For businesses looking to accelerate growth and uncover high-value relationships, choosing the right CRM is critical. It can be the difference between beating your competitor to that next big opportunity and leaving valuable connections to influential stakeholders on the table.

With so many options available, however, it’s tough to find the platform that aligns with your specific needs—whether it’s advanced prospecting, deep relationship mapping, or robust portfolio management.

To help, we’ll do a deep-dive comparison of two top CRMs on the market: Rings and Affinity. We’ll break down their core features, pros, cons, and price points to help you make the best decision for your business goals.

Rings: An Advanced XRM for Relationship Mapping & Portfolio Management

Rings is a next-generation XRM (extended relationship management) platform built to help relationship-driven companies identify and win high-value business opportunities. It offers a powerful suite of tools for deep relationship intelligence, global prospecting, and enterprise-grade portfolio management.

Core features:

• Relationship mapping: Integrate emails, meetings, Crunchbase, and LinkedIn to unify data and uncover deeper relationship insights.

• Pathpower: Identify the most valuable people in your network—including advisors, investors, and board members—and your strongest connections to them to unlock new business opportunities.

• Investment data: Access a database of 500,000+ funding rounds with investor details, valuations, and real-time updates showing full, round-by-round deal data.

• Portfolio management: Unlock detailed tracking across asset classes with AI scoring, predicted fundraises, and relationship analytics.

• Relationship and company scoring: Leverage fully customizable, AI-driven scoring to enhance sales prospecting.

• Centralized data and real-time updates: Store notes and files across your team and automatically refresh contact details when individuals change jobs or roles.

• Pre-meeting intelligence: Automatically see common investments and relationships to come prepared to every meeting and zero-in on value.

• Smart Privacy: Leverage intuitive privacy controls so ensure sensitive information stays secure with your organization.

• Customized integrations: Connect to 7K apps via Zapier as well as native integrations with Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce, HubSpot, and LinkedIn.

Pros:

• Full deal data, real-time company news, and investor portfolios, not just surface-level contacts.

• Prospecting opportunities beyond your existing network.

• Customized data, scoring, and relationship strengths.

• Free, human-led onboarding and setup support.

• Eliminates manual entry and outdated records with automated data enrichment.

• Creates a single source of truth for seamless coordination across teams.

• Identifies emerging influencers before competitors do and stay up-to-date on their activities.

Cons:

• May be feature-rich for very small teams or those with simple needs.

Use cases/ideal users:

• Startups and investors, as well as any business selling to or prospecting them.Any business selling to or prospecting startups, venture-backed companies, or investors.

• Businesses with complex and high-value relationships that want to unlock new opportunities from their networks.

• Venture capital and private equity firms seeking deep deal and relationship intelligence.

• Business development teams needing global prospecting and AI-driven prioritization.

• Enterprises managing complex portfolios and requiring robust privacy controls.

Price: 

• As low as $1K per user/year

Affinity: A CRM Built for Private Capital Investments

Affinity is a CRM that’s designed to help investment firms make better deal decisions with data and AI insights. 

Core features:

• Relationship intelligence: Track communications and rank connections within your existing network.

• Deal management: Review and track deals across your organization.

• Data enrichment: Update your records with data from 40+ sources.

• Integrations: Sync network and deal data throughout your tech stack.

• Activity tracking: Monitors emails and calendar meetings for relationship insights.

Pros:

• Provides a clean, user-friendly interface for basic relationship tracking.

• Helps teams make faster, more informed investment decisions.

• Automates activity tracking through email and calendar integration.

Cons:

• Cannot prospect outside your existing network—insights are limited to known contacts and companies.

• No full deal data, company news tracking, or investor portfolio views.

• Can’t important or analyze LinkedIn connections for relationship mapping.

• Limited data customizability; cannot adjust relationship strengths or use AI scoring.

• Lack of support for fund and portfolio management.

• Essential features (analytics, privacy, integrations, mobile app) cost extra.

• Pricier than other CRMs plus required onboarding fees.

Use cases/ideal users:

• Venture capital, private equity, and professional services firms focused on managing deals through network intelligence.

• Small investment teams managing a known contact base.

• Teams that do not require deep data enrichment, prospecting tools, or advanced mapping.

Price:

• $2K per user/year

• Onboarding fee required: Starts at $3K

• Extra charges for analytics, privacy controls, Chrome extension, mobile app, and integrations.

Rings vs. Affinity: Key Differences to Consider

Breaking their features down further, this side-by-side comparison helps you see how Rings and Affinity stack up against each other:

Ultimately, Rings provides a much richer, comprehensive feature set for businesses that want to access real-time market data, uncover relationships beyond their own networks, and leverage AI insights to identify new growth opportunities.

Which CRM is Best for Your Business?

Still not sure which platform aligns best with your business needs? Follow these guidelines:

Choose Rings if:

• You need to prospect beyond your existing network and want a global view of deals, investors, and companies in your target markets.

• Your team requires deep relationship mapping across investors, advisors, and board members.

• You want access to AI-driven scoring, real-time news, and centralized knowledge management.

• Privacy, customization, and automation are top priorities.

• You value free, human-led onboarding and all-inclusive pricing.

Choose Affinity if:

• Your needs are limited to managing and tracking known contacts.

• You have a smaller team with basic CRM requirements.

• You’re comfortable paying extra for analytics, integrations, and privacy controls.

• You don’t require advanced prospecting, deal data, or AI-driven insights.

Why Rings Is the Winner: The Best CRM is an XRM

While both Rings and Affinity are robust relationship management solutions, Rings delivers a next-generation XRM platform that goes far beyond what traditional CRMs offer. With advanced features for dynamic relationship mapping, global prospecting and AI-powered insights, Rings empowers teams to unlock new opportunities and streamline workflows, so they can maximize ROI and fuel growth. On top of that, all essential features are included and onboarding is free and human-led. Meaning, you can start uncovering new connections and business opportunities right away.

The verdict? For organizations that see relationships as their most valuable asset, Rings stands out as the clear winner—offering unmatched power and intelligence in one intuitive platform.