Crunchbase vs. PitchBook

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.

Incentivized

PitchBook could be a one-stop shop for private markets research needs. Again, their analyst notes and industry reports are top notch and they are now on the leading edge of bringing their intellectual capital into the evergreen space. As for shortcomings, I have found data is often sparse for mid-tier or emerging managers and, it's not always clear where the data comes from (public filing, self-report, etc.).

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• 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

• It would be nice to have the best parts of the deal tab merged into the general information tab for a company.
• If possible, gather more information on certain executives. There are use cases where our clients want us to research candidates who may not have much information on LinkedIn or RocketReach.

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 think its a great platform as is. Its usable and we get most of the information as and when we need. I don't like the landing page after login, so I don't like to go to PitchBook every day to review daily updates on the industry. It's way too cluttered and requires MFA every time

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

did not participate

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.

FINTRX is good at identifying family offices and, similar to PitchBook, adding new groups to the site consistently and often. However, the quality of leads on FINTRX was poorer in general, and it was more difficult to identify investment theses and appetites for the family offices which we did identify (including industry, target return profile, etc.). Whether this be due to the quality of the FINTRX platform or just due to the generally opaque nature of family offices, I am not sure, but PitchBook generated higher quality leads more frequently.

we can give access to anyone interested

Incentivized

• 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 probably saves us 2 hours a week.
• It gives us data that we can trust, which is worthwhile. Other than PitchBook most of our data would come from a news report or website with questionable validity.
• They have the most complete data set you could ask for. So, when researching what's the best VC to introduce to a startup, if you use PitchBook, you can be sure you searched from the full list of VCs. Other tools are piecemeal so you can't ever be sure you got them all.

Incentivized