Connect The Dots vs Village

Connect The Dots counts only interactions it can see. Its graph is built from communications metadata: email plus LinkedIn connections and messages. The score is bidirectional, weighing frequency, recency and whether the other person wrote back. Its FAQ puts it in one sentence. If someone emailed you 100 times but you never replied, that's a zero. Group threads are excluded. The effect is a smaller graph in which a strong path means two people have corresponded.

Village starts from the same kind of material, its members' synced accounts, and then adds a second layer that CTD's individual plans don't have: a pre-built graph of public work and education records, published on its home and pricing pages as 775M+ profiles, 52M+ companies and 4.77B relationships. That layer is what lets it answer a question about a company where nobody on your side knows anyone. Village's own data page publishes the composition: co-worker 613M edges, role 569M, alumni 490M, direct 133M, with direct labeled 7%.

The interesting detail is that CTD does the same thing, just later and further up the price list. Its Business plan card offers more paths, probabilistic matches from public data, and its FAQ explains the logic in the same terms Village uses: two people who worked together for years probably know each other. So the split is about when you get the inference, not whether it's allowed. Village hands it to a free account. CTD holds it behind a custom-priced enterprise tier, and everyone below that sees only correspondence.

CTD's answer is that the work happens where the seller already is. The Chrome extension runs over LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Gmail and Salesforce, the CRM integration is Salesforce and HubSpot, and its distinctive feature is ghost emails: an AI-drafted introduction request that an executive approves and sends under their own name. A mobile app and its Dottie assistant are on every plan. The product's center of gravity is a rep's day, and the assumption is that the CRM is the system of record either way.

Village's answer is that the work happens in Village. Search, paths, lists, autopilots, AI intro sequences and lead screening sit in one place, with 500+ CRM and ATS integrations arriving on Business. Its browser extension, API and MCP server are on every plan including free, so an unusual amount of the product is reachable without paying, in exchange for the credit meter.

Neither approach is better in the abstract, and the choice usually follows an existing habit. Teams that live in Salesforce resent a second tab; teams with no CRM discipline do better with a product that doesn't assume one.

The individual comparison is stark and easy to state. CTD Professional is $20 a month billed annually, $25 month-to-month, and it lifts every cap on the free plan: unlimited AI contact searches, unlimited ghost emails, lists and summaries, faster refreshes, plus basic API and MCP access. Village Pro is $79 a month, $49 billed annually, and buys 4,000 credits, unlimited autopilots and unlimited lists on top of the pre-built graph. The premium is the graph, and whether it is worth four times the price depends on how often your answer is nobody.

At the team level only one price is published. Village prints $149 a month for Business with 7,500 pooled credits, plus $19 per collaborator for third-degree access. CTD prints custom, and its Business tier holds the company-wide network search, the probabilistic public-data paths, the CRM integration, SSO, unlimited external members and the full API. One team price can be read off the page; the other needs a call.

Both of these have free plans, and both are shaped to run out. CTD Free stops at 10 AI contact searches and 5 ghost emails a month; Village Free stops at 100 credits, roughly a dozen questions. That is the normal design of a self-serve funnel, and it works perfectly well for someone who intends to upgrade. It works less well for a founding team, a group of advisors or a set of alumni who want to search each other's networks and will never file an expense.

Happenstance is built for that case: the free plan is the whole product with usage limits, and groups pool networks without seats. The CRM integration and ghost emails are CTD's, the pre-built global graph is Village's, and a sales team that needs either runs Happenstance beside it. Happenstance vs Connect The Dots and Happenstance vs Village go through each pairing in detail.

Running both buys coverage from two directions: CTD for paths the team can vouch for and send through Salesforce, Village for accounts where a communications graph has nothing to offer. The cost is two subscriptions answering one question, and the second answer still has to be checked before anyone acts on it.

Switching is uneventful in either direction, because neither graph is portable and both are rebuilt from the same accounts. Reconnect email and LinkedIn and the new product regenerates its own version within its own refresh schedule. What doesn't transfer is the scoring, the lists and, on CTD, the record of which introductions were sent.