Best Private Equity Software Solutions, by the Job

The best private equity software is not one product, because a private equity firm has four separate jobs and every product on the market does one or two of them well. This ranking sorts five products by the job each was built for: the deal pipeline, the portfolio, the fund's administration and accounting, and the investors with their commitments and figures. It is ordered by how much of a firm's work each product carries, not by any score, and it says plainly which job this site's own product does and which three it does not, so a firm can read it as a map of the category rather than as a sales page.

Best private equity software: the ranking, and the criterion

DealCloud (Intapp): The widest single platform: deal pipeline, fundraising and investor relations in one configurable system, priced and implemented for a firm with a deal team and an investor relations team.
Altvia: Fundraising, investor relations and an LP portal on Salesforce, for a firm whose investor relations function wants the portal and the reporting in one place.
Affinity: The deal pipeline and relationship graph, built from email and calendar; the best single product for the deal job and a contact-level answer for the investors.
Juniper Square: Fund administration and investor management with an LP portal, for a firm that wants the administrator's platform and the investor portal from one vendor.
Rapportvo: The investor record only: commitments, capital calls, distributions and the quarterly figures, for the fund below the platform line whose investors are still in a spreadsheet. No pipeline, no portfolio, no NAV, and the page says so.

The four jobs, and why no product does all of them well at every size

The deal pipeline is read by the investment team every day and lives on email capture. The portfolio is the companies' quarterly figures and valuations. The administration is the ledger, the NAV, the waterfall and the audited close. The investors are the commitments, the calls, the distributions and the letter. A platform that does all four is sized for a firm that has a team for each, and a first fund that buys it pays for three teams it does not have. The ranking above is by breadth, and breadth is the right measure only for the firm that can use it.

The investor job, worked

Whichever product carries the investor job, it has to compute the same figures. On this site's worked example a fund with ten million dollars committed and six and a half million paid in has three and a half million uncalled and reports sixty-five percent paid in; with two million six hundred thousand distributed and nine million four hundred and twenty-five thousand of residual value its total value is twelve million twenty-five thousand dollars, a TVPI of one point eight five times split into a DPI of zero point four zero and an RVPI of one point four five. A product that stores those as typed fields is not doing the investor job; one that computes them from the record is.

Reading the ranking for your own firm

Sort your own four jobs into done, done by hand, and not needed yet. A firm with an administrator and a deal team whose investor relations lead keeps a spreadsheet has one job done by hand, and the product for that job is at the bottom of this list. A firm with no administrator, no deal team and a partner doing everything has three jobs by hand and should still buy for the investors first, because that is the job whose mistakes an LP sees. A firm with all four teams belongs at the top of the list on a platform, and this site says so rather than pretending otherwise.

Questions people ask about best private equity software

Why is the ranking by breadth rather than by quality?

Because quality within a job is hard to rank honestly from the outside and breadth is a fact each vendor states about itself. The order says how much of a firm's work each product carries, and the sections say which firm each breadth suits.

Is the best private equity software for a first fund on this list?

The bottom entry is built for it, and the reason it is at the bottom is that it does one job. A first fund whose one undone job is the investors should read the bottom of the list first.

Does the ranking include fund accounting software?

Juniper Square is the entry that carries administration; the pure accounting products a fund administrator runs are not ranked here, because the buyer of those is the administrator rather than the fund.

The best private equity software, sorted by the job each product does