HubSpot vs Attio
HubSpot API
Best free CRM endpoint Free tierAttio API
Best API-first CRM $44/HubSpot puts full CRM API access on a free tier, which makes it the cheapest place to land enriched rows and the one your reps probably already use. Attio lets you define the objects your motion actually runs on rather than bending them into contacts and deals. Both ship official MCP servers. Pick HubSpot for zero cost and familiarity, Attio when your data model is the problem.
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 | HubSpot API | Attio API |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Write back to the CRM your team already lives in | A CRM whose data model you define in code |
| Entry price | Free tier | $44/user/mo |
| Unit cost | $0.0000 free tier | Not sold by the unit |
| Billing model | Free tier Subscription Per seat | Per seat Subscription Free tier |
| Free tier | Free CRM including API access | Free plan with full API access, 100 seat credits a month |
| GTM motion covered | Sync Engage | Sync |
| Data returned | CRM recordsWork emailFirmographics | CRM recordsWork emailFirmographics |
| MCP server | Yes Official remote and local servers | Yes Part of the Attio developer platform |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node | REST API MCP server Webhooks n8n node |
| Auth | Private app token or OAuth 2.0 | Bearer token or OAuth 2.0 |
| Rate limits | 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps. | 100 requests/s for reads, 25/s for writes, across the whole API |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II |
| Best for | Best free CRM endpoint | Best API-first CRM |
Pick each one when
HubSpot API
- You want CRM API access at no cost.
- Marketing and sales already live in HubSpot.
- You want both a remote CRM server and a local dev server.
Attio API
- Your objects do not fit a standard contact-and-deal model.
- You want the schema defined through the API.
- You want the MCP surface to reflect your own objects.
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. HubSpot API lists 4 tiers and Attio API lists 4. 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 | HubSpot API | Attio API |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Starter, $20 | Plus, $44 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 4 |
| Free tier | Free CRM including API access | Free plan with full API access, 100 seat credits a month |
| Unit cost at entry | $0 free tier | 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.
HubSpot API
HubSpot API publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $20 to Quote.
Free
- Full CRM object access over the API
- Free Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Data and Revenue tools
- 100 calls per 10s, 250,000 a day
- No credit card required
Starter
- Same API, same limits as Free
- 500 HubSpot Credits included
- 1,000 marketing contacts
- From $7/seat/mo on the current new-customer offer
Professional
- 190 calls per 10s per app
- 625,000 calls a day per account
- Where the limit increase starts to matter
Enterprise
- 190 calls per 10s per app
- 1,000,000 calls a day per account
- Highest published daily ceiling
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
What HubSpot and Attio 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.
HubSpot API
Priced per seat, so the bill moves with headcount rather than with volume.
Attio API
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. HubSpot API and Attio API are priced per seat, so those columns do not move with volume. The figure shown is 3 seats for a year.
| A year at | HubSpot API | Attio API |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $720 Starter | $1,584 Plus |
| 10,000 a month | $720 Starter | $1,584 Plus |
| 50,000 a month | $720 Starter | $1,584 Plus |
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
HubSpot puts full CRM API access on a free tier, which makes it the cheapest place in this directory to land enriched rows, and it is almost certainly where your reps already work. That combination is hard to argue with for the write-back step of any pipeline.
Attio matters when the objects are the problem. If your motion runs on something that is not a contact and a deal, a partner, a location, a piece of equipment, a franchise, then bending it into HubSpot's model is a tax you pay forever. Attio lets you define the schema through the API, and its MCP surface reflects whatever you defined.
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.
HubSpot API
Free, and the free tier is the real product
HubSpot's free CRM carries full object access over REST with no clock and no seat cap at that level. Attio's free plan carries the API too, metered at 100 seat credits and 250 workspace credits a month. Both are genuinely free; only one of them is free without a meter running.
Two MCP servers, for two different jobs
A remote server for the CRM and a local one for builds. Attio publishes an MCP server as part of its developer platform, so both are covered, but the local build server has no equivalent here and it is the one that matters if agents run against a workspace copy.
The reps are already in it
This matters less in the API and more in whether anyone uses what you build. A pipeline that writes into the CRM a team already lives in gets opened; one that writes into a second system gets checked on Fridays. HubSpot is the default for a reason and the reason is adoption rather than architecture.
Attio API
The schema is written through the API, not configured around it
Custom objects and attributes are created by calling the API. If your motion runs on a workspace, a property, a vehicle or a clinic rather than on a contact and a deal, you declare that once in code. On HubSpot the same thing becomes a custom property hanging off a standard object and stays that way forever.
A plain rate limit with no shared pool
A hundred requests a second for reads and 25 a second for writes, across the whole API. There is no daily budget and nothing a colleague installs from a marketplace can spend. Sizing a job is one division, and the number you measured in testing is the number you get in production.
The MCP surface reflects your objects
Because the schema is yours, the agent-facing surface describes the things your business actually has. On a CRM with a fixed object model, an agent sees contacts and deals whatever you called them in the interface.
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.
HubSpot API
The daily cap is shared across every connected app
The per-10-second rate is per app and the daily cap is not, so a marketplace integration somebody installed spends the same budget your pipeline does. You discover it through a failing sync rather than through a notification, and your own logs will not show the cause.
The tier where the limit improves is not priced in public
The rate goes from 100 to 190 requests per 10 seconds at Professional, and Professional and Enterprise are not on the CRM pricing page at all. HubSpot is free right up to the point where throughput becomes your problem, and then it is a quote.
Attio API
Writes are limited four times harder than reads
A hundred a second for reads against 25 a second for writes. An enrichment pipeline is almost entirely writes, so the number that governs your job is the smaller one, and a bulk backfill has to be planned around 25 a second rather than 100.
Twice the seat price and a smaller ecosystem
$44 a user a month, or $35 annually, against HubSpot's $20 a seat. Attio is also a newer product, so the supply of consultants, contractors and prebuilt connectors is a fraction of HubSpot's, which is a real cost on a migration even though it never appears on a rate card.
The free plan is metered, not unlimited
A hundred seat credits and 250 workspace credits a month. That is enough to prove an integration and not enough to run one, so the free tier is an evaluation rather than a place to leave a small pipeline running indefinitely.
Using HubSpot and Attio 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.
Both are systems of record, so this is a choice rather than a stack. The one arrangement that is not a mistake is evaluation: run your real objects through Attio's free plan while the team keeps working in HubSpot, and find out whether the model you want is the model you need before anybody migrates.
If you do end up running both for a while, keep the direction of travel one way. Pick the system that owns each object and make the other a read-only mirror. On the HubSpot side a sync loop spends a daily cap you cannot see the other consumers of; on the Attio side it spends your write rate, which is the quarter of the API you have least of.
HubSpot or Attio, for you
Three 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot API | CRM records, Work email, Firmographics | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | Not stated |
| Attio API | CRM records, Work email, Firmographics | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | 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 HubSpot and Attio
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 HubSpot 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
Attio API returns every field HubSpot 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
HubSpot API authenticates with private app token or OAuth 2.0. Attio API uses bearer token or OAuth 2.0.
The limits are the part that bites later. HubSpot API rate: 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps.
Attio API rate: 100 requests/s for reads, 25/s for writes, across the whole API. 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.
What practitioners say about HubSpot
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written, linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above.
The per-app rate limit is why people end up running several private apps
API limits are not being respected or the sync isn't really set up in a way that someone with knowledge of the api. They may not be using a queue system. They haven't optimized and paid attention to api limits. [...] This may need to be done using multiple private app keys because you are hitting specific limits. [...] If these updates are happening all at once, batch and import/export APIs are the way to go
r/hubspot · April 2025 · 2 points
This corroborates the shape of HubSpot's limits rather than the numbers. The rate, 100 requests per 10 seconds on Free and Starter and 190 on Professional, is per app, which is exactly why splitting work across several private apps raises throughput at all.
The part that is easy to miss is that the daily cap is not per app, so the same trick does nothing for it. Splitting a sync across three private apps triples the requests a second you can make and shares one daily budget between them, which is a fix for the wrong half of the problem if the daily cap is what you were hitting.
The search endpoint is the one to design around
When building custom integrations or custom data migrations, always set the external ID as a unique property so you can use the unique identifier endpoint to read/query records... instead of using the search endpoint which has a 5 calls per second limit. Use batch endpoints as much as possible.
r/hubspot · August 2025 · 10 points
The same lesson the Pipedrive side of this directory records as a token cost, arriving here as a separate rate. Search is the expensive call on every CRM in this listing and it is the one a first integration reaches for, because searching by email is the obvious way to find a contact when you have not stored its id.
Storing an external id on creation is the fix in both products, and it is cheaper to do on day one than to retrofit. Treat this as a design note rather than as a published figure: HubSpot's own documentation is the authority on the per-endpoint limits.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
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.
Inbound speed to lead
<60sForm submission to enriched, verified, routed and sequenced in under a minute, with no human in the path.
Agent-driven account research
$0.09Point an AI client at two MCP servers and have it write a researched account brief straight into the CRM.
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: HubSpot alternatives and Attio alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
HubSpot API alternatives
4The free tier is the best in the category. The bill when you outgrow it is why people look at HubSpot alternatives.
See the alternatives →Attio API alternatives
4A CRM for people who want to define the schema themselves. Not everybody does.
See the alternatives →Everything in Sync
6The full category these two sit in, filtered by data returned, billing model and entry price.
Browse the category →Related comparisons
The 26 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: HubSpot vs Freshsales, Attio vs Twenty and HubSpot vs Copper.
And: Attio vs folk and HubSpot vs Close. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
HubSpot API vs Salesforce
A CRM that gives the API away against one that sells it by the seat.
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 →HubSpot API vs Pipedrive
A free tier with a per-second rate limit against a $14 seat with a daily token budget.
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.
HubSpot and Attio, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is HubSpot or Attio cheaper?
On the entry plan it is HubSpot, free against Attio at $44/user/mo. The entry price is the comparable figure, because they do not meter the same thing.
Can I try HubSpot and Attio for free?
HubSpot: Free CRM including API access. Attio: Free plan with full API access, 100 seat credits a month.
What are the rate limits on HubSpot and Attio?
HubSpot: 100 req/10s on Free and Starter, 190 on Professional. Daily cap shared across apps. Attio: 100 requests/s for reads, 25/s for writes, across the whole API.
Do HubSpot and Attio both have MCP servers?
Both do. HubSpot: Official remote and local servers. Attio: Part of the Attio developer platform.
Which is better, HubSpot or Attio?
HubSpot puts full CRM API access on a free tier, which makes it the cheapest place to land enriched rows and the one your reps probably already use. Attio lets you define the objects your motion actually runs on rather than bending them into contacts and deals. Both ship official MCP servers.
Can you use HubSpot and Attio together?
Both are systems of record, so this is a choice rather than a stack. The one arrangement that is not a mistake is evaluation: run your real objects through Attio's free plan while the team keeps working in HubSpot, and find out whether the model you want is the model you need before anybody migrates.
Can I migrate from HubSpot to Attio without losing data?
The fields survive: Attio returns everything HubSpot 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.