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When limited partners (LPs) evaluate private equity, venture capital, credit, or real asset funds, one of the most important steps is benchmarking fund performance. LPs want to understand how a fund compares to its peers by vintage year, strategy, and geography, and increasingly, against public market equivalents (PMEs) like the S&P 500 or MSCI World.
The challenge is that reliable private fund benchmarking data is hard to come by. Many of the established databases come with a heavy price tag, and each tends to focus on just one angle of the market, whether it's fund-level returns, allocator behavior, or underlying portfolio company data. This fragmented landscape makes it difficult for LPs and fund managers to get a full picture.
That's where Joe, powered by Dakota, comes in. By combining named, individual fund performance data with GP and sponsor intelligence, transaction data, and custom benchmarking, Joe offers a single place to benchmark fund performance while also understanding the market activity behind those results.
In this article, we'll review 10 of the top databases for benchmarking private funds. By the end of this, you'll have a better understanding of what each has to offer and which may best serve your team.
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.
Best for: 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.
If your question is about one specific fund rather than an industry index, it helps to see the difference directly. Request access to Joe.
Cambridge Associates is perhaps the most widely cited source of private market benchmarks. Their quarterly reports cover strategies and vintages across private equity, venture capital, private credit, and real assets. Because the data is based on LP-reported fund performance, it is considered among the most credible and trusted sources for fund due diligence.
Best for: LPs who want long-established, LP-reported quarterly benchmarks for due diligence across private equity, venture capital, private credit, and real assets.
Preqin provides coverage spanning private equity, venture capital, private credit, infrastructure, and real assets. They publish vintage year quartiles and benchmarks by strategy and geography, making them a go-to for market reports and broad comparisons across private capital.
Best for: teams that need broad vintage-year quartile benchmarks and market reports spanning private equity, venture capital, private credit, infrastructure, and real assets.
PitchBook combines fund performance benchmarks with its well-known deal-level database, which makes it particularly valuable for connecting fund outcomes to underlying transactions.
Best for: analysts and deal teams who want fund performance benchmarks connected directly to deal-level transaction data.
Burgiss has become a gold standard among institutional investors thanks to its data sourced directly from GPs and LPs, highly trusted by LPs for benchmarking and ongoing portfolio analysis.
Best for: institutional investors who want GP- and LP-sourced performance data integrated directly into their existing portfolio monitoring systems.
Through its Cobalt LP platform, Hamilton Lane delivers benchmarking and portfolio analytics for institutional investors, including peer quartiles and PME-style comparisons.
Best for: institutional investors who want peer quartile and PME-style comparisons built into a broader portfolio analytics platform.
eVestment provides benchmarks for private equity, and is widely known for their hedge fund analytics, built from GP submissions.
Best for: investors who want to evaluate private equity performance alongside hedge fund and other alternative strategy analytics in one platform.
Most of the providers on this list are built for market-level context: broad, category benchmarks pulled from LP- or GP-reported data, useful for quarterly reports and quartile rankings across an entire vintage. That's valuable, but it answers a general question, not a specific one.
Joe is built for the specific fund in front of you. Instead of pooled or anonymized benchmarks, Joe tracks named, individual fund and vehicle data across 18,000+ funds and vehicles, so a custom peer group can be built by strategy, vintage, geography, and fund size rather than accepted as a fixed category. That depth comes paired with GP and sponsor intelligence, funds currently in market, and transaction data in the same platform, starting at $9,500 a year for up to five users, without the enterprise contract most broad providers require.
To explore private fund performance and benchmarks, request access to Joe.