Is Copper or DealCloud the right CRM for your firm?

Copper bills itself as the Google Workspace CRM, and user reviews confirm it works well across Google products. It works on top of the Google Workspace platform and integrates seamlessly with all your Google tools including Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive—which may work well for small businesses and startups.

If your firm already operates on the Google Workspace platform, this may be a great solution for your lead management and relationship network management. Copper automatically pulls in contact details from your Gmail inbox, and you can add these contact details to your CRM software with the click of a button.

Unfortunately, Copper’s seamless integration with Google products is also its biggest downside. It doesn’t integrate well with many tools outside of the Google ecosystem, including Outlook.

Pipeline management may be a challenge if you need a customer relationship management platform for more sophisticated deals or a platform with more robust analytics for reporting on your team’s most important metrics. Privacy and security could also be a concern for certain industries, as the platform is much more lightweight relative to more financial and professional services-oriented CRMs.

Visit the Copper website to further compare Copper and DealCloud features, and if you’re still not ready to choose, take the time to review more Copper CRM alternatives.

DealCloud is a SaaS CRM platform targeted to capital markets firms including venture capital and private equity. Unlike Copper, Google Workspace isn’t required to get the most out of this powerful tool. DealCloud was made for single-source deals, and is robust enough to be deployed across larger organizations (with help from developers and training from the DealCloud team). The company also offers mobile apps so teams can use DealCloud across Android, iPhone, and iPad devices.

DealCloud is a leader in the financial CRM space but lacks some of the features many firms require to keep pace in today’s marketplace. Relationship-focused teams including venture capital, private equity, and investment banking may find the workflow management features hard to use relative to the simple interfaces in Excel.

Contact and activity entry and management must be done manually, which takes time and puts your firm at risk of missing or incorrect data. And your firm won’t be up and running quickly with DealCloud—full deployment and training can take up to six months, and many teams find they need to rely on the company’s help desk as they navigate the steep learning curve. DealCloud’s higher pricing also reflects those extra services which come at a premium.

For more information on CRMs for sophisticated dealmaking, download the Ultimate Buyers Guide to CRM for VC. You can also visit the DealCloud website to further compare DealCloud and Copper’s features, or explore more alternatives to DealCloud.

When it comes to the question of Copper vs DealCloud, both CRMs come up short for automation, AI-powered relationship intelligence, and managing long, complex deals.

Neither tool offers total automated contact and activity entry and maintenance, leaving your firm to spend hundreds of hours entering data—time that would be better spent building relationships and closing deals. The respective tools struggle to balance ease of use and sophistication to make managing long, complex, relationship-focused deals efficient and simple.

Just looking at DealCloud vs Copper, Copper doesn’t work well outside the Google ecosystem, and DealCloud also has a steep learning curve (much like competitors Salesforce and 4Degrees). In either case, this could slow down your firm when competition is only speeding up.

Affinity is the AI-first private capital CRM, designed to manage complex deal flow processes, automate manual data entry, and help you uncover opportunities within your firm’s collective network. With your relationship management and deal flow management consolidated in one platform, your firm can focus on building new relationships and closing new deals without spending time entering contact and activity data or worry about losing track of critical information.

Affinity saves your firm hundreds of hours of time per person per year on manual data entry and helps you build better, longer-lasting relationships with your clients, team members, and partners—from vendors to LPs. If you’re only comparing Copper vs DealCloud, you’re missing out on the intelligent CRM insights that can help your firm move faster and have greater confidence in their data accuracy.

Talk to an Affinity sales team member to learn more.