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BlackRock closed its $3.2 billion acquisition of Preqin in March 2025, then folded Preqin's benchmarks directly into Aladdin and eFront by February 2026. MSCI did something similar with Burgiss, paying $913 million in aggregate to fully absorb it into its multi-asset platform back in 2023. The private fund benchmarking category is consolidating into a handful of large, integrated platforms, and LPs are left choosing between fewer, bigger, more expensive options.
That consolidation is exactly why the tools an LP actually needs don't fit into "pick one database" anymore. Benchmarking a fund well requires a data source, a way to build a real peer group, and often a separate system for monitoring the portfolio once capital is committed.
In this article, we're covering the 10 tools LPs actually rely on across that full workflow: benchmarking databases and the portfolio monitoring platforms that sit alongside them. By the end, you'll know which ones handle which job.
Best for: Named, fund-level performance benchmarking without an enterprise budget
Joe, Powered by Dakota, is a private markets intelligence and performance platform built for institutional investors and investment professionals. It brings together fund performance, custom benchmarking, GP and sponsor intelligence, funds in market, portfolio company data, private company transactions, and market news in one connected platform.
Joe provides performance data for more than 18,000 named funds and vehicles, including Net IRR, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI for closed-end private market funds. Joe also includes returns for hedge funds, evergreen funds, and semi-liquid alternatives.
Users can evaluate individual fund performance, analyze a manager’s track record across fund vintages, and build custom peer groups by strategy, vintage year, geography, fund size, and other relevant criteria. Joe also enables users to identify funds currently raising capital and evaluate them alongside manager histories, investment strategies, portfolio companies, transaction activity, and allocator relationships.
Every record is reviewed by Joe’s research team, structured consistently, and updated in real time as new information becomes available. Users can search, compare, benchmark, and export data through the Joe platform, with additional access through API, MCP, and AI connectors.
Joe is available for $9,500 per year for up to five users, with transparent pricing and a straightforward purchasing process.
Typical user: investment consultants, endowments and foundations, family offices, RIAs, institutional allocators, CIOs, secondaries investors, and GP investor relations teams conducting manager diligence, evaluating named-fund performance, benchmarking track records, and identifying funds currently raising capital.
Best for: The benchmark index your investment committee already measures against
Cambridge Associates publishes some of the most widely cited private markets benchmark indices, covering buyout, growth equity, venture capital, real estate, and infrastructure. It functions less as a lookup database and more as the reference line institutional portfolios get measured against.
Typical user: endowments, foundations, and investment committees that need a credible index, not a fund-level search tool.
Best for: Broad market intelligence inside a single integrated platform
BlackRock completed its $3.2 billion acquisition of Preqin in March 2025. By July 2026, Preqin's benchmarks and indices were folded directly into Aladdin, eFront, and Aladdin Wealth, covering more than 10,000 closed-end funds representing over $13 trillion in assets. Preqin still operates as a standalone research and fundraising database.
Typical user: institutional investors and placement agents already working inside BlackRock's Aladdin ecosystem.
Best for: Cash-flow-verified benchmarks pensions and endowments trust
MSCI completed its full acquisition of Burgiss in 2023 for $913 million in aggregate consideration. Burgiss sources performance from LP cash flow reporting rather than GP self-reporting, which is why pensions, endowments, and academic researchers treat its benchmarks as a credible reference point.
Typical user: institutional LPs that weight cash-flow verification above everything else.
Best for: Connecting fund performance to the deals that drove it
PitchBook combines fund performance with its deal, valuation, and company-level database, which makes it useful when a benchmarking question is really a deal-sourcing question in disguise.
Typical user: teams whose primary need is deal and valuation intelligence, with fund performance as a secondary layer.
See how Joe compares on named, fund-level data: request access.
Best for: Turning a benchmark into a pacing and commitment plan
Cobalt is built for what an LP does after it has a benchmark: commitment pacing, cash flow forecasting, scenario analysis, and portfolio construction across a diversified private markets book.
Typical user: institutional allocators optimizing pacing across an existing portfolio, not sourcing a benchmark fresh.
Best for: Unifying portfolio monitoring across commitments, secondaries, and co-investments
Chronograph is a cloud-based portfolio monitoring platform built specifically for LPs, unifying data across fund commitments, secondaries, co-investments, and directs in one place. The company held its first LP-GP user conference in 2026, drawing roughly 200 private markets professionals spanning buyout, venture, private credit, secondaries, pensions, and sovereign wealth funds.
Typical user: LPs managing a multi-strategy portfolio who need one monitoring system instead of a spreadsheet per fund.
Best for: ILPA-standard LP reporting built into the same platform as portfolio monitoring
Allvue ships pre-built ILPA v2.0 quarterly reporting templates aligned to the ILPA GP-LP Reporting Framework updated in January 2025, alongside portfolio monitoring and fund accounting on a single platform. Its Nexius data platform aggregates information from nearly 600 private capital firms to support benchmarking and liquidity analysis.
Typical user: GPs and fund administrators who need LP reporting and monitoring in one system instead of stitched together.
Best for: Portfolio monitoring and benchmarking in the same Aladdin-connected platform
eFront Insight covers portfolio monitoring, exposure analysis, performance benchmarking, and risk analytics, and now surfaces Preqin's benchmarks and indices directly following BlackRock's February 2026 integration of the two platforms.
Typical user: LPs already running Aladdin who want benchmarking and monitoring under one roof.
Best for: Looking through a fund's TVPI to the deals that produced it
CEPRES tracks deal-level data across 16,500+ funds and 143,000+ individual deals, sourced directly from GPs, and its DealForge platform decomposes fund performance into the operating results of underlying portfolio companies. In June 2026, CEPRES added DealLens, an AI layer that surfaces deal comps and value creation patterns in natural language.
Typical user: due diligence teams that need to see what actually drove a return, not just its size.
Most LPs end up running more than one of these, a benchmarking source, plus a monitoring or reporting layer, because no single platform in this category does both equally well yet. Joe's custom benchmarking is built to close part of that gap: a named, verified data source that also connects benchmark results back to GP and sponsor intelligence, so the peer group and the firm context live in the same place.
Request access to see how Joe fits into your benchmarking workflow.