AFFINITY VS SALESFORCE

Is Affinity or Salesforce Sales Cloud right for your team?

Affinity CRM is a Salesforce Sales Cloud alternative that delivers relationship insights, deal management, and fully automated data entry.
Request a demo of Affinity

Choosing a CRM for relationship-driven deal teams

Salesforce is the world’s largest customer relationship management (CRM) and for good reason: it’s designed to fit into any industry, integrate with any number of apps through their API, and can support some of the largest organizations in the world. Their tenure as the reigning, one-size-fits-all CRM solution has lasted for over 20 years, and it has continued to grow. Sales teams ranging from small businesses to mid-sized SaaS companies and international retail giants all use Salesforce.

More recently, however, a new type of intelligent CRM platform has risen to meet the needs of less transactional, more relationship-driven dealmaking. Capital markets teams in venture capital, private equity, investment banking, and consulting have added to the model of a sales-focused CRM built by companies like Salesforce and Hubspot and augmented it to support relationship management—not just contact management or lead management. Here you can see how Affinity and Salesforce Sales Cloud stack up, so you can choose the best CRM solution for your needs.

See more alternatives

Relationship intelligence

Automated data capture

Implement your CRM easily and encourage adoption

Affinity vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Single source of truth for your data

Relationship intelligence

Automate data capture

Implement your CRM easily and encourage adoption

Start using your data in your CRM quickly—sometimes in only a few days.

Track all of your deal and relationship data in one place

Use a single platform to keep track of every detail about your connections and deals, including the ability to capture intelligence on entities in multiple dimensions in a single record.

Capture your deal and relationship data automatically

Ensure your team records the data that you need by trusting automated data capture, including the ability to capture relationship insights, startup, and people data using Affinity Extensions.

Tie your tech stack to your CRM

Customize your software experience by integrating your most-used tools with your CRM platform.

Gain new insights into your network with relationship intelligence

Make more informed decisions with insights into your network, connections, and conversations to help find, manage, and close more deals faster.

Retain your team’s contact history

Surface every interaction your team has had—dating back to the start of their inboxes—so you have a more complete picture of your data.

Close deals on the go

Keep your deals in the palm of your hand with mobile apps for both iOS (iPhone and iPad included) and Android devices with a cloud-based SaaS platform.

Trust a reliable customer support team

Turn to a customer support specialist—available when you need them, not days later—if problems arise.

Customize your CRM experience

Make changes to your views, columns, rows, and settings to customize your deal management without needing external support.

Keep your team up to speed on industry trends

Combine proprietary CRM datasets and external data partners to enrich your records with industry-specific data.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes Affinity the best alternative to Salesforce for dealmakers?
Why do capital markets professionals depend on Affinity for relationship intelligence and automation?
How much does Affinity cost?
How do I choose the right CRM for my team?

Why our customers love Affinity

"We use Affinity to stay on the same page, hold each other accountable. It’s been a game changer for collaboration. "
Jocelyn Goldfein
Managing Director, Zetta Venture Partners
Read case study
"A product that has truly changed the way I work and made me so much more efficient across the team! Amazing and recommend to all! "
Harry Stebbings
Founder, Stride.VC
Read case study
"Affinity has helped us centralize our CRM efforts in the most automated way. By organizing our pipeline, community, to-do’s, and distributing our Alliances to portfolio companies. "
Michael Tam
Partner, Craft Ventures
Read case study
Affinity has changed the way we, the Value Creation team, work with our portfolio companies. The fact that it offers automated capabilities for viewing relationships with executives both inside and outside my organization has been a game-changer. Also, the platform is easy to navigate and personalize, plus my CSM is available within 24 hours if I ever have a question or problem.
Dorin Baniel
VP Value Creation, Glilot Capital Partners
Read case study
We tried three market-leading CRMs but were never completely happy, and then we found Affinity. It’s genius — intuitive, flexible, super smart. What an effective CRM should be.
Dan Bowyer
Partner & Co-Founder, SuperSeed
Read case study
"Affinity has completely changed the way we do business, we are now far more organized and streamlined. Grouping advisors and target businesses using various filters and automatic logging of contact details, emails and meetings have saved us so much time in an administrative sense. If we ever have a query, Affinity is quick to respond."
Shannon Potts
Marketing and ESG Manager, Pemba Capital Partners
Read case study
"As a Venture Capital fund of fund and secondaries investor, Affinity has helped our team manage our network as both a GP and LP. In conjunction with our other investor reporting and portfolio management tools, we are able to more efficiently provide client service and stay in touch with our venture network. "
Christopher Johnson
Investment Principal, Knightsbridge Advisers LLC
Read case study
"Affinity keeps us organized! It is perfectly tailored to what we need. Cataloging all of our emails and grouping them by an organization made it much easier to track contacts and report on how we’re managing deal flow. "
Adam Struck
Founder and Managing Partner, Struck Capital
Read case study
"Look, you do not know what it takes to integrate Salesforce, don’t go there! Your entire team is incredible; our entire team loves Affinity and is so happy. "
Susan Su
Head of Portfolio, Sound Ventures
Read case study
"Affinity takes all the best parts of RelateIQ and significantly improves on them. For us, it’s the perfect blend of great product design, feature-richness, and workflow integration. Highly recommend it for people who have to manage many relations and pipelines. "
Ben Blumenrose
Co-Director, Designer Fund
Read case study
I built one of the first CRMs — Dynodex — in 1989, I feel like I’ve been waiting for a decent replacement for 30 years, now I’ve found it in Affinity. It automates many of the rote tasks and “digital fork-lifting” of legacy CRMs
Brian Smiga
Partner, Alpha Venture Partners
Read case study
"Let’s be honest: no one wants to use Salesforce reporting. Affinity isn’t just better—for most teams, it’ll make the difference between managing your pipeline to success, versus not tracking it at all. "
Kevin Zhang
Partner, Bain Capital Ventures
Read case study
"We’re really impressed by the speed that the Affinity team operates and the availability of the team. "
Christian Meermann
Founding Partner, Cherry Ventures
Read case study
"Managing your relationships is everything in commercial real estate. Affinity allows us to manage more clients and all our data in one place. That will lead to more top-line for our business. '
Michael Sanberg
Leasing and Sales, Touchstone
Read case study
"With Affinity, we can easily revisit firms at appropriate times and know what the next steps should be. I’m very excited to see where the product goes."
Henry Jefferies
Associate, Dawn Capital
Read case study
"Affinity is a very useful, tailor-made product for such a Venture Capital fund like us. The biggest advantage is having all of our data and communication in one place. We talk to thousands of startups and hundreds of VCs, and Affinity lets us keep track of those relationships over time. "
Marcin Zabielski
Partner, Market One Capital
Read case study
"I’ll check my Alliances weekly to see which new ones I can form. As we scale, Affinity’s Alliance will be instrumental to our growth. "
Paul Ipavec
Business Development Lead, Anduin
Read case study
"Within weeks of moving to Affinity, we were able to easily discover and manage the thousands of entrepreneur and venture community relationships already latent within our team. What’s more, the Affinity Alliances professional network has helped us quickly build new and valuable connections. "
Eric Emmons
Managing Director, MassMutual Ventures
Read case study
"Having all the documents and information in one place without having to clamp around on different systems is really valuable. Affinity is a massive time saver and enables us to be super-efficient."
Sam Endacott
Investor, firstminute capital
Read case study
"The integration of email and calendar data streamlines our workflow and saves us a ton of time every day. "
Carlo Egle
Investment Manager, Redalpine Venture Partners
Read case study
"As an early stage investor, my constant focus is finding new ways to turn my connections into my portfolio’s next hundred opportunities."
Mar Hershenson
Managing Partner, Pear VC
Read case study
"Affinity has become a daily tool that is ingrained in our workflow. I get a richness of data that didn’t exist before. It enables us to be able to move fast in the same direction without stepping over each other. "
Burke Davis
Partner, Sorenson Capital
Read case study
"With Affinity, my team and I can track and nurture all of our firm’s most important relationships. In an industry like real estate, Affinity gives us a competitive advantage. "
Roy Hirshland
Vice Chairman, T3 Advisors
Read case study

Interested in learning more?

Reach out to us and get a personalized demo

Talk to Sales