PitchBook vs Crunchbase: What Each Covers, What Each Costs, Who Should Buy Which

Price: what you pay in year one

Crunchbase sells self-serve. Its checkout lists Pro at $948 a year per seat ($79 a month, billed annually) or $99 month to month, and Business at $2,388 a year ($199 a month), annual only. Older guides, including earlier versions of ours, quote Pro at $49 a month; that is no longer the default annual price. PitchBook publishes nothing. Its parent Morningstar’s February 13, 2026 10-K says the platform is priced “primarily based on the number of licensed users,” with custom pricing for large enterprises, boutique firms and startups.

The PitchBook figures: CostBench, from Vendr procurement data on 125 purchases, reports single-user quotes of $12,000 to $20,000, a median contract near $30,000, a range of $20,000 to $124,000, a one-year minimum term and 15% to 30% off for two- and three-year terms. Failory’s customer reports (updated January 2024) put three seats at $18,000 to $24,000 and each added seat near $7,000.

One cross-check from PitchBook’s own side: Morningstar reported $664.5 million of PitchBook license revenue for 2025 and 113,451 licensed users, which is about $5,900 per user per year on average (our arithmetic). Volume pricing on large multi-seat contracts likely pulls that average below what a single-seat buyer is quoted, so read it as context, not a price you can get.

Checked October 2, 2026: Crunchbase checkout, Morningstar 10-K, CostBench, Failory. Your PitchBook quote will differ.

The coverage test: 200 real 2026 venture funds

Both vendors claim to cover more of the market than the other. Neither measures itself against a sample it did not choose. So we built one from the filing most new US venture funds make when they start raising: SEC Form D. From the 834 original filings by venture fund vehicles (Form D item 4 says “Venture Capital Fund”; single-deal series and SPVs left out) filed from July 1, 2026 to September 29, 2026, we drew 200 at random with a fixed seed, so anyone with the same filings gets the same 200.

What we could not do honestly: look these funds up. We have no PitchBook seat, and a check against either vendor’s free pages would measure its public teaser, not its database. So the lookup half of the test is yours to run: the sample below is the dataset, and the vendor columns report only what each company documents in public.

What the sample contains

What each vendor documents about funds like these

As reported by each company, checked October 2, 2026. These are claims, not measurements.

Run it yourself

Download the 200-fund sample (CSV). Every row links to its filing on SEC EDGAR and carries two empty columns, one per vendor. Search each fund by its exact filed name and its GP entity, mark it found or not, and note whether the amount and date match the filing. Here are a few of the rows:

Method: Original Form D filings in the window whose fund type (Form D item 4) is Venture Capital Fund and whose issuer is a fund vehicle, not a series cell or SPV. Each population filing is keyed by sha256(seed:accession); the lowest keys are kept, then sorted by filing date. Seed “vcbeast-pitchbook-vs-crunchbase-2026-10”. Source filings: the September 2026 new VC funds report and the two months before it. We will rerun the draw on a fresh window every six months with the same method.

Data quality: researched versus collected

The two companies describe their data differently. Morningstar describes PitchBook as a research operation: full-time analyst coverage across 30 sectors and more than 2,400 research reports published in 2025. Crunchbase describes a collection engine: “proprietary ingestion systems, trusted external sources, analyst validation, and live signals from 80M+ professionals,” producing more than 30 million data updates a year across more than 4 million private companies.

Which model is more accurate on a given round is an empirical question, and neither company publishes an error rate. We would like to show worked examples where the two disagree on one round, but that needs a seat in each, and we will not print a disagreement we have not seen. For any US fund or raise that matters to a decision, the Form D filing on EDGAR is the record to check both against.

Side-by-side features

As reported in each vendor’s documentation (PitchBook via Morningstar’s 10-K), checked October 2, 2026. Sources listed at the end of the page.

What each vendor’s comparison page leaves out

Crunchbase’s page is a row-by-row table in which PitchBook loses every row. It claims 264,112 early-stage companies against 227,071 for PitchBook, and that it “correctly forecasts 84% of real funding rounds.” It gives no method for counting either vendor’s companies, no date for the comparison and no price.

PitchBook’s page ranks first for this search, but pitchbook.com blocked every request we made on October 2, 2026, so we can describe it only by its search-result title and will not characterize its contents. What we can say from PitchBook’s parent: no price is published, and coverage is described as “millions” without a count.

Cheaper ways to get the same answer

Most of what a small fund asks a data terminal is answerable from three sources. Crunchbase Pro for companies and rounds. SEC Form D for which funds and companies raised, how much they targeted and who the general partner is, free on EDGAR and summarized monthly in our new VC funds report. And the VC Beast firm directory for investor criteria, free.

Large firms buy data platforms less than the market assumes. In the VC Tech 100, 12 of the 100 largest VC firms have a sourcing or market-data platform we could evidence, and 82 have not been reviewed for that column yet, so treat it as a lower bound. For paid options beyond these two, see PitchBook alternatives and Crunchbase alternatives; for LP-side data, the LP database comparison.