How does Attio compare to other CRMs, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho and Pipedrive? An overview to help you make the right choice.
by Will Sawney, Founder - Sideways CRM
4 minute read
Excited by the potential of Attio? Let’s explore how it compares to other possible CRM providers…
My clients often start with a major decision – “which CRM should I choose?” It’s a decision that has significant, long-term implications. This is critical software for revenue generation. Choose well, and you could unlock immense value. Get it wrong and you could be stuck in frustrating stasis for years to come.
If you’re facing this decision, and wondering whether Attio is the right choice, here’s my take on how Attio compares to the primary competition.
Want to know more about Attio? Read my Why Attio feature.
Compared to other CRMs, Attio offers incredible flexibility, exceptional user experience and powerful features, with a fair and transparent pricing model.
Attio vs Hubspot
HubSpot was founded in 2006 on the premise of “inbound marketing,” aiming to attract customers through valuable content and helpful tools rather than traditional advertising. It has grown into a public company with a massive user base of over 250,000 customers, primarily targeting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Its core strength lies in its all-in-one suite of “Hubs” for marketing, sales, and service, built on a free CRM foundation.
Pricing: HubSpot’s initial pricing is extremely attractive, but there’s a major catch, as costs ramp up significantly for higher usage and features.
How Attio Compares
Attio’s AI-native flexibility stands in contrast to HubSpot’s more rigid, all-in-one suite. While HubSpot offers a broad array of features, Attio focuses on a fluid data model that can be customized to your specific workflow, rather than forcing your business into a predefined structure. Attio’s data enrichment happens automatically and in real-time, pulling in details from your inbox, calendar, and beyond without manual setup.
Why Choose Attio?
- Flexible Data Model: Attio’s relational database lets your CRM perfectly mirror your unique business, not the other way around.
- Effortless Automation: Built-in automations and data enrichment seamlessly connect your data and eliminate manual work.
- Predictable Cost: Avoid HubSpot’s scaling costs and pay for what you need, with no hidden fees for increased usage.
- Choose Your Stack: Unlike an all-in-one suite, Attio allows you to integrate with the best tools for your specific needs, from marketing to analytics.
- Intuitive UX: A clean, Notion-style interface means minimal training is required for your team to get up and running. |
My Verdict: HubSpot gives you an all-in-one suite (at a significant price point), but Attio gives you a CRM that is infinitely customisable to your business. And, whilst HubSpot is constrained by its past, Attio is fully ready for the future. Attio is an ideal alternative to – or replacement for – HubSpot.
Attio vs Salesforce
Founded in 1999, Salesforce pioneered the cloud-based CRM model and has since become the industry giant, with over 150,000 customers worldwide. It is a publicly traded company that targets enterprises and large corporations, but it has a significant presence across businesses of all sizes. Its core USP is its immense power, customization capabilities via the Force.com platform, and a vast ecosystem of third-party apps on the AppExchange.
Pricing: Salesforce’s cost is a significant barrier to entry, with complex plans and hidden fees that make it difficult to predict and budget for.
How Attio Compares
Salesforce is renowned for its power and customisation, but this often comes with a steep learning curve and the need for a dedicated administrator. Attio provides a similar level of flexibility with its data model, but in a user-friendly package. You can build complex relationships and workflows without a developer, a key differentiator that makes Attio accessible to teams of any size.
Why Choose Attio?
- Power Without Complexity: Get the functionality of an enterprise CRM without needing a dedicated admin or developer.
- True AI-Native: Attio intelligently logs and enriches data from your communication, creating a dynamic, up-to-date source of truth without any manual input.
- Faster Time-to-Value: Attio’s intuitive design means you’ll be up and running in a fraction of the time it takes to set up a legacy system.
- Cost And Clarity: Achieve immense value for a fraction of the cost and with greater transparency for planning.
- Build Your Ideal Stack: Connect with any tool you choose, giving you the freedom to build a modern, best-of-breed GTM stack.
My Verdict: Salesforce is undoubtedly the heavy-weight contender, but it’s weighed down by a long legacy and complex structure. Setup takes months and change is hard. Attio is the flyweight; flexible, agile, fast. If you need a more modern and fit-for-purpose CRM, Attio is the ideal Salesforce alternative.
Attio vs Pipedrive
Pipedrive, founded in 2010, was built by salespeople for salespeople. It targets small to medium-sized businesses and is known for its visual pipeline-centric approach. With over 100,000 customers, its core USP is simplicity and an easy-to-use interface that helps sales teams visualize their deals and focus on taking the next action.
Pricing: Pipedrive has straightforward, affordable pricing, but its simplicity means you’ll hit a ceiling on what you can do without investing in expensive add-ons or integrations.
How Attio Compares
While Pipedrive excels at a single-purpose sales pipeline, Attio offers a more holistic view of customer relationships. The Attio platform goes beyond just deals, enabling you to manage any process – from fundraising and recruiting to project management and client delivery – all within a single, interconnected system. This flexibility means you’re not confined to a single sales-centric view.
Why Choose Attio?
- Beyond Standard Sales: Attio is designed to manage every relationship and workflow in your business, from fundraising and recruiting to project management.
- Comprehensive View: Go beyond a single sales pipeline to get a holistic, interconnected view of every relationship.
- Flexible Integrations: Connect with your preferred tools and avoid being limited by Pipedrive’s smaller ecosystem.
- Intelligence-Driven: Attio automatically captures and enriches data from your communications, providing a rich, always-current context for every contact.
My Verdict: Pipedrive is ideal for businesses who ‘fit the mould’, but Attio offers substantially more power. With Pipedrive you get a prescribed system, with Attio you get an entire platform for driving your growth. Whilst Pipedrive offers an easier ‘out of the box’ setup, including marketing automation add-ons, there’s minimal room to expand or evolve with your business.
Attio vs Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM, part of a suite of over 45 applications from the company founded in 1996, targets small and medium-sized businesses. It is known for its affordability and vast feature set, positioning itself as a comprehensive, all-in-one solution for business operations, with over 100 million users worldwide. Its core USP is its extensive product suite and competitive pricing.
Pricing: Zoho’s pricing is highly competitive, but the trade-off is often a cluttered user experience and a lack of cohesiveness between its many different applications.
How Attio Compares
Zoho’s greatest strength is also its biggest weakness: the sheer number of applications can lead to a disjointed and overwhelming user experience. Attio, by contrast, is a native-AI CRM built from the ground up to be a single source of truth. It unifies all of your data, making it easy to create custom workflows and reports without navigating a complex web of different products and interfaces.
Why Choose Attio?
- One Unified Platform: Attio is a single, clean platform, preventing the data silos and scattered processes that can come with a suite of separate apps.
- Cohesive Intelligence: Built-in AI unifies your data and automates updates, a level of intelligence that traditional CRMs struggle to match.
- Predictable Cost: Avoid the unpredictable costs and complexity often found in large suites.
- Modern Design: The UI/UX is built for today’s workflows, offering a clean, modern design that is a joy to use.
My Verdict: Zoho’s cost and ecosystem potential is undeniably appealing for many businesses. Unfortunately, the actual product experience can be incredibly frustrating. Attio doesn’t do everything Zoho does, but as a CRM it is lightyears better. Plus, if you need other apps, you can choose the *best* provider to integrate with, not just Zoho’s suite of often-mediocre products.
Attio vs Monday.com
Monday.com was founded in 2012 as a project management tool and has evolved into a “Work OS,” a highly visual, no-code platform. While it’s used by over 225,000 customers, its CRM functionality is an extension of its core project management capabilities. Its primary selling point is its visual, customizable boards that can be adapted for a wide variety of use cases.
Pricing: Monday.com’s pricing is flexible but can be difficult to predict, as costs increase with users, boards, and features, making it hard to budget for as you scale.
How Attio Compares
Monday.com is a work management tool with CRM features, whereas Attio is a native CRM with a powerful relational database. While Monday’s boards offer visual flexibility, they can become cumbersome for complex relationship management. Attio’s data model is specifically designed to handle intricate connections between contacts, companies, and deals seamlessly, with a purpose-built architecture that is more scalable for revenue operations.
Why Choose Attio?
- Purpose-Built Power: Attio is built from the ground up as an intelligent CRM, not a project management tool with a CRM layer on top.
- Superior Data Enrichment: Attio provides automatic, magical data enrichment, including key fields like ARR and funding rounds, which is far more robust than Monday’s standard integrations.
- Scalability for Revenue Teams: Attio’s architecture is designed to handle the complexity and interconnected data that modern sales, partnerships, and customer success teams require to grow.
- Predictable Pricing: Avoid Monday’s complex and unpredictable cost structure as your team and feature needs grow.
My Verdict: Project and operations managers love Monday.com, and its CRM is certainly better than many. But Monday.com’s CRM is nowhere near as easy-to-maintain, or as powerful, as Attio. Attio is far superior when it comes to data quality, relationship tracking and commercial performance. Unless you’re determined to get an ‘all-in-one’ workspace to cover everything, choose Attio as the better dedicated CRM.
Attio vs Folk
Folk, founded in 2020, is a modern, collaborative CRM built for “relationship-driven teams.” It targets startups, VCs, and small teams looking for a lightweight, spreadsheet-like interface. Its core USP is its ease of use, contact-centric design, and seamless integrations with social platforms like LinkedIn.
Pricing: Folk’s pricing is competitive and great for small teams, but it lacks the deep feature set and scalability needed for more complex use cases as a business grows.
How Attio Compares
While both Attio and Folk are next-generation CRMs with clean interfaces, Attio is a more robust and scalable “system,” whereas Folk is a powerful “tool.” Folk is excellent for managing and organising existing contacts for targeted outreach, but Attio’s native relational database allows for more complex, dynamic workflows and automations. Attio is the right choice when you need a foundational system that can grow and adapt to your most complex business needs.
Why Choose Attio?
- A Foundational Database: Attio is a scalable “system” built to manage your data for the long term.
- True Relational Model: Create complex, interconnected data objects that reflect your unique business logic, moving beyond simple lists and tags.
- Designed for Scale: Attio is built to support your growth, with a scalable architecture, rich API, and an ecosystem of partners to help you build and automate your go-to-market engine.
- Best-of-Breed Integrations: Attio’s open API, and solid Zapier and n8n connections, allows you to connect with any tool you choose, giving you the freedom to build a modern, best-of-breed tech stack.
My Verdict: On the surface, Folk and Attio share a similar aesthetic and approach, both vying for market share held by the incumbent CRMs. The big difference is that Attio is creating a platform for businesses to build the CRM they really need, whereas Folk is still solving the specific problem they see. For long-term growth, Attio is 100% the right choice.
Attio vs AirTable
Airtable, founded in 2012, is a relational database that functions as a highly flexible spreadsheet. It has found a broad user base across a variety of industries, with many teams using it to build custom applications, including makeshift CRMs. Its core USP is its ability to let users create a custom data structure from the ground up, giving them full control.
Pricing: Airtable’s pricing is simple at first, but costs can escalate quickly and unpredictably as your data, records, and automations grow.
How Attio Compares
While Airtable gives you the building blocks to create a CRM, it requires significant manual effort and time to build and maintain. Attio is a native CRM that provides the same level of flexibility and customization, but with built-in AI intelligence and automation that eliminates the need for manual data entry, cleaning, and maintenance. You get the best of both worlds: a highly customizable database that works like a powerful, intelligent CRM.
Why Choose Attio?
- Live Updated Data: Attio’s AI automatically enriches data and logs interactions from your inbox and calendar, saving you countless hours of manual data entry.
- A CRM, Not a Project: Get a purpose-built CRM with pre-configured features like deal tracking, pipelines, and reporting without the hassle of building them from scratch.
- Automate with Ease: Attio’s automations are built for complex business workflows and data-driven tasks, going far beyond the basic triggers found in Airtable.
- Predictable Cost: Attio’s pricing is transparent and predictable, allowing you to scale your business without worrying about a ballooning software budget.
My Verdict: Airtable gives you the building blocks to create a CRM, while Attio gives you a fully functional, intelligent CRM that is just as flexible. That’s really where the similarities end, though – because with Attio your entire team get the functionality they need to communicate with clients, win business and track performance – all with minimal data entry.
Attio vs Other Specialist CRMs
Beyond the major players, there is a vast market of specialist CRMs designed for a single niche—be it a specific industry like real estate or a specific function like fundraising. The appeal is that these tools speak directly to your business, but that focus is also their biggest weakness. These platforms, unlike the larger companies, don’t have the scale to build really impressive and useful features, and their rigid structure can quickly become a problem. You can get locked into a system that doesn’t allow room to breathe or adapt as your business evolves.
How Attio Compares
Attio offers the best of both worlds—the ability to create a custom CRM tailored to any industry or purpose, without the limitations of a specialist tool. You can build the exact workflows and data models you need, but you’re not sacrificing the powerful, innovative features that only a modern, well-funded platform can offer.
Why Choose Attio?
- Unbounded Adaptability: Build custom workflows for any industry or function, all in one platform.
- Future-Proof Your Business: You’re investing in a system that will continue to evolve and add powerful features, so you’re not stuck with a limited tool.
- Escape Vendor Lock-in: Attio’s open API and flexible data model ensure that your business is not confined to a rigid, one-size-fits-all solution.
- Best-of-Breed Integrations: Attio empowers you to choose the best technology for every part of your stack, based on quality, relevance, and price.
My Verdict: If a CRM seems to service your exact specific sector and business model, this can seem very appealing. But in my experience, this category creates the very worst problems for businesses – as the suffer with a lacklustre product, that’s hard to integrate, and poorly supported. I strongly advise against this approach, and wholeheartedly recommend Attio instead.
The Verdict? Attio Wins…!
Finding the right CRM is about more than just a list of features; it’s about finding a system that adapts to your business, not the other way around. While traditional CRMs are powerful, their rigid, legacy architectures can create more problems than they solve.
Attio represents a new generation of CRM, one built to be flexible, intelligent, and truly collaborative. It’s the CRM I believe in because it’s the one I’ve seen solve the real-world problems that others just can’t.
Ready to take the next step? Let’s meet to discuss Attio’s potential for your business.
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