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AffinityvsDealSage

Affinity vs DealSage: CRM or firm brain?

Affinity's auto-capture is a genuinely good answer to a CRM nobody updates. DealSage answers a different question: what holds the documents, models and memos that never lived in a CRM to begin with. Here's the honest comparison, and where the two fit together.

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CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE

Affinity's auto-capture is real and well-corroborated: email, calendar and meeting activity land in CRM records without anyone on the team tagging a contact by hand, and relationship-strength scoring surfaces warm-intro paths that a manually-updated CRM would simply miss. It's the reason Affinity has become a default for a lot of VC, PE and IB teams, and it's not something we're going to pretend isn't genuinely useful.

SIDE BY SIDE

Where they actually differ.

AffinityDealSage
Capture mechanismAutomatic: email, calendar and meeting activity flow into CRM records with zero manual taggingIngests from your CRM, including Affinity, plus documents, models, memos and email threads
Data model scopeRelationship and pipeline record: contacts, deals, warm-intro paths, relationship-strength scoringWhole-firm record: Deal, Contact, Organisation + custom objects, with field-level source lineage
AI groundingRelationship-scoring ML, plus a hosted MCP server (April 2026) connecting the relationship graph to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, CopilotMCP into the same firm-wide ontology; every answer traces back to the source document
DeploymentCloud only; VPC or on-premise not publishedDealSage Cloud, private VPC, or on-premise
ImplementationLive in weeks, a plausible claim given how auto-capture worksEmbedded team (consultant, technologist, builder), live in weeks
Pricing motionSales-led; not publishedScoped to your engagement; sales-led

Sourced from Affinity's own site, trust.affinity.co and their April 2026 MCP server announcement. Where Affinity doesn't publish something, like deployment options or pricing, we say so rather than guess.

THE COEXIST PATH

You don't have to choose.

Affinity is a legitimate data source, not a system to rip out. DealSage reads from it and builds the record underneath.

AffinityRelationships, pipeline, warm-intro paths
DealSage ontology+ documents, models, memos, email, lineage

One case study lives this out directly: an investment bank team runs the CRM that fills itself, where DealSage covers the CRM's job as well as everything around it. Whether DealSage replaces your CRM or sits on top of Affinity depends on your firm, not on a rule we're applying here.

What auto-capture actually solves

A CRM only earns trust if it's current, and the classic failure mode is well known: an analyst forgets to log a call, a partner's inbox has three months of context nobody transcribed, and by the time anyone checks the relationship graph it's already stale. Affinity's answer is to stop asking humans to do the logging. Email, calendar and meeting activity flow into records automatically, enrichment pulls in data from 40-plus sources, and relationship-strength scoring turns raw activity into something a sourcing team can actually act on, a warm path to an intro instead of a cold outreach. That's a real product decision, well executed, and it's the reason the tool has stuck at firms like Bain Capital and Lightspeed.

Two products that both speak MCP, reaching different things

Affinity's April 2026 hosted MCP server is a meaningful move: it connects ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot directly to a firm's relationship graph, so a model can be asked "who at our firm knows someone at this target" and get a real answer. DealSage's MCP connection reaches further, not by being a smarter protocol, but by connecting to a wider ontology. The same relationship data sits alongside the documents, models and memos that produced it, and every field carries lineage back to its source. Ask a model "what did we assume in the last model on this sector" through DealSage's MCP and it can answer with the actual cell, not just the fact that a model exists somewhere.

Security, published plainly

Affinity's trust centre is genuinely thorough: SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 3, and ISO 27001, 27017, 27018 and 27701 certification are all verifiable on trust.affinity.co. What isn't published anywhere in that documentation is a VPC or on-premise deployment option, Affinity runs cloud-only. That's a reasonable choice for a relationship-graph product and won't matter to most firms. It matters more once the record in question includes unreleased models, board memos and diligence documents, which is why DealSage offers DealSage Cloud, a private VPC, or fully on-premise as an explicit choice rather than a single cloud path. Our own posture is verifiable the same way, at trust.dealsage.io.

HONEST FIT

When each one is actually the right call.

Affinity is the right call

Your team is network- and sourcing-driven, warm intros are the whole game, and the problem you're actually solving is that nobody updates the CRM. Affinity's auto-capture and relationship scoring are purpose-built for exactly that, and we'd recommend it on its own merits.

DealSage is the right call

Your real problem sits outside the CRM: models nobody can find the source for, memos scattered across drives, an IC that keeps asking questions your systems can't answer with lineage. That's a whole-firm record problem, which is what DealSage is built to solve, with or without Affinity underneath it.

Frequently
asked questions

Is DealSage an Affinity alternative?

For some firms, yes, and for others it is not trying to be one. Affinity’s fight is automatic CRM versus manually-updated CRM, and it wins that fight convincingly. DealSage’s job is different in kind: a whole-firm record that includes the documents, models and memos Affinity never claims to hold. If your CRM is the problem, Affinity solves it. If everything outside the CRM is still scattered, that is the gap DealSage closes.

Can DealSage work alongside Affinity?

Yes, and it is a normal way for firms to run both. DealSage ingests relationship and pipeline data from Affinity rather than asking you to replace it, then extends the record to cover documents, models, memos and email threads with source lineage, the layer Affinity was never built to hold. Some firms keep Affinity as the CRM of record and add DealSage underneath it; others fold Affinity’s data into DealSage entirely. Both are supported.

How much does Affinity cost?

Affinity does not publish pricing; it is a sales-led motion. Third-party marketplace estimates put per-seat pricing in the region of $2,000 to $2,700 a year, but treat that as a reported estimate, not an official figure, and confirm current pricing directly with Affinity.

Does Affinity offer on-premise or VPC deployment?

Not that Affinity publishes. Its trust centre documents SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 3 and ISO 27001, 27017, 27018 and 27701 certification, which covers the security basics a firm would ask about, but there is no mention of a VPC or on-premise option anywhere in that documentation. DealSage offers DealSage Cloud, a private VPC, or fully on-premise.

What is the difference between Affinity’s MCP server and DealSage’s?

Both speak MCP, so the protocol is not the differentiator, what the model can reach through it is. Affinity’s hosted MCP server, launched April 2026, connects ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot to Affinity’s relationship graph, contacts, deals, warm-intro paths. DealSage’s MCP connection reaches a whole-firm ontology: the same relationship data plus documents, models and memos, each field carrying lineage back to the source it came from.

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