A VC CRM has to do more than hold names. It should show who knows a founder, what your firm last said, and which deal needs a response. If people still ask those questions in chat all day, the system has missed its job.
Affinity vs Attio starts with how your firm works. Do you need a ready way to map the people you know? Or do you want to build more of the system yourself? Affinity puts the firm's network at the center. Attio gives you room to shape how the firm tracks people, companies, deals, and other records.
Affinity vs Attio at a glance
| Need | First choice to test | Main trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Warm paths to founders | Affinity | Higher annual seat cost |
| A CRM shaped around unusual workflows | Attio | Someone must own the data model |
| A small team on a tight budget | Attio | Check plan limits and setup work |
| Firmwide relationship history | Affinity | Agree what email and calendar data may be shared |
| Strict access rules across funds | Either, after a permissions test | Needed controls may require a higher plan |
Affinity: relationship intelligence for deal flow
Affinity uses email and calendar activity to help build relationship history. Its relationship intelligence can show who knows whom. It can also show paths to a warm introduction. For a venture capital firm, that makes a clear question easier to answer: who can help us reach this founder?
The Affinity pricing page lists Essential at $2,000 per user per year, Scale at $2,300, and Advanced at $2,700. Enterprise requires a quote. Essential includes automatic activity capture, relationship strength, warm introductions, and deal pipeline tools.
Higher plans add capabilities such as AI tools, more enrichment, workflows, and integrations. Some third-party data needs a separate subscription. Get a written list of what your quoted plan includes before you compare it with another CRM.
Affinity's relationship graph is most valuable when the team uses its existing network to source deals. It has less value if key partners will not link their accounts. It may also miss key chats that take place elsewhere.
When the relationship graph drives sourcing
Picture a partner who wants an introduction to a founder. The firm may already know an angel investor, former colleague, or board member who can help. A relationship graph can bring that path into view without a round of internal messages.
Still, a strong score is not a promise of a warm response. A recent email may be a routine group thread. Someone with little recent activity may have a close friendship. Use relationship intelligence to find a path, then ask the person who owns it.
That human check matters. The CRM should help you understand the firm's network. It should not decide who may claim a relationship or send an introduction without context.
Attio: a flexible data model for your firm
Attio's VC guide describes deal and fundraising pipelines, portfolio support, and network workflows. Custom objects let a firm track more than a standard person or company record. That can suit events, hiring needs, or other parts of a fund's work.
Attio can also show links between people. The choice is not whether one CRM knows people and the other does not. It is how much of your workflow you want shaped for you, and how much you want to build.
Attio's US pricing lists Plus at $35 per user per month with annual billing, or $44 with monthly billing. Pro is $79 with annual billing, or $99 monthly. The free plan supports up to three seats; Plus supports up to ten. Check object limits, permissions, and credit allowances for the plan you need.
A highly customizable CRM can be a good fit for a fund with a clear view of its process. It is a poor fit for a team that keeps changing fields because nobody agrees what a deal stage means.
Custom objects need an owner
Before you build a data model, write down the few records that matter. A company is one record. A deal is another. A company may raise more than one round, so one company can link to several deals.
Next, decide where notes, owners, and next steps live. If the same fact appears in three places, someone will update only one of them. Custom objects should reduce that confusion.
Name one person who can approve changes to fields and workflows. Give that person time to keep the CRM clean. A lower subscription bill is not a saving if every partner builds a different system inside it.
What does a five-person VC team pay?
On the listed annual rates, five Affinity Essential seats cost $10,000 a year. Five Attio Plus seats cost $2,100 a year. Five Attio Pro seats cost $4,740 a year. These are seat-price calculations, before tax, add-ons, services, or extra usage.
Those totals are not feature-equivalent quotes. Attio Plus may not include the access controls or record structure your firm needs. Affinity Essential may not include the integrations you want. Compare the least expensive plan that meets your requirements, not the least expensive plan on each page.
Add the time needed to migrate, train, and maintain the system. If a partner spends hours fixing records each week, the seat price is only part of the cost.
Test relationship intelligence with real examples
Choose ten founders your firm already knows and ten it would like to meet. Ask each vendor to show the path from a company record to the best person to contact. Check whether the result matches your team's knowledge.
For Affinity, this tests whether relationship intelligence earns its premium. For Attio, it tests whether your chosen setup puts useful context where people can find it. Run the same tasks in both systems.
- Find the last useful contact with a founder.
- Find the person who owns the relationship.
- Show why a deal was passed on last year.
- Add a new round without losing the earlier deal history.
- Build a partner meeting view with an owner and next step for each deal.
Time those tasks, but also note wrong answers. A fast CRM that points to stale context can waste more time than a slower one that shows the source.
Migration, integrations, and privacy
Move a small sample before you move the whole firm. Include duplicate names, people who changed jobs, companies with several funding rounds, and deals with private notes. Check what happens to each record.
For a custom integration, list the direction of each data transfer. Which system creates the record? Which system may overwrite it? What happens when a sync fails? Ask about API access, rate limits, and the plan needed for the load you expect.
Keep the research database and CRM roles clear. A database supplies outside company facts. Your CRM holds your firm's history. See PitchBook vs Crunchbase if company research is the missing piece.
Test access rules with two normal user accounts. An admin account can show too much. Make a private note and a restricted deal. Check search, email history, exports, and mobile views. A rule that hides a record in one view may not answer every access question.
Agree on email capture before rollout. People should know what is shared, what stays private, and how to keep unrelated contacts out of the firm's records.
Plan the move from Affinity to Attio
An Affinity to Attio migration is more than a contact export. Contacts are rows. Relationships are context. Before you switch, list the meeting notes, activity history, deal links, and access rules you need to keep.
Ask both vendors what can move. Do not assume that an exported contact list recreates Affinity's relationship intelligence in an Attio workspace. Test the move with a few known relationships and compare the result side by side.
Keep the old CRM available until the team has checked the new CRM. Set a date after which new notes go in one place. Two live systems with no clear rule will soon disagree.
The same care applies to a move toward Affinity. A new platform does not fix an adoption problem on its own. Teams need clear owners, useful views, and a reason to stop keeping private lists.
Automation should remove small, repeated jobs
Start with one safe workflow. A new deal enters the pipeline. It gets an owner and a next-step date. A missing field goes to a review list. This kind of automation can save time without making a judgment for the fund.
Keep warm intros under human control. Affinity's relationship intelligence can suggest a path. Let the person who knows the founder approve the request. Automation should not spend trust on the firm's behalf.
Ask what happens when a workflow runs twice or an API call fails. For the Affinity API, the current Scale and Advanced plans list 100,000 calls a month. Check the allowance and rate limits against your planned load. Attio users should confirm both API limits and any credits their chosen workflows consume.
VC and PE firms may share a private capital focus, but their records can differ. Private equity teams may need many contacts per deal. A seed fund may need a light pipeline. Make the tech stack serve that work.
A real example of a custom data model
In Attio's Union Square Ventures case study, the firm describes using custom objects for events and searches. This vendor-published example shows how a VC team can model work beyond a basic deal list. It does not mean every fund needs the same setup.
For your own team, start with the workflow people use most. Add custom fields only when a person can say who will fill them in and who will use them. Empty fields make a CRM look thorough while doing little for the firm.
Use your Affinity vs Attio trial to test two costs. How much work does setup take? How much work will the team need to do each month?
Which VC CRM should you choose?
Choose Affinity when the firm needs relationship intelligence each day. The team must share enough of its work to make it useful. Its case is strongest when warm paths and shared relationship history can remove repeated work.
Choose Attio when you want a flexible CRM, can name an owner for the setup, and need a lower starting seat cost. Keep the first version small. Add fields and workflows only when the team can explain the job they serve.
For either tool, judge adoption by use. Can a partner prepare for a call without asking someone else for the history? Can an associate close out next steps in one place? If those tasks work, the CRM has begun to earn its place.