CB Insights Alternative? Value Add VC vs CB Insights Compared (2026)

CB Insights is enterprise market intelligence: analyst research, predictive company scores and market rankings, sold through a sales conversation. Value Add VC is a free, much smaller site for tracking venture rounds, investors and SEC Form D filings. If you need research you can take into a boardroom, CB Insights is the tool. If you need to know who raised and who invested, for free, start with Value Add VC.

The short answer

The scale gap is large. CB Insights' pricing page promises “Powerful AI search and analysis of 1,600+ markets, 12 million companies, and 1 billion data points.” As of October 5, 2026, Value Add VC tracked about 1,300 companies on its company directory, about 1,600 investor firms on its investor directory and 409 startup rounds with verified dollar figures on the Funding Tracker.

The products also do different jobs. CB Insights sells interpretation: research reports, scores and market rankings. Value Add VC reports what was announced or filed, with a source and date on each figure, and gives all of it away.

Value Add VC vs CB Insights: feature comparison

CB Insights details from cbinsights.com/pricing and its developer portal, read October 5, 2026. Contract figures from Vendr (Internet Archive capture of February 15, 2026). Value Add VC figures checked on valueaddvc.com on October 5, 2026.

CB Insights pricing: request only

CB Insights' pricing page lists what each offering includes but no prices; every call to action reads “Request pricing.” The page pitches itself to large buyers (“The top 10 Fortune 500 firms trust CB Insights”) and lists enterprise features such as single sign-on, onboarding and migration help, and a “Dedicated forward deployed strategist.”

For a sense of scale, Vendr's CB Insights page reported a median contract value of $46,984 a year based on 10 purchases, with observed contracts from $24,748 to $184,986. Ten purchases is a small sample, so use it as a rough budget marker and get a real quote.

Value Add VC has no pricing page (valueaddvc.com/pricing returns a 404), no seats and no trial. The newsletter is free to subscribe.

What CB Insights does better

Analyst research. The pricing page describes “Proprietary research on thousands of markets and companies, written by our world-class research team.” Value Add VC writes daily news analysis, not analyst-written multi-year market forecasts.

Predictive scores. CB Insights lists “measures available exclusively from CB Insights, such as Mosaic Score, Commercial Maturity, and Exit Probability.” We do not score companies.

Enterprise integrations. CB Insights offers “Turnkey integrations with tools like Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce, and more,” data that is “Also available to purchase via Snowflake Marketplace,” and an MCP server that “enables integration with CB Insights APIs.” If your company runs on Copilot or Salesforce, that matters.

What Value Add VC does better

Free and immediate. No budget approval, no sales call. Investor profiles, company profiles, the Funding Tracker, the fund benchmarking dashboard, the VC glossary, the VC job board and the tools directory are open to anyone.

SEC Form D filings. Under Regulation D, a company must file a Form D within 15 days after the first sale of securities, according to the SEC. Raise Radar lists recent Form D filings whose raise is not yet in our news coverage, each linked to EDGAR; on October 5, 2026 it showed 163 filings dated August 3 to October 2.

Keyless AI access. Our MCP server is free, needs no account or API key, and allows 300 requests per hour per IP. The full Funding Tracker downloads as CSV or JSON from /api/funding-data.

Who should choose which

Choose Value Add VC if you are a founder, angel, emerging manager or student who wants to track rounds, find investors and see Form D filings without spending anything, or you want that data inside Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor.

Choose CB Insights if you sit on a corporate strategy, corporate development or innovation team that needs analyst research, tech market rankings, predictive scores and Salesforce or Copilot integrations, and can budget for an enterprise contract.

Use both if you have CB Insights for research and want a free daily feed of rounds and filings alongside it. See also Value Add VC vs PitchBook, vs Crunchbase and vs Carta.