Happenstance

The best relationship intelligence software in 2026

Nine platforms, sorted by the one thing that decides which you can buy at all: whose graph gets built, and whether the vendor sells to a firm or to a person.

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

The short version

The best relationship intelligence software in 2026 for most people is Happenstance: free, seven connected sources, 500,000+ users, and the only platform anyone can self-serve. The rest of the market sorts by whose graph it builds: firm-wide CRMs for private capital (Affinity from $2,000/seat/year, 4Degrees), enterprise capture for professional services (Introhive), sales-team graphs (Connect The Dots, Boomerang), and inferred or external graphs (Village, Vieu, The Swarm). Unless you're a firm buying a system of record, start with the free one.

The picks, one line each

  • Best for one person or an ordinary team: Happenstance. Seven connected sources, plain-English search, free.
  • Best system of record for private capital: Affinity. $2,000 to $2,700 a seat a year, and the only firm platform that prints its prices.
  • Best for private-market deal teams outside VC: 4Degrees. Banking, private equity and commercial real estate, priced per user through sales.
  • Best for professional services firms: Introhive. Firm-wide capture for law, accounting and consulting.
  • Best for coverage beyond anyone's network: Village. A pre-built graph of 775M+ profiles on every plan, including free.
  • Best if you are building on the data: The Swarm. A 500M-profile dataset and a full API at $99 per company.
  • Best for a sales team inside Salesforce or HubSpot: Connect The Dots. $20 a month billed annually, with a free plan.
  • Best when the intro motion needs running for you: Boomerang. Sales-led, team-only.
  • Best for an enterprise business graph: Vieu. 4 billion nodes, demo-gated.

Five things worth checking before you pay

1. Whose graph it builds. Three answers exist. Firm platforms (Affinity, 4Degrees, Introhive) capture the firm's email and calendar, so the graph is the firm's and stops at the firm's inbox. Inferred platforms (Village, Vieu) layer a graph built from public records over what you connect, so coverage extends to people nobody on your side has met and the paths need checking. Personal platforms (Happenstance, Connect The Dots) build from the accounts each person connects, including the personal ones, and pool them through groups or a team.

2. Whether you are allowed to buy it. Four of the nine publish no price and sell only through a sales conversation. A solo investor, a founder or a five-person team is not the customer for those.

3. What a path is made of. A path built from a reply, a meeting or a shared thread is a relationship. A path inferred from two people having overlapped at an employer is a guess. Village's own data page labels only 7% of its edges direct; the rest are co-worker, role and alumni overlaps. Treat inferred paths as leads to verify before you spend a favor on one.

4. Where the answer arrives. Some tools answer the question in the product (Happenstance, Village, Affinity). Some hand you data to rank yourself or to pipe into another tool (The Swarm, Vieu). Both are legitimate; they are different purchases.

5. What it reads. Every tool here reads email or calendar activity in some form. Ask whether it reads headers or content, who inside the company can see whose relationships, and what happens to the graph when a person leaves. Happenstance reads email as headers only and each person's connections are visible to them, their friends and their groups.

The nine at a glance

Relationship intelligence software compared by whose graph it builds, who it is sold to, published pricing and free plan
Whose graphSold toPublished pricingFree plan
HappenstanceEach person's seven connected accounts, pooled through groupsAnyone, self-serve$30/mo, $24/mo billed yearlyYes, the whole product with usage limits
AffinityThe firm's email and calendar, enrichedPrivate capital firms, through sales$2,000, $2,300 or $2,700 per user per yearNo
4DegreesThe firm's email and calendar, enrichedPrivate-market deal teams, through salesPer user per month, figure not publishedNo
IntrohiveThe firm's email and calendar, into the CRMProfessional services firms, enterprise salesNot publishedNo
VillageYour team's accounts plus a 775M+ profile inferred graphTeams, self-serve$79/mo Pro, $49 billed annually; $149 Business plus $19 per collaboratorYes, 100 credits a month
The SwarmTeam connectors plus a 500M-profile datasetRevOps and developers, self-serve$99 per company per monthYes, 10 connectors, no API
Connect The DotsEmail, LinkedIn and the CRMSales teams, self-serve$20/mo billed annually, $25 month to month; Business customYes, 10 AI searches a month
BoomerangThe company's extended networkB2B sales orgs, through salesNot published; Boomerang's own estimate is $15,000 to $25,000 a year for ten repsNo
VieuAn inferred business graph, 4B nodesEnterprise GTM teams, demo-gatedNot publishedNo

The nine, in the order worth trying

Ordered by how many kinds of buyer each one will sell to. The free self-serve tool is first because it is the only one everybody can test; the firm platforms come last because most readers cannot buy them.

Happenstance

Best for
One person, or a team that pools its networks in a group, who wants to search who they know without a contract.
Where it wins
Connect Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram and ask in plain English: who on our team knows someone at Stripe, which investors in my network back AI, how am I connected to this person. Results rank by relationship strength learned from what happened, with email read as headers only. Friends and groups pool networks in both directions, and the largest groups make 380,000+ people searchable. 500,000+ people use it, and the free plan includes the public API, the MCP server, the ChatGPT app and the Claude integrations.
Pair it with
Affinity or Introhive, if the firm needs a system of record with firm-wide capture. Happenstance is the search layer beside it.
Price
Free, and the free plan is the whole product with usage limits on chat and on web searches beyond your network. Pro $30 per month, $24 per month billed yearlyChecked August 2026
Choose it if
you want the category's core question answered today, for you or a team, and you would rather find out what is left over before buying a platform.

Affinity

Best for
A venture, private equity, credit or family office firm choosing its system of record.
Where it wins
Affinity captures every seat's email and calendar into one permissioned firm graph, scores relationship strength, runs the deal pipeline and enriches records from Crunchbase, PitchBook and Dealroom. It publishes three per-seat prices and names what each buys, which no other firm platform here does. Scale adds AI Chat, the Notetaker and Affinity Ascend, the agent platform announced on July 21, 2026 with warm-intro and meeting-prep agents and an MCP server. Its trust center lists SOC 2 and ISO 27001. It claims 3,300+ private capital firms.
What you give up
No free tier and no self-serve signup: every tier goes through sales on an annual per-seat contract. The first-party signal is work email and calendar, so personal LinkedIn and social graphs are not part of the model, and an individual investor is not the customer.
Price
Essential $2,000, Scale $2,300, Advanced $2,700 per user per year; Enterprise custom; no free tierChecked August 2026
Consider it only if
you are the fund. Happenstance is the search layer beside it.

4Degrees

Best for
Private-market deal teams in banking, private equity, commercial real estate and venture.
Where it wins
The same model as Affinity applied across private markets: the firm's email and calendar synced, relationships scored, deal pipelines run, records enriched from Crunchbase and PitchBook, with Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn and Chrome extensions. Its pricing page states the unit, per user per month.
What you give up
It states the unit and not the number: the price depends on factors specific to your organization, and you have to get in touch. No free tier, no self-serve.
Price
Per user per month; the figure is not publishedChecked August 2026
Consider it only if
your deal team is outside venture and Affinity's private-capital framing does not fit, and you would rather have the conversation first.

Introhive

Best for
Law, accounting, consulting and built-environment firms with hundreds of fee-earners.
Where it wins
Introhive captures firm-wide email and calendar activity into the CRM the firm already runs, enriches the records and shows which partner knows which client. It names Freshfields, Grant Thornton, Colliers, Baker Tilly and Osler among its clients and describes itself as the number one relationship intelligence platform.
What you give up
It publishes no price, no plan page and no unit. Boomerang's own estimate for a typical Introhive contract is $50,000 to $150,000 a year with 90 to 180 day implementations. A five-partner practice is not who it is built for.
Price
Not published; enterprise sales, quoted per firmChecked August 2026
Consider it only if
you are a professional services firm with an enterprise procurement process and a CRM to feed.

Village

Best for
A team whose targets sit mostly outside anyone's real network and who wants candidate paths anyway.
Where it wins
On top of your team's synced accounts, Village layers a pre-built graph its home page puts at 775M+ profiles, 52M+ companies and 4.77B relationships, with a scoring model it names Person Rank. Around the search it wraps autopilots, intro sequences, lead screening, a browser extension and an MCP connector for Claude and ChatGPT. It publishes every price, and the free plan includes the graph.
What you give up
Its data page labels 7% of edges direct, the rest inferred from co-worker, role and alumni overlaps, so paths need verifying before you spend one. Credits meter AI and data actions on every plan including the free one, which caps AI searches at 10 results, and Person Rank is named on its site but not described.
Price
Free at 100 credits a month; Pro $79 a month, $49 billed annually; Business $149 a month, $119 annually, plus $19 per collaboratorChecked August 2026
Consider it only if
coverage matters more than confidence and you will check a path before using it.

The Swarm

Best for
RevOps teams and developers who want relationship data as an API and will rank it themselves.
Where it wins
The Swarm pools a team's networks through connectors and layers a dataset of 500M profiles and 50M companies with daily job-change tracking over them, exposed through an app, a documented API and one of the more mature MCP servers in the category. It is priced per company rather than per seat, which gets cheap for a large team. It acquired Commsor in July 2026.
What you give up
It is a data layer more than an answer layer: plain-language search happens mostly in the tools you connect it to, path quality depends on how many teammates connect accounts, and the free plan has no API.
Price
Free up to 10 connectors, no API; Premium $99 per company per month for 50 connectors, the whole database and the full APIChecked August 2026
Consider it only if
you are building on the data. Buy the dataset if the answer is going to live in your own tools.

Connect The Dots

Best for
A sales team that lives in Salesforce or HubSpot and wants intro drafts routed through it.
Where it wins
The tool most like Happenstance here: a graph built from your team's email and LinkedIn, each tie scored on two-way replies rather than on the existence of a connection, plain-English search, and intro emails drafted for an executive to approve. It publishes its prices, offers basic API and MCP access on Professional, and raised a $15M Series A led by Norwest in December 2021.
What you give up
Calendar is listed as coming soon and there are no address books, Twitter or Instagram, so the graph is narrower than the accounts you hold. The free plan is 10 AI searches a month, and team network search sits on a sales-quoted Business tier.
Price
Free at 10 AI searches a month; Professional $20 a month billed annually or $25 month to month; Business customChecked August 2026
Consider it only if
your sales team's world is the CRM and you want the intro motion inside it.

Boomerang

Best for
A B2B sales org that wants the introduction motion run for it, not just mapped.
Where it wins
Boomerang maps a company's warm graph across four pillars, the team, its customers, its board and advisors, its partners, then fires on a signal such as a champion changing jobs, drafts the ask in the connector's voice, routes it through Slack and the CRM, and reports the booked meeting. Its own materials describe the target customer as B2B SaaS and enterprise sales teams with at least $30,000 average contract value.
What you give up
No pricing page and no individual or free plan: every call to action is a demo request. It orchestrates asks more than it answers open questions about who you know.
Price
Not published; sales-led; Boomerang's own 2026 estimate is $15,000 to $25,000 a year for a ten-rep teamChecked August 2026
Consider it only if
the bottleneck is running intros as a pipeline channel rather than finding them.

Vieu

Best for
Enterprise GTM teams from Series A to the Fortune 50 that want a business graph assembled from CRM, email, Slack and public data.
Where it wins
Vieu counts its graph at 4 billion nodes and 14 billion edges from 30+ live sources: user-contributed LinkedIn exports, tenant data from CRM, email, Slack and HR tools, public internet data and specialized signals. It names 100+ enterprise customers including Rubrik, NetApp and Amazon Web Services, and sells to sales, marketing, customer success, partnerships, fundraising and talent teams.
What you give up
No published price and the only route is a demo request; press coverage describes a platform fee plus outcome-based pricing per initiative. Individuals cannot sign up, and the graph is primarily inferred from external signals such as shared work history and board affiliations rather than from your own communications.
Price
Not published; demo-gated; described in press as a platform fee plus outcome-based pricingChecked August 2026
Consider it only if
you are an enterprise with a procurement process and the graph you want is the whole market, not your own network.
Who on our team knows anyone at Datadog?
The category's core question, asked of the accounts a team has connected.

Which one should you pick

  • You are one person, or a team without a procurement process: Happenstance.
  • You are a fund choosing a system of record: Affinity, with 4Degrees if the fit is banking or real estate.
  • You are a law, accounting or consulting firm: Introhive.
  • Your targets are outside anyone's network: Village, and verify the paths.
  • You are building on the data: The Swarm.
  • Your team works inside the CRM and wants drafts routed there: Connect The Dots, or Boomerang if you want the motion run for you.
  • You are an enterprise buying the whole market's graph: Vieu.

Whatever the firm buys, the search layer costs nothing to test. Search your network free, or start with the definition on what relationship intelligence is.

Prices and plan limits are from each vendor's own site. Vieu's pricing model is from press coverage of its launch.

What the graph is built from, and who can see it

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 relationship intelligence software?

For individuals and teams who want to search who they know: Happenstance, free, with Pro at $30 per month, seven connected sources, warm paths ranked by real relationship strength. For a private capital firm's system of record: Affinity ($2,000 to $2,700 per user per year) or 4Degrees. For professional services firms: Introhive. For sales teams wanting CRM-native paths: Connect The Dots.

How much does relationship intelligence software cost?

The spread is enormous. Happenstance is free with a $30 per month Pro tier. Connect The Dots starts at $20 per month billed annually, $25 month-to-month. Village Pro is $79 a month, $49 billed annually, and Business $149 plus add-ons. The Swarm is $99 per company per month. Affinity publishes $2,000 to $2,700 per user per year, and Introhive, 4Degrees, Vieu, and Boomerang don't publish pricing at all.

What data does relationship intelligence software use?

Communications metadata: who emails whom and how often, who meets whom, who's connected where. The best systems read only metadata (Happenstance reads email headers, never content). Some platforms add inferred ties from public records (Village, Vieu) or external datasets (The Swarm); those extend coverage but the ties need verifying.

Do I need enterprise relationship intelligence?

Only if you're a firm buying a system of record with procurement and implementation behind it. Everything the category does for an individual or ordinary team (search who you know, find warm paths, prep for meetings) Happenstance does self-serve and free, which is the simplest test: try the free one first and see what's left over.

Is Happenstance free?

Yes. The free plan is the whole product, Sidedoor included, with unlimited connected accounts, friends, and groups. No credit card required.

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