Cortellis has been the default pharma intelligence platform for two decades. If your CI or BD team runs on structured clinical and regulatory data, you almost certainly have a Cortellis subscription. The question pharma teams are asking in 2026 isn't whether Cortellis has value, it's whether the value justifies the synthesis overhead it places on your analysts every single week.
This comparison breaks down exactly where Cortellis performs well, where it falls short for modern CI and BD workflows, and how Ferma's Agentic Workflow platform addresses the structural gaps. All capability comparisons below reflect publicly available information as of May 2026.
Cortellis is one of the most comprehensive structured databases in pharma. Its clinical trial coverage, regulatory filing data, and drug pipeline depth are genuinely strong, and for teams that need a reliable structured data source to feed internal models or dashboards, it delivers.
Its breadth is also an asset. Cortellis covers a wide range of therapeutic areas, regulatory jurisdictions, and data types making it a useful reference layer for teams building custom intelligence infrastructure.
This is important context for a fair comparison: Cortellis isn't a bad platform. It's a database platform being asked to do something it was never designed to do, synthesise intelligence and deliver finished outputs for modern CI and BD workflows.
Data freshness. Based on ZoomRx's assessment of Cortellis's data architecture as of May 2026, Cortellis updates data on a periodic rather than continuous basis, meaning a meaningful portion of the competitive picture may not reflect the most recent pipeline movements, regulatory filings, or conference readouts at any given time.
The synthesis gap. Cortellis returns search results. What it doesn't return is the competitive landscape brief, the BD screening package, or the conference coverage summary your stakeholders need. Every Cortellis workflow ends with an analyst pulling data, reconciling it across sources, and formatting it manually.
Data model limitations. Based on ZoomRx's assessment of Cortellis's data architecture as of May 2026, Cortellis organises data by event, a trial registration, a regulatory filing, an earnings call mention. Reconstructing an asset-level intelligence picture means your team manually links events to compounds, organisations, and trial IDs across multiple queries.
China pipeline coverage. Cortellis monitors western-centric regulatory sources with limited native-language NMPA coverage. For BD teams tracking early-stage Chinese biotech assets, now the largest origin of global deal value, this is a structural gap.
No conference intelligence. Cortellis does not include medical congress coverage. For CI and Medical Affairs teams, this means a separate vendor, a separate cost, and a separate synthesis workflow. Ferma's Conference Coverage Agentic Workflow covers 489K records across 250+ conferences natively.
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Cortellis |
Ferma |
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Data freshness |
Periodic updates |
Continuous 24/7 monitoring |
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Output |
Search results to format manually |
Finished deliverables in your templates |
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Data model |
Event-organised |
Asset-organised — all data linked at entity level |
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China coverage |
Limited |
Native-language NMPA monitoring |
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Conference coverage |
Separate vendor required |
Native Agentic Workflow — 489K records, 250+ conferences |
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Synthesis |
Analyst-built manually |
Automated — every claim cited to source |
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Time to deliverable |
Days to weeks |
Hours |
Ferma's Agentic Workflows encode your CI or BD methodology as an AI agent — monitoring configured sources continuously and delivering finished, cited outputs automatically. A competitive landscape that takes a Cortellis-based team three to five days to assemble becomes a same-day deliverable. See how Ferma works.
CI landscape monitoring. A CI team tracking a fast-moving oncology indication on Cortellis rebuilds their competitive landscape manually from fresh database queries every four to six weeks. Ferma monitors the same indication continuously, surfacing every pipeline movement, regulatory filing, and conference readout automatically, and delivering an updated landscape assessment the same day the data moves.
BD opportunity screening. A BD team evaluating inbound licensing assets on Cortellis pulls clinical data, models financials separately, sources deal comparables from a third platform, and formats the IC package manually, a process that typically takes one to two weeks per asset. Ferma's Opportunity Screener Agentic Workflow runs the entire process automatically in a single workflow run.
Cortellis remains a strong choice for teams that need a structured data feed for internal model training, teams with dedicated data engineering capacity to build the asset-level reconciliation layer themselves, and organisations whose primary use case is regulatory filing tracking rather than competitive intelligence synthesis.
For teams whose primary need is finished intelligence deliverables, the synthesis overhead Cortellis places on analysts is a structural cost that Agentic Workflows eliminate.
Ferma is trusted by 19 of the top 20 global pharma firms. See how CI and BD teams use Ferma.
Competitor information is based on publicly available data as of May 2026 and reflects ZoomRx's interpretation of Cortellis's capabilities. Capabilities and pricing may have changed. This post is scheduled for review in November 2026.