Choosing the right CRM can transform how you attract, engage, and delight customers, but with so many options on the market, it’s hard to know which platform truly delivers.
HubSpot is often seen as one of the premier choices for growing B2B businesses thanks to its all-in-one suites, intuitive interface, and powerful automation tools.
But how does it stack up against Attio?
In this comparison, we’ll break down the key differences between HubSpot and Attio, looking at everything from features and flexibility to pricing to technical details, such as integrations, which will help you decide which platform fits your business best.
A slight caveat before we get into the meat of this article - we’re a HubSpot Solutions Partner. We’re well-versed in working with the platform, and we think it’s a brilliant fit for most B2B businesses. However, we would never recommend it if it doesn’t fit your specific business requirements.
Throughout this article, we will give an impartial comparison between HubSpot and Attio to help you make the correct decision for your circumstance.
Starting with HubSpot, there are numerous ways to get onboarded and started within the system. You can start with:
Either one of the three is effective in getting you started and helping you set up your portal in the correct way. And once you’re set up, you can take advantage of the numerous products that HubSpot offers.
Whilst, like all other CRMs, there may be an initial learning curve, HubSpot's user-friendly design supports businesses in effectively leveraging the platform's capabilities to drive growth and improve customer engagement. One user on G2 commented by saying:
Hubspot is very helpful, offering a robust way to learn and manage service, sales, and marketing. Its built-in help resources and user-friendly tools have made it much easier to understand and implement key business strategies.
With its wide array of tools and features across its three tiers, Starter, Professional and Enterprise (including a stripped-back, free version too), HubSpot is known for combining sales, marketing, service, operations and, most recently, eCommerce functionality within its suite. This makes it ideal for those B2B businesses looking to scale their business without the investment into a wide tech stack that needs external integrations to merge with your CRM.
Meanwhile, Attio is also lauded for its high degree of customisation, allowing users to tailor the platform to their specific needs. As one user noted:
Attio offers exceptional flexibility in customization (sic), allowing teams to create custom data objects, fully customizable (sic) pipelines, automation flows, and detailed reports for various use cases from marketing to recruiting
Attio is known for being the ‘CRM for startups’ due to it being tailored towards agile teams and the ability to evolve and be customised efficiently. Focusing on a swift onboarding period, its intuitive interface and flexible structure allow users to set up and customise their CRM without extensive technical knowledge.
It offers similarities to other alternatives such as Airtable and Notion, offering a familiar and adaptable workspace for startups to begin growing their business in an easy, scalable way. One user on G2 commented that:
The Attio team, especially Alex, provided exceptional support during the onboarding process. It's the go-to CRM solution we highly recommend to businesses of all sizes - especially early-stage startups that don't want to lose time with complex CRM.
HubSpot’s flexibility is one of the key reasons businesses continue to scale with - and use - the platform. With the ability to create custom properties, objects, workflows, and dashboards, teams can shape the system around their exact processes rather than adapting their processes to fit the tool.
Whether it’s segmenting contacts with bespoke criteria, building out tailored sales pipelines, or automating marketing workflows based on specific behaviours, HubSpot’s customisation options and flexibility enable users to design a system that mirrors their real-world operations. As one G2 reviewer puts it:
Adapt quickly with a flexible system that allows you to architect your business exactly as it appears in the real world... without months of custom dev work.
This level of adaptability means that even as your business evolves, HubSpot evolves with you, without the need for expensive development work or third-party tools
Attio, similarly, is designed to offer a high degree of customisation, allowing businesses to tailor the platform to their specific workflows and data structures. Its flexibility is particularly beneficial for startups and teams that need adaptability.
Users can define custom objects, attributes, and relationships, enabling the creation of a CRM environment that mirrors the datapoints that their specific needs. One user said:
Attio is a great CRM, simple but complete. Friendly but very powerful. And above all, very well thought out. It is very easy to use and customize (sic).
However, and something we’ll note on later, whilst Attio has extensive customisation functionality, some users have pointed out that certain advanced features, such as reporting and analytics, are still developing. This could impact teams that rely heavily on these functionalities at the current time until the product develops.
This will be no surprise, but HubSpot’s main standout strength is its unified system across all business departments.
From marketing automation and sales pipelines to customer service, CMS, and operations, every tool is designed to work together on a single platform. This native integration removes the friction of jumping between disconnected systems and gives teams a clearer, shared view of the customer journey. It also connects up to your CRM, which enables your users to have a single-view of the customer.
What really sets HubSpot apart, though, is the balance between depth and usability.
Each Hub is feature-rich in its own right, with a level of practicality that you would usually assume to be reserved for specialist, independent tools. Having all these tools under a single umbrella enables businesses to take advantage without the need to patch together a load of third-party apps. As one reviewer puts it:
HubSpot is more than just a CRM – it's an ecosystem of powerful tools that seamlessly integrate to help you grow.
As the user in the previous section said, Attio, although powerful, has a growing ecosystem which is comparatively smaller than HubSpot. It currently lacks the fully developed marketing, service, and automation modules you’d find in more mature ecosystems. Integrations are available via Zapier and API, but native apps are limited at this stage.
However, Attio combines CRM functionality with the familiarity of a collaborative workspace. It sets focus on core CRM essentials: contact and account management, collaborative pipelines, activity tracking, and custom fields.
A final thing Attio offers is its real-time collaboration mode. This is where teams can work together in shared views, apply filters, and manipulate CRM data dynamically.
This is where HubSpot can get tricky, as it’s not exactly a cheap option if you want all the bells and whistles.
HubSpot offers a free CRM option, but only allows you to store up to 1,000 non-marketing contacts within this tier. From there, if you want the customer platform (which is the bundle which encompasses all ‘Hubs’), it comes priced at:
However, what HubSpot does allow you to do is scale your tiers as you grow and adopt new features within ALL tiers if you choose the customer platform option. However, if you don’t you can also pick and choose what tier of each suite and make your own, personalised bundle - something that other CRM providers don’t often allow.
Attio is a comparatively cheaper product, offering payment terms of both annual and monthly. It also offers a free version for users who need a cost-effective option and don’t mind the stripped-back functionality.
The pricing models are as follows:
Despite being a cheaper option, the previous section comes into play here. Although there are extensive customisation opportunities, it doesn’t come close to the range of options you get with HubSpot - and that’s not including all the marketing, operations, service and eCommerce tools you get. However, if your only requirement at this stage is a CRM and you need to do it in a budget-friendly capacity, Attio could be a good option for you.
The final comparison point is regarding integrations and how easy it is to connect multiple apps to the CRM.
Firstly, HubSpot offers an extensive integrations ecosystem, featuring over 1,500 native integrations through its App Marketplace. This allows users to connect their CRM with a wide array of tools, including, for example, QuickBooks, Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and other ERP & CRM tools.
This connectivity ensures that data flows smoothly between platforms, including HubSpot’s CRM, which reduces manual input and enhances operational efficiency. A Capterra user highlighted the value of HubSpot’s integration abilities by saying:
The integrations of HubSpot are unmatched, big reason they charge big is those ecosystem integrations.
This flexibility ensures that, as your business evolves and introduces more systems into your tech stack, HubSpot can adapt with you without needing substantial change.
On the other hand, Attio approaches extensibility with a modern, developer-friendly mindset. Built with flexibility in mind, it offers a robust API and webhooks, enabling teams to create custom integrations and workflows tailored to their specific tech stack.
However, in its current form, Attio doesn’t yet boast a large marketplace of native integrations.
Instead, it focuses on offering clean, well-documented infrastructure that developers can use to hook into tools like Slack, Notion and other internal data systems. For less technical teams, integrations can be achieved through platforms like Zapier or Make.com, which help automate actions across tools like Gmail, Google Sheets, and calendar apps for example.
That said, the lack of a mature native app marketplace may be a blocker for businesses looking for plug-and-play integrations with tools like HubSpot, Mailchimp, QuickBooks, or Shopify. While Attio has announced its intention to expand its integration capabilities, it’s currently best suited to teams who are happy to build or configure their own workflows.
Choosing the right CRM comes down to your team’s needs, technical capabilities, and growth ambitions. While Attio may offer strong features in certain areas, HubSpot stands out for its ease of use, unified ecosystem, and scalability, particularly for growing B2B businesses.
If you're leaning towards HubSpot and want to get implementation right from day one, download our 5 Stages of HubSpot Implementation guide. It walks you through each phase of a successful rollout, helping you avoid common pitfalls and maximise ROI from the get-go.