Village vs The Swarm

Village counts people and actions. A seat is $79 a month, $49 billed annually, and inside that seat almost everything burns credits: an AI search costs about 6, warm intro paths to a person cost 5, building a list of 25 with AI costs about 16, and running a project agent costs about 50. The team graph is a tier above, at $149 a month with 7,500 pooled credits, and each extra collaborator with third-degree access is $19 a month and brings 1,000 credits of their own.

The Swarm counts companies and connectors. Premium is $99 per company per month for 50 connectors, 12,000 API credits a month and overage at $0.10 a credit, and a connector is a person whose professional history maps relationships rather than a paid seat. Its free tier allows 10 of them. So a fifteen-person sales team pays $99, and the number that constrains it's how many people have plugged their history in, not how many people log in.

Set those two sentences next to each other and the buying question mostly resolves. One paid user is cheaper on Village; anything that looks like a department is cheaper on The Swarm, and the crossover arrives at two paid Village seats.

Village is an application. You ask it a question in the product, it returns paths scored by a model it calls Person Rank, and the layers above search are its own: autopilots, AI intro sequences, lead screening, a browser extension that surfaces a path while you read a profile. Its API and MCP server exist, and they're on every plan, but they're an extension of the app rather than the point of it.

The Swarm calls itself the relationship data company, and it means it. The app browses and exports; the Data API is the product, with enrichment, the network mapper, job-change tracking, fundraising data and per-field timestamps documented for builders. Its own positioning is by builders, for builders, and the plain-language asking usually happens somewhere else: Claude or ChatGPT over the MCP, or Clay next to the rest of a RevOps stack.

This is why the free tiers differ in the way they do. Village gives away a metered version of the answer, credits and all. The Swarm gives away a small version of the network and withholds the API, because the API is the thing being sold.

Village publishes 775M+ people, 52M+ companies and 4.77B relationships, and its data page breaks the graph down by edge type: co-worker 613M at 34%, role 569M at 32%, alumni 490M at 27%, direct 133M at 7%. Nearly all of it's overlap, not acquaintance. That is a description of what a pre-built graph is, and it applies to The Swarm's network mapper too, which explores extended networks using work-experience correlations and common investors.

The Swarm publishes fewer numbers and different ones: 500M profiles, 50M companies with fundraising data, 100M+ profiles monitored for job changes, and per-field timestamps so a caller can see how old each value is. That last one says which buyer it was written for. Freshness guarantees matter to someone building on the data, and they rarely reach a sales demo.

Both of these are team products. Village's pooled graph and third-degree mapping sit on Business at $149 a month, and The Swarm's connector model assumes a group of colleagues supplying histories, with the free tier capped at 10 connectors and no API. An individual evaluating either one is buying the half of the product that wasn't designed for them, and paying the credit meter to find that out.

There is a third shape in this category that neither vendor sells: search over the network you already have, with no pre-built graph on top. Happenstance is that, and it's free, with groups that pool networks at no cost and usage limits rather than a credit meter. The licensed dataset is The Swarm's and the autopilots and CRM integrations are Village's; a RevOps team that needs either runs Happenstance beside it. For one person, or a founding team pooling its angels and advisors, it answers the who-do-we-know question without a seat. Happenstance vs Village and Happenstance vs The Swarm have the row-by-row detail.

They overlap less than the shared category language suggests. A team already piping The Swarm into Clay gets no intro sequencing from it, which is exactly where Village's autopilots live. A team on Village Business that wants relationship data inside its own warehouse has to work through a credit meter for something The Swarm sells as the product. Teams that run both use The Swarm for the pipes and Village for the interface, and pay $99 plus at least one $79 seat.

Moving in either direction is mostly re-syncing accounts, since neither graph is portable. Village exports lists on Pro and unlimited exports on Business; The Swarm exports up to 10,000 people on Premium. What leaves is a list of records, not the scored paths.