Affinity is the better choice if you are a firm that wants every partner’s email and calendar mapped into one network, with relationship scores and warm paths. FRONT OF MIND is the better choice if you are one person and what you need is a short list each morning of who to text today, why, and a draft to send.

Full disclosure: I built FRONT OF MIND. I already wrote a roundup of Affinity alternatives for solo deal makers that covers Attio, folk and Dex. This page is narrower. It puts the two side by side on the one thing they both promise: catching the relationship before it goes quiet.

Here is the scene. Your firm’s Affinity instance shows a founder’s relationship strength dropping. Nobody on the team owns it, so nobody texts. Or you are solo, sitting on 1,000 contacts, and the broker who could send you a sell side mandate has not heard from you since spring. Both are the same failure. The question is which tool turns that signal into a text that actually gets sent.

Same promise, different unit

Affinity’s homepage headline is “Your next deal is in your network.” It says Affinity captures “every email, meeting, and calendar interaction across your firm automatically,” scores relationship strength from real communication, and flags relationships “going quiet before it costs you the deal.” It is built for private equity, venture, private credit, investment banking, family offices and similar firms, and says it is used by 3,300+ private capital firms.

FRONT OF MIND opens on your 10 minutes for today. Each person has a one line reason why today: they posted, it is their birthday, you met at an event 12 days ago and never followed up, a follow up is due, a pipeline deal has been quiet 7+ days, their company was in the news, or they are going cold.

The unit is the difference. Affinity’s unit is the firm. FRONT OF MIND’s unit is you, this morning.

Where Affinity is clearly better

I would not pretend otherwise.

• Firm wide capture. Affinity pulls email and calendar activity from everyone on the team into one record. FRONT OF MIND is one person’s network.
• Who on the team knows them best. Its App Store listing says you can see who on your team has the strongest connection to a company, from your phone. That is a firm question FRONT OF MIND does not answer.
• Scale of data. Affinity says it has captured 25 billion+ emails and calendar events and 130 billion+ structured relationships. No one person tool matches that.
• Enrichment and agents. Per its pricing page, Scale adds a notetaker, AI chat, the Ascend agents and inferred network connections. Advanced adds enrichment from PitchBook, Dealroom and Crunchbase, plus workflow automations.
• Deal pipeline and compliance. Every tier includes deal pipeline tracking. Enterprise adds fund level permissions and SSO.

If you run a fund or a deal team, Affinity does things FRONT OF MIND is not built to do.

Where FRONT OF MIND is better

• It makes the call for you. A quiet relationship flag still needs someone to decide to act. FRONT OF MIND hands you the few names for today, with the reason already written.
• It writes the text. Every draft reads like a text, 40 words max. Nothing sends without your tap, and it learns from your edits so the next one sounds more like you.
• It sees beyond the inbox. Many of the people who send deals, a CPA, an estate attorney, a broker you met once, rarely email you. FRONT OF MIND uses signals like their posts, birthdays and news, and posts are only shown if they are confirmed to belong to that person.
• It captures in the room. Say a name and a sentence out loud, snap a business card or badge, or take a selfie together, and it is filed under the event.
• You can ask it out loud. Ask Liala “who do I know that is an M&A advisor” or “who lives in Miami” and get the right people with why. That is the warm path question, for one person.
• Intros with proof. Intros to make this week come with dated proof on both sides.

Pricing, solo and team

From Affinity’s pricing page, as of October 2026, per user per year, billed annually:

• Essential: $2,000. Activity capture, relationship scoring, interaction history, deal pipeline tracking.
• Scale: $2,300. Adds notetaker, AI chat, Ascend, MCP server, inferred network connections.
• Advanced: $2,700. Adds PitchBook, Dealroom and Crunchbase enrichment and workflow automations.
• Enterprise: custom.

The page lists no monthly billing and no free trial.

FRONT OF MIND: free for your first 25 contacts and 1 intro, then $29 a month.

Simple math for one person: Affinity Essential is $2,000 a year. FRONT OF MIND for twelve months is $348. For a five person team, Affinity Essential is $10,000 a year, and you get a shared network map FRONT OF MIND does not offer. The price gap is real, but so is the feature gap. Prices change, so check both pages before you buy.

On your phone

Affinity has a mobile app. Its mobile page promises “Relationship and deal insights wherever you are” and says it helps you “Find the right people to (re)connect with.” On the App Store it is rated 3.3 from 38 ratings as of October 27, 2026, a small sample for a firm tool.

There is no native iPhone app yet. FRONT OF MIND runs in your iPhone’s browser, and you can save it to your home screen.

FRONT OF MIND is built around the phone moment: the morning list, the drafted text, the capture at an event.

Can you run both?

Yes, with a caveat. If your firm runs Affinity, it is the record for firm relationships and deals. Keep it that way. Some people want a personal list for the relationships that never touch the firm’s inbox, the CPA whose client is thinking about selling, the banker who just changed shops. FRONT OF MIND can sit beside it for that. Check your firm’s policy on personal tools before you import anything.

If you are wondering why you would add anything to a CRM you already pay for, I already have a CRM. Why would I need this? answers that directly. And if the quiet relationship problem is what keeps costing you, recency beats reputation in deal origination explains the mechanism.

Which one to pick

Pick Affinity if you are a firm, several people share one network, and you want capture, scoring, enrichment and permissions in one platform.

Pick FRONT OF MIND if you are one person whose next deal depends on who calls you first, and you want to open your phone to the few people worth texting today, why, and a draft that sounds like you.

For the firm side of the market, see FRONT OF MIND vs 4Degrees and the DealCloud alternative for small firms.

Start free with your first 25 contacts and see who comes up first. Your contacts are encrypted. No one on our team looks at them, and you can export and delete anytime.

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