Is Affinity or HubSpot Sales right for your team?
Choosing a CRM for relationship-driven dealmaking
HubSpot Sales is a cloud-based CRM platform designed for sales and marketing automation. With their extensive set of email marketing and communication tools and an inbound approach to sales and marketing, HubSpot gives teams the ability to attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers in a single ecosystem. This makes it a powerful platform for tracking and managing traditional sales and marketing funnels for customer-focused industries like retail and SaaS. It also means that HubSpot Sales is designed to do exactly what it says: sell.
Dealmakers in the professional and financial services industries—from venture capital to private equity, investment banking, consulting, and more—are supporting vast, complex networks of prospects, clients, and businesses partners, not traditional customers. CRMs like Salesforce and Pipedrive are excellent examples of other sales-oriented tools, but teams that are looking for relationship management and not just manual contact management or lead management solutions have other options to explore. Let’s take a look at how Affinity and HubSpot Sales differ so you can choose the best CRM solution for your needs—whether you're selling or closing deals.
Relationship intelligence
Automated data capture
Improve your decision making with relationship intelligence
Affinity vs. Attio CRM

Single source of truth for your data
Relationship intelligence
Automate data capture
Manage deals and relationships in one place
Track data related to both your deal flow pipeline and professional relationships with a single platform.
Improve your decision making with relationship intelligence
Gain insights from your network, connections, and conversations to help find, manage, and close more deals faster.
Automate contact and deal data capture
Capture contact information from every email, meeting, and calendar invite, including retroactive information dating back to the start of your inbox.
Launch your CRM platform quickly
Choose a platform that won’t disrupt your workflows—deploy fast; sometimes in just a few days.
Depend on consistent customer support
Rely on a dedicated customer support team and detailed FAQs when your team needs help.
Reference your CRM data on the go
Access your CRM data via mobile apps for both iOS (iPhone and iPad included) and Android devices with a cloud-based SaaS platform.
Analyze core KPIs with Looker
Build, share, and review your team’s most important metrics with real-time reporting supported by business intelligence platform, Looker.
Put your CRM at the center of your tech stack
Utilize both native and custom integrations to connect your most-used software directly to your CRM.
Email directly from your CRM
Stay in contact with your clients without having to switch to a separate email tool with batch and direct email.
Expand access to industry-specific datasets
Enrich your team’s existing information with proprietary and external data partner datasets to make better investment decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions
HubSpot’s flywheel sales model is a standard-bearer for customer success, marketing, and sales team ecosystems. More specifically, HubSpot Sales, their dedicated sales-focused CRM tool is built on the foundation of a marketing and customer success platform. This means it also includes built-in calling features and email tools that can replace other email marketing platforms like Mailchimp. The platform’s user-oriented design and hundreds of hours of training courses make it easy to become an expert—if at the expense of time spent on training.
HubSpot prides itself, first and foremost on being an inbound marketing platform. While its sales and customer success features are still powerful independently, HubSpot CRM is most effective as a complete ecosystem for client and customer management. This means that teams that don’t need a full software suite end up with bloated features (e.g. social media management or retail payment functions) that won’t get used.
Additionally, like other legacy, transaction-oriented CRM platforms, HubSpot CRM’s deal and contact management is still manually managed. This can present challenges for deal teams working with high volumes of contacts and deals that are dependent on accurate contact records and frequently nurtured relationships.
See more reviews for Affinity vs. HubSpot Sales.
Rather than being a dedicated marketing or sales platform, Affinity is a dealmaking platform that focuses on the relationships at the heart of relationship-driven businesses. Industries like venture capital, private equity, investment banking, commercial real estate, consulting, and more use Affinity to make more data-driven decisions for their dealmaking process.
By automatically capturing “data exhaust”—details that are automatically captured from email communications, meetings, and contact information such as names, roles, industry, and source of introduction—Affinity ensures all of your internal data is up-to-date. This data is then converted into relationship intelligence—insights that help your team find, manage, and close more deals.If you’re still unsure about which CRM is the right fit for your business, check out these other CRM alternatives.
Relationship-driven dealmakers need features that work for their workflows—not retrofitted sales tools.
Purpose-built dealmaking platforms directly support long-term relationships and automate redundant, manual work like data entry and report building. Here are a few ways teams are using Affinity’s relationship intelligence to build a better business and close more deals:
- Built-in analytics support reporting on your relationship and deal data—combined with external data partner datasets—so you can visualize your dealflow pipeline in real time.
- Native and custom integrations help you connect your entire tech stack to your CRM—from email providers like Gmail or Outlook to email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, and any other software products that your team depends on.
- Relationship intelligence is drawn from a combination of your team’s collective network—from customer interactions, meetings, phone calls, notes logged from exchanges on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, and everything in between— to give your team paths to new warm introductions and opportunities.
Affinity’s pricing structure offers a wide range of options for teams of all sizes—from large enterprise organizations to small businesses. The most popular solution is Affinity Premium Tier—which gives teams access to Affinity Analytics reporting dashboards—combined with either Enhanced Support or Enhanced Support Plus customer support expansions.
Explore other add-ons—including the proprietary datasets offered through Affinity Data to grow your team’s access to people and organization-related details that help you make better investment decisions. Reach out to our sales team today to find the pricing package that suits your needs.

Legacy CRM solutions are well-suited for sales teams but can be difficult to fit into dealmaking workflows. Relationship intelligence platforms like Affinity are purpose-built for dealmakers.

CRM platforms like HubSpot Sales are flexible, multi-use tools that are used by companies of all shapes, sizes, and industries to manage linear, traditional sales pipelines. Teams that are looking for a transaction-focused CRM solution can find great success with HubSpot’s variety of functionality, but for dealmaking teams that want to focus on their relationships, a relationship intelligence platform is a purpose-built fit.
If your team is ready to automate manual contact and deal data entry and take back time to focus on the relationships that drive your business, try Affinity. Talk to our team today to learn more.