Attio vs folk: two new CRMs, one published ceiling

Attio and folk are the two newest CRMs this site covers and the pair most often shortlisted together. They price similarly, they look similar in a demo, and they diverge sharply on the one question Switchyard exists to ask: what happens when you arrive with a database.

The short answer

Attio publishes its import ceiling and folk does not — or at least, folk's import documentation did not load for this site, which for a buyer amounts to the same problem on the day they need it. Attio is more expensive per seat and more explicit about what it will take. folk is cheaper per seat and, on this site's reading, an unknown at the door.

What each one costs

Attio. Plus is $35 a user a month billed annually and $44 billed monthly. Pro is $79 billed annually and $99 monthly. Enterprise is a custom quote, billed annually. There is a free plan of up to three seats.

folk. Standard is $24 a member a month billed annually — its page also states $288 billed yearly — and $30 billed monthly. Premium is $48 billed annually, $576 a year, and $60 monthly. Enterprise starts from $80 billed annually, $960 a year, and $100 monthly. There is no free tier.

Both were read on 24 September 2026 with the currency set to USD and both billing toggles checked. On entry price folk is cheaper by $11 a seat a month billed annually; at the second tier folk is cheaper by $31.

For scale, Pipedrive Lite is $14 a seat a month billed annually and Zoho CRM Standard is $14. Both of these are premium-priced against the established field, which is a positioning choice rather than an accident.

The import question

Attio publishes its numbers plainly: CSV only, a header row required, a maximum of 100,000 rows, 100 columns and 100 MB per file. That is the second-largest published ceiling anywhere on this site, behind only HubSpot on a paid plan.

It also states the condition that makes an import safe rather than duplicative: your file needs all required attributes and at least one unique attribute for each object you are importing, or you create duplicates instead of updating records. New attributes can be created during the import, and you decide up front whether data lands in an object or a list — a decision Attio's own guidance treats as a data-model question rather than a mapping one, because in Attio it is.

folk has an import — its feature comparison lists CSV import and export, auto-merge for contacts and a REST API — but the help article describing its limits did not load for this site, so no ceiling, no file-size cap and no column limit is printed here. That is a statement about our reading, and it is also the honest answer to "which takes more data": we do not know, and neither will you until you try.

The model difference, which matters more than the price

Attio is built on objects, lists and attributes. It does not assume that a CRM is contacts, companies and deals; it lets you define what the records are. That is the source of its appeal and the source of the migration work, because a spreadsheet exported from a conventional CRM has to be mapped onto a model you design rather than one that is waiting for it.

folk positions itself more conventionally, around people, companies, pipelines and campaigns, with its Premium tier adding custom objects and deals. For a team arriving from Pipedrive or HubSpot, that is less to think about on day one.

So the trade is not really Attio's ceiling against folk's price. It is a model you configure against a model you inherit, and the ceiling is the thing that tells you whether the configuration is worth doing at your data's scale.

Who each one is for

Attio suits a team with a large, simple contact database and a specific idea about how their data should be shaped — and the patience to shape it. The 100,000-row ceiling means most of those teams arrive in one file per object, which is rarer than it should be.

folk suits a small team who want something lighter than the incumbents and are not carrying much. Its lowest tier is genuinely cheaper, and a few thousand contacts will not test any ceiling anyone publishes.

Neither is the answer for a team carrying years of logged calls. Neither vendor's documentation, as read here, describes an activity or note object receiving imported history the way Pipedrive's and Zoho's do.

If neither is quite right

Both sit in the full table on the HubSpot alternatives page alongside seven others, with the ceilings each one publishes in the same column so they can be compared directly. If your reason for looking at these two is that HubSpot got expensive rather than that it got clumsy, the Pipedrive note covers the move with the fewest published surprises.

Two practical checks before either

Count your largest object. If it is under 100,000 records, Attio is one file. If it is over, it is two or more, sliced on a date field. For folk, this is the number to put to their support team as a direct question, because it is the one their documentation did not answer for us.

Decide what you are doing with history. Neither vendor's documentation, as read here, describes a route for importing a structured call log. If years of activity matter to you, this pair is the wrong shortlist, and the destinations that do document it — Zoho CRM's Notes and Activities modules, Pipedrive's activity and note item types — are the ones to look at instead.

The free tiers, which differ completely

Attio publishes a free plan of up to three seats, which is the joint-largest free tier on this site alongside Zoho's three-user Free Edition. For a two- or three-person team that is not merely a trial — it is a live option, and it makes Attio much cheaper to evaluate properly than a fourteen-day window allows.

folk has no free tier at all. Its cheapest route in is $24 a member a month billed annually.

That asymmetry cuts against the per-seat comparison above. folk is cheaper once you are paying; Attio is the only one of the two you can run a real pilot on, with real data, without a purchase order. Given that the main risk in either move is how your data maps onto an unfamiliar model, being able to test that for nothing is worth more than $11 a seat.

Where the extra money goes

It is fair to ask what you get for $35 a seat that you do not get for $14 at Pipedrive, since both are per-seat CRMs for small teams.

The honest answer, from the published material rather than from use, is that these two are selling a data model and an interface rather than a sales methodology. Attio's objects-and-attributes structure is closer to a database you shape than a pipeline you fill; folk's pitch is a lighter, more contact-centric workspace with campaigns attached. Whether that is worth twenty dollars a seat a month is a judgement about how your team works, and it is not one a documentation review can settle.

What a documentation review can settle is whether your data will fit through the door, and on that one, only Attio has answered.

A note on how this page was written

Neither product was used. Every figure above is from the vendors' own pricing pages and, for Attio, its own help centre, read on one day and saved. Where folk's documentation would not load, this page says so instead of substituting a number from somewhere else. That gap is the most useful thing on the page for anyone actually choosing: it is exactly the check to run yourself before committing a database to either of them.