Close vs Attio: Which CRM for startups wins?

In the fast-paced world of early-stage startups, the margin for error is slim, especially when it comes to closing deals. Often, opportunities slip through the cracks, not due to a lack of great products, but because follow-ups become disorganized across various inboxes, spreadsheets, and team communications. A CRM for startups addresses this critical issue by ensuring that every interaction, next step, and responsible owner remains visible and easily accessible.

Close and Attio represent two distinct approaches to solving the CRM challenges faced by startups. Close emphasizes a sales-first methodology that streamlines communication and automates follow-ups for high-velocity teams, while Attio offers a data-centric solution that focuses on flexibility and relationship management. Both platforms cater to the unique needs of startups but do so in vastly different ways.

This article compares these two CRMs, exploring essential aspects such as contact capture, data hygiene, automation capabilities, collaboration features, and overall cost-effectiveness as teams scale. Understanding these differences will equip startups to make informed decisions that drive growth and efficiency.

What is Close?

Close is designed specifically for high-velocity sales teams that thrive on calls, emails, and sequences. It caters to startups engaging in outbound or hybrid sales efforts, providing robust activity tracking, integrated calling, and rapid workflows. The user interface minimizes tab switching, enabling sales reps to remain focused on execution. Additionally, Close offers automation for follow-ups and pipeline management without requiring extensive configuration. Unlike larger platforms, it is less focused on complex account hierarchies or enterprise-level reporting.

O que é o Attio?

Attio is a modern, data-centric CRM tailored for startups seeking flexibility and streamlined modeling. It is ideal for teams managing dynamic relationships, offering custom views, enrichment, and structured workflows without the need for an enterprise setup. Attio excels in facilitating relationship-driven go-to-market strategies and can adapt to distinct sales processes. It is particularly beneficial for teams that prioritize a CRM aligned with their data, rather than conforming to inflexible structures. However, some companies might require additional tools for marketing automation or advanced service workflows.

Feature comparison of Close and Attio

Email and Calendar Sync

Close seamlessly integrates with Gmail and Microsoft email accounts, ensuring that your email communications are automatically synced with the appropriate leads and contacts. It also enables meeting sync through calendar connectivity, allowing scheduled events to appear within Close alongside related records. This consolidation keeps your outreach history and meeting context organized in one central location, rather than scattered across various inboxes and calendars. It's ideal for fast-paced teams looking to capture activity without the hassle of manual logging, making the timeline invaluable for coaching, handoffs, and pipeline reviews.

Attio connects with both Google and Microsoft accounts to sync email and calendar seamlessly, ensuring that messages and events are correctly linked to the right records. Email syncing is powered through Gmail, and Attio can automatically populate People and Company records based on inbox history. Calendar events sync in tandem with email activity, forming a relationship timeline that reflects real interactions. This arrangement minimizes manual logging and keeps deal context readily accessible across the workspace, making it a perfect fit for startups seeking a CRM that emphasizes communication history.

Clean Contact Data with Enrichment and Deduplication

Close enhances data hygiene by preventing duplicates during imports and offering native merge actions for leads. The importer can verify incoming rows against existing leads, ensuring duplicates are addressed before they contaminate the database. If duplicates do occur, leads can be merged directly within the app, consolidating all activities into a single destination record. Additionally, Close features AI Enrich, which automatically enhances lead and contact fields within the CRM, minimizing the need for tedious manual data entry. This ensures records are comprehensive enough for effective routing, personalization, and reporting.

Attio takes data enrichment a step further by automatically enhancing People and Company records with essential data points like logos, profile pictures, social media handles, and descriptions. Enriched attributes can be updated whenever Attio discovers new information, keeping records up to date without requiring manual research. The platform also facilitates duplicate cleanup through a merge feature for People and Companies, providing prompts when duplicates are identified based on email addresses or company domains. This merging process consolidates properties into a single record while eliminating the duplicate, ensuring contact data remains functional as your lists expand.

Flexible Pipelines and Views

Close enhances team collaboration by providing shared visibility into lead timelines, activities, and ownership. All records—calls, emails, SMS, notes, and next steps—are consolidated in one place, ensuring that context isn’t lost in separate threads. Assignment workflows efficiently direct new leads or status changes to the appropriate owner, minimizing the risk of dropped follow-ups. Teams can standardize their processes by agreeing on statuses, views, and activity expectations, ensuring consistent execution even as headcount grows.

Attio streamlines work organization through objects, lists, and views, offering both table and kanban views for list workflows. Kanban views illustrate a pipeline or process with distinct stages, allowing for easy drag-and-drop movement between them. Teams can customize views with filters and visible attributes, ensuring they only see what’s relevant to their current tasks. This flexible structure supports sales pipelines and other startup workflows within the same workspace, enabling effective process tracking without imposing a rigid data model.

Team Collaboration

Close enhances team collaboration by providing shared visibility into lead timelines, activities, and ownership. All records, including calls, emails, SMS, notes, and next steps, are consolidated in one place, ensuring that context is not lost in separate threads. Assignment workflows efficiently route new leads or status changes to the appropriate owner, minimizing the risk of missed follow-ups. Teams can standardize their processes by aligning on statuses, views, and activity expectations, which ensures consistent execution even as headcount grows.

Attio fosters collaboration directly within the CRM by allowing comments, tasks, and mentions on records and list entries. Team members can be @mentioned in notes, tasks, and comments, triggering notifications in the sidebar. Tasks can be created, assigned, and tracked, ensuring that next steps are clearly owned and visible. Sharing and permission controls enable teams to manage who can view or edit specific areas of the workspace, keeping coordination linked to records rather than dispersed across separate threads.

Lightweight Automation and Integrations

Close automation revolves around Workflows and Sequences, enabling follow-ups to occur repeatedly without the need for constant manual input. Triggers can automatically enroll contacts into sequences or initiate actions when lead conditions are met, ensuring consistent outreach throughout the sales funnel. Additionally, Close integrates with Zapier, offering no-code connections to a wide array of tools, and it features an API for more extensive custom integrations. With bulk actions, users can apply updates or execute actions across numerous leads as processes scale, allowing for a gradual introduction to automation that can grow alongside the startup.

Attio connects with external tools through its Workflows and integrations, including a Zapier integration that facilitates automation across thousands of applications. Zapier can trigger workflows based on changes in Attio or transfer data from other systems into Attio. For those looking for custom solutions, Attio offers a public REST API and supports real-time subscriptions through webhooks. The developer platform also features an App SDK that allows apps to be embedded directly within the Attio interface, providing startups with both no-code and developer-level options for automation and data synchronization.

folk CRM: The Best CRM for Startups in 2026

folk is a cutting-edge CRM designed specifically for startups, seamlessly integrating relationships across Gmail, Google Calendar, LinkedIn, and spreadsheets. It consolidates contacts, companies, deals, notes, files, and interactions into a streamlined workspace, ensuring that pipeline context is directly linked to genuine conversations rather than being scattered across multiple tabs.

Top features that startups love in folk

• Gmail and Google Calendar sync for an automated activity timeline
• LinkedIn-ready contact capture through a Chrome extension
• Contact enrichment to quickly fill in missing data
• Deduplication to maintain a clean database as your volume increases
• Custom pipelines and fields tailored to fit any go-to-market strategy

For startups, folk excels in delivering speed-to-value and daily usability. The setup is quick, workflows are adaptable, and multichannel context remains easily accessible without transforming the CRM into a cumbersome suite. This leads to more consistent follow-ups, cleaner data, and clearer revenue visibility with minimal friction.

👉 Experimente o folk CRM gratuitamente

Conclusão

In the competitive landscape of CRM solutions, Close excels with its sales-centric focus and automation for fast-paced teams, while Attio offers adaptability and a strong relationship management framework. However, for startups heavily relying on email integration, automation, and sequencing, folk emerges as the premier choice. It seamlessly consolidates essential tools, provides quick setup, and maintains a clean database, ensuring teams can focus on genuine interactions and effective follow-ups. Experience the difference with folk CRM.

Comece o seu período de avaliação gratuita de 14 dias ou marque uma demonstração hoje mesmo.