Affinity alternatives

Affinity bundles a deal CRM with relationship intelligence and sells the bundle to firms at $2,000 a seat. Most people who leave only needed one half. Here is where each half goes.

By Jerry Feng, Growth at Happenstance. Updated August 28, 2026.

The short version

The best Affinity alternatives in 2026 are Happenstance, 4Degrees, Attio and Village. Happenstance if you want to search who your firm knows, including partners' personal and social networks, without buying seats; 4Degrees if you still want a private-markets deal CRM; Attio if you want a self-serve CRM with a free plan; Village if you need inferred coverage beyond the firm. Affinity costs $2,000 to $2,700 per user per year, is sold only to firms, and sees only firm email and calendar. 500,000+ professionals search their networks on Happenstance, and a fund can run it beside Affinity.

Affinity details from affinity.co public pages, other prices from each vendor's own pricing page.

Why firms look past Affinity

Affinity is the CRM of private capital, and it says so: 3,300 or more firms on its homepage, 25 billion emails and calendar events captured, an agent platform launched in July 2026. Firms leave for limits of the model rather than complaints about quality, and the price only becomes a reason once one of the others has.

It's sold to firms, not people. There's no individual plan and no self-serve signup; every tier, Essential included, begins with a sales conversation. An angel, a scout, a solo GP, an operator who advises three companies, a founder trying to reach a partner: none of them can buy one seat, and the firm that can buy one has no reason to buy it for them.

The graph stops at the firm's inbox. Affinity's first-party signal is the email and calendar activity it captures across the firm, enriched from PitchBook, Preqin, Grata and similar. What it doesn't see is anything that never passed through a firm mailbox: a partner's LinkedIn connections, who they follow on Twitter, the address book on their phone, the founder they had dinner with last month who emailed their personal account. Portfolio founders, scouts and advisors don't get $2,000 seats, so their networks aren't in the graph either. The people who could make the introduction are often the ones the system of record has no record of.

It is a CRM to administer. The value of a system of record arrives when the whole firm adopts it as the system of record. That's an implementation project (dedicated implementation and success support is an Enterprise-tier feature), and after it a standing discipline: pipelines kept current, lists maintained, fields filled. Firms that only wanted the "who do we know" answer find they've bought a workflow to run in order to get it.

Then the price. $2,000 per user per year on Essential, $2,300 on Scale (which adds AI Chat, the Ascend agents, the MCP server and inferred network connections) and $2,700 on Advanced (enrichment, packaged integrations, workflow automation). Annual, per seat, no monthly option. Ten seats on Advanced is $27,000 a year before Enterprise terms.

When Affinity is still the right call

The fund is choosing its system of record

Deal pipelines, stages and reporting in one place
Fund-level permissions, SSO, custom data retention
Adoption across 3,300+ firms means your LPs and co-investors know it

Enrichment inside the CRM is the point

PitchBook, Preqin, Grata, Crunchbase and Dealroom data on companies and funds
Company growth insights on the Advanced tier
Fund-level data at a depth no relationship-search tool matches

You want agents on your own captured activity

Ascend agents for meeting prep, warm intros and data updates
An MCP server so the firm's data answers in Claude or ChatGPT
Scale tier and above

Seven alternatives, ranked by which problem they fix

The order follows the four reasons above, not size or price. Happenstance first, for the firm-only model and the inbox-bound graph; then 4Degrees, Attio and folk, the CRMs that change the price or the administration; then Village and The Swarm, which widen the graph another way; and DealCloud last, for firms moving up-market.

Happenstance: best for searching who the firm knows, at no seat cost

Best for: Firms, partners, scouts, founders and anyone else who wants the relationship half of Affinity without the CRM half or the seats.
What it fixes about Affinity: Firms only, the inbox-bound graph and the price, all three. Anyone can sign up. A free group pools every partner's seven connected sources, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Google Contacts included, and portfolio founders, scouts and advisors join at no charge. Ask "Which of our LPs knows the CFO at Rippling?" and get paths ranked by relationship strength. Web search reaches beyond the network and profiles are enriched from external providers.
Pair it with: A CRM, if the firm needs a system of record with pipelines, stages, reporting and fund-level data from PitchBook or Preqin; Happenstance is the search layer beside it.
Price: Free; the free plan is the whole product with usage limits on chat and web search. Pro $30 per month, $24 billed yearlyChecked August 2026
Choose it if: the question you're paying $2,000 a seat to answer is "who do we know", and you would like the answer to include the networks that never reached the firm's inbox. 500,000+ professionals search this way.

Pool your firm's network free, no sales call. The full comparison is at Happenstance vs Affinity.

4Degrees: best for firms that still want a private-markets deal CRM

Best for: VC, PE, banking, corporate development and commercial real estate teams replacing Affinity with the same category of tool.
What it fixes about Affinity: The CRM half, competitively. 4Degrees syncs the firm's email, calendar and communications, scores relationship strength, augments with Crunchbase and PitchBook, ships Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn and browser extensions, and is listed in OpenAI's app directory.
What you give up: Nothing structural; it's the same shape. Pricing is per user per month, quoted by sales rather than published. Still firm-only, still firm email and calendar as the first-party signal, still a system of record to administer.
Price: Not published; per user per month, quoted by salesChecked August 2026
Consider it only if: you are leaving Affinity for another private-markets CRM and want to compare pipeline flexibility and the quote side by side.

Attio: best for a self-serve CRM with a free plan

Best for: Small firms and founders who want a flexible CRM they can start on today, free, and shape themselves.
What it fixes about Affinity: Self-serve and the price. Attio is free for up to three seats and $35 per user per month on annual billing after that, with no sales call to start. A three-partner fund can run a pipeline on it for nothing.
What you give up: Private-capital depth. No PitchBook or Preqin enrichment, no fund-level permissions, no relationship scoring built for deal flow. It's a general CRM, so the warm-path question isn't what it answers.
Price: Free up to 3 seats; Plus $35 per user per month annual, $44 monthly; Pro $79 annual, $99 monthlyChecked August 2026
Consider it only if: you want a CRM you can bend into a deal pipeline and Affinity's investor-database enrichment was never why you bought it.

folk: best for a light CRM at a small team's price

Best for: Small teams that want a simple CRM for a pipeline they already know by name.
What it fixes about Affinity: The administration burden and the price. folk is a lightweight CRM for small teams at $30 a month billed monthly or $24 annual, with a two-week trial and no implementation project.
What you give up: A free plan; folk does not have one. Firm-wide activity capture, investor-database enrichment, relationship scoring across a firm. It organizes a pipeline; it doesn't tell you who at the firm knows the person in it.
Price: Standard $30 per month, $24 annual; Premium $60, $48 annual; Enterprise from $100; no free plan, two-week trialChecked August 2026
Consider it only if: the job is keeping a small pipeline and its follow-ups tidy, and relationship intelligence isn't on the list.

Village: best for coverage beyond the firm's own relationships

Best for: Teams that want machine-proposed paths to people nobody at the firm has met.
What it fixes about Affinity: The inbox ceiling, by inference. Village pools the team's LinkedIn, Google and Outlook into one graph and layers a public-record graph on top (Village publishes 775M+ profiles), inferring ties from shared employers, schools and investors. Self-serve, with a free plan, and plain-English search built in.
What you give up: Certainty. Inferred paths run through people who may never have met, so each needs a check before the ask. Credits meter every plan, team features cost $149 a month plus $19 per collaborator, and there's no deal CRM.
Price: Free (100 credits a month, 10 results per AI search); Pro $79 per month; Business $149 per month plus $19 per collaboratorChecked August 2026
Consider it only if: you need candidate paths to people outside anyone's network and will verify each one before spending a favor on it.

The Swarm: best for a pooled team graph priced per company

Best for: Firms with a builder on staff that want relationship data and fundraising signal without per-seat pricing.
What it fixes about Affinity: Per-seat pricing. Premium is $99 per company per month for 50 connectors, full database access and 12,000 API credits. The dataset tracks job changes daily on 500M profiles and carries fundraising data on 50M companies, which is investor-grade signal without the seat count.
What you give up: The answer in the product, and the CRM. The Swarm calls itself the relationship data company; plain-language search happens mostly through its MCP in Claude or ChatGPT. The free tier has no API and coverage depends on how many teammates connect.
Price: Free (10 connectors, no API); Premium $99 per company per month; Enterprise customChecked August 2026
Consider it only if: you have someone to build with the data, in Clay, HubSpot or code, and want fundraising and job-change signal without paying per seat.

DealCloud: best for firms moving up-market, not down

Best for: Larger private-markets firms comparing pipeline systems of record.
What it fixes about Affinity: Nothing about the price or the firms-only model. DealCloud is the other private-markets system of record that Affinity compares itself against on its own compare hub, and the one firms consider when the question is more configuration and control, not less cost.
What you give up: Self-serve, a free plan and a published price. Individuals are further from the target than they are at Affinity.
Price: Not published; enterprise, sales-ledChecked August 2026
Consider it only if: you are leaving Affinity for something larger, with an implementation team and a budget that makes the seat price a rounding error.

The table: seats, individuals and sources

Two columns decide most of these choices: whether one person can buy the product, and what the graph is built from beyond the firm's email. Affinity is the last row for reference.

Affinity alternatives compared on best fit, starting price, whether an individual can buy a plan, and which sources feed the graph beyond firm email
	Best for	Starting price	Individual plan	Sources beyond firm email
Happenstance	Searching who the firm knows, free	Free; Pro $30/mo	Yes	LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, calendar, Google Contacts, web search
4Degrees	Private-markets deal CRM	Not published	No	Firm email and calendar, LinkedIn extension
Attio	Self-serve flexible CRM	Free to 3 seats; $35/user/mo	Yes	No relationship graph
folk	Light CRM for small teams	$30/mo, no free plan	Yes	No relationship graph
Village	Inferred coverage beyond the firm	Free; Pro $79/mo	Yes	LinkedIn, Google, Outlook, plus inferred public-record ties
The Swarm	Team graph plus data API	Free; $99/company/mo	Free tier, thin solo	LinkedIn, Google Contacts, CRMs, plus 500M-profile dataset
DealCloud	Enterprise private-markets CRM	Not published	No	Not published
Affinity	Private capital CRM of record	$2,000/user/yr	No	Enrichment databases only

Moving from Affinity to Happenstance, or running both

What you keep. The relationship question, answered better. Partners connect their own accounts, a free group pools them, and "Who here knows a partner at Benchmark?" returns paths ranked by relationship strength, drawn from email headers, calendar history, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and both address books rather than firm mail alone. Portfolio founders and advisors join the group free. Enrichment from external providers and web search beyond the network cover the research half. The API, the MCP server, the ChatGPT app and the Claude integrations are on every plan, with API and MCP calls metered by credits, so the "answer in Claude" feature Affinity gates to Scale doesn't need a tier.

Pair it with. Affinity or one of the CRMs above, if the firm needs a system of record with pipelines, stages, reporting and fund-level enrichment, which most funds past a certain size do. The CRM is the record and Happenstance is the search, and the pairing costs the firm nothing to test because the search side is free.

Which of us knows a partner at Benchmark?

Example

Ran 2 searches

3 Benchmark partners are in the group's network, each through one person here.

Example results for “Which of us knows a partner at Benchmark?”
Person	Thinking	Mutuals
MW Marcus WhitlockPartner, Benchmark	General partner at Benchmark since 2017; previously founded an enterprise software company.
LH Leila HaddadinPartner, Benchmark	Partner at Benchmark, invests in consumer companies; earlier a product lead at a marketplace.
JF Jonas FerrandPartner, Benchmark	Joined Benchmark as a partner in 2021 after a decade as an operator in developer tools.

An example of the answer this question returns. The people and the counts are illustrative; what a search returns depends on the accounts each person has connected.Three partners at the firm, and beside each one the group member who knows them. The search ran over every account those members connected, beyond the firm's mail.

What a firm's data looks like inside Happenstance

Email is read as headers only. Message content and attachments never reach our servers. Yes. Your connections are searchable only by you, the friends you accept, and the groups you join, and sharing is always mutual. Your public profile shows a constellation of named people you know by default, which you can turn off anytime. We never share, sell, or use your data to train AI models. Happenstance is SOC 2 certified and DTI Trust Level 2; the full list of what is stored and for how long is on the security page.

Frequently asked questions

What's the best alternative to Affinity CRM?

Happenstance for the relationship half; 4Degrees or Attio for the CRM half. For the relationship half, searching who the firm knows and finding warm paths, Happenstance is free and sees networks Affinity never captures. For the CRM half, 4Degrees is the direct private-markets competitor and Attio is the self-serve general CRM with a free plan. Many firms keep a CRM and add Happenstance as the search layer.

Is there a free alternative to Affinity?

Yes. Happenstance is free; the free plan is the whole product with usage limits on chat and web search, and a free group pools a whole firm's networks. Attio is free for up to three seats. Affinity has no free tier and no self-serve signup; every plan starts with a sales conversation.

How much does Affinity cost per user?

Affinity's published pricing is $2,000 per user per year for Essential, $2,300 for Scale and $2,700 for Advanced, billed annually, with Enterprise on custom terms. There's no monthly plan and no free tier.

Is Affinity worth it for a small fund?

If the fund needs a system of record with deal pipelines, fund-level permissions and investor-database enrichment, Affinity is the established choice and three seats on Essential is $6,000 a year. If what the fund needs is to know who it collectively knows, that's answered free by pooling the partners' networks in Happenstance, and the seats can wait until the pipeline outgrows a spreadsheet.

Can an individual investor use Affinity?

Not as a product. Affinity is sold to firms, with no individual plan and no self-serve signup. An angel, a scout, a solo GP or a founder raising a round is Happenstance's user: sign up, connect accounts, ask who can introduce you to a partner at the fund you want.

What's the difference between Affinity and 4Degrees?

Both are relationship-intelligence CRMs for private markets that capture the firm's email and calendar and score relationship strength. Affinity publishes its prices ($2,000 to $2,700 per user per year) and leads with enrichment from PitchBook, Preqin and Grata plus the Ascend agent platform. 4Degrees prices per user per month through sales, doesn't publish the figure, and covers VC, PE, banking, corporate development and commercial real estate.

Can Happenstance replace Affinity?

As the way a firm searches who it knows and finds warm introduction paths, yes, and it reaches the personal LinkedIn, social and address-book networks a firm CRM never sees. The deal pipeline, the stages and the reporting are Affinity's, so the usual outcome is both: Affinity as the record, Happenstance as the search.

Is Attio a good Affinity alternative?

For a firm that wants a flexible, self-serve CRM and does not need private-capital enrichment, yes. Attio is free for up to three seats and $35 per user per month on annual billing after that. It's a general CRM rather than relationship intelligence, so warm paths and relationship scoring aren't what you're buying.

Is Happenstance free?

Yes. The free plan is the whole product, Sidedoor included, with unlimited connected accounts, friends and groups, and usage limits on chat and web search. Pro is $30 per month, $24 billed yearly, and raises the limits. No credit card.

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