Crunchbase Alternative? Value Add VC vs Crunchbase Compared (2026)

Crunchbase is the default place to look up a private company and the stronger tool for sales prospecting, and its useful features sit behind paid plans. Value Add VC is free, focused on venture rounds, investors and SEC Form D filings, and much smaller. Use Value Add VC for free VC research; pay for Crunchbase when your job is lists, exports and CRM workflows at scale.

The short answer

Crunchbase is a far bigger dataset. Its homepage describes a data pipeline that combines first-party input, “aggregated engagement signals from 80M+ users,” external sources and analyst validation, and cites “30M+ verified updates per year” and “39B live private market signals.” As of October 5, 2026, Value Add VC tracked about 1,300 companies on its company directory, about 1,600 investor firms on its investor directory and 409 startup rounds with verified dollar figures on the Funding Tracker.

The trade is breadth and sales tooling versus price and openness. Crunchbase charges for search depth, exports, the API and its MCP. Value Add VC gives away what it has, including a downloadable dataset and a keyless MCP server, but it does not try to be a company database for every business on earth.

Value Add VC vs Crunchbase: feature comparison

Crunchbase product, export and MCP details from about.crunchbase.com and data.crunchbase.com, checked October 5, 2026. Plan prices are third-party reports (Clay; Vendr, as captured May 2026), because we could not load crunchbase.com/pricing that day. Value Add VC figures checked on valueaddvc.com on October 5, 2026.

Crunchbase pricing in 2026, as reported

We could not load Crunchbase's own pricing page on October 5, 2026, so these numbers come from third parties. Clay's Crunchbase vs PitchBook guide lists Pro at “$49/user per month with annual billing or $99/user per month for monthly billing,” Enterprise as custom, and a seven-day free trial of Pro. Vendr's Crunchbase pricing page reports Pro list pricing of $49 to $99 per user per month, and a median buyer spend of $20,000 a year based on 70 purchases.

Both guides also mention a $29 Starter tier. Crunchbase's own product menu on October 5 listed Pro, Business, API, MCP, Data Enrichment and Data Licensing, with no Starter plan, so treat Starter as unconfirmed. The official pages do confirm the export caps: Pro lets you “Export up to 2K rows monthly” and Business lets you “Export up to 5K rows monthly.”

Value Add VC has no pricing page (valueaddvc.com/pricing returns a 404), no seats and no trial. The newsletter is free to subscribe.

API and MCP: both have one, only one is free

Crunchbase's developer docs say plainly: “We are no longer offering our Basic API,” and holders of existing Basic keys “will no longer be able to regenerate new ones” (Crunchbase Basic docs). Crunchbase also runs an MCP server for AI assistants, and its MCP overview says “MCP is purchased per workspace and access is assigned per user as an MCP seat by your workspace admin,” with a seat including “Crunchbase's highest level of data access, including predictions and insights.”

Value Add VC's MCP server is free, needs no account, cookies or API key, and allows 300 requests per hour per IP. It answers company, investor, funding-round, Form D and news questions with a date and source attached to each figure. The full Funding Tracker also downloads as CSV or JSON from /api/funding-data. Crunchbase's MCP draws on a much bigger dataset and adds predictions; ours costs nothing and works in a minute.

What Crunchbase does better

Breadth. If you need to look up an arbitrary private company, Crunchbase is far more likely to have it. Value Add VC tracks companies that raised notable rounds or made venture news.

Prospecting workflows. Crunchbase Pro adds heat scores, notes and tags on profiles, and exports, and Business adds CRM integrations and auto-enrichment, according to its product pages. Value Add VC has no CRM integration or sales-prospecting tools.

Predictions. Crunchbase sells funding, growth, acquisition, IPO and closure predictions. We do not make predictions; we report what was announced or filed.

What Value Add VC does better

Free, complete access. Investor profiles, company profiles, the Funding Tracker, Raise Radar, the fund benchmarking dashboard, the VC glossary, the VC job board and the tools directory are all free, with no account.

SEC Form D data. Companies relying on Regulation D must file a Form D within 15 days after the first sale of securities, per the SEC. Raise Radar surfaces recent Form D filings whose raise is not yet in our news coverage, each linked to EDGAR; on October 5, 2026 it listed 163 filings from August 3 to October 2. That can surface a raise before, or without, a press release.

Sourced, dated figures. Every round on the Funding Tracker links to the story it came from, and records with contradictory figures are held for review instead of counted (60 were held on October 5, 2026).

Who should choose which

Choose Value Add VC if you are a founder mapping investors, an angel or emerging manager tracking rounds, a student or a journalist, and you want free data you can download or query from an AI assistant.

Choose Crunchbase if you run sales or business development and need broad company search, saved lists, exports and CRM sync, or you need an API with support behind it.

Use both if you pay for Crunchbase but want free Form D filings and daily round news next to it. For more free options, see free startup funding trackers, and compare Value Add VC vs PitchBook, vs CB Insights and vs Carta.