Alphabet vs Meta, side by side
Strip away the products and both are advertising businesses: advertisers pay them for your attention. The difference is the front door. Alphabet owns the places you go when you want something - Search, YouTube, Maps - while Meta owns the places you go to pass time - Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp.
On our factor screen it looks strongest on growth and quality, and weakest on value.
On our factor screen it looks strongest on quality and income, and weakest on momentum.
The numbers, side by side
| Measure |  Alphabet |  Meta |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $356.13 | $556.71 |
| Market cap: The company's total value on the stock market - share price times the number of shares. Big = 'large-cap', small = 'small-cap'. | $4.36T | $1.42T |
| P/E: Price-to-earnings: the share price divided by yearly profit per share. Lower can mean cheaper; higher often means investors expect fast growth. | 16.8 | 21.0 |
| Div yield: Dividend yield: the yearly dividend as a percentage of the share price - roughly the income you'd earn just from dividends. | 0.2% | 0.4% |
| Revenue growth | 24.2% | 28.0% |
| 1Y: How much the share price has moved over the past year. | +82% | -20% |
More measures
| Forward P/E: Price-to-earnings: the share price divided by yearly profit per share. Lower can mean cheaper; higher often means investors expect fast growth. | 24.2 | 15.7 |
|---|---|---|
| Net margin | 54.8% | 29.8% |
| ROE | 48.7% | 29.8% |
| Beta: How bumpy the share price is versus the whole market. Above 1 swings more than the market; below 1 is calmer. It's about the ride, not whether it goes up or down. | 1.25 | 1.25 |
The bolder figure is simply the larger of the two - higher is not automatically good (a higher P/E means more expectation in the price; a higher beta means bigger swings).
How they differ
Alphabet is roughly 3x the size of Meta by market value. On our factor screen Alphabet currently screens higher on momentum and growth, while Meta screens higher on value. Meta trades on the higher P/E (21.0 vs 16.8), so more expectation is already built into its price. Over the past year the share prices moved +82% (Alphabet) vs -20% (Meta).
Descriptive only - how the two compare on today's data, never a verdict on either.
Alphabet, in one line
Alphabet is the parent company of Google, the world's most popular search engine, and YouTube, making most of its money from digital advertising.
Read the full Alphabet explainer →Meta, in one line
Meta is the digital giant behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, connecting billions of people while selling advertising space to businesses worldwide.
Read the full Meta explainer →Common questions
If both are ad businesses, what actually differs?
The intent of the audience. Search ads catch people actively looking for something; social ads interrupt people scrolling. Both models are enormous and profitable, but they respond differently to privacy rules, AI chatbots and where attention shifts.
Is Alphabet just Google?
Mostly. Alphabet is the parent company; Google (Search, YouTube, Android, Cloud) produces the overwhelming majority of its revenue, alongside smaller bets like Waymo self-driving cars.