What to use instead of S&P Capital IQ Pro

The product

S&P Capital IQ Pro is the research desktop of S&P Global Market Intelligence. The name dates from 7 September 2021, when S&P announced it as the new brand for its most comprehensive desktop solution; S&P Global's annual report for 2025, filed with the SEC on 11 February 2026, places it inside the Data, Analytics & Insights business line beside the older Capital IQ, the Office tools and the mobile app.

What a seat buys, from S&P's product page — read through the Internet Archive's copy of 27 September 2026, because the live page refused our requests on 9 October:

• Companies. 109,000-plus public companies, 49,000 of them active with current financials, and 60 million-plus private companies, 16 million with recent financials.
• Estimates. Consensus from Visible Alpha, which S&P bought on 1 May 2024 — over 200 million data points, including more than a million consensus line items built from the analyst models of 200-plus brokers.
• Deals and ownership. Records of 1.2 million-plus M&A transactions, 907,000-plus funding rounds, equity and debt offerings, buybacks and 12,000-plus activism campaigns, plus ownership across institutions, funds and insiders.
• Everything around it. Fixed income from Markit, news from Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal and Nikkei among others, charts built on ChartIQ (bought in January 2023), Office Tools that carry data into Excel, PowerPoint and Word and refresh Excel formulas with one click, a mobile app for subscribers, and support around the clock. An S&P release dated 6 October 2026 adds ChatIQ Spreadsheets, an AI modelling assistant writing refreshable Capital IQ Pro formulas into Excel.

The price is a demo request. Nobody reading this page is choosing Capital IQ Pro against a 50 dollar subscription; they are an analyst whose employer's seat ended, a student who has graduated past the library's licence, or someone who used a third of it. S&P's own risk factors describe the pressure plainly: "increased availability of free or relatively inexpensive information sources may materially reduce demand for our products and services".

What to use instead

The unusual thing about Capital IQ is that its data reaches individuals through other people's products. Four cards in this catalogue name S&P as their source for fundamentals, and that is the first place to look. Where research terminals get their data traces the chain.

Statements and consensus on public companies. TIKR is the closest in shape — the financials tab standardised by Capital IQ, consensus estimates, transcripts, ownership and a screener across 92 countries. Koyfin licenses the same S&P fundamentals and estimates and puts them in dashboards beside macro and fund data. The two are compared in Koyfin vs TIKR. Stock Analysis shows five years of S&P statements to anyone, free and without an account.

Comps and valuation. If what you did in Capital IQ was build a comparable-companies table or a DCF, Finbox pre-fills both from S&P data — EV/EBITDA, EV/Revenue and P/E comps, five- and ten-year DCFs — and lets you change the assumptions. Its headline fair value is its own model output, not a reported number.

Segments, KPIs and the documents. Fiscal.ai breaks out segments and operating KPIs for the largest 2,300 companies and answers questions with a link to the page it read. BamSEC is the reader for US filings, and the transcripts beside them are S&P's, licensed in.

Deals, private companies and activism. This is the thin part. sec-api.io parses what US issuers must file — Form D for private offerings, Forms 3, 4 and 5 for insiders, 13F for institutions and, on its 239 dollar tier, 13D and 13G for activist stakes. That covers a filing record, not a private-company database. The insider and 13F trackers category holds the ownership tools built on the same filings.

The Excel layer. None of the S&P resellers above sells an Excel add-in or an API — the TIKR, Koyfin and Finbox cards each record that. The add-ins in this catalogue run on other suppliers' data, and Wisesheets is the cheapest of them.

What you give up

Private companies and transactions. Sixty million private companies and 1.2 million M&A records have no equivalent here. EDGAR holds only what is filed with the SEC, which for a private company is often a Form D and nothing more; a banker's target screen does not survive the move.

The numbers leaving the screen. The S&P licence follows the data downstream, and this is where it bites. Koyfin's global equity financials, estimates and valuation cannot be downloaded, by the data vendor's restriction; Finbox's terms keep S&P data for internal use and forbid passing exports on; Stock Analysis serves downloads from a fallback provider because S&P bans exports outright, so the file can disagree with the table. You can read Capital IQ numbers for very little money. You cannot easily model on them.

The broker-model depth. Visible Alpha's line items come from individual analysts' models. The resellers show a consensus figure and, on TIKR, how many analysts contributed — never which, and never the segment-level forecasts behind the headline.

Migration notes

Freeze your workbooks before the seat ends. A model built on Office Tools formulas refreshes only where the plug-in is installed and licensed, and a recalculation without it can wipe the cached figures. Paste values into a copy while you still have access, and keep the formula version separately so you can see what each cell used to fetch.

Expect close numbers from S&P resellers and different ones elsewhere. A margin you built in Capital IQ should land near the same figure in TIKR, Koyfin or Finbox, because all three start from S&P's standardisation. Products on other suppliers will not map line for line — GuruFocus builds on Morningstar, Financial Modeling Prep on its own extraction from filings; why two screeners disagree explains where the gaps open.

Leave the old exports behind. Files you downloaded under an employer's or a university's licence belong to that licence, not to you. Carrying them into a personal project or a new firm is a redistribution question to settle before the data is reused.

Check a consensus figure against its date. Consensus is a snapshot of whichever analysts a supplier collects, taken at a moment. Two products quoting different EPS estimates for the same quarter are usually reading different contributor sets or different days, not making an error.