The best warm introduction software in 2026

An introduction has two halves: finding who can make it, and getting it made. Ten tools, sorted by which half they do and what they charge for it.

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

The short version

The best warm introduction software in 2026 is Happenstance for finding the path, Bridge for running the ask on someone else's behalf, and Boomerang for a sales org treating intros as a pipeline channel. That split matters more than any ranking, because most of these products do only one half of an introduction: finding who can make it, or getting it made. Happenstance is free, reads seven connected accounts and has 500,000+ users; Connect The Dots is $20 a month billed annually; Bridge is $29 per person per month billed annually. Common Room and UserGems are signal platforms rather than introduction tools, and start at $2,500 a month and $40,000 a year.

Quick picks

Best overall for one person or one team: Happenstance, free, from seven connected accounts
Best when the answer has to land in the CRM: Connect The Dots, at $20 a month billed annually
Best for people who make introductions for others: Bridge, whose free tier is built for exactly that
Best for a B2B sales org running intros as a channel: Boomerang
Best for a fund choosing a system of record: Affinity
Best pay as you go: Draftboard, at $0.30 per path and never more than $0.90 per target
Best when nobody you know knows anybody there: Village, whose inferred graph will at least propose a candidate

Finding the path and making the ask are two jobs

Finding the path. Given a name or a company, who on your side knows someone there, and which of those ties is strongest. This is a search problem over a relationship graph, and it's where Happenstance, Connect The Dots, Village, The Swarm and Affinity compete.

Getting the ask made. Given a path, putting the request in front of the connector in language they will send, and following it to a reply. This is a workflow problem, and it's where Bridge, Boomerang and Draftboard compete. Bridge is the clearest case: its whole product is the mechanics of the introduction itself, with double opt-in flows and reusable links.

A third group turns up under this phrase and belongs to neither half. Common Room and UserGems watch signals such as job changes and website visits, then deploy agents to act on them. That's outbound orchestration, and an introduction is one output among many.

What to look for

How it gets its data. A graph built from email headers, calendar entries and connections records ties that happened. A graph built by inference links people who overlapped at an employer or a school, which produces far more candidates and a lower hit rate per ask. A shared-network product holds only what members contribute. Ask which of the three you're buying, because every other feature sits on top of that answer.

The billing basis, not the headline number. Two of the published prices in this category are annual rates displayed as monthly ones. Connect The Dots shows $20 by default and charges $25 month-to-month; Bridge shows $29 and charges $35.

Whether an individual can buy it. Six of these ten have a self-serve entry point. The other four need a call, and two of those start in the tens of thousands a year.

What happens to the connector. The person asked to make the introduction is the one whose reputation is spent. Tools that route the request through their own inbox and let them decline quietly, as Bridge and Boomerang do, protect that.

Whether it can say it doesn't know. A graph built on real interactions returns nothing when there's no route, which reads as a weakness in a demo and is a strength on a Tuesday.

Ten tools and what each one costs

Warm introduction software compared by role, data source, free plan, published price and whether the tool runs the introduction
	What it does with the path	How it fills itself	Free plan and limit	Paid starts at	Runs the intro for you
Happenstance	Finds and ranks it	Seven connected accounts, read automatically	Yes, the whole product with usage limits	$30/mo, $24/mo billed yearly	No
Connect The Dots	Finds it, drafts the ask	Email and LinkedIn, enriched and deduped	Yes, 10 AI searches a month	$20/mo billed annually, $25 month-to-month	Partly, via ghost emails
Village	Finds it, sequences the outreach	Synced accounts plus an inferred public graph	Yes, 100 credits/mo, 10 results per search	$79/mo billed monthly, $49/mo billed annually	Yes
The Swarm	Surfaces and exports it	Connectors plus a 500M-profile dataset	Yes, 10 connectors, no API	$99 per company per month	No
Affinity	Finds it inside the firm's CRM	The firm's email and calendar, enriched	None	$2,000 per user per year	Partly, via its agents
Bridge	Runs the ask end to end	Networks members share on Bridge	Yes, $0 for connectors, 2 introlink intros/mo	$29/person/mo billed annually, $35 monthly	Yes
Draftboard	Scores paths, drafts the message	Inferred employment overlap, plus CSV targets	50 paths, no card	$0.30 per path, never above $0.90 per target	Yes
Boomerang	Runs the motion across a sales team	The company's reps, customers, board and partners	None published	Not published	Yes
Common Room	Acts on buying signals	Signals, intent data and its own contact database	None	$2,500/mo billed annually	Yes
UserGems	Acts on job changes	CRM contacts tracked as they move jobs	None	$40,000 a year, plus $3,000 implementation	Yes

The tools that find the path

Happenstance

Best for: Anyone who wants the question answered from relationships that exist, without a seat, a CRM or a sales call.
What it does best: Answering in plain English from evidence. Connect Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, then ask who can introduce me to someone at Stripe. Paths run through named people, ranked by strength learned from how often and how recently you interact. Groups pool networks free and without limit. Public API, MCP server, ChatGPT app and Claude integrations.
Pair it with: Bridge or Boomerang, if you also want the request sent and tracked to a booked meeting. Happenstance finds and ranks the path.
Price: Free, 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: the blocker is knowing who to ask rather than how to ask, and you'd rather not pay for the asking to be metered. 500,000+ people use it.

Connect The Dots

Best for: Sales teams that want warm paths to appear where they already work, in Salesforce, HubSpot and Gmail.
What it does best: The closest mechanism to Happenstance's, aimed at the company rather than the person. It builds from email and LinkedIn, enriched and deduped, and scores each relationship in both directions. Ghost emails let an executive approve an AI-drafted request sent on their behalf. The mobile app and its Dottie assistant are on every plan, and it is SOC 2 certified.
Where it falls short: On sources and on the free ceiling. Calendar isn't a source yet, and no social network beyond LinkedIn is. Free stops at 10 AI searches, five ghost emails and two lists a month. Searching the whole company's network sits on a custom-priced Business tier.
Price: Free forever for individuals; Professional $20 per month billed annually, $25 month-to-month; Business customChecked August 2026
Consider it only if: your intro motion is a sales motion and the answer needs to be in the CRM rather than in a browser tab.

Village

Best for: Teams whose targets sit outside anyone's own network and who want a candidate path proposed regardless.
What it does best: Reach. A pre-built graph of 775M+ profiles and 4.77B relationships, with ties inferred from shared employers, schools and investors, plus autopilots, intro sequences, lead screening, an MCP connector for Claude and ChatGPT, and access to 14,000+ pre-mapped VC networks.
Where it falls short: Certainty and price discipline. Inferred ties are candidates, not relationships, and each needs checking before you spend someone's goodwill. Credits meter every plan, free included, where AI search returns 10 results. Team pooling sits on the $149 Business plan at $19 per collaborator per month.
Price: Free (100 credits/mo); Pro $79/mo billed monthly, $49 billed annually; Business $149/mo, $119 annually, plus $19 per collaboratorChecked August 2026
Consider it only if: you've already exhausted the people you know and would rather verify a machine's suggestion than send a cold email.

The Swarm

Best for: RevOps teams and developers who want the graph as data to pipe into something else.
What it does best: Being a data product. Pooled team networks plus a dataset of 500M profiles with daily job-change tracking, through a documented API and a mature MCP that works in Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Claude Code. Premium is priced per company rather than per seat. It acquired Commsor in July 2026.
Where it falls short: The last mile. Plain-language questions mostly get asked in external tools rather than in the product, and it does nothing to run the introduction. Free is 10 connectors with no API at all, and path quality tracks how many teammates import their networks.
Price: Free (10 connectors, no API); Premium $99 per company per month; Enterprise customChecked August 2026
Consider it only if: you are building the intro workflow yourself and want the underlying relationship data rather than an answer.

Affinity

Best for: Private capital firms buying a system of record with relationship intelligence inside it.
What it does best: Depth for a firm. It captures every teammate's email and calendar into one permissioned firm graph, scores relationship strength, surfaces intro paths and runs deal flow, with enrichment from Crunchbase, PitchBook and Dealroom. Scale adds an MCP server, AI chat and the Ascend agents, including a warm-intro agent.
Where it falls short: Everything about buying it as a person. The cheapest published entry is $2,000 per user per year, with no free tier and no self-serve signup, and the first-party signal is work email and calendar, so personal LinkedIn and social graphs sit outside the model.
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're choosing the CRM for a fund and want warm paths scored from the firm's own captured activity.

Who can introduce me to someone at Stripe?

Example

Ran 2 searches

6 people at Stripe are reachable through your colleagues; four are in product or data.

Example results for “Who can introduce me to someone at Stripe?”
Person	Thinking	Mutuals
VH Viktor HansenProduct Manager at Stripe	Product Manager on Stripe Billing since 2023.
IL Ines LopesData Scientist at Stripe	Data science at Stripe since 2019, on the risk team.
CG Callum GrantAccount Executive at Stripe	LinkedIn post, July: 'Four years covering enterprise accounts in EMEA at Stripe.'

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.The half these tools disagree about: who to ask, and how well they know the person.

The tools that make the ask

Bridge

Best for: VC platform teams, accelerators and community operators whose job is making introductions for other people.
What it does best: The mechanics of the introduction itself, which nothing else here treats as the product. Introlinks work like a scheduling link for intros, and only the person creating and forwarding one needs an account. Double opt-in, single opt-in and no opt-in flows, groups, network sharing, feedback scores, an API and Zapier. Direct introductions made by connectors are always free.
Where it falls short: On finding the path in the first place. Bridge holds the networks members deliberately share, not a graph read from your accounts, so it can only route through what has been contributed. Seeing intro paths and connection rankings, and requesting intros at all, are Pro features.
Price: Free $0 per person per month; Pro $29 per person per month billed annually, $35 monthly; Platform $149 annually, $199 monthlyChecked August 2026
Consider it only if: you're the connector rather than the asker, and the bottleneck is running dozens of introductions rather than finding one.

Boomerang

Best for: B2B sales organizations running warm intros as a repeatable pipeline channel against priority accounts.
What it does best: Orchestration across a team. It maps the company's warm graph across reps, customers, board and investors, and partners, then runs the motion: when a signal fires it surfaces the warmest path, drafts the request in the connector's voice, routes it through Slack and the CRM and closes the loop when the meeting books.
Where it falls short: Individual access and price transparency. No free tier, no self-serve signup and no published price. It orchestrates asks rather than answering open questions about who you know.
Price: Not published; Boomerang's own estimate is $15,000 to $25,000 a year for a ten-rep teamChecked August 2026
Consider it only if: intros are already a named channel with a target attached, and the gap is a system for running them at team scale.

Draftboard

Best for: Teams that want paths into a target list without a subscription, and will verify what comes back.
What it does best: The pricing model, which fits occasional use: $0.30 per quality path, a hard cap of $0.90 per target, and 50 free paths with no card. It scores each route with a written rationale, tracks the intro request lifecycle, drafts the message, and reaches second and third degree without every teammate connecting an account.
Where it falls short: On what a path means. Its scoring factors are length of overlapping employment, recency, multiple overlaps, titles and seniority, which is employment inference rather than interaction, so two people who never spoke can score well. No natural-language search, no pricing page, no CRM-native integration.
Price: $0.30 per quality path, maximum $0.90 per target; 50 free paths, no cardChecked August 2026
Consider it only if: you have a target list, no appetite for a subscription, and time to sanity-check a path before you use it.

A different approach, at a different price

These two are sold as warm introduction software and are something else: signal-driven outbound platforms where an introduction is one output among many. Neither holds a graph of who you know, so a warm path in them means a signal rather than a person who can vouch for you.

Common Room unifies job changes, website visits and deanonymization, product usage, community engagement and Bombora intent topics with identity resolution and a prospecting database, then runs agents against the result. It ships an MCP server and a CLI and says it's SOC 2 certified. Essential is $2,500 a month billed annually for five seats, Advanced and Enterprise are custom, and there's no free tier or trial: every tier is a demo request.

UserGems does one thing thoroughly, tracking the people already in your CRM as they change jobs and deploying agents to run outbound off that trigger, with contact-level intent, buying stages and calendar capture. It publishes hard annual prices and a money-back ROI guarantee by tier: Core $40,000 a year, Advanced $75,000, Elite $150,000, plus a $3,000 to $10,000 implementation fee. There's no free plan, no trial and no self-serve route.

Why asking the team in Slack stops working

Before any purchase, the default tool is a message in a company Slack channel: does anyone know someone at Ramp. With twelve people in the company that works. It fails three ways, and each one is a product above. It reaches only whoever is watching the channel that hour. It relies on someone recalling a relationship they have not thought about in two years. And it leaves nothing reusable, so the same question comes back next quarter. Scrolling LinkedIn's mutual connections view has the same shape: fine for one target, useless for forty.

Which one to pick

You are one person and the block is who to ask: Happenstance, free.

You are a seller and the CRM is the workspace: Connect The Dots.

You make introductions for a portfolio or a community: Bridge.

You are the head of sales and this is a channel: Boomerang, and expect a call before a price.

You are choosing a fund's system of record: Affinity.

You have a target list and no budget for a seat: Draftboard, at 50 free paths.

You want the wider category, including the databases and personal CRMs people compare against these: our warm intro tools page sorts the category by where the graph comes from. Or search your own network free and see which paths already exist.

Prices are from each vendor's own pricing page, with the billing basis as the vendor states it.

What Happenstance reads to find a path

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 warm introduction software?

Software that finds the shortest path between you and a person you want to reach, through someone who knows you both, and in some cases carries the request through. A warm introduction converts better than cold outreach because the introducer's credibility travels with it. The software exists because the hard part is knowing who to ask rather than writing the ask.

What's the best warm introduction software in 2026?

Happenstance for an individual or a team that wants the path found from relationships that exist: free, seven connected sources, 500,000+ users. Connect The Dots if the answer needs to land inside Salesforce or HubSpot. Bridge if your job is making introductions for other people. Boomerang if a B2B sales org is running intros as a channel against priority accounts.

Is there free warm introduction software?

Yes, and the free tiers differ a lot. Happenstance is free, and the free plan is the whole product with usage limits on chat and on web searches beyond your network. Connect The Dots is free forever for individuals at 10 AI contact searches a month. Bridge is free for people making introductions, with two introlink introductions a month. Village gives 100 credits a month and 10 results per AI search. Draftboard gives 50 free paths. Affinity, Boomerang, Common Room and UserGems have no free tier.

How much does warm introduction software cost?

From nothing to six figures. Happenstance Pro is $30 a month, or $24 billed yearly. Connect The Dots Professional is $20 a month billed annually and $25 month-to-month. Bridge Pro is $29 per person per month billed annually and $35 monthly. Village Pro is $79 a month, $49 billed annually. Affinity starts at $2,000 per user per year. Common Room Essential is $2,500 a month billed annually and UserGems Core is $40,000 a year.

Can one person buy warm introduction software?

Only some of it. Happenstance, Connect The Dots, Bridge, Village, Draftboard and The Swarm all have a self-serve entry point, each with a free tier. Affinity is sold per seat with no self-serve signup, Boomerang publishes no price, and Common Room and UserGems are platform purchases in the tens of thousands a year.

Does warm introduction software write the intro request?

Some of it does. Bridge sends double opt-in requests from the connector's own inbox and gives them a link they can reuse. Boomerang drafts the ask in the connector's voice and tracks it to a booked meeting. Connect The Dots has ghost emails, where an AI-drafted request goes out with an executive's approval. Happenstance finds and ranks the path and leaves the asking to you.

How does warm introduction software know who knows whom?

Three mechanisms, not equally reliable. Communications graphs read email headers, calendar entries and connections, so a tie means an interaction happened: Happenstance, Connect The Dots and Affinity work this way. Inferred graphs link people who shared an employer, school or investor, which is Village and Draftboard, and those ties need checking. Shared-network products such as Bridge hold what members deliberately contribute.

What's the difference between warm introduction software and a sales database?

A database sells you access to people you do not know, and reaching them is your problem. Warm introduction software maps people you or your colleagues already know and finds the route. Teams often need both, but confusing them is how a company ends up paying for contact data when the block was that nobody asked the investor on their own cap table.

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