Affinity vs The Swarm

Affinity sells itself as the AI-first private capital CRM, with the homepage line your next deal is in your network. The Swarm calls itself the relationship data company and, on its homepage, the relationship intelligence leader. Both sentences describe a firm getting more out of who it knows. Only one of the two products is somewhere your team logs in every day.

Two events this summer. The Swarm announced its acquisition of Commsor on July 23, 2026, with Commsor's products being wound down and features folded in. Affinity launched its agent platform, Affinity Ascend, on July 21, 2026, and it appears on the live pricing page from the Scale tier. Both products changed their pricing this summer, and by enough to matter.

Affinity is a CRM in the full sense: lists, views, a deal pipeline, an activity history that fills itself from the firm's email and calendar, and on the upper tiers a notetaker, AI chat and the Ascend agent platform. Buying it's a decision to make one product the firm's system of record, which is an adoption project as much as a purchase. Affinity sells dedicated implementation and success support at the Enterprise tier, which tells you how the company expects a rollout to go.

The Swarm isn't a place to work. It's a dataset, a network mapper and an API, and its own positioning is by builders, for builders. The in-app experience is filter-driven and data-centric; conversational questions are handled mainly through the MCP server, and the deep integrations are with HubSpot, Attio and Clay, which is to say with the systems where the work happens. Its pricing axis is connectors and credits, not seats, because you're buying access to data rather than a workspace.

That's why the comparison keeps happening and keeps disappointing people. A firm evaluating Affinity is choosing a system of record. A firm evaluating The Swarm is choosing a source of relationship data to feed something it already has. If you have not decided which of those two problems you're solving, no feature table will separate them for you.

Affinity is priced per user per year: $2,000 for Essential, $2,300 for Scale, $2,700 for Advanced, billed annually, sales-led at every tier. A five-person fund on Essential is $10,000 a year. Ten people on Advanced is $27,000. The number scales exactly with how many people you want inside the system, which is a reasonable model for a product whose value is the shared record.

The Swarm is priced per company. Premium is $99 per company per month, and the axis that changes is connectors: 10 on the free plan, 50 on Premium, custom above that. Ten people at $99 a month is $1,188 a year in total, not per person. Annual billing is $2,990 per company per year.

The order of magnitude is real, and it is not a bargain so much as a different purchase. What Affinity charges per seat buys pipeline, permissions, capture and support. What The Swarm charges per company buys data and API access, with the free tier deliberately withholding the API so that the thing you'd build on starts at the paid rung.

Affinity captures what the firm did. Every licensed person's email and calendar flows in automatically, relationship strength is scored on recency and frequency of real interactions, and the result is a picture of who the firm has spoken to, enriched from 40 or more external sources including PitchBook, Preqin and Grata. Its published scale claims are 25 billion or more emails and calendar events captured and 130 billion or more structured relationships. The weakness is that it is bounded by the firm's systems, and it advertises no connection to a partner's personal LinkedIn or Twitter graph.

The Swarm builds outward from connectors. Active connectors are team members with logins, passive connectors are people whose professional histories you add, and each one extends the map. On top of that sits an external dataset of 500 million profiles with daily job-change tracking and 50 million companies with fundraising data, and a Network Mapper that explores extended networks using work-history correlations, common investors and its own signals. The weakness is that path quality is bounded by connector count, which is exactly what the plan tiers meter.

One is deep on what your firm knows first-hand. The other is broad on what's publicly true about a very large number of people. A firm with a long history and heavy email volume gets more from the first. A firm sourcing into markets it hasn't yet touched gets more from the second.

Both of these are firm-level purchases whose value comes from a shared asset the firm administers: Affinity's captured record, The Swarm's connector map and dataset. Both assume there's someone whose job includes keeping it healthy. That's the right shape for a fund, an investment bank or a partnerships team. It's a heavy shape for one person, or three, who mostly want to know who they and their friends already know.

Happenstance is scoped to that smaller question. Each person connects their own accounts, Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, groups pool those networks into one graph any member can search, and questions are asked in plain English. There's a public API and an MCP server, and the free plan is the whole product with usage limits on chat and on web searches beyond your network. A firm that needs a system of record buys Affinity; a team that needs a licensed dataset buys The Swarm; Happenstance is the search layer beside either.

A good number of firms end up with Affinity as the record and The Swarm as a source feeding it, which is the configuration both products are shaped for. The Swarm's integrations point at HubSpot, Attio, Clay and Airtable rather than at Affinity specifically, so check the route before assuming it, and note that Affinity's own API sits on the Enterprise tier while The Swarm's starts at Premium.

If you are switching rather than stacking, the direction matters. A firm moving from The Swarm to Affinity is adopting a CRM and should plan the implementation accordingly. A firm moving from Affinity to The Swarm is giving up the pipeline and needs somewhere else for it to live first. The cheap first step in either direction is The Swarm's free plan, since 10 connectors is enough to see what its mapping returns for your firm before anyone signs anything.