Building and maintaining deep relationships is crucial to your success as a private equity dealmaker.
The stronger your relationships with C-level executives, bankers, fund managers, venture capital firms, and other stakeholders are, the more you can improve your deal flow and find new investment opportunities while adding the most value to your firm’s portfolio companies.
But relationships don’t just happen automatically; they must be nurtured, monitored, and followed up with consistent, thoughtful investor communications.
To effectively manage and maximize the value of your relationship network, your organization requires customer relationship management (CRM) software purpose-built for the private capital industry.
Selecting the right CRM is critical to ensuring your workflows, automation, and tracking align with your firm's investment strategy and to improving decision-making across your deal teams.
Most private equity firms still rely on outdated tools such as Excel spreadsheets and generic contact management applications rather than adopting scalable crm software solutions designed specifically for private equity investors.
Your CRM should serve as your firm’s central hub for data management, deal sourcing, portfolio monitoring, and pipeline management. It should optimize key features of the deal-making process, eliminating manual data entry and enhancing data enrichment to keep your contact information accurate and actionable. This enables you and your team members to make informed decisions, spend more time on meaningful outreach, and focus on value creation across your portfolio.
With dozens of vendors offering similar CRM tools, navigating the private equity CRM market can be overwhelming.
This article will highlight the most popular CRMs used by private equity firms in 2026, helping you understand the key features and functionality to look for when evaluating modern CRM software providers, including those that leverage AI-powered automation and third-party data.
Let’s get started.
DealCloud
DealCloud is a cloud-based legacy CRM system designed for the capital markets. Private equity, hedge funds, LPs, and other financial services firms across asset classes rely on DealCloud as their CRM to manage business development, track deal flow, manage portfolios, and manage investor relationships through reporting tools and integrations with investor portals.
As with other deal flow management platforms lacking relationship intelligence, you must devote time to manually keeping data clean & organized and ensuring your team constantly enters contact, interaction, and deal data directly into the DealCloud system.
On the other hand, modern private equity CRMs with relationship intelligence automatically create and enrich profiles with high-quality data from third-party sources and API integrations, saving your team hundreds of hours per year.
Given its size, deploying DealCloud can be expensive and time-consuming, requiring significant manual effort and data uploads. A significant advantage is that DealCloud can be customized to meet your firm’s needs, but this customization can lead to costly deployments that last up to 6 months or more. Once the system is configured, most changes and customizations must be handled exclusively by the DealCloud team, which adds cost and complexity.
Pros
- Industry-Specific Design: built for private equity, ensuring its features align directly with industry needs.
- Customizability: The platform is highly customizable, allowing firms to tailor it to their unique requirements, including customizable dashboards.
Cons
- Learning Curve: Given its comprehensive suite of tools, new users face a steep learning curve.
- Integration Challenges: Setting up integrations with specific third-party tools requires additional development work.
- User Interface: Some users find the UI/UX outdated and difficult to use.
- High Cost: Compared to other options, Dealcloud can be expensive, and firms would need to budget extra for any required customization.
A different provider might be better for your firm if you want a more modern, easier-to-use, agile CRM platform that can be deployed quickly without needing expensive customization work or ongoing professional services.
Altvia
Altvia is a web-based CRM built for alternative investment firms and built on Salesforce.
PE firms and other alternative investment organizations rely on Altvia to organize deal flow, track fundraising, monitor portfolio companies, and manage limited partners and investor relations.
On the CRM side, Altvia is similar to other generic CRMs, as it lacks relationship intelligence and relies on manual data entry rather than automation and enrichment.
The Altvia CRM enables firms to track their deal pipeline and streamline due diligence by using customizable checklists for each stage of the evaluation process. From a reporting standpoint, Altvia enables users to create custom reports and dashboards to track deals, deal-flow sources, valuation trends, and other analyses.
Unfortunately, Altvia is not a relationship intelligence CRM. It cannot analyze your firm’s relationship network to uncover new opportunities, measure relationship strength, or provide you with real-time alerts across your network. If you want to leverage your team’s network for deal sourcing, due diligence, portfolio monitoring, and strategic outreach, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
Pros
- Industry-Specific Design: Tailored to private equity and alternative investment sectors.
- Dedicated Support: Altvia’s support team is well-versed in the challenges private equity firms face.
- Robust Data Analytics: Altvia offers powerful tools for firms to derive actionable insights and make data-driven decisions.
Cons
- Learning Curve: New users might face a steep learning curve, especially those unfamiliar with the Salesforce interface.
- Lack of Integration with Other Tools: Integration with third-party tools is limited or requires customization, which adds costs.
- High Cost: Some firms may find Altvia’s pricing higher than other options in the market.
Salesforce
Salesforce.com is the largest and most well-known CRM platform. As pioneers in cloud-based CRM, Salesforce enables companies of all sizes and industries to manage their CRM and other software needs.
Unfortunately for PE firms, Salesforce is a transactional CRM designed for transactional sales teams moving prospects down a sales pipeline.
Given its size and breadth, most private equity firms find Salesforce too complex for their needs. Plus, you would pay for functionality you do not need, such as customer support and marketing automation modules. As a result, your team may be reluctant to use Salesforce as their private equity CRM.
Using Salesforce as a private equity CRM requires extensive and expensive customization from a third-party Salesforce partner or consultant. Most customization work would need to be complemented by a personalized training program, adding an extra layer of complexity and cost and making your deployment more time-consuming and costly than out-of-the-box solutions.
When working with a Salesforce consultant to customize the system, you will also need to budget for any additional enhancements or changes required after the initial implementation.
If your firm has a team dedicated to managing and customizing your Salesforce CRM, there might be a case for using Salesforce instead of other " out-of-the-box” private equity CRMs. As the most widely used CRM, thousands of integrations in the Salesforce AppExchange allow you to integrate with other tools in your technology stack and connect with other systems using native integrations or Zapier.
Like other CRMs on this list, Salesforce still relies on manual data entry, which means your team spends more time on admin work and less time building relationships and sourcing new opportunities. If your firm uses Salesforce and wishes to remain with it, 4Degrees can integrate with it to activate your relationship network, uncover more opportunities, and eliminate data entry.
Pros
- Highly Customizable: Salesforce is known for its customizability, allowing firms to adapt it to their unique operational requirements.
- Integration Capabilities: Salesforce’s ability to integrate with various third-party tools and data sources ensures a streamlined workflow. Including 4Degrees for relationship intelligence.
- Scalability: Salesforce can serve small and large firms, scaling its capabilities as it grows.
Cons
- Customization Requires Expertise: Making significant changes or setting up complex integrations might require expensive technical expertise.
- Lack of Expert Support: Salesforce support staff are not well-versed in the common challenges of private equity (PE) firms.
- Steep Learning Curve: It requires substantial training for users to fully harness its capabilities.
4Degrees
4Degrees is a relationship intelligence CRM platform built by ex-investors exclusively for firms in the private markets.
As a full-featured CRM, 4Degrees lets your team visualize your deal pipeline in list or Kanban views, keeping you updated on the status of every deal across the entire lifecycle, from origination to close.
By automatically capturing all your interactions by syncing with Microsoft Exchange and Gmail and enriching contact data with high-quality data providers such as Pitchbook, 4Degrees serves as your firm’s single source of truth, ensuring your whole team is on the same page.
Additionally, the platform’s workflow automation features allow firms to punch above their weight by automatically creating contact and company profiles, eliminating manual data entry, and integrating into your firm’s existing workflows to automate other time-consuming processes.
To quickly surface insights and drill into data, 4Degrees includes a reporting and analytics engine that provides real-time snapshots of key metrics, including relationships, fundraising, and deal progress. This gives you access to the data you need to make the right decisions throughout the investment lifecycle.
The platform’s relationship intelligence capabilities analyze the strength of your team’s relationship networks to surface warm introductions and identify the best path to a company, expert, or investor in seconds across your ecosystem.
To help you build stronger relationships, 4Degrees provides notifications when members of your network make investments, change jobs, or send other signals that help you stay abreast of your network, nurture relationships, and source new opportunities.
4Degrees includes a mobile app for iOS and Android devices to ensure you always have access to your network.
The pages below provide a more detailed comparison of 4Degrees vs. other common CRMs used by private equity teams.
4Degrees vs. Other Competitors
Affinity®
Affinity is a deal management and CRM platform built for deal-driven firms to automate data entry, manage their relationship networks, and track their organization’s deal flow pipeline. Using proprietary technology, Affinity provides teams with a deeper understanding of their network to source new relationships and deals.
Affinity claims to save investors hundreds of hours per year that would otherwise be spent on manual data entry by automatically plugging into Gmail and Outlook and exporting email content into contact and deal profiles.
Although it is a capable product, Affinity falls short of providing users with news and updates about people in their networks. This makes it hard for investors to stay engaged with their contacts and build deeper relationships.
Pros
- Automated Data Capture: Automatically capture data, reducing manual entry and ensuring accuracy.
- Customizable: Offers customization to cater to the specific needs of different industries and teams.
Cons
- Learning Curve: While designed to be user-friendly, those new to CRM platforms might face a learning curve
- Integration Limitations: While it offers integrations, it may not fully support all third-party tools PE firms use, potentially requiring additional tools.
- Pricing: The cost compared to similar solutions may be a barrier for smaller teams.
Dynamo
Dynamo is a highly customizable, end-to-end alternative asset management platform used by private equity, investment banking, and other investment management firms. It is not a dedicated CRM company; its CRM capabilities are part of a broader feature set that includes back-office applications.
For PE firms seeking a CRM to track their deals and leverage their relationships, Dynamo can be cumbersome, with extra functionality that some firms may not need. Like other private equity CRM solutions, Dynamo relies on manual data entry to maintain up-to-date contact and activity records.
As a complete end-to-end platform, Dynamo integrates with popular SaaS tools used by PE firms, but the options are limited compared to other, more modern Private Equity CRMs.
If you are looking for a PE CRM system but don’t need back-office functionality, consider another solution.
Pros
- Holistic Solution: From investor relations to deal tracking, Dynamo offers a comprehensive suite of tools that eliminates the need for multiple software solutions.
- Customizability: Offers customization options that enable firms to adapt the platform to their specific operational requirements.
- Dedicated Support: Provides extensive support, enabling users to quickly address challenges.
Cons
- Not Specialized: Given its multi-purpose nature, Dynamo does not offer the most robust CRM functionality.
- Updates and Changes: As with many platforms, frequent updates require users to adapt and relearn certain functionalities.
- Pricing: Given its diverse feature set, Dynamo may command a premium price.
eFront
eFront offers a suite of features tailored to the unique demands of the alternative investment industry. From comprehensive portfolio management and robust risk assessment tools to transparent investor reporting, advanced data analytics, and seamless integration capabilities, eFront ensures that every facet of alternative investment is covered.
Acquired by BlackRock in 2019, eFront has further solidified its position in the market, leveraging its parent company’s vast resources and expertise to cater to its clientele’s evolving needs.
Other CRMs
This guide reviewed the leading CRM platforms private equity firms use. Other platforms include Microsoft Dynamics, designed for firms that rely on other Microsoft enterprise applications, and Navatar, a Salesforce-based private markets CRM that offers industry-specific workflows and tools for deal sourcing, investor relations, and portfolio management.
By onboarding a CRM not designed specifically for private equity professionals, you risk spending considerable time and resources explaining your specific use cases to their implementation teams, who may not have deep expertise in the alternative assets sector. On the other hand, by working with a team of former investors or a provider with a platform purpose-built for private markets, your firm will start seeing value from your CRM much faster and support strategic goals such as fundraising, investor communications, and long-term value creation.
Finding the Best CRM For Private Equity
In an industry where relationships are your most valuable assets, you need a CRM backed by a team that has previously been there and understands your unique needs. Spending time and money trying to shoehorn and adapt a CRM platform designed for a transactional sales process does not make sense for your private equity firm.
If you want to leverage your firm’s most valuable asset to find and close more proprietary deals while automating time-consuming processes such as data entry, you should request a personalized demo of 4Degrees, the best private equity CRM and Relationship Intelligence platform built for
