The Attio alternative for digital marketing agencies

What changes on Phloz

• Pre-assembled agency shape — clients, departments, tasks, messages, retainers on day one
• Native typed tracking-infrastructure map per client (no building required)
• Per-active-client pricing instead of per-seat
• Free unlimited client portals with magic-link access

Should you actually switch?

A switch is real cost — a few days of structural mapping, a parallel-running week, training time, and the friction of breaking habits your team has built. Worth it when the new tool meaningfully changes how you work; not worth it when the gain is incremental.

The five signals that you're ready to leave Attio: (1) you're paying for seats or contacts you don't use, (2) you're running the tracking stack in a separate Sheet because the CRM has nowhere for it, (3) onboarding a new team member takes more than a day because the configuration is tribal knowledge, (4) clients ask "where do I see progress?" and you don't have a clean answer, (5) you're duplicating client data across two or three tools because no single tool fits.

If three of those five describe your agency, the structural upgrade pays back inside a quarter. If only one or two, stay where you are and revisit at the next pricing renewal — switching for marginal gain is usually a worse decision than the marginal gain.

When Attio is still the right choice

The honest counter-positioning. Attioisn't wrong for everyone — these are the cases where staying makes more sense than switching. If any of them describe you, weigh the trade carefully before migrating.

• You want a flexible, modern relationship/sales CRM and genuinely enjoy shaping the data model to your process. Attio is one of the best at that; Phloz is opinionated instead.
• Relationship-driven sales / BD is the core of the work, not multi-client delivery. Attio is built for that motion.
• Attio's modern UX and AI features are central to how your team works.
• You're early and still figuring out your process — a flexible CRM you can reshape weekly beats an opinionated one.

Migration: what to plan for

Attio exports records (Companies, People, Deals) to CSV. Map Companies to clients, People to client_contacts, won Deals to active clients; import via Phloz workspace import. Attio's custom objects, attributes, and automations don't translate one-to-one — but most of that bespoke modelling is replaced by Phloz's built-in agency primitives. Plan about a day; less structural rethinking than a generic-tool migration because you stop modelling and start using defaults.

The structural rethink — mapping Attio's shape to Phloz's opinionated agency model — takes longer than the data move. Read the marketing agency CRM buyer's guide for the six capabilities that should drive the decision, and the pricing page to run the per-active-client math at your client count.

Attio migration FAQ

The three questions agency owners ask before signing the switch decision. Honest answers — same data we'd give a friend evaluating the move.

Attio is flexible — can't I just build the agency setup there?

You can, and some teams do. The question is whether you want to build and maintain it. Attio gives you the blocks; you assemble clients, delivery, and a tracking schema yourself, then keep them current. Phloz ships that assembly as defaults — including the typed tracking map, which is the one piece a flexible CRM still leaves you to model from scratch.

Can I keep Attio for sales and use Phloz for delivery?

Yes — a clean split. Attio runs the relationship/sales pipeline; at deal-won, the Company becomes a Phloz client (CSV import or a Zap). You keep Attio's modern sales UX and get agency-shaped delivery + the tracking map Attio has no native home for.

Does Phloz have Attio's flexibility?

Deliberately less. Phloz is opinionated about the agency shape — that's the trade. You give up Attio's reshape-anything flexibility and get a tool that's already correct for agency delivery + tracking without configuration. If flexibility is your top criterion, Attio; if agency-shaped-on-day-one is, Phloz.

What you keep when you migrate

The honest list of what survives the move from Attio. Your client list and contact records (CSV import). Your active tasks and their assignees, statuses, due dates (CSV import). Your custom fields, on clients and tasks (mapped to Phloz custom fields during import). Your inbound email addresses if you set up forwarding (re-pointed at the per-client Phloz inbound addresses).

What doesn't survive: historical activity logs older than what you'd realistically reference (most agencies discover they don't open activity from before the last quarter). Bespoke automation rules built on Attio's specific automation engine — these need to be re-expressed in Phloz's patterns (recurring tasks, status hooks, inbound thread routing) or offloaded to Inngest / Zapier. Time entries stay in your time-tracking tool of record (Phloz integrates rather than re-imports).

The trade is a lighter, more opinionated tool that runs your agency's shape natively — at the cost of some per-tool customisation that, in retrospect, was usually a workaround for a missing primitive. See agency project management software for the broader buyer's guide on what to evaluate alongside this switch decision.

Want the head-to-head, not the switch story?

The Phloz vs Attio comparison covers what each tool does, what each doesn't, and when Attiois the right choice — for the cases where you're evaluating rather than already unhappy.

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