Both of these products are excellent at what they were built for, and neither was built to call an owner. That is the entire distinction, and it is worth spelling out carefully because the two categories are sold in the same sentences and bought for the same stated reason.
Everything below is sourced to what each vendor publishes, with the date we read it. Last reviewed 20 September 2026. Pricing and coverage claims in this category change without announcement.
What a PitchBook seat gives you
PitchBook publishes coverage of 12.9M+ companies, 657K+ investors, 3.2M+ deals, 171K+ funds and 565K+ debt financings (pitchbook.com/data, observed 2026-09-20), plus screeners, market maps, Excel and PowerPoint plug-ins, CRM sync and connectors into several AI assistants.
For a deal team, that is the reference layer: who owns what, who funded what, what traded at what multiple, what the benchmark looks like for an investment committee memo. There is no substitute for it and no argument worth having about whether it is good at that.
What it does not do, by its own account: Morningstar's FY2025 10-K names PitchBook's competitors as Beauhurst, FactSet, MSCI, Preqin, Refinitiv and S&P Global — data providers, every one. The company does not consider sourcing services peers, because it is not one. Nobody at PitchBook contacts an owner, confirms a listed deal is still available, or delivers a CIM.
Its own deal sourcing guide, dated 7 February 2024, answers "how does private equity deal sourcing work" in terms of screening and research inside the product (pitchbook.com/blog, observed 2026-09-20). That is a fair description of what the product does, and it is a much narrower answer than the question.
Coverage floor. PitchBook's strength is the transacted and sponsor-backed universe. A founder-owned company that has never raised, never sold and never filed leaves little trace in a transaction-led dataset — which is exactly the company most lower middle market mandates are looking for.
Price. Not published. The pricing page is a request form stating that pricing varies with seat count and firm type (observed 2026-09-20), and the FY2025 10-K describes pricing as primarily based on the number of user seats. Third parties report a single seat around $12,000 to $20,000 a year (startupyeti.com, 2026-04-28); a procurement aggregator reports a median of $31,875 across 132 recorded purchases (vendr.com/marketplace/pitchbook, observed 2026-09-20); analysis of public US federal award records puts it at $7,000 to $10,500 per seat on contracts of 5 to 21 seats (USAspending, as computed by investables.ai, retrieved Aug–Sep 2026). None are PitchBook-confirmed.
A signal worth reading. The 10-K reports an annual revenue renewal rate of about 103% in 2025, down from 108% in 2024, attributed to softness in the corporate client segment including higher churn and lower expansion activity. Morningstar's Q4 and FY2025 release of 12 February 2026 describes continued softness in the corporate client segment, especially among smaller firms with more limited use cases, with seat counts relatively flat. That is the vendor's own account of fit at the small end, in a filing, which is a better source than any review site.
What a Grata seat gives you
Grata is built around the private-company universe rather than the transacted one: 22M+ private companies including bootstrapped and founder-owned businesses, with contextual search, executive contacts, buyer-list building, pipeline tracking, CRM sync and an MCP server (grata.com, observed 2026-09-20). It reports 2,000+ customers, including 35 of the top 40 firms.
That is a genuinely different product from PitchBook and a better fit for a sub-$10M EBITDA mandate on the dimension that matters most: the companies you are looking for have usually done nothing that a transaction database records.
Seller Intent scores flag companies Grata expects to enter a process in 6–12 months. Its published recall figures — 98% in the US and 89% in EMEA on back-tested 2025 transactions — are scoped by Grata to mid-market and large-cap deals. That scope is part of the claim and we reproduce it, because quoting the number without it would over-credit the product.
Coverage, honestly. Grata states it covers the lower middle market. It publishes no breakdown by revenue or EBITDA band, so there is no figure to check that against — which is a fact about the disclosure, not an accusation about the data. Test it against your own sector before you buy.
Ownership. Datasite acquired Grata in June 2025 with a stated $500M investment commitment, and acquired Sourcescrub in August 2025, folding its data into Grata (datasite.com, observed 2026-09-20).
Price. Not published. Three tiers, all demo-gated, with the entry tier named on the pricing page for family offices and independent sponsors (grata.com/pricing, observed 2026-09-20). The only dollar figures Grata publishes anywhere on its own site are on its referral page, whose worked examples use a $20,000 contract and a $30,000 contract (grata.com/referral, observed 2026-09-20). A third-party review site reports roughly $25,000 to $50,000 per year depending on seat count, unconfirmed by Grata (praxisrock.com, observed 2026-09-20).
We have left out the aggregator "median contract value" most often quoted for Grata. It rests on a sample of six purchases at a stated confidence of 30%, which is not a number anyone should plan a budget around.
What neither one does
Nothing on either surface addresses what happens after the screen:
- Who contacts the owner, and what they say.
- Whether a listed deal is actually available or under LOI with somebody else, with the listing still up because nobody is paid to take it down.
- Who asks for the NDA, and who asks again on day five.
- Who chases the CIM, and who escalates when an advisor goes quiet.
- Who tracks the owner who said "not this year" so that somebody is there fourteen months later.
That is not a criticism. It is a category boundary, and both vendors are clear about which side of it they sit on. The mistake is on the buying side: firms short of capacity routinely buy information, because information is the thing with a website and a procurement path.
The diagnostic
One question: what happened to the last hundred companies you identified?
- We never built the list → you have a data problem. Buy the seats. It is the cheapest fix available and it scales across mandates.
- The list exists and nobody called it → you have a capacity problem. A second subscription makes it worse. What is missing is hours, and that is a hire or outside origination capacity.
- We called them and nothing came back → you may have a message problem, which is neither. Check whether the approach demonstrates that you know what the company does, and whether anyone is revisiting the ones who said "not yet".
Most firms answer the second and buy for the first.
Where we sit, stated plainly
OmniSource is on the services side of that boundary: a platform and an origination team on one pipeline, covering Off-Market, Pre-Market and On-Market against a documented mandate, with the team running the outreach, the NDA ask and the CIM chase. We are in this comparison, which is a reason to read our framing of the other two skeptically — so every figure above carries its source and the date we read it, and the full side-by-side with all the sources listed is on PitchBook for deal sourcing and Grata alternatives.
We do not compete with either product on database size or tooling, and we do not publish a company count to compare against theirs, because we have not published one. BizNexus's broader treatment of the discipline is at deal origination.
The short version
Data tools tell you a company exists. Sourcing services get that company talking to you. Firms that own both usually bought them in the wrong order, and firms that own one usually think they own the other.