Attio

While Attio is highly customizable, it still provides everything you would need in a CRM: pipelines, people, companies, and deal tracking.

Deals move through stages visually, similar to a Kanban board you'd see in other CRMs. You can associate deals with contacts and companies, track deal values, and add activities like calls or notes.

When we tested it he interface felt modern, with everything having the ability to be dragged and dropped. You can quickly jump in anywhere and have a great overview of what's happening with a contact without digging through tons of menus.

That said, we spoke to a user who has used it for a while he said "it gets quite slow with scale".

Connection strength is an interesting feature baked into Attios CRM. It automatically calculates how strong your relationship is with a contact based on signals like:

• How recently you've emailed them
• How frequently you communicate
• Calendar interactions
• Overall engagement history

So if a sales rep hasn't contacted a lead in months, the relationship score drops. If conversations happen frequently, it increases.

Lots of tools have you set up parameters that trigger a customer's "health" or "relationship strength," but Attio does the manual work of digging through your activity history and provides your sales team with a helpful signal that shows them where they should be spending their time.

This is one of those features that is a huge help to small teams and is genuinely useful, as opposed to gimmicky AI that just provides summaries.

You can build fairly sophisticated automations that would normally require multiple tools.

But this is also where the learning curve becomes very real.

We found that building workflows requires some familiarity with automation tools. If you’ve used tools like Zapier or Airtable automations, you'll likely be comfortable here.

If you haven't, it will feel a bit intimidating and overwhelming.

For teams with a dedicated RevOps person, it's no problem; this is one of the areas where Attio can lean towards unusable if no one can pick up the technical knowledge required to make good use of this robust feature.

While Attio has claimed to be the AI-CRM of this era, and many people in our audience encouraged us to try it when it came out, we found it was lackluster. And it makes sense, it was built an entire 3 years before ChatGPT even launched 😅 After evaluating it 3 times, we couldn't be convinced to switch to it.

Sure, they have AI features (like all CRM software does now). For example, AI Attributes are custom fields on any record that fill themselves in. Ask Attio is their AI Chat. And of course they have an MCP.

But their workflow tools still require using their workflow builder, which feels heavy and more technical than is required in this era. With other AI CRM software, you can just tell the chat what workflows to build and it will consult with you and configure the automation entirely hands off.

Something unique about Attio is that they took their CRM and blended it with a to do list. In the dashboard, you're given access to tools that help you manage your day-to-day work without jumping between tools.

Attio also lets you send and reply to emails directly inside the CRM.

The experience is fast, but it by no means is going to replace your email inbox.

It doesn't pull in your entire email history the way some CRM inbox integrations do. Instead, it seems to focus on emails connected to your sales pipeline.

So you'll still spend most of your time managing your inbox in your Gmail or Outlook (or Superhuman Mail which is what we use), but you have the option to continue in Attio if/when a conversation relates to a deal.

We don't think that's a bad thing; it's just that it serves the very specific purpose of helping your team answer sales-related emails that are connected to the sales pipeline.