Apollo.io vs. Crunchbase vs. PitchBook

Apollo.io played big role for us in saving $$$ by bringing data mining, AI Email Writing and acting as CRM altogether...for small to medium organization they can surely rely on Apollo.io...and it is doing things mostly right with some room for improvement for sure. Sales and Marketing team saves time in getting their emails drafted based on prompts, list of contacts they can fetch in minutes of time, earlier we used to have seperate tool just to mine data, then we used to upload the CSV file to email marketing tool, then we used to draft email...for all these process we were using three different tools - Apollo.io brought everything under one umbrella.

Incentivized

Looking to create lists of target companies through the advanced search feature or the query builder if one is planning to reach out to the individuals listed in the profile. Looking for investment and company history information to inform sourcing or competitive landscape research.

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Appropriate: We will use Pitchbook, for example, when we need to screen for companies in a certain sector or when a keyword gets a priced funding round (Seed, Series A, B, C). Screening of deal as a way to benchmark prices of potential investments Screening of potential LPs based on past investments Challenging: Quickly pull analyst commentary on certian companies/events. consensus sales or prices Analyse non venture deals. for example in biotech, licensing deals are key ways to create value and always analysed in detailed. We will probabaly use dealbook or Cortellis for this

Incentivized

• Firstly, finding the details of the potential customers that is there name, designation email and phone number since these are the most important cases most of the times I can get this data in Apollo.io
• I can pull the bulk data of the targeted organization, or I can pull the emails based on the location and job titles
• Apart from the email capture, the thing which helpful is that the email sequence can find emails and send emails in Apollo.io itself and also the report and the dashboard are so clean
• Friendly UI and UX Apollo.io was the first tool which I used. Since then I'm still using Apollo.io for easy understanding

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• Crunchbase has an easy-to-navigate user interface. The bar at the top of the screen that shows the different data points available on companies is particularly helpful for quick navigating.
• The ability to make and import lists and save searches is helpful for customizing the software to your particular needs.
• The web and mobile app data that Crunchbase offers is very helpful to gauge trends and interest in companies for diligence purposes.

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• Historical deal dynamics detailing pricing and financing as well as which parties worked on the transaction
• Initial screenign on public and private comparables
• Breadth of private companie details including descriptions, financials, etc.
• Ability to filter / sort and eventually export details on private companies

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• There are certain features about prospecting that require updates. For example, if people switch organisations, it should be automatically requesting the new email or new contact data for a particular contact in order to be updated in the system
• The lead databases that are created if their new addition should automatically be updated in the list that I created with Apollo.io

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• Notifications - Something similar to TweetDeck would be nice, so that when news breaks it could be an immediate fact.
• Honestly dont add too much because you don't want it to become more of a social tool with cluttered info, keep it straight to the point.

Incentivized

• The price is insane. Most of their competitors are free, and those that aren't are less than 5% the price of PitchBook.
• The excel plugin is incredibly complicated and the formula builder function is awful. You cannot search easily to find formulas for things you don't already know (unless you ask support)
• The UI is old, and they are slow to innovate. They need to add in a new incredible feature in the next year or two or my firm might move on, as it's getting harder to justify the price when competitors get better every year (signalnfx!) and PitchBook doesn't.

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at this moment Apollo.io seems to be the perfect tool that has mastered all aspects of outbound marketing and CRM to handle and manage sales cycle.

Incentivized

Apollo.io does provide campaign setup help and made my SDRs team's life easier, with the use of lead enrichment, lead distribution, I can manage my team from a single dashboard. It also comes with CRM that helps me navigate the progress on leads and what my SDRs progress.

Incentivized

In our experience, the customer service is horrible to non existent. If we were a fortune 100 company with a staff of computer people I am sure this would be a valuable service as they would "speak the language" but that is not us. Not being able to reach customer service when we are thinking about upgrading is, in my opinion, a crazy business model.

I rely on PitchBook when researching potential investments, particularly in the tech and AI space. It’s an excellent tool for early-stage market analysis and becomes especially valuable when evaluating private or emerging startups. PitchBook provides all the essential company details—financials, funding history, valuations—which are critical for my work as an investment professional. The three points I took out is for the lack of market analysis framework and the lack of P&L data.

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The team wants to solve probelms, but we are finding that they don't know how to solve the more technical issues quickly. I suspect that they don't have a mature process for escalations, and they don't have a usable knowledge base article repository. They seems to push emails around to let us know that people are working on the issues to find solutions, but this takes weeks and oftentimes still leaves us without a resolution.

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They give standard answers. They are not a customer first business. I tried to cancel my subscription after using it for only 1 week as we found the information was outdated and not at all useful. But they would not cancel the year long subscription I mistakenly signed up for

The overall support for PitchBook is about average. It is not excellent for two primary reasons. First, PitchBook can run slow from time to time, and I cannot copy and paste from the Chrome extension. I have found neither of those issues to be a function of the computer I am using. However, the PitchBook support team has proved helpful on several occasions.

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did not participate

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All of these platforms are good and offer valuable tools, but where Apollo.io is different is how this one platform does the job of several different ones. It is nice not having to use multiple platforms to get things done and makes integration and analytics issues occur less often. It is user friendly and constantly working to improve.

Incentivized

Crunchbase is definitely bottom of the barrel in this space. At similar pricing models, all competitors I have tried have significantly bigger and more updated databases. Crunchbase may have been great sometime in the past, but they are not worth engaging now.

Really well - though I think Beauhurst has the edge on UK specific investments, and Bloomberg has the edge on immediate updates. I think PitchBook is better than fDi Markets though, I would definitely recommend purchasing a PitchBook license over fDi Markets - but in a policy area that isn’t considering international investment, I might go with Beauhurst.

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we can give access to anyone interested

Incentivized

• It provides more opportunities to gather more clients.
• It gives more results and better results in targeting our sales.
• It is a more effective way to provide information to a large number of potential clients about the events/ projects the company is offering.

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• Crunchbase has been great and given us a lot of new companies to go after that have received funding and turned into great meetings. We do not pay a ton, so the ROI is great.
• We have nothing but positive results using Crunchbase and rely on it heavily for prospecting.
• It might add more value if we get a more expensive or advanced version.

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to be more targeted in our sales campaigns.
• Great headhunting and market mapping data.
• We have been in a very difficult hiring market so it hasn't given me the ROI I would have hoped, but that isn't PitchBook's fault!

Incentivized