FactSet Review 2026

Two things share the name, and a search for "factset review" returns both, mixed together, with neither side answering the other's question. Here is the verdict up front. As an M&A reference, the FactSet Review is a periodical bought per edition for valuation work, and it is useful to appraisers who need documented deal statistics rather than a data feed. As a platform, FactSet Research Systems sells into research and portfolio workflows at banks and asset managers, and it suits buyers who want a supported analyst desktop with a vendor relationship behind it. It is the wrong instrument for one specific and common requirement: a scheduled, machine-readable file of index and ETF constituents with stable identifiers, delivered on a clock, at a price you can publish in a budget line.

A note on method, because it determines what this review can honestly claim. The only vendor page read for this article on 8 September 2026 was the Business Valuation Resources catalog listing for the FactSet Review, 2026. FactSet's own product and pricing pages were not part of that material, so this review does not state FactSet feature names, module contents, seat rates or contract terms as fact. Where a figure is not verifiable from a dated source, it is named as unverified rather than filled in.

Two different things are called "FactSet Review"

There are two distinct objects behind the phrase, plus a third search intent that has nothing to do with either. The FactSet Review is a published M&A deal and premiums-and-discounts reference sold through valuation resellers. A "FactSet review" is also an evaluation of the FactSet platform sold by FactSet Research Systems, and, separately, crowd-sourced employer ratings written by current and former staff.

In one sentence each: the publication is a periodical roster of transactions and deal statistics used to support valuation conclusions; the platform is a subscription research and analytics environment for institutional finance; the employer reviews are self-selected staff opinions on working conditions in specific offices.

If you came for the publication, the next section is yours. If you are evaluating the platform as a data buyer, skip to the six-criteria section and the pricing section. If you landed here from an employment query, the company-review section explains why those pages rank on this keyword and what they do not tell a procurement team.

What the FactSet Review publication actually contains

The publication is a valuation reference, not a feed. Business Valuation Resources lists it as the FactSet Review, 2026, describing it on its catalog page as of 8 September 2026 as a resource for keeping up with M&A activity, trends and deal data, positioned as the cornerstone of an M&A library and used by financial professionals to support valuations and communicate conclusions. That page also describes it as covering verified data on U.S. M&A activity.

In practice, buyers use a reference of this shape for a narrow set of tasks: assembling comparable transactions, citing observed control premiums and minority discounts, and documenting a market-derived input that will be read by a reviewer, a court or an auditor. The value is partly evidentiary. A defensible citation to a published edition carries weight that a screenshot from a terminal does not.

The naming history matters for search, because older editions are hunted by title. Practitioners refer to earlier volumes as the Mergerstat Review and the FactSet Mergerstat Review, and queries for 2017, 2018 and 2019 editions are usually people trying to match the year of a valuation date to the year of the published data. The material reviewed for this article does not document that title lineage, so treat the exact renaming sequence as unverified here and confirm the edition title with the reseller before you cite it.

The consequence for anyone with a systems requirement is the important part. A periodical is bought per edition, arrives as a bound or digital publication, and is priced and licensed accordingly. It is not a machine-readable input, it does not update on a schedule you can code against, and it will not populate a database on Monday morning. If your requirement is programmatic, a deal reference and a data feed are two purchases, not one.

FactSet the platform: what it is built for

FactSet Research Systems sells subscription research and analytics to institutional finance, centred on an analyst desktop and on data delivered under that same commercial relationship. The workflows it is built around are the familiar ones: sell-side and buy-side equity research, portfolio analytics and attribution, and banking deal work such as comparables, screening and pitch material.

That positioning is the stable, observable thing about the product, and it is what should drive your evaluation. Specific module names, coverage counts and delivery options change between contract cycles and between regions, and none of them were verifiable from the material read on 8 September 2026. Ask for them in writing, dated, on the vendor's letterhead, and hold the answer against your own test cases rather than against a review.

One structural point about products of this type. A workstation optimises for a human analyst answering a question interactively, and every design decision follows from that: the screens, the linked navigation, the export shape, the support model. If your consumers are people, that is an advantage. If your consumers are jobs, it is friction you pay for daily.

FactSet product review: judged against six criteria

Judged as a data purchase, FactSet is strong on breadth and on analyst-facing workflow, and weakest on the things a buyer cannot see before signing: delivery outside the desktop, redistribution terms and procurement time. Below is the criteria set to score it against, with what is observable separated from what you must extract from the vendor.

Two criteria deserve emphasis because they are where file-based buyers get surprised. Identifier licensing is separate from data licensing in this industry, and the right to store or redistribute a symbology can be governed by a third party rather than by the vendor you are paying. Ask specifically which identifier systems arrive with the data and what you are permitted to do with them downstream.

Historical depth is the other. There is a difference between a long archive and a point-in-time archive: the first tells you what a series says today about 2013, the second tells you what it said in 2013. For index membership, backtest work, and anything that has to survive an audit, only the second is usable. If you are reconstructing a series such as an index-level earnings multiple, the point-in-time question decides the whole project, which is the practical problem behind Build the P/E Ratio S&P 500.

What FactSet does better than any file-based provider

This is not a comparison a file vendor wins on every axis, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. A research workstation gives an analyst a single place to ask an unplanned question and get an answer in minutes, with no engineering ticket in between. That is worth real money on a research desk, and no CSV subscription reproduces it.

Breadth under one contract is the second genuine advantage. Consolidating equities, estimates, deal data, private companies and portfolio analytics into one vendor relationship reduces the number of licences, invoices and security reviews your firm carries, and enterprise buyers weigh that heavily. Third, there is a support and account-management layer that answers when something looks wrong at 4pm on a reporting day.

A file feed replaces none of that. It replaces one workload, precisely, and usually for less money. Knowing which workload is the whole skill in this purchase, and the same logic applies when weighing FactSet Alternatives: 2026 Options against a full platform renewal.

FactSet pricing: what is public and what is not

FactSet does not publish a per-seat rate card that could be verified from the material read on 8 September 2026, and no monthly licence figure for the platform appears on the page that ranks for this term. Quotes are enterprise-negotiated. Any specific dollar-per-month number circulating in forums, comparison posts or aggregator listings is unsourced unless it links to a vendor page with a date on it, and repeating it in a procurement memo is how a budget gets built on fiction.

What a buyer can reason about are the cost drivers, which are consistent across this category even when the rates are not published:

• Seats and seat type. Named-user counting, and whether analyst, portfolio manager and read-only access are priced differently.
• Data modules. Coverage sold in components, with deal data, estimates, private company and fixed income commonly separable.
• Delivery method. Desktop access versus programmatic feeds, which are typically a distinct line item with distinct terms.
• Redistribution and downstream use. Whether you may store, model, display to clients or embed in a product, which is often the single largest multiplier.
• Term and true-up. Multi-year commitments, mid-term seat additions, and what happens at renewal.

Because none of those rates are public, the honest comparison is not price against price but publishable price against negotiated price. For the record, and as the only prices this article states as fact: AmericanETP is $1,500 per year or $150 per month for an individual, and $2,500 per year or $250 per month firm-wide. A deeper breakdown of the platform-side cost drivers sits in FactSet Pricing: What It Costs in 2026.

The practical procurement consequence is timing. A published figure can be approved by a manager in an afternoon; an enterprise quote runs through a sales cycle, a legal review and a security questionnaire. If the project needs constituent files in the sprint that starts Monday, that difference is not a detail.

Where a terminal is the wrong instrument

If the requirement is a daily list of index and ETF constituents with identifiers, a research workstation is the wrong delivery mechanism, whatever its quality as a research tool. The output you need is a file on a schedule, not a screen a human interrogates. Buying a terminal to satisfy it means paying for an interaction model you will never use and then writing scraping or export glue to get back to a file.

A file-based provider addresses that workload directly. AmericanETP publishes constituent lists twice daily, with a primary update at 6pm EST and a secondary update around noon EST, covering 3,878 US and global indexes and US-traded ETFs. Holdings files carry Bloomberg FIGIs, so positions join to an internal security master without a name-matching step, and the Bloomberg Extensions documentation covers how those identifiers arrive in the files.

Alongside holdings, a fundamentals file carries the ETF description, leverage and constituent counts, which is what most classification and screening work actually needs before anything else. Archived constituent datafiles run back to July 2009, which is the point-in-time history that makes membership reconstruction possible rather than approximate. FTP access is available for teams that want the file pulled by a scheduled job rather than downloaded by a person, and current files sit under Downloads.

Two operational details matter more than they sound. Membership changes are the events that break downstream models, and a dedicated Constituent Change Report is a cheaper way to detect them than diffing two full files every day. And sector classification work, the kind described in ETF List by Sector: 2026 Classification Guide, depends on having the same fields in the same shape every day rather than on having more fields once.

The lineage is worth stating because longevity is the one durable signal in data vendors. AmericanETP was founded in the 1990s as MasterDATA, predating most of the current ETF data competitors, and was renamed to avoid confusion with IBM's use of the term. If your actual job is scheduled ingestion, the mechanics are set out in Daily ETF Holdings Download: 2026 Guide.

FactSet company review: reputation and employer signal

Employer ratings rank on this keyword because "FactSet review" is lexically identical to the phrase people type when researching an employer, and review platforms optimise hard for exactly that pattern. That is why searches such as FactSet Philippines review, FactSet JobStreet review, FactSet software engineer review and FactSet consultant review surface alongside procurement content. They are answering a different question with the same words.

What those pages tell a data buyer is close to nothing. Glassdoor-style and TrustRadius-style ratings are self-selected samples, they skew toward people with a reason to post, and they are regionalised in ways that reflect local labour markets rather than product quality. No score is quoted here, because review aggregate scores move continuously and cannot be verified from the material read today.

Staffing signal is a particularly weak proxy for feed reliability. The things that determine whether a data product holds up are the delivery clock, restatement policy, identifier stability and support escalation path, and none of them are visible in an employee survey. Test the file, not the culture page.

Separately, the FactSet name also appears on periodic activism and shareholder-engagement reporting, which is a distinct editorial output rather than part of the workstation subscription. Its current publication cadence could not be verified from the material read on 8 September 2026, so confirm with the publisher before citing any edition.

Choosing between FactSet, its rivals, and a file feed

Compare these products on who they are built for and the shape of the workflow, not on numbers, because the numbers are either unpublished or stale within a quarter. The positioning statements below are category-level and were not verified against each vendor's own pages on 8 September 2026, so treat them as a starting frame for your own diligence rather than as sourced claims.

Verdicts by buyer type follow from that shape. A research desk whose analysts answer unplanned questions all day should buy a workstation, and the choice between FactSet and its rivals is a workflow-fit question best settled by running your own real queries during an evaluation.

A quant fund should buy files. The interaction model of a terminal is irrelevant to a research pipeline, and what matters is delivery time, point-in-time history and identifier stability, which is the case for pairing a narrow constituent feed with whatever pricing source you already carry.

An RIA usually sits in the middle: it needs fund-level analytics for client reporting more than it needs deal data, which is why the comparison set for that buyer often looks like Morningstar Alternatives: 2026 Options rather than a terminal renewal. A fintech building a product should focus almost entirely on redistribution rights, because the licence, not the coverage, decides whether the product can ship at all.

If your requirement is the daily constituent file rather than the desktop, see the coverage, the update times and the archive for yourself, or get in touch with a specific index list and check it against what you need. Start at americanetp.com.

FAQ

Is FactSet a reputable company?

FactSet Research Systems sells research and analytics into institutional finance, and the FactSet Review publication is carried by valuation resellers including Business Valuation Resources, whose catalog page on 8 September 2026 positions it as a standard M&A library reference. Nothing further about the company's standing was verifiable from the material read for this article. Reputation is not the useful question for a data buyer in any case: ask for the delivery schedule, the restatement policy and the redistribution terms in writing, because those are what you can hold a vendor to.

Is FactSet a legitimate company?

The query usually appears because searchers land on employer-review pages or third-party resellers and want to confirm the underlying entity exists. The only corroboration available from the material read on 8 September 2026 is indirect: Business Valuation Resources lists a current FactSet Review edition on its catalog page. For corporate status, use company registries and the company's own filings rather than a review page, since none of that was verifiable here.

Which is better for constituent data, a terminal or a file feed?

For a scheduled, machine-readable list of index and ETF constituents with stable identifiers, a file feed is the right instrument and a research desktop is not, because the deliverable is a file a job can collect rather than a screen a person reads. Whether FactSet offers a file-based delivery option for that specific dataset, and on what terms, was not verifiable from public pages as of 8 September 2026, so put the question in writing. Judge any answer on delivery clock, point-in-time history, identifier licensing and redistribution rights, tested against your own index list.

Why is FactSet stock falling?

No market data was consulted for this article, so this answer states no price, direction or percentage. Share price movements in subscription data businesses generally track subscription growth and retention disclosures, client headcount in the financial sector, currency effects and forward guidance, all of which appear in quarterly filings and earnings materials. Read those primary documents rather than a review page for anything time-sensitive.

How much does a FactSet license cost per month in 2026?

FactSet does not publish a per-seat monthly rate that could be verified from public pages as of 8 September 2026, and pricing is negotiated per client. Monthly figures quoted on comparison sites are unsourced unless they link to a dated vendor page. For contrast, AmericanETP's constituent file subscription is published: $1,500 per year or $150 per month for an individual, and $2,500 per year or $250 per month firm-wide.

What is the FactSet Mergerstat Review and is it still published?

It is the M&A deal and premiums reference that valuation practitioners cite when documenting comparable transactions and control premiums, and it is commonly searched under earlier titles including Mergerstat Review and FactSet Mergerstat Review. As of 8 September 2026, Business Valuation Resources lists a current edition under the title FactSet Review, 2026. The exact renaming history was not documented in the material read for this article, so confirm the precise edition title with the reseller before citing it in a valuation report.