Four metrics show up on nearly every private fund report. Here's what each one actually measures, how they work together, and where they can mislead you if read in isolation.
Morgan Holycross, Marketing Manager · August 19, 2026
Data sourced from Joe, the private fund performance platform powered by Dakota. Learn More | Request Access
PitchBook contracts run $20,000 to $124,000 a year, with a median annual contract value of $30,000, sold exclusively through annual agreements with no monthly option. That's the price of a platform built primarily around deal, valuation, and company intelligence, with fund performance data layered on top rather than built as the core product.
For a team whose actual need is benchmarking fund performance, not sourcing deals or researching cap tables, that's a lot of platform to buy for one layer of it.
In this article, we're looking at why teams search for a PitchBook alternative specifically for fund performance work, and how Joe, Powered by Dakota compares directly.
PitchBook's real strength is connecting fund performance to the deals, valuations, and financing rounds that produced it, which makes it genuinely useful when a benchmarking question is really a deal-sourcing question in disguise. It's particularly deep in venture capital, where its financing-round and company-level data is hard to match.
Fund performance isn't PitchBook's core product. It's a layer on a platform built first for deal and company intelligence, which shows up in the depth of the benchmarking tools compared to a dedicated performance database.
Data freshness has been a recurring complaint: company profiles reportedly refresh only every three to four months, which matters when a benchmarking decision depends on current figures.
Coverage gaps show up for smaller funds and firms, with some reviewers noting the need for independent validation rather than relying on PitchBook's numbers alone.
Pricing scales with seats and modules through negotiated annual contracts only, with no way to start small and no published rate card to compare against.
See what fund-performance-first data looks like: request access to Joe.
Joe tracks Net IRR, TVPI, DPI, and RVPI on 18,000+ funds across seven asset classes, reported at the level of the specific, named fund rather than folded into an anonymized cohort. Every fund record connects to GP and sponsor intelligence on 20,000+ investment firms, so a benchmark comes with the firm context a pooled database strips out.
Custom benchmarking lets you build a peer group by vintage, strategy, geography, and size on your own terms, instead of accepting a vendor's predefined category. Joe also tracks funds currently raising capital, so you're not limited to looking backward at historical performance.
It's built on the same data infrastructure that already powers Dakota Marketplace, priced at $9,500 a year for up to five users, published openly with no sales process required just to see what it costs.
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Joe, Powered by Dakota |
Preqin |
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Pricing |
$9,500/year for up to 5 users, published |
$20,000-$124,000/year, median $30,000, negotiated |
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Contact Terms |
Annual, published rate |
Annual only, no monthly option |
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Core Product |
Fund performance and benchmarking |
Deal, valuation, and company intelligence, with fund performance as a secondary layer |
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Data Approach |
Named, fund-level performance |
Fund performance tied to deal-level data |
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Update Cadence |
Continuously updated |
Company profiles reportedly refresh every 3-4 months |
If fund performance benchmarking is the actual job, not deal sourcing with performance data attached, Joe was built to be the dedicated tool for that instead of an add-on to something bigger.
Request access and compare it against what you're paying for PitchBook today.
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