1. Overview
The Alternative Datasets APIs provide access to two proprietary third-party data sources that are not captured in standard firmographic or financial databases: G2 product reviews and Glassdoor employee reviews. Both are synchronous GET endpoints that return paginated data immediately in the HTTP response. Two endpoints, two data sources:
Common use cases:
- Pre-IC product due diligence — pull G2 product reviews for a target SaaS company and its top 3 competitors to compare customer satisfaction, identify recurring complaints, and surface NPS signals before a diligence sprint
- Competitive product benchmarking — compare star distributions and review counts across a set of competitors to quantify perceived product quality at scale
- Management assessment in CDD — use Glassdoor’s CEO approval rating, senior management score, and business outlook as quantitative proxies for leadership quality and workforce confidence
- Talent and culture diligence — track
culture_and_values_rating,work_life_balance_rating, andrecommend_to_friend_ratingover time to detect cultural deterioration or post-acquisition integration signals - Portfolio health monitoring — run both endpoints quarterly across a portfolio to surface early warning signals in customer perception or employee sentiment before they become widely reported
- Customer voice analysis — use individual product review text as input to an LLM pipeline for theme extraction, sentiment classification, and feature gap analysis
Both APIs are synchronous. Results are returned directly in the HTTP response — no job submission or polling required.
2. Quick Start
Product Reviews — get G2 reviews for a company3. Authentication
All requests must include a Bearer token in theAuthorization HTTP header.
4. Request Reference
Product Reviews
Endpoint
Full request example:
Employee Reviews
Endpoint
Full request example:
5. Response
Product Reviews response
data object fields:
The
star_distribution keys are strings ("1", "2", etc.), not integers. When iterating or sorting, cast to int: sorted(star_distribution.keys(), key=int). The total review count is sum(star_distribution.values()).Employee Reviews response
data object fields:
overview fields — two different scales:
6. Examples
Competitive product sentiment sweep
Fetch G2 ratings for a set of competing SaaS products and compare overall scores and star distributions.Paginating through all product reviews for LLM analysis
Retrieve the full review corpus for downstream theme extraction or sentiment analysis.Employee sentiment benchmark — portfolio health check
Compare Glassdoor ratings across a portfolio of companies to surface cultural warning signals.Combined product + employee sweep before IC meeting
Pull both data sources for a target company in two parallel calls to get a fast 360-degree view.JavaScript / Node.js — both endpoints
7. Error Handling
Both APIs use standard HTTP status codes and return errors synchronously.
Retry logic with exponential back-off:
8. Best Practices
Use permalinks, not company names or URLs Both endpoints accept only thecompany permalink as an identifier — not a display name or website URL. Use the Company Search API to resolve a name to its permalink before querying:
star_distribution keys are strings — sort and access accordingly
The five keys in star_distribution are string values "1" through "5", not integers. When iterating in order or computing a weighted average, cast to int explicitly:
overview uses two different scales — display them correctly
Three fields (business_outlook_rating, ceo_rating, recommend_to_friend_rating) are approval ratios between 0.0 and 1.0. The remaining five rating fields are on a 1.0–5.0 scale. Multiply ratio fields by 100 to display as percentages; never multiply by 5:
limit=1
When you only need aggregate metrics (overall rating, star distribution, Glassdoor overview scores), set limit=1 to return a minimal review payload. The overview and star_distribution aggregate fields are always present regardless of limit:
limit reviews per call (default 100). When building a full review corpus for LLM or NLP processing, paginate using offset and stop when the returned reviews array is empty:
concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor or asyncio to halve the total latency when you need both product and employee data:
404 response or an empty reviews array with null rating fields indicates no data is indexed for that company:
9. Related APIs
Company Instant Enrichment
Structured firmographic, funding, and financial data from Wokelo’s native database — synchronous, results within seconds.
Company Deep Intelligence
AI-synthesised product portfolio, strategic initiative, and sentiment analysis — includes
employee_sentiment and product_sentiment sections that complement raw review data.Company News Monitoring
Real-time news feed for any company — synchronous, source-cited. Use alongside review data to combine sentiment signals with current event context.
Company Research
Full async intelligence report for a single company with product insights, transaction highlights, and executive summary — PDF/DOCX/PPT export.
Peer Comparison
Side-by-side competitive benchmarking including product feature matrices and business model analysis — use after review data to add structured competitive context.
Supporting APIs
Company Search — used to resolve company names to permalinks before querying either review endpoint.