their alignment with the specific use cases, data requirements and integration needs that are most critical to their business. The right platform will depend on the organization’s strategic priorities, industry context and the intelligence workflows that drive the greatest value.
Organizations should also monitor adjacent tech categories (e.g., knowledge management platforms, social monitoring and analytics tools, revenue enablement platforms, voice-of-the-customer platforms, win/loss analysis solutions, GTM data applications) that may offer advanced C&MI capabilities embedded in their solutions in the future.
This is the first version of the Magic Quadrant for Competitive and Market Intelligence Platforms. It replaces the Market Guide for Competitive and Market Intelligence Tools.
1 2025 Gartner Tech Marketer Role Survey. This survey was conducted to understand evolving priorities, focus, collaboration with other key functions, metrics used to measure performance and technologies used for/by tech marketers. The research was conducted online from 9 June through 21 July 2025. In total, 242 respondents were surveyed across North America (n = 141) and Western Europe (n = 101). Qualifying organizations reported enterprisewide annual revenue for fiscal year 2024 of at least $100 million. All respondents were from the technology and telecommunications industries, representing software (n = 174), professional/managed services (n = 48) and hardware (n = 20). Qualified participants were senior leaders in their organizations whose job titles included C-level executive and equivalent (n = 36), SVP/EVP/head of function/general manager (n = 33), vice president and equivalent (n = 66), and director and equivalent (n = 107) in the marketing or product marketing function. Respondents were further classified as CMOs (n = 36), product marketing leaders (n = 97), demand generation leaders (which also included leaders from traditional and digital roles; n =109). Disclaimer: The results of this survey do not represent global findings or the market as a whole, but reflect the sentiments of the respondents and companies surveyed.
Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.