5 reasons to migrate from LexisNexis Metabase to AYLIEN News API

If you subscribe to our regular blog updates you may have come across an article we published titled “What to look for in a News API”. We published this article to try to highlight some key points of reference for would-be News API users that we believe should be top of mind when evaluating News API providers. 

This blog goes one step further providing a deep dive into one of our longtime competitors, LexisNexis, and their media intelligence solutions, paying particular attention to LexisNexis Metabase or what now seems to be marketed as Nexis Daas. In this blog, we’re hoping to highlight some key points for comparison that we’ve compiled through conversations with prospective and active News API customers who may have moved from or evaluated the LexisNexis data solutions.

Why Choose AYLIEN News API? 

1. Breadth of Features

Content Coverage

Following a recent News API feature release, we increased our source coverage by more than 400% across 200 countries. We now collect and analyze more than ~1.2M articles every day and we offer web, licensed, and premium content packages based on your specific needs.

Search and Enrichment

Our News API provides access to search and enrichment features that are designed to ensure you can easily block out the noise and identify the news events and articles that matter to you.

With 26 metadata and NLP enrichments added to every single article available through the News API, we offer the most expansive search capabilities among alternative News API providers. These include state-of-the-art entity recognition features, Entity-level Sentiment Analysis, industry-standard taxonomy categorization, and event detection capabilities.

We also offer multilingual search in up to 14 languages and translated content for 5 languages using our proprietary in-house translation pipeline.

Advanced Analytics Endpoints

We also offer a range of collective analysis endpoints that allow you to uncover insights and build effective data visualizations. Time Series allows you to track changes in quantitative values contained in stories over time. This information can be anything from mentions of a topic or entities, sentiment about a topic, or the volume of stories published by a source, for example. Trends allow you to identify the most frequent mentions of categorical attributes contained in stories, e.g. most frequent entities, concepts, or keywords. Histograms lets you retrieve a snapshot of any quantitative attribute of articles that match your query.

2. Product focus

Our focus on News API allows us to invest all of our resources and efforts into ensuring we provide the best service available in the market. LexisNexis on the other hand, is a very large organization, with 36 different products on offer across a wide range of industries.

We’ll be the first to admit the breadth of the product catalog is impressive but with many vastly different products that all need to be enhanced, maintained, and supported you can only wonder how much love their news and media intelligence products are getting as they battle for resources and investment.

AYLIEN are known for their NLP expertise, and their capabilities as a nimble organization means they are a lot more flexible than legacy providers in the news intelligence space.

Maya Gal

Co-Founder at OKAPI AI

3. Product updates

A particular theme that consistently raises its head on competitive sales calls is that since the acquisition of Moreover 7 years ago, the pace of innovation has slowed significantly with LexisNexis Metabase and Nexis products. This is probably to be expected given the number of products they offer across multiple industries and verticals.

At AYLIEN, we’re committed to providing product enhancements that transform how our customers track and identify the news events that matter to them with ease.

Recent product updates:

Improved search capabilities in our News API

• New Entity recognition model that identifies 65% more entities than LexisNexis in a head to head comparison
• Entity-level Sentiment Analysis which provides improved sentiment results vs article-level sentiment scores
• Enhanced search capabilities that allow you to combine search parameters with ease

Increased content coverage

• 5x our source coverage with 80,000 sources now available
• We now process over 2M articles per day

Event detection and article deduping

• Real-Time Clustering: An automatic topic and event discovery algorithm that groups similar articles together in clusters to provide a 50,000-foot view of the world’s news landscape

Multilingual support and translation

• Further language support for global news coverage with 14 languages supported to provide extended global coverage
• Our in-house neural machine translation system translates every non-English article ingested in the News API to English

4. Research-backed innovation 

Failure to embrace new technologies, in particular, AI and NLP, in analysis and search pipelines, means legacy media monitoring tools and data services are struggling to keep up with the overwhelming volumes of content published online every day.

Our research and science teams are constantly advancing the state-of-the-art in deep learning-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) research. This ensures our customers have access to cutting-edge technology brought to the fore in our advanced NLP enrichment and search features. Our team of PHDs and Postdocs work in collaboration with some of the world’s leading universities and academic institutions. They’re active in the field and have published over 20 academic papers and been cited over 560 times. You can read more about our Research function at AYLIEN here or read some of our recent papers below.

• Examining the State-of-the-Art in News Timeline Summarization

• A Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset from the Wikipedia Current Events Portal

• Latent Multi-task Architecture Learning

5. Customer focus

Integration made easy

At AYLIEN we have always differentiated by focusing on developer experience and we pride ourselves on offering the simplest and best-documented API on the market. We’ve always tracked our TTFHW as a focus metric and along with dedicated resources, meticulous up-to-date documentation, and supported SDKs in 4 languages getting started with our News API  literally takes just a couple of minutes.

Take a look for yourself at our News API Documentation and News API Jupyter Notebooks.

Transparent, simple, and scalable pricing

We believe that license plans, where possible, should be simple and transparent (talk to sales for a quote). We provide scalable and flexible pricing options based on customer requirements. Our pricing is feature and usage-based and we make a conscious effort to not penalize our customers for growth.

AYLIEN's pricing structure is much easier to work with.

Product Leader

Media Intelligence Tool (ex-LexisNexis customer)

Dedicated customer success and support

We have a dedicated customer success team that not only helps you integrate with the News API and get the most of the service, but are also waiting to help if you have any urgent issues that need solving immediately. We run joint success plans with every new customer and track customer success through quarterly review and check-in calls.

We also work directly with ex-LexisNexis customers to help them migrate with ease providing a migration plan that includes transforming API queries from Metabase to AYLIEN News API.

We really enjoyed developing the News feature with AYLIEN. The team were flexible in designing a bespoke solution.

Harjas S Ahuja

Product Owner, Revolut