By Brett Kaufman. 8 years using relationships to build sales pipelines, from political fundraising to a 7 figure business to running matchmaking for two communities. Over 1,000 introductions facilitated.

Attio is the better choice if you run a team and want a CRM you can shape around your process. FRONT OF MIND is the better choice if you are one deal maker who needs to know which broker, owner or banker to text today, and why.

Full disclosure: I built FRONT OF MIND. So I will be straight about where Attio wins.

Here is the scene. You spent a Saturday building Attio. An object for target companies, one for brokers, one for owners. A pipeline with seven stages. It looked beautiful on Sunday night. By the third week of diligence on a live deal, nobody had touched it, the broker who sent you that deal was four months stale, and the record still said “intro call.”

That is not Attio’s fault. It is a question of which job you hired the tool to do.

What Attio is now

Attio no longer pitches itself as a simple CRM. Its homepage opens with “Welcome to agentic revenue” and says Attio “is the platform that builds pipeline, advances deals, and grows accounts around the clock.”

The feature list backs that up: a flexible data model, call recording and analysis, an AI assistant called Ask Attio, workflows, custom agents, a web research agent, outreach sequences, reporting and forecasts, and automatic enrichment of every record. It pulls in what it calls Universal Context: “Emails, calls, records, product usage, connected tools. All live.”

The customers on that page are mostly software companies: OpenAI, Notion, Ramp, Linear, Cursor. That tells you who it is designed for. Revenue teams with operations people.

It also has real deal flow users. Seedcamp, the venture firm, says on its Attio customer page that “Attio is the core platform upon which Seedcamp manages its deal flow.” Their head of technology describes building custom objects for each phase, workflows that move records between them automatically, and a browser extension on top of the API. “It truly is a source of truth for the whole team.”

Notice the words: head of technology, custom objects, API, whole team.

What Attio does better

I want you clear eyed about this before you pick anything.

• The data model. You can model your actual world. Owners, intermediaries, target companies, lenders, LOIs, each as its own object with its own fields and links. FRONT OF MIND does not let you design a schema. It is not trying to.
• Team workflows. One shared record, permissions, and a single source of truth for a deal team. If you have a partner, analysts or a sponsor group working the same pipeline, Attio is built for exactly that.
• Automations. Workflows that create and update records when criteria are met, sequences for outreach, and custom agents. If you think in triggers and actions, Attio gives you a lot of rope.
• Reporting and forecasts. Up to 100 reports on Pro. FRONT OF MIND has no pipeline dashboards.
• Email, calendar and calls in the record. Attio syncs your inbox and calendar and records meetings into the same place your deals live.
• A real free plan for small teams. Up to 3 seats at no cost.

If you are a search fund with two partners and an analyst, or an independent sponsor running a small deal team, Attio is a serious option and may be the right one.

Where Attio strains for one person

Flexibility is setup. Somebody designs the objects, maps the stages, writes the workflows and keeps them clean. On a team, that is an operations role. Alone, it is you, at 11pm, between a quality of earnings call and a lender call.

And even a perfect Attio answers a different question. It shows you the deals you already know about and where they stand. It does not open in the morning and say: this broker has been quiet 112 days, she just posted about a new HVAC listing, here is a text. The deal that never reached you never becomes a record. More on that gap in why your CRM failed you for deal origination.

What FRONT OF MIND does instead

I built it around the question I kept asking myself while making over 1,000 introductions: who should I reach today, and why? It opens on your 10 minutes for today. A short list of people, each with a one line reason why today:

• They posted something, confirmed to belong to that person
• A follow up is due
• You met at an event days ago and never followed up
• A pipeline deal has been quiet 7 days or more
• Their company was in the news
• The relationship is going cold
• Their birthday

Each comes with a draft written like a text, 40 words max. Nothing sends without your tap. It learns from your edits, so the drafts start sounding like you.

Ask Liala, the assistant, out loud: “who do I know that is an M&A advisor” or “who lives in Miami.” You get the right people and why each one fits. It also shows intros to make this week, with dated proof on both sides, so you are not guessing whether two people still fit.

At an event, say a name and a sentence out loud, snap a business card or badge, or take a selfie together. It is filed under the event.

There is no schema to build. That is the point and also the limit.

Pricing side by side

As of October 2026, per Attio’s pricing page:

Attio

• Free: $0, up to 3 seats, 1 email and calendar account per user, up to 3 custom objects, up to 3 reports
• Plus: $35 per seat a month billed annually, $44 monthly, up to 10 seats, up to 5 custom objects
• Pro: $79 per seat a month billed annually, $99 monthly, unlimited seats, up to 12 custom objects, advanced permissions
• Enterprise: custom, billed annually
• 14 day Pro trial

FRONT OF MIND

• Free for your first 25 contacts and 1 intro
• $29 a month after that
• Encrypted contacts. No one on our team looks at them. Export and delete anytime.

Prices change, so check each pricing page before you buy.

How I would choose

Pick Attio if you have a deal team, you want one shared record of every target, owner and intermediary, and someone on the team enjoys building workflows.

Pick FRONT OF MIND if you are a searcher, broker, independent sponsor or connector working mostly alone, your pipeline is your phone, and what you need every morning is the short list of people to text and why.

Run both if you already have Attio. Keep the deal record there. Use FRONT OF MIND for the people around the deals, the brokers and bankers and CPAs who decide who hears about the next one first. The two do not compete for the same 10 minutes.

For the solo case against firm platforms, see the Affinity alternative for solo deal makers. For a lighter personal CRM, see FRONT OF MIND vs Dex. Every other tool I have compared is in personal CRM comparisons.

See who comes up first

Attio is a great place to keep deals once you have them. The next one usually starts as a text to someone you have not talked to in months. Start free with your first 25 contacts and see who comes up first.

See how it works