PitchBook is a comprehensive tool but not quite worth the massive price tag.
December 19, 2025

PitchBook is a comprehensive tool but not quite worth the massive price tag.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PitchBook

We use PitchBook to research VC firms. We're looking for which VCs would be the best funders for the startups we've invested in. For example, if we've invested in a pre-seed startup that works in the digital creator space, we would look for other successful digital creator tool startups (which don't compete with ours), then backtrack to their pre-seed and seed rounds, and consider that the VCs that invested in them would also be a good match for our startup.
We also use the excel plugin for use cases like looking up business data in live spreadsheets.

Pros

  • Most complete data source when it comes to VC firms. By stitching together other sources, you can find almost everything you can on PitchBook, but PitchBook is much more convenient
  • The excel plugin has INCREDIBLE functionality. Anything you can do on the website, you can do in excel, and automate it.
  • The support is the best of any product I've ever used. They answer within 60 seconds and their support is incredibly highly skilled, and never tell you no.
  • All I do is figure out the scope of the project, then submit a support ticket and they build it out for me in excel formulas which I copy and paste and I'm done.

Cons

  • 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.
  • 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.
Responses within 1 minute. Very friendly. More than anything, they are insanely capable. They know PitchBook front and back and every single tiny hidden functionality, (of which there are more than you could believe), and they are trained to do whatever you ask of them.

You can literally tell them "my boss needs me to make x report and I need y data. can you give me the relevant excel formulas?" and they will do it within 10 minutes ready to deliver.
The quality (both accuracy and completeness) of their data on private market deals is unmatched. It's not perfect, but it's the most complete and reliable way to find any deal done. The search features make it easy to find said deals, and the plugins make it easy to find company info from a huge list of companies.
It's really unintuitive. The excel plugin specifically is needlessly tough to use. I'm pretty experienced with excel, and my coworkers have been using the plugin for 3+ years, and there is still so much we can't do with it. The biggest problem with PitchBook is that you don't know what you can't do. If you did, it would be easy enough to ask support.

My recommendation is to go to support as soon as you know what needs to be done and they'll help you figure out what PitchBook can and can't help with. Odds are, they can help more than not.
I also use SignalNFX, but it doesn't exist in the dropbox.

Signal is a much more practical tool when it comes to a preliminary search, and when it comes to connecting with the right person. It scrapes your gmail history and linkedin to find who you're really connected to and figures out how to leverage that to get an intro.

Sales NAVIGATOR is better for massive outbound, but not very relevant otherwise.

PitchBook's real value is in the database. It won't help you reach out, but it sure will find you every single VC firm that could ever invest in your company.

Do you think PitchBook delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with PitchBook's feature set?

No

Did PitchBook live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of PitchBook go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy PitchBook again?

No

If the firm has money to burn and has highly paid employees, PitchBook is probably a good fit. And of course if they're doing a good amount of research into companies. Especially if they are doing things like researching VC firms or startups, that's where I have experience.

If they are cash-strapped, or they have analysts with free time (who can easily build out every search PitchBook can do manually), or they don't do an extensive amount of research, I'd recommend saving the 10s of thousands and instead using a free tool.

PitchBook Feature Ratings

Financial Research
4.6
Public Company Data
6
Private Company Data
10
Industry and Sector Research
6
Industry-Specific Information
5
Independent Research Access
3
M&A Analysis
4
Supply Chain Data
2
ESG Data
2
Credit Ratings Reports
2
Macroeconomic News
1
Search Tools
10

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