CRM and sales decision
Attio
A competent engineer can build a useful, narrow CRM replacing core record management, search, imports, and simple workflows in ~30 hours, but Attio’s scale, AI agent orchestration, call intelligence, and enterprise features are not practical to reimplement cheaply.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Attio alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- A minimal, self-hosted replacement would store contacts/companies, ingest emails/calendar events, provide search and basic record views, run simple rule-based workflows (triggers -> actions), and allow exporting/importing CSVs.
What it still won’t have
- Agentic multi-step AI agents and proprietary orchestration
- Call intelligence (recording/transcription/analysis)
- Large-scale reliability and throughput (MCP/API capacity)
- Enterprise admin, SSO/SCIM, and audit controls
- Built-in data enrichment and vendor-managed integrations catalogue
What remains hard
- Infrastructure at scale
2.6M MCP calls/month
- Infrastructure at scale
400M API calls/week
- Brand trust
Trusted by 30,000+ customers. From first agent to enterprise scale.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 5 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal CRM on Postgres + Node.js (Express) + React. In scope: Postgres schema for contacts/companies/deals/activities; CSV import with field mapping and dedupe; IMAP connector to sync one user's email and attach messages to records; full-text search using Postgres tsvector; a simple rule engine (record created/updated triggers -> actions: assign owner, update field, send templated email via SMTP); React UI to browse/search/edit records and configure workflows. Out of scope: multi-tenant scaling, call recording/transcription, enterprise SSO/SCIM, large-scale enrichment services. Include logging, retry/error handling for connectors, and unit/integration tests for import, sync, and workflow components.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productAttio — official product
- official pricingAttio Pricing
- official docsAttio Help Center
- open sourceoroinc/crm-application
- open sourcekrayin/laravel-crm
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
