Is DealCloud or Pipedrive the right CRM for your firm?
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DealCloud and Pipedrive are two popular CRMs built for managing business relationships in the cloud. And while they both function well to manage and maintain contact information, there are differences in how each solution works.
Sales teams need more than a spreadsheet to track contact information. Especially in more complex industries like venture capital, private equity, and investment banking, features including relationship intelligence, automation, and data capture can make all the difference in how a CRM adds value.
Is DealCloud or Pipedrive the better CRM for your firm? In this article, you can compare key features across DealCloud, Pipedrive, and Affinity to find your ideal CRM solution.
DealCloud vs. Pipedrive
Single source of truth for your data
Relationship intelligence
Completely automated data capture
Automate deal and relationship data capture
Ensure your team captures the data you need from any email platforms, calendar invite, or meeting software to form a comprehensive contact record.
Customize your deal management
Standardize your deal flow with customizable sales pipeline views.
Rely on a sophisticated—and not complicated—platform
Easily collaborate on complex, long-term deals with a user-oriented design.
Surface all of your interactions
Capture all current and historic communication and activity dating back to the start of your inbox.
Build industry-leading analytics dashboards
Customize bespoke reporting dashboards powered by Looker to report on deal activity, productivity, and more.
Learn more, faster with relationship intelligence
Contextualize your relationships across your network with detailed relationship scoring to determine who on your team can make new intros.
Enrich people profiles with industry data
Get actionable insights by leveraging data from trusted external data partners.
Trust that customer support is there when you need them
Work with customer support to build workflows that meet your needs.
Use your CRM with ease—fast
Onboard with your new CRM rapidly, and start using it reliably right out of the box.
Grow your network on the go
Gain the insight you need, wherever you are, with iOS apps for your iPhone and iPad, and Android apps for your Google mobile devices.
Frequently Asked Questions
DealCloud is a cloud-based CRM for single-source deals and is well known with capital markets firms. This CRM built a strong reputation in the decade before AI-powered relationship intelligence. The platform is built for scale and breadth, and can be deployed across larger organizations—however, this does require time and help from developers.
While DealCloud does sync data across Microsoft Outlook, it requires users to upload existing data and maintain contacts manually. The drudgery of manual contact data management can cost your team hundreds of hours of time per year—and if your team falls behind or succumbs to human error, the data in your CRM is no longer trustworthy. In addition, it integrates with fewer tools than other traditional CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot.
Though the platform is well known and trusted for lead management, it does not have many of the modern features the new generation of CRMs offer, such as automated data capture from platforms outside of Outlook, and DealCloud's relationship intelligence offering is nascent. And for startups, small businesses, or firms needing to move faster in the marketplace—including VCs and private equity firms competing against high-speed firms for fewer targets—DealCloud may be too cumbersome to meet their needs.
(For a deeper dive, download the Ultimate buyers guide to CRM for VC.)
DealCloud does not show their pricing on their website, but user reviews confirm it is significantly more expensive than traditional CRM solutions including Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Insightly, and Freshsales. Interested in learning more? Explore these Dealcloud alternatives.
Pipedrive is a straightforward sales CRM and pipeline management software. It works well for smaller teams with linear sales processes—including software, retail, and hospitality. It includes pipeline customization features that let you tailor your pipelines to fit your firm’s sales process, and pull simple sales activity reports. With a user-friendly, web-based user interface, and the ability to connect Pipedrive with other sales tools, it is a strong contender for firms that follow traditional sales funnels and need an easy-to-use SaaS solution.
For more complex deal-making, however, Pipedrive is limited. The platform does not include automated contact capture, workflow automation, or relationship intelligence. Like DealCloud and other traditional CRM alternatives to Pipedrive, Pipedrive’s usefulness relies on users manually inputting and updating contact and deal information.
Pipedrive is renowned for its 24/7 customer support where you can always reach a live rep, and with more expensive plans it offers a lot of flexibility for contact management and deal management. But sophisticated, relationship-driven firms will likely need more advanced functionality than Pipedrive includes.
Pricing is on a per-user basis, and billed annually.
When you compare DealCloud and Pipedrive to Affinity, they come up short for complex deal-making and longer, relationship-driven sales cycles. Without comprehensive automated data capture, these platforms rely on your team members to add and update all contacts and deal activity manually, and data can easily become outdated or left in unintentional data silos. If your firm relies on your CRM software as a source of truth, missing and incorrect data can be devastating, and negatively impact your ability to close valuable deals.
Affinity is a customer relationship management platform driven by relationship intelligence. It helps you leverage your network by instantly surfacing relationship details from meetings and emails dating back to the beginning of your inbox.
Watch this demo to see how your firm can drive new, warm introductions for your next big deal with Affinity's automated communications data tracking, relationship strength ratings, and smart lists.
When you compare Pipedrive and DealCloud, you’re comparing more traditional CRM systems. Affinity stands apart as a new breed of software that helps firms build and sustain long-lasting relationships with their clients and other business connections.
Where Affinity wins over DealCloud and Pipedrive is with automated contact and activity capture and relationship intelligence—the additional, contextualized insights into your team’s network, business relationships, and customer interactions that help you find, manage, and close deals.. Contacts and relationships are automatically enriched with data from across your team’s collective network, and from industry leading external data partners including PitchBook and Crunchbase. Affinity goes beyond enabling your deal and relationship management, it improves them.
Talk to an Affinity sales team member to learn more and discover if Affinity is a good fit for your company.