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Attio is the modern, fast, Notion-influenced CRM that B2B SaaS teams are picking when HubSpot starts feeling rigid. It's also easy to break in the first month — wrong workspace name, wrong currency, wrong member roles, wrong billing seat plan. Here is the setup sequence that holds up.
Who this is forFounders, RevOps leads, and ops generalists opening a fresh Attio workspace — or anyone who created an account, invited five teammates, and now has no idea who can see what. If you are about to migrate from HubSpot or Pipedrive and want Attio to start clean, this is the first tutorial.
What you'll need
Step 1
Workspace name, default time zone, currency, and locale are workspace-wide defaults. Changing them after data exists creates reporting headaches forever.
Open Attio → click your workspace name (top-left) → Workspace settings → General.
Set the Workspace name (this shows up in every email notification, share link, and integration). Use the actual company name, not "Test" or "Trial."
Set the Default time zone. Attio uses this for "Created at," "Last interaction," workflow timing, and report rollups. Pick the time zone your sales motion runs in, not where your ops lead happens to live.
Workspace settings → Billing → Currency. Set your primary currency now. Deal values, MRR fields, and number formatting all flow from this. Switching later requires reformatting historical records.
Workspace settings → General → Locale and number format. Pick once. Mixed locales across users cause comma-vs-period confusion on imported CSVs forever.
Step 2
Workspace logo and favicon show up in every notification email, public share link, and the in-app sidebar. Five minutes here saves trust later.
Workspace settings → General → Workspace icon. Upload a square logo (256x256 minimum). This becomes the icon in the top-left sidebar.
Workspace settings → General → Favicon. Upload a 32x32 favicon. This is the browser-tab icon teammates stare at all day.
Workspace settings → Workspace URL. Customize the slug (e.g. `acme.attio.com`). Cannot be reused after deletion, so pick once.
Workspace settings → Email settings → Sender name. Set this to a real person ("Sarah from Acme") rather than "Attio Notifications." Increases reply rates on system emails.
Step 3
Attio has Workspace roles (Admin / Member / Limited Member) plus per-object access control. Picking the wrong default creates either bottlenecks or data leaks.
Workspace settings → Members → understand the three tiers before inviting: Admin (full control including billing, members, and all data), Member (full data access, no admin), Limited Member (restricted access — only what you explicitly grant).
Workspace settings → Permissions (Plus / Pro tier) → set object-level access. Decide upfront who can edit Companies, Deals, People, and any custom objects.
For sales reps: usually Member with restricted edit on Workflows, Reports, and Workspace settings. They can write to People/Companies/Deals but cannot rewrite the underlying schema.
For ops / RevOps: Admin. For executives who only need read access: Limited Member with read on the objects they care about.
Do not default everyone to Admin "to keep things moving." Admins can delete attributes, archive objects, and rewrite workflows — within 60 days someone will accidentally archive an attribute three workflows depend on.
Step 4
Attio bills per active member on Plus / Pro tiers. Send invites once you have roles ready, not before — every accepted invite is a billed seat.
Workspace settings → Members → Invite members.
Enter email, assign role (Admin / Member / Limited Member), and assign any Teams (Plus / Pro tier) — useful for ownership defaults and reporting filters.
Confirm the seat math against your plan. Plus is roughly $34/seat/month annual; Pro is roughly $69/seat/month annual as of 2026. A 10-person team on Pro is ~$8,300/year — easy to over-buy.
Send the invite. Recipients get an email with a magic link. Stale invites do not consume a seat until accepted.
After they accept, log in as Admin and verify their actual access matches what you intended. Pretend-to-be-them: open a Person record they should not be able to edit and confirm they cannot.
Step 5
Attio sends notifications across email, Slack, and in-app. Set the defaults once so every member starts with sane settings.
Workspace settings → Notifications → Default channels. Pick which workspace-wide events go to email vs in-app vs Slack.
Settings → Integrations → Slack. Connect once at the workspace level. Then individual members can subscribe to specific lists, workflows, or record changes.
Personal profile → Notifications. Each member can override the workspace default — but the workspace default is what new hires inherit. Set it conservatively (in-app + Slack, email only for @mentions).
Email settings → Email sending domain (Pro). Add your sending domain and authenticate with DNS records (SPF, DKIM). Without this, Attio-sent emails (sequences, manual sends from a record) can land in spam within weeks.
Step 6
Workspace settings → Integrations is where the platform gets compounding value. Enable thoughtfully — every connected app is data flowing in and out.
Workspace settings → Integrations. Browse the native integration list: Gmail / Outlook for email + calendar, Slack for notifications, Linear / Notion for product workflows, Zapier / Make for general automation.
Install only what you need now. Every integration is a permission grant and a data flow you will own forever. Disconnect anything trial.
For Gmail / Outlook specifically: connect at the user level (each rep authorizes their own inbox), not just the workspace. Without per-user inbox connection, Attio cannot log emails or sync calendar events for that rep.
For Slack: install the workspace integration first, then have each member opt-in to the channels and events they care about. Default-everyone-to-everything is how teams end up muting Slack notifications.
For more, see the API + integrations tutorial in this series.
Common mistakes
Inviting the whole team before defining roles + object permissions
What goes wrong: Every rep gets default Member permissions, which include edit access on Workflows and the data schema. Within 60 days an SDR renames a critical attribute, breaking three reports. You are paying $69/seat/month on Pro across 8 seats and the data trust is already fragile.
How to avoid: Set roles + object-level permissions (Workspace settings → Permissions) before inviting. Even on the free plan, decide who is Admin vs Member before sending the invite.
Skipping the email sending domain authentication
What goes wrong: Emails sent from Attio (sequences, individual record sends) start landing in spam after two or three weeks. Reps assume Attio is broken and revert to native Gmail — losing logging, threading, and analytics. You are paying for Pro but rep adoption drops to 30% after three months.
How to avoid: Workspace settings → Email settings → Sending domain → authenticate via DNS records (SPF, DKIM, optionally DMARC). Takes 20 minutes and prevents months of deliverability decay.
Leaving the time zone wrong because nobody noticed
What goes wrong: Default workspace time zone is whatever the creator's browser said. Your team is on the West Coast; the creator was in London. Every report rolls up eight hours off. Workflow timers fire at 3 AM. Compounding small confusions everywhere.
How to avoid: Workspace settings → General → set workspace time zone before inviting users. Each user can also set their own personal time zone for views.
Buying Pro seats for everyone "just in case"
What goes wrong: You give every teammate (sales, marketing, ops, exec) a Pro seat. That's 10 seats × ~$69/month = ~$700/month. Six months later, only four use workflows and reports — the rest could be on Plus or Limited Member. You have burned $3-4K on unused seat capability.
How to avoid: Start with Pro seats only for ops + active reps. Add seats as people clearly need them. Audit seat usage quarterly via Workspace settings → Billing.
Mixing currencies on Deal values without setting workspace primary
What goes wrong: Some reps log deals in USD, some in EUR, some in GBP — Attio does not auto-convert. Total pipeline value reports are meaningless. Forecast accuracy collapses. RevOps spends Saturdays manually normalizing currencies in CSV exports.
How to avoid: Workspace settings → Billing → Currency: pick a primary currency. Train reps to convert at deal-creation time. For multi-currency businesses, add a custom "Deal currency" attribute and a workflow to normalize to primary on a known FX rate.
Installing every integration in week one
What goes wrong: You connect Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Linear, Notion, Zapier, Make, and three custom webhooks on day one. Three are duplicates. Each is silently writing attributes. By month two the Person record has 14 custom attributes nobody set up intentionally.
How to avoid: Install one integration per week. Test each end-to-end before adding the next. Disconnect trials immediately.
Recap
Done — what's next
How to set up the Attio data model without making a mess
Read the next tutorial
Hand it off
A clean Attio workspace setup pays compounding dividends. A messy one creates a Saturday-cleanup job every quarter. A vetted Attio specialist will run the entire setup — defaults, branding, permissions, integrations — typically as a one-shot $300-600 engagement, or ongoing ops support at $400-1,200/month at $14-16/hr.
See specialist rates
The Free plan is genuinely usable for the first three to six months for small teams. You get unlimited users (limited collaborators), basic objects, and the core data model. You pay for Plus when you need workflows, sequences, more custom attributes, and Reports; Pro adds advanced permissions, SSO, audit logs, and email sending domain. Start free; upgrade when a specific feature gates real work.
Attio is built around a flexible, Notion-influenced data model — every object (Companies, People, Deals, custom) is essentially a customizable database that talks to other objects. UI is faster and more keyboard-driven than HubSpot or Salesforce. The tradeoff: fewer out-of-the-box opinions, smaller integration marketplace, less marketing-automation depth. Strongest fit for B2B SaaS teams who want sales/CRM ops without marketing-suite bloat.
Yes. Attio supports CSV imports for any object and has a guided HubSpot importer (Workspace settings → Imports → HubSpot) that preserves Companies, People, and Deal data. For larger or more complex migrations (10,000+ records, lots of activity history, custom objects), use a specialist. See the dedicated `migrate-from-hubspot-to-attio` tutorial in this series.
Member has full access to records and editing on objects where they have permission — the default for sales reps and most teammates. Limited Member is restricted by default — they only see what you explicitly grant. Use Limited Member for executives who want read-only dashboards, external consultants, or anyone who should not be able to bulk-edit data. Limited Member is a Plus/Pro feature.
A solo founder with no team can finish the workspace-level setup in 2-3 hours. A 5-person team with role design, integrations, and a documented data model is 1-2 days of focused work. A 20+ person organization with custom objects, multi-team permissions, and a migration from another CRM is a 1-3 week project — usually run by a specialist.
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