The CRM Market Collapsed Into Two Things

If you go looking for a CRM in 2024 — really looking, not just clicking the first sponsored result — you eventually arrive at the same conclusion everyone arrives at: there are two options, and then there is HubSpot, and then there is Salesforce, and then there is a graveyard of products that want to be one of those four things but aren't.

Pipedrive is the one that's been around long enough to feel safe. Pipeline-first, visually obvious, priced for humans — it became the answer people give when the question is "we need to track deals without hiring a Salesforce admin." This is a low bar, and Pipedrive clears it. It's the product that exists because someone looked at Salesforce and thought: what if we only kept the part that actually matters. They were right. That was the correct thought to have.

Attio is the more interesting bet. It launched in 2019 — during the golden age of "we're rebuilding [X] for modern teams," a phrase that meant nothing and sometimes meant everything — and it seems to be one of the cases where they actually meant it. The pitch is that your CRM should be as flexible as a spreadsheet without being a spreadsheet, that contacts and companies and deals should be objects you can model like a database, that the tool should wrap around how you work instead of the other way around. Whether that turns out to be right or just sounds right is the question.

The Attio homepage video is worth the two minutes. Not because it reveals something surprising, but because it's one of the few product demos that doesn't make you feel like you're watching a hostage situation.

What's notable is that the conversation around replacing HubSpot and Salesforce has quietly narrowed to just these two names. Not a dozen names with a comparison chart — two names, full stop. HubSpot and Salesforce didn't lose because they got worse. They got bought by their own surface area, buried under features that serve the enterprise deal and not the person actually logging calls. The replacement market exists because software can forget who it's for, and these two remembered.

Which one you pick depends on whether you want the thing that works reliably in a familiar way, or the thing that might change how you think about the problem. Pipedrive is the former. Attio is trying to be the latter.

Both of them are, at minimum, real software built by people who apparently use software. That is not nothing.