I do not build inside Salesforce, and I say so on this site. That makes me the wrong person to sell you a Salesforce project, and I think the right person to tell you honestly whether you need one.
The deepest object model in the category, governance for regulated industries, an integration marketplace where every vendor has a connector, and a partner network the size of a small country. It assumes someone is employed to run it.
Custom objects a founder can shape in an afternoon, an API-first build, native workflows and AI functions, and a price a Series A budget does not flinch at. No admin, no sandbox, no change sets.
Salesforce without an admin becomes the most expensive spreadsheet in the building. If nobody owns it, the reps stop trusting it, and the reporting stops meaning anything. That is the situation I get called into.
Pricing checked September 2026, against each vendor's own UK pricing page.
| Salesforce | Attio | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Mid-market and enterprise sales organisations with a dedicated admin, compliance requirements and a procurement process. | B2B teams that want the CRM shaped around how they sell, run by the people who use it rather than a team who configures it. |
| Data model | Salesforce wins on depth The most flexible object model there is, with validation rules, record types and field-level security. It needs an admin to design it and a sandbox to change it safely. | Fully custom objects and attributes on every paid plan, changeable in minutes by the person who understands the business. Less depth, far less ceremony. |
| Governance and control | Salesforce wins Sandboxes, change sets, permission sets, audit trails, the security certifications regulated buyers ask for by name. | Permission controls on Pro, SSO and admin controls on Enterprise. Enough for most B2B teams, not built for a compliance department. |
| Automation | Flow is powerful and will do almost anything, once someone has built and tested it. | Attio wins on time to value Native workflow builder and AI functions for scoring and research, plus clean hooks into Clay, n8n and a modern data stack. Live in an afternoon, not a release cycle. |
| API and integrations | Salesforce wins on integrations AppExchange and a connector from every vendor you have heard of. The API is comprehensive and governed by the same limits and edition rules as everything else. | API-first. Everything in the UI is reachable programmatically, which is what makes enrichment feeds and warehouse syncs straightforward. A younger marketplace, so some integrations get built rather than installed. |
| Speed to live | Weeks to months, with a partner, a sandbox and a change window. | Attio wins Days. A migrated workspace with custom objects, stages and views can be live inside a week. |
| Pricing | Sales Cloud per user per month on the UK page: Starter £20, Pro £80, then Core £156, Advanced £316 and Max £440, all billed annually above Starter. The Starter and Pro suites are a different product from what most people mean by "Salesforce". | Attio wins Free for up to 3 seats, then £27 (Plus) or £59 (Pro) per user per month billed annually. A ten-person team on Pro is about £7,000 a year, against roughly £19,000 on Salesforce Core. |
| Contract | Annual, negotiated, sales-led. Adding seats mid-term is easy, removing them is not. | Self-serve, monthly or annual, cancel when you like. |
| Best fit | 200+ staff, an admin or a partner on retainer, regulated data, and a sales process with real approval chains in it. | 15 to 100 staff, a sales-led team, and a business that changes faster than a change-set process can keep up with. |
Both sets of figures are the sterling prices each vendor shows a UK visitor, read from their own pricing pages in September 2026. Salesforce's page notes its pricing is for information and subject to change; negotiated contracts differ.
My honest read. If you are a 200-person company with an admin, a compliance function and a process that genuinely needs approval chains, Salesforce is the right tool and the switching cost is not worth it. I will say that on a call, and then I will not be the person who builds it.
If you are 15 to 100 people, bought Salesforce because it was the safe choice, and the reps run the real pipeline in a spreadsheet because the CRM takes a ticket to change, the maths is different. A CRM the founder can reshape on a Tuesday, at a third of the licence cost, with the history brought across.
Other comparisons: Attio vs HubSpot · Attio vs Affinity
Building inside Salesforce means change sets, sandboxes and sign-offs. That is a different job done by different people, and pretending otherwise would break the fixed-fee promise everything else here is built on.
Because I sell fixed-scope, fixed-fee builds with the limits written down, and Salesforce's change sets, sandbox testing and sign-off cycles make a fourteen-day sprint impossible to promise honestly. The buyers who run it also tend to come with 90-day procurement. It is a good platform, and it is a different job done by different people. What I do build is everything around it: the data audit, the feeds in and out, the lead infrastructure, the reporting.
Yes. Accounts, contacts, opportunities, activities, notes and owners all come across, and the data model gets redesigned properly on the way in rather than copied. What does not transfer like-for-like is custom code and Flow automations, which get rebuilt for how you sell now. Same rule as every migration I run: read the model first, migrate second.
For most B2B companies under a couple of hundred people, yes: permission controls, SSO and admin controls on the Enterprise plan, and a data model that scales. If your buyer's security questionnaire asks for certifications by name and your sales process has real approval chains in it, Salesforce is built for that and Attio is not trying to be. I would rather say that here than in month three.
On the licence, yes. Starter and Pro Suite are cut-down products with a fixed model and limited customisation, which is fine until your process stops fitting it, at which point the next step is Core at £156. Attio Pro at £59 gives you the custom objects, workflows and reporting most teams actually want, with no cliff in front of them. Compare what you will be paying in eighteen months, not this month.
It starts with the CRM & Data Audit, from £1,000, which reads the Salesforce instance properly and scopes the move. The build is then a fixed fee, agreed up front. At Salesforce licence prices the first year's saving usually covers most of it. Exact numbers land in the proposal, after the audit.
Fifteen minutes. Tell me how your team actually sells and who owns the CRM today, and I will tell you straight whether Salesforce is earning its keep, including when the answer is yes.
Book a 15-minute intro callPrefer email? sonny@weareapexai.com