You are choosing between two CRMs that do not charge for the same thing. Attio sells you seats and meters the AI on top of them. Clarify sells unlimited seats and meters the work instead.
Most comparisons stop at features, which is the half that never shows up on the invoice.
Attio charges per seat and meters AI work in credits on top. Clarify charges for credits only and gives you unlimited seats, though its credit tiers are labelled by headcount on its own pricing page. Fluid CRM charges $16/seat/month for one plan with every feature in it.
What Attio And Clarify Are Built To Do
Attio is a workspace you shape. You define custom objects, build your own data model and wire up workflows, and that flexibility is the product. Teams who pick it usually have someone who enjoys that work.
Clarify comes at it from the other end. It records the meeting, enriches the contact and updates the deal, so you stop maintaining the CRM by hand. It aims at seed to Series A B2B teams.
Those are genuinely different products, and plenty of posts will tell you that much. The part that decides your bill is what each one puts a meter on.
What Attio And Clarify Charge For
Attio pricing
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Seats |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | Up to 3 |
| Plus | $35/seat/month | $44/seat/month | Up to 10 |
| Pro | $79/seat/month | $99/seat/month | Unlimited |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Unlimited |
The seat price is only the first meter. Every plan carries allowances that tend to run out before the seats do.
| Plan | Seat credits per user/month | Workspace credits per month | Outbound emails per month | Reports |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 100 | 250 | 200 | Up to 3 |
| Plus | 500 | 1,500 | 1,000 | Up to 15 |
| Pro | 1,000 | 10,000 | Unlimited | Up to 100 |
| Enterprise | 2,500 | Custom | Unlimited | 100+ |
Attio’s own pricing FAQ says credits are “shared across our AI and workflows features”, with workspace credits covering all AI features including Ask Attio plus workflows, and seat credits covering Ask Attio personally. Your automations draw down the same balance your AI does.
Run the workspace pool dry and you buy more. An extra 5,000 credits a month costs $70 on annual billing and $85 monthly, 10,000 costs $120 and $150, and the largest pack of 50,000 runs $475 and $595.
Clarify pricing
Clarify’s page leads with “Unlimited seats on every plan. Pay for the work, not the headcount.” Here is what that costs.
| Plan | Credits per month | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Clarify’s own description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1,000 | $0 | $0 | Individuals and small teams |
| Starter | 5,000 | $40/mo | $50/mo | “Great for teams up to 3 people” |
| Starter | 10,000 | $80/mo | $100/mo | “Great for teams up to 4 people” |
| Starter | 20,000 | $160/mo | $200/mo | “Great for teams up to 6 people” |
| Starter | 40,000 | $320/mo | $400/mo | “Great for teams up to 10 people” |
| Growth | 100,000+ | From $1,000/mo | Not offered | Scaling teams |
Read that right-hand column again. The credit tiers are labelled by headcount, by Clarify, on Clarify’s own page. Buying more credits is what a bigger team is told to do, so headcount still sets the price, just through a different unit.
It is a clearer pricing page than most, and none of this is hidden. It does mean that not charging per seat and not letting headcount change your bill are two different claims, and only the first one holds.
Clarify publishes its rates, which helps. A meeting summary costs 30 credits and a campaign email costs 1, and meeting recording is never credit-gated, so the notetaker keeps working at a zero balance.
What Attio And Clarify Cost At 3, 10 And 15 People
Attio and Clarify both look affordable on a feature page, so here they are at three real sizes. Both are shown on annual billing.
Three people
| Attio | Monthly, billed annually |
|---|---|
| Free | $0, capped at 3 seats |
| Plus | $105 total, at $35/seat/month |
| Clarify | Monthly, billed annually |
|---|---|
| Free | $0, 1,000 credits |
| Starter, 5k credits | $40 total |
Attio is free for three people on seats, and that is where the sentence usually stops. A three-seat team fits the free plan comfortably and then hits the 200-email and 250-credit ceilings long before it runs out of seats.
Clarify Free gives the whole team 1,000 credits, or about 33 meeting summaries, before the AI features pause for the month.
Ten people
| Attio | Monthly, billed annually |
|---|---|
| Plus | $350 total, at the ten-seat ceiling |
| Pro | $790 total |
| Clarify | Monthly, billed annually |
|---|---|
| Starter, 40k credits | $320 total |
Ten is the number that matters, because both plans reach their ceiling there at once. Clarify’s Starter tops out at 40,000 credits, which its own page sizes at ten people. Attio Plus stops at ten seats.
Whichever meter you picked, the tenth hire is the one that puts you on the edge of it.
How many people will actually need a login next year, not this month? That number decides which meter suits you, and it is the one most teams guess at.
Fifteen people
Fifteen is where both plans have already run out, and the step up is steep on both sides.
Attio Plus stops at ten seats, so the eleventh hire moves you to Pro at $79/seat/month annual, which is $1,185 a month for fifteen. I went through the credit maths behind Attio’s seat price separately.
On Clarify the next plan above Starter is Growth, from $1,000 a month billed annually. Annual to annual that is a 3.1x step up from the $320 you were paying at the top of Starter.
Neither company hides any of this. They simply put the wall in different places, and crossing it costs a similar multiple either way. Clarify’s step from Starter to Growth is 3.1x, and on Attio the eleventh seat takes you from $350 to $869, which is 2.5x for one extra person.
That multiple is what the seat-versus-credit argument tends to obscure. To model what either one returns against the cost, the crm roi calculator does the arithmetic.
When Attio Is The Right Call, And When Clarify Is
The choice between Attio and Clarify is not really about features. Both cover the basics competently, and the decision comes down to which meter fits how your team actually works.
Buy Attio when the data model matters more than the data entry. If your business does not fit deals and contacts, if you need objects of your own, or if someone on the team will happily spend a weekend building workflows, Attio pays that back.
Its free plan holding three seats with email and calendar sync included is also the more generous entry point of the two.
Buy Clarify when most of your cost is meetings and most of your team barely types. A company with four salespeople and eight people who only look things up is the exact shape the credit model suits, because those eight cost nothing extra.
Where a configurable CRM tends to lose people is the daily grind rather than the capability. A CRM that is powerful and slow to use gets opened less, and the deals inside it decay while everyone means to get to them.
A G2 reviewer in IT services described what the other end of that feels like: “I don’t need to click a hundred times to perform a simple action, or constantly refer to support docs because basic features are buried ten layers deep.”
If you are weighing either one against a more conventional pipeline tool, Attio vs Pipedrive covers that ground and the best CRMs for startups is the wider field.
Why A Metered CRM Costs You Attention
Attio and Clarify are both priced to grow with you, so the bill moves when your team moves or your usage moves. You end up managing a meter either way, and watching a credit balance is attention your pipeline does not get.
That matters more than it sounds. Leads do not die because a CRM lacked a feature, they die on the days nobody opens it, and every minute spent thinking about allowances is a minute not spent working the list.
Fluid CRM is built the other way round. One plan, every feature in it, at $16/seat/month or $144/seat/year. There is a 7-day free trial and no credit card required.
The Fluid CRM MCP server shipped on 21 September 2026, which lets an AI assistant read and update the pipeline directly. Attio has had one since February, on its free plan.
The difference is on the meter. The AI client does the work, so there is nothing on the Fluid CRM side to bill for.
A Fluid CRM customer coordinates a European coaching network of around eighty coaches, and moved six pipelines and roughly 190 deals across from Attio. He runs seven pipelines now and automates his weekly reporting against the API.
That is the part he singles out: “having a complete REST API on every account, with no paywall, is exceptional for a tool in this price range.”
Two things Fluid CRM does not do matter for this choice. Email is logged by BCC, where Attio syncs your inbox and calendar both ways on its free plan.
There is also no AI notetaker sitting in your meetings. If that is the reason you are shopping, Fluid CRM is not the tool for it.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends on your ratio of people to AI usage. Clarify wins clearly when you have many light users who need a login but barely type. Attio wins when your headcount is small and your AI usage is heavy.
Yes. Attio Free covers up to three seats at no cost and includes email and calendar sync, 100 seat credits per user per month and 250 workspace credits. It is a real free plan rather than a trial, though the three-seat ceiling is firm and the 200-email monthly limit usually bites first.
Credits pay for the AI work: meeting prep, summaries, deal updates, follow-ups and workflow runs. Clarify prices a meeting summary at 30 credits and a campaign email at 1, so the 5,000-credit Starter tier covers roughly 166 meeting summaries a month across the whole team. When the balance hits zero the AI features pause until the next cycle, though meeting recording carries on regardless.
Five people sits inside Clarify’s 20,000-credit tier, which its page sizes at up to six people, for $160 a month annual or $200 monthly. The same five on Attio Plus is $175 a month annual. Pick Clarify if your week is meeting-heavy and you want the record kept for you, and Attio if you need the CRM shaped around a business that does not fit standard deals and contacts.
Both support CSV import and export, so contacts, companies and deals travel without much trouble. What does not travel is the structure. Custom objects, workflows and any reporting you built in Attio have to be rebuilt, and that is usually the part that takes the week.
Attio Or Clarify: Which To Actually Buy
Pick Attio if you want to build the system yourself and you have someone who enjoys doing it. Pick Clarify if the meetings are the job and you want the typing to stop. Both are good at what they set out to do, and both will ask for more money at around the same point in your growth.
If what you want instead is a pipeline you open every morning with no credit balance to think about, that is what Fluid CRM is for.
Start your 7-day free trial here, no credit card required.