Choosing a CRM for dealmakers
When you’re choosing a new CRM, it’s important to determine which features matter most to your team and how those features will positively impact your ability to close deals. Pipedrive—much like other CRM platforms such as Salesforce, Hubspot, or Zoho CRM—is built for sales teams. If your team is managing deals that don’t move easily from one stage in the funnel to the next, and you need more than sales pipeline and contact management, you may want to consider Affinity—a platform purpose-built for relationship-driven dealmakers.
Relationship intelligence
Automate data capture
Automate contact data capture
Affinity vs. Pipedrive

Single source of truth for your data
Relationship intelligence
Automate data capture
Automate contact data capture
Gather the “data exhaust” of all of your calendar, email, and meeting activity in your CRM automatically.
Consolidate deal and relationship data
Store all of the information relevant to your team’s contacts and deals in one place—not in separate spreadsheets.
Integrate your CRM with your tech stack
Connect your CRM with the rest of your software—either natively or through an API.
Leverage relationship intelligence for dealmaking
Allow an AI-driven platform to deliver detailed insights that help close deals.
Send outgoing emails
Reach out to clients and prospects without leaving your CRM—attach hyperlinks, screenshots, and other files as needed.
Stay connected to your deals anywhere you go
Open your CRM anywhere, anytime with mobile apps for iOS (including both iPhone and iPad) and Android devices.
Analyze and visualize your data
Uncover real-time insights with sophisticated analytics that explore the data trends that shape your business.
Customize your deal management views
Craft your deal and lead management processes from scratch or by using templates for lists and common workflows.
Deploy and onboard quickly
Spend time on your relationships and deals with an easy-to-use system, not training your team to use a complicated CRM.
Gain new insight from enriched datasets
Give your team access to more context for every account with built-in data partnerships.
Trust in customer support
Rely on a team of experts to address any questions your team has about your CRM.
Frequently Asked Questions
Pipedrive is a sales pipeline management tool built by salespeople for salespeople. An easy-to-navigate, lightweight platform makes it easy to quickly manage deals for anyone—from small teams at startups to large, enterprise sales teams.
Firms looking for simple, customizable CRM software functionality can rely on Pipedrive to be easy to set up and even easier to train the team to use. Consolidating your deal and relationship management into a CRM makes follow-ups easier than ever, and Pipedrive makes it simple to turn your notes about calls and meetings into forecasting dashboards to review your current deal progress.
See more reviews for Affinity vs. Pipedrive.
The user-oriented interface and spreadsheet-like features are ideal for traditional customer relationship management—short-term, transactional deals like those executed by SaaS and retail sales teams—but it has its limitations.
One of those limiting factors is the platform’s dependence on Zapier in order to effectively integrate with other software platforms. Dealmaking teams focused on complex, relationship-driven deals that don’t fit neatly into a traditional sales funnel need more sophisticated tools than a traditional system.
Affinity is a relationship intelligence platform purpose-built for dealmakers. Teams in professional and financial services industries, including private equity, venture capital, investment banking, and commercial real estate, require a deep level of relationship context because their deals are defined by longer-term engagements and frequent collaboration.
If you’re still unsure about which CRM is the right fit for your business, check out these Pipedrive alternatives.
Affinity supports your dealmaking team by providing a CRM platform driven by relationship intelligence—additional insights that help you find, manage, and close more deals. These insights are gathered through a combination of:
- Automatically captured “data exhaust”—details pulled from email communications across any platform (including Gmail and Outlook), meetings, and contact information such as names, roles, industry, and source of introduction. This data exhaust creates a comprehensive history of every relationship in your collective business network.
- Enriched proprietary and third-party datasets integrated directly alongside your team’s own CRM data to expand your available knowledge outside of your organization.
- Analytics and reporting dashboards powered by the industry-leading business intelligence platform Looker. Visualize and surface real-time insights into your team’s performance and deal pipeline and make more informed data-driven decisions.
- Relationship scoring algorithms that quantify the connections between people in your professional network and help identify good opportunities for warm introductions
In addition to relationship intelligence, Affinity offers a user-oriented approach to customization so teams can build processes they want. It also provides an easy-to-use interface to custom software integrations that let you connect Affinity with other platforms in your tech stack—from Slack to Dropbox to email marketing automation platforms like Mailchimp. An extensive knowledge base also ensures you can answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the relationship intelligence platform quickly.
Affinity’s flexible, software as a service (SaaS) pricing model includes three tiers of feature sets. The Affinity Premium tier is the most popular option, which includes custom workflow integrations and Affinity Analytics reporting dashboards.
Additional add-on options include our Enhanced Support and Enhanced Support Plus service packages with data add-on packages for expanded insights into the data your team needs to close deals. Reach out to our team today to find the pricing tier that suits your needs.
There are dozens of CRM solutions on the market, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, but there are solutions tailored to meet specific needs for specific teams. Traditional, transactional CRM platforms can be good solutions for startups and SaaS sales teams.
Lightweight CRM platforms help consolidate important data into an easy-to-use single source of truth that doesn’t scare off potential users with unnecessary or overly complicated features. But deal teams managing complex relationships shouldn’t have to choose between having a lightweight, user-friendly experience and sophisticated features. If you’re willing to trade a more comprehensive feature set for a CRM that is simple, easy to use, and fast to set up, Pipedrive is an excellent choice.
You can also consult the definitive guide to CRM for venture capital to help weigh your options.
If your team is looking for a true relationship management platform that is easy-to-use, can be up and running quickly, and is still sophisticated enough to manage complex, years-long relationships and your complete relationship network, choose Affinity.
Talk to an Affinity sales team member today to learn more and schedule a demo.