Spiro vs Attio (2026)

TL;DR

• Spiro is built for manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors: automatic activity capture, ERP-connected order and reorder intelligence, route planning, and territory management. Roughly $70/user/month, typically quoted near $1,500 per user per year, 15-user minimum, implementation from about $5,000, no free trial.
• Attio is a general-purpose CRM that auto-builds people and companies from email and calendar and lets you define your own objects. Free for up to 3 users, $35/user/month on Plus (capped at 10 users), $79 on Pro, Enterprise custom.
• The deciding question is industry, not preference. Spiro is explicitly the wrong tool outside manufacturing and distribution; Attio has no reorder-pattern intelligence to offer a distributor.

What each one is actually watching

Spiro's premise is that reps at distributors will not log calls, so the system captures activity from email, calls, and the ERP itself, then tells reps which accounts need attention. The failure mode it exists to prevent is specific and expensive: a large repeat customer quietly stops ordering and nobody notices for a quarter. Reorder patterns, account health for repeat-purchase businesses, order history, and inventory context are the whole product.

Attio watches your inbox and calendar instead. It builds and enriches contact and company records automatically, then hands you a spreadsheet-like surface where you define fields, views, filters, and templates without a developer. Multiple people can edit a record simultaneously. It is a system of record you mold, not a vertical opinion you adopt.

Neither approach substitutes for the other. Attio has no concept of your ERP's order book; Spiro has no ambition to serve a VC firm or a recruiting team.

Pricing structures that barely rhyme

Attio's model has two meters. Seats are the visible one: free for three users, $35 on Plus billed annually ($44 monthly), $79 on Pro ($99 monthly). The second meter is credits, which fund enrichment and AI actions — 250 workspace credits a month on Free, 1,500 on Plus, 10,000 on Pro, with top-up blocks from $70/month for +5,000 up to $475 for +50,000. A workflow-heavy small team can spend more on credits than on seats.

Attio's other trap is the Plus cap at ten users. The eleventh person moves the entire workspace to Pro, taking a bill from $350 to $869 a month. If you are at eight or nine and hiring, budget Pro now.

Spiro does not publish tiers. Its own figures do not fully reconcile either — twelve months at $70 is $840, while the reported annual quote is near $1,500 per user, a 79% gap. Ask for the annual per-user contract rate in writing rather than budgeting from the monthly headline. On top of that sit the 15-user annual minimum and implementation from around $5,000, which is dominated by whatever it takes to connect your ERP.

The ERP integration is the project

Any manufacturing CRM rollout is an integration project wearing a CRM costume. Spiro's intelligence needs to see orders, inventory positions, and pricing; without that feed the recommendations have nothing to reason about. The $5,000 starting figure assumes a clean connection. A heavily customized ERP, an older on-premise system, or several systems inherited across acquisitions will push it up, and that scope belongs in the conversation before licenses are signed.

Attio's equivalent work is lighter but not zero. The repo's own caveat is that deep customization takes trial and error, and the email experience is strongest on Google Workspace. You are trading a defined integration project for an open-ended modeling exercise you run yourself.

Evaluation: try it versus talk to sales

Attio's free plan is a real plan, not a countdown — three users, contact syncing, enrichment, no card. There is no seat minimum either, so a solo operator can run Plus at $35 a month. You can form an opinion before anyone calls you.

Spiro offers no free trial at all, and there is a defensible reason: an empty instance cannot demonstrate reorder intelligence, because the intelligence is entirely about your order history. The workable substitute is a proof of concept against six months of your own data. A vendor confident in the pattern detection should agree to it, and reluctance is itself informative.

Where the money makes sense

At roughly $1,500 per user per year plus setup, Spiro is priced for mid-sized manufacturers with ten to fifty sellers and enough repeat revenue that one missed reorder is a financial event. Below the minimum, the implementation fee swamps the license line — a small deployment can spend 40% of year one on setup. Comparing that per-seat number to a $35 horizontal CRM misreads what is being bought: the comparison is against the cost of making a general CRM understand order patterns.

Attio's economics favor small, technical, fast-moving teams — startups, VC firms, agencies, ops-led groups escaping HubSpot's bloat or Salesforce's rigidity. Its weaknesses are the ten-user cliff and the credit meter turning a predictable seat bill into a usage bill.

Who should pick what

• Distributors and industrial suppliers with ERP-driven repeat revenue → Spiro, and scope the ERP integration first.
• Startups, VCs, recruiters, and ops teams under ten people → Attio Plus, or the free tier while you decide.
• Manufacturing teams under 15 sellers → not Spiro; the minimum and setup cost rule it out. A general CRM plus ERP reporting is the pragmatic fallback.
• Teams that want to model their own objects and views → Attio.
• Buyers who insist on hands-on evaluation before committing budget → Attio; Spiro has nothing to trial.
• Businesses selling one-off deals rather than repeat orders → Attio, since Spiro's vertical premium buys nothing without a reorder pattern.

Bottom line

If you manufacture or distribute, run on an ERP, and lose money when accounts go quiet, Spiro solves a problem no horizontal CRM addresses without custom work — provided you clear the 15-user minimum and treat the ERP connection as the real budget line. Everyone else should be looking at Attio, where the free tier, single-seat pricing, and flexible data model make it easy to start and easy to reshape. Model Attio's credit burn and the ten-user cliff before committing, and get Spiro's annual per-user rate in writing before believing the monthly number.