Attio vs Twenty
Attio API
Best API-first CRM $44/Twenty
Open-source CRM you can self-host $9/Attio if the integration is going to move volume, because 100 reads a second against 50 a minute is a factor of 120 and no license saving covers it. Twenty if you want the schema-as-code model at $9 a user, or if self-hosting is a requirement rather than a preference, which for some businesses it genuinely is. Both define objects through an API and both ship MCP, so this is not a feature comparison: it is a hosting and throughput one. Run your heaviest planned job against Twenty's 50 a minute on paper before the price decides it.
Where they actually differ
Every value comes from the same record that drives the CRM and sync APIs listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not.
| Compare | Attio API | Twenty |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A CRM whose data model you define in code | REST, GraphQL and MCP on the $9 plan, or run it yourself |
| Entry price | $44/user/mo | $9/user/mo |
| Unit cost | Not sold by the unit | Not sold by the unit |
| Billing model | Per seat Subscription Free tier | Per seat Subscription Free tier |
| Free tier | Free plan with full API access, 100 seat credits a month | Free trial without a card, and the source is open so you can self-host instead. |
| GTM motion covered | Sync | Sync |
| Data returned | CRM recordsWork emailFirmographics | CRM recordsWork emailFirmographics |
| MCP server | Yes Part of the Attio developer platform | Yes Included on every tier, per the pricing page |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks n8n node | REST API MCP server Webhooks |
| Auth | Bearer token or OAuth 2.0 | API key, created under Settings then API and Webhooks |
| Rate limits | 100 requests/s for reads, 25/s for writes, across the whole API | 50 API calls a minute on Pro, 100 on Organization, custom on Enterprise |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | GDPR DPA |
| Best for | Best API-first CRM | Open-source CRM you can self-host |
Pick each one when
Attio API
- Something will move thousands of records at a time.
- You want the vendor to run it and you do not want to own a database.
- The free plan matters for proving the model before you buy seats.
Twenty
- Self-hosting is a requirement, for data residency or for cost.
- $9 a user against $44 is the difference between a yes and a no.
- You want the source, and the ability to change what the CRM does.
There is no match rate to test here, so the bake-off is about shape and headroom. Build the object you actually sell on in each of them, using both free tiers, write a thousand records through the API, and watch which one needs a custom object and which one needs a plan upgrade to take the write rate. An afternoon, and it surfaces the data-modeling work before it is in production rather than after.
What each one costs, tier by tier
Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. Attio API lists 4 tiers and Twenty lists 3. Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, and the pages they came from are listed at the foot of this one.
| The short version | Attio API | Twenty |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Plus, $44 | Pro, $9 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 3 |
| Free tier | Free plan with full API access, 100 seat credits a month | Free trial without a card, and the source is open so you can self-host instead. |
| Unit cost at entry | Not sold by the unit | Not sold by the unit |
The cheapest paid plan is rarely the plan you end up on, because what moves you up a tier is usually volume rather than a feature. The two rate cards below are what you are choosing between.
Attio API
Attio API publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $44 to Custom.
Free
- Full REST API access
- 100 seat credits a month
- 250 workspace credits a month
Plus
- 500 seat credits a month
- 1,500 workspace credits a month
- Billed monthly or annually
Pro
- 1,000 seat credits a month
- 10,000 workspace credits a month
- The tier Attio marks as popular
Enterprise
- 2,500 seat credits a month
- Custom workspace credits
Twenty
Twenty publishes 3 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $9 to From $50k.
Pro
- REST, GraphQL, webhooks and MCP all included
- 50 API calls a minute
- Full customization and custom apps
Organization
- 100 API calls a minute
- Row-level permissions, SAML and OIDC SSO
Enterprise
- Custom API call allowance
- Single-tenant isolation
What Attio and Twenty cost at your volume
Put your own volume in. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers it on each side, which is the question a rate card cannot answer and the one that decides the bill.
Attio API
Priced per seat, so the bill moves with headcount rather than with volume.
Twenty
Priced per seat, so the bill moves with headcount rather than with volume.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices before any discount you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for. Attio API and Twenty are priced per seat, so those columns do not move with volume. The figure shown is 3 seats for a year.
| A year at | Attio API | Twenty |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $1,584 Plus | $324 Pro |
| 10,000 a month | $1,584 Plus | $324 Pro |
| 50,000 a month | $1,584 Plus | $324 Pro |
2 of the 2 providers here publish enough to be put in this table. These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, so they are the number before you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount by between a fifth and a half.
How this plays out once it is running
These two are unusually alike in philosophy. Both treat the data model as something you write rather than configure around: Attio creates custom objects and attributes through its API, and Twenty ships a separate Metadata API at /rest/metadata/ whose whole job is creating and changing objects, fields and relations in code. Both publish REST, both publish webhooks, and both ship an MCP server on every tier. If you were picking on capability alone this page would be very short.
The separation is throughput and hosting. Attio allows 100 requests a second for reads and 25 a second for writes across the whole API. Twenty allows 50 API calls a minute on Pro and 100 a minute on Organization, which is between 50 and 120 times slower depending on which tiers you compare. Against that, Twenty is $9 a user a month to Attio's $44, and the source is open so you can run it yourself and set your own ceiling.
What each one is genuinely good at
Not a feature list. These are the things that make somebody keep paying after the novelty has worn off, which is a different question from what the marketing page leads with.
Attio API
120 times the read throughput
100 requests a second against Twenty Pro's 50 a minute. A 50,000-record extraction is about eight minutes on Attio and the better part of seventeen hours on Twenty Pro. For a nightly sync, a migration or anything an agent drives in a loop, that is the entire comparison and the price difference does not touch it.
A free plan with the full API on it
Full REST access plus 100 seat credits and 250 workspace credits a month, so the data model can be proved before anything is bought. Twenty has a free trial and an open-source repository, which is a different kind of free: one lets you test, the other asks you to run it.
Somebody else runs it
SOC 2 Type II, a managed service and no database to operate. Twenty cloud is managed too, but the reason to pick Twenty is usually self-hosting, and self-hosting a CRM means owning backups, upgrades and an on-call rota for the system your revenue team works in.
Twenty
A quarter of the seat price
$9 a user a month on Pro against $44, or $19 on Organization against Attio's $99 Pro tier. For a team of twenty that is $8,400 a year, which buys a lot of engineering time to work around a rate limit. The 25% annual discount takes it further.
The Metadata API is a first-class product
A separate API at /rest/metadata/ and /metadata/ whose job is creating and changing objects, fields and relations programmatically, with REST and GraphQL on both the core and metadata surfaces. GraphQL adds batch upserts and relation traversal in one query, which is a genuine advantage over REST-only extraction when the data model is deep.
Open source, so the ceiling is yours
Self-hosting is a supported option rather than a grudging one, and a self-hosted instance sets its own rate limits because you are the one enforcing them. That turns the 50-a-minute problem from a product constraint into an infrastructure decision, which is exactly the trade some teams want.
Where each one falls down
Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
Attio API
$44 a user a month with no usage allowance
Nothing is metered because there is nothing to meter, so every seat is full price whether that person logs in daily or quarterly. A team of ten is $440 a month before any data is bought, against $90 on Twenty Pro.
You cannot run it yourself
There is no self-hosted Attio. If data residency, an air gap or a procurement rule requires the CRM to sit in your own infrastructure, this page has one answer and it is not this one.
It sources nothing
Attio stores what you bring it, so the real comparison is Attio plus a data provider. The same is true of Twenty, so this is a tie rather than a differentiator, but it is worth saying on both sides.
Twenty
50 API calls a minute on the $9 tier
And 100 a minute on the $19 one. That is the tightest published ceiling of any CRM in this directory except Freshsales, and it binds hard on anything bulk. Organization doubles it and Enterprise is custom, which starts at $50,000 a year, so there is no affordable middle step between 100 a minute and a negotiation.
Self-hosting is work, and the cheap answer has a cost
The open-source route removes the rate limit and adds backups, upgrades, monitoring and the obligation to keep a revenue-critical system running. Price that honestly against $35 a seat a month before treating self-hosting as the saving.
The enterprise step is $50k a year
Pro at $9 and Organization at $19 are self-serve, and above them the next published figure is from $50,000 a year for single-tenant isolation. That is a large gap for a business that outgrows 100 calls a minute but is nowhere near enterprise scale.
Using Attio and Twenty together
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of them. On this pairing it often is not, and the arrangement below is what teams actually end up running.
Running both makes sense in exactly one shape, and it is a migration rather than an arrangement: Twenty self-hosted as the system of record for a team that needs the data in its own infrastructure, with Attio used by a go-to-market function that needs the throughput. In practice that means two sources of truth, which is the thing to avoid, so treat it as a transition state with an end date.
If you are moving between them, go Twenty to Attio with the GraphQL extraction and Attio to Twenty with patience. Twenty's GraphQL API can traverse relations in a single query, which makes the read side of an export unusually clean; writing 50,000 records back in at 50 calls a minute is the part that takes seventeen hours, so batch where the API allows it and run it overnight.
Whichever way you go, declare the objects before you move the rows. Both of these exist because the schema is supposed to match your business, and a migration that copies a contacts-and-deals shape across because that is what the export produced throws away the only reason either product is on this page.
Attio or Twenty, for you
Two questions, answered from the same records as the rest of this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no result to email yourself.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your segment, and the one test that does is the bake-off further down: real rows, cheapest entry on each side, spend divided by survivors.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is not how good the data is, it is who is allowed to hold it. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Attio API | CRM records, Work email, Firmographics | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
| Twenty | CRM records, Work email, Firmographics | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor, not your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving between Attio and Twenty
Most readers of this page are already on one of these two. A swap is four hours of code and a month of watching, and the order below is the one that catches the expensive mistakes while they are still free.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Run 500 rows you already have through Attio API and record the match rate, the fields that came back populated and the cost. Without that number a migration cannot be judged, because every provider looks cheaper per unit than the one you are paying for today.
Check the fields, not the field count
Twenty returns every field Attio API does, so nothing downstream has to change shape. Confirm the values rather than the keys: two providers can both return a mobile number and disagree about which one it is.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Attio API authenticates with bearer token or OAuth 2.0. Twenty uses API key, created under Settings then API and Webhooks.
The limits are the part that bites later. Attio API rate: 100 requests/s for reads, 25/s for writes, across the whole API.
Twenty rate: 50 API calls a minute on Pro, 100 on Organization, custom on Enterprise. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date, not before
Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new match rate against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your segment looks like a provider that is fine.
Where each one sits in a working pipeline
Neither of these is bought in isolation. These are the worked stacks on this site that use one or both, with the cost run end to end.
The wider field for both
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of these two. Often it is not, and the reason you are comparing them at all points somewhere else entirely: Attio alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
Related comparisons
The 26 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: Attio vs folk, Attio vs Close and Attio vs Salesforce.
And: Attio vs Pipedrive and Attio vs Clay. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
HubSpot API vs Attio API
A free CRM API against a CRM whose data model you define in code.
Compare them →Attio API vs Salesforce
Define the schema in code for free, or buy the deepest API in the category by the seat.
Compare them →Attio API vs Pipedrive
A schema you define in code against a pipeline that works out of the box.
Compare them →Comparison pages end at the rate card. Your list does not.
We run the bake-off on your actual data, pick the provider order, and build the pipeline behind it: waterfall routing, credit ceilings and the write-back that puts a verified contact in front of a rep the same day.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
Attio and Twenty, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Attio or Twenty cheaper?
On the entry plan it is Twenty, $9/user/mo against Attio at $44/user/mo. The entry price is the comparable figure, because they do not meter the same thing.
Can I try Attio and Twenty for free?
Attio: Free plan with full API access, 100 seat credits a month. Twenty: Free trial without a card, and the source is open so you can self-host instead.
What are the rate limits on Attio and Twenty?
Attio: 100 requests/s for reads, 25/s for writes, across the whole API. Twenty: 50 API calls a minute on Pro, 100 on Organization, custom on Enterprise.
Do Attio and Twenty both have MCP servers?
Both do. Attio: Part of the Attio developer platform. Twenty: Included on every tier, per the pricing page.
Which is better, Attio or Twenty?
Attio if the integration is going to move volume, because 100 reads a second against 50 a minute is a factor of 120 and no license saving covers it. Twenty if you want the schema-as-code model at $9 a user, or if self-hosting is a requirement rather than a preference, which for some businesses it genuinely is.
Can you use Attio and Twenty together?
Running both makes sense in exactly one shape, and it is a migration rather than an arrangement: Twenty self-hosted as the system of record for a team that needs the data in its own infrastructure, with Attio used by a go-to-market function that needs the throughput. In practice that means two sources of truth, which is the thing to avoid, so treat it as a transition state with an end date.
Can I migrate from Attio to Twenty without losing data?
The fields survive: Twenty returns everything Attio does. What changes is the auth and the limits. Either way, measure your match rate on 500 rows before you switch, because that number is the one you cannot recover afterwards.