Migrate from Affinity to Attio without losing what matters
We help VC firms, PE shops, and relationship-driven teams migrate from Affinity to Attio. If you’re considering the switch, we’ll show you what migrates cleanly, what needs strategy, and how to avoid surprises.
Limited schema flexibility
Why teams move off Affinity
Affinity is a good tool for a specific job, but teams outgrow it in predictable ways.
- Affinity is good at what it does, but it's narrowly scoped. Once you need custom objects, deeper relational filtering, or integrations beyond what's available in their marketplace, you start hitting walls. The API has hard rate limits that make building anything ambitious pretty painful, especially if you're on a plan with only a few thousand monthly calls.
- Schema flexibility is extremely limited. If your business model doesn't fit the standard people-companies-opportunities structure, there's not a lot of room to customize.
- It's way too expensive. We've talked to firms paying $60k+ a year on Affinity who can get equivalent, or better, functionality on Attio's Pro plan for a fraction of that. The math makes the migration easily pay for itself within the first few months.
- The bandwagon trend. The VC space has been one of the biggest sources of Attio adoption. We see it every month. Deal flow management, portfolio tracking, LP relationships. These are all things Attio handles well once the schema is set up correctly.
The full picture
What the migration involves
Every Affinity workspace is different, but the data categories are consistent. Here's how each one translates.
| What's different | How we handle it | |
|---|---|---|
| Email & Calendar Caveats | What's different Both systems capture email and calendar through connected inboxes, but Attio doesn't support importing email history via API. History comes in through native sync when users connect their accounts, but only for users with a seat in Attio. | How we handle it Active employees’ email history will reappear once they connect their inbox—Attio backfills prior correspondence automatically. The risk is departed employees: if someone has left and their mailbox is disconnected or no longer exists, that email history won’t come back. To preserve some continuity, we typically export interaction metadata into Attio as notes (or, if preferred, a custom “Activity” object). However, Affinity’s API only provides metadata (date/time, participants, subject line), not the email body, so this can’t fully recreate the original threads. |
| Companies Direct mapping | What's different Affinity provides third-party sources, as well as a proprietary enrichment source, for firmographic data. Attio auto-enriches companies on creation (Clearbit, Crunchbase, FullContact) and deduplicates on domain. | How we handle it Custom fields come over as attributes. Attio's enrichment is sometimes a sufficient replacement for Affinity's native enrichment, but some teams choose to leverage additional 3rd party sources as well. The migration and implementation needs vary on a case-by-case basis. |
| People Direct mapping | What's different Affinity supports multi-company associations natively (so a single person can be linked to multiple companies with role context on each), while Attio's out-of-the-box configuration is a one-to-many relationship between People and Companies. | How we handle it For most firms the "primary company" association is sufficient. If you have advisors, board members, or people spanning multiple portfolio companies, we recommend a custom attribute to represent that relationship. |
| Deals / Opportunities Direct mapping | What's different Some Affinity teams use proper Opportunity records, while others track deal flow through lists of companies. Attio has dedicated Deal objects with pipeline views and stage-based automations. | How we handle it We generally recommend translating lists of companies into Attio's Deal object for better pipeline visibility and reporting. If your deal flow is tracked entirely through list membership today, this is a workflow shift to plan for. |
| Lists Direct mapping | What's different Lists are a core organizational layer in both Affinity and Attio, and most teams accumulate a lot of them (events, networking, deal flow by vintage, LP tracking). The main difference is that Attio can also have lists of custom objects, not just People, Companies, or Deals. Both platforms support custom attributes on lists, plus dynamic filtering and manual curation. | How we handle it Most Affinity lists migrate directly to Attio lists (including list-level attributes). When a “list” is really just a label, it may be cleaner to model it as a tag or an attribute instead. Either way, we recommend using the migration as a cleanup moment: archive stale or temporary lists, consolidate duplicates, and avoid importing everything blindly. |
| Notes Caveats | What's different Affinity notes can attach to multiple records simultaneously, but Attio notes attach to a single record. | How we handle it For the migration process, we typically attach multi-person notes to the company as the canonical record and include participants in the body. We also add metadata (for example, the original creator name) into the note text, because Attio does not allow you to assign a "creator" of the note. The original created date is preserved during the migration. |
| Reminders Optional | What's different Affinity calls them reminders, Attio calls them tasks (with due dates, assignees, and record associations). | How we handle it We can bring these over, but many clients either skip them entirely, or choose to only bring over recent reminders. |
| Enrichment & AI Fields Caveats | What's different Affinity includes proprietary, auto-populated enrichment fields (Affinity Data) layered on top of the CRM. It’s generally solid, but the important nuance is ownership: those fields are tied to Affinity’s enrichment product and its underlying data providers. Attio also provides native enrichment on People and Companies (and keeps enriched attributes updated), and you can extend coverage via marketplace apps or custom integrations. | How we handle it We usually do not migrate Affinity’s proprietary enrichment attributes. Once you’re no longer in Affinity, that enrichment source is effectively gone, and the imported values will start going stale immediately. Instead, we rely on Attio’s built-in enrichment to repopulate the baseline fields, then layer in any additional enrichment tools you plan to keep long-term (e.g., Apollo/Clay/Harmonic) so the data stays fresh and supportable. |
| Files & Attachments Caveats | What's different Affinity auto-extracts email attachments and stores them directly on records. In Attio, attachments show up in the activity stream once inboxes are connected, but they aren’t pulled into the record’s Files tab—so they’re slightly less searchable. Our recommendation is to use Attio’s native storage integrations (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox) to link a source folder to each record and transition file management there going forward. | How we handle it We export all files from Affinity, organize them by company in your file storage, and link those directories to company records in Attio. Most clients prefer this because files live in a system you control (visible inline from Attio) rather than being locked inside the CRM. |
API limits: If you're on a plan with limited monthly API calls, a migration export can consume most (or all) of that allocation. The migration approach is worth confirming before kickoff.
Repeatable, automated, low-risk
Our Affinity to Attio migration playbook
We run migrations with a standardized playbook backed by robust internal tooling. That’s how we keep timelines short while staying rigorous about data integrity, verification, and cutover.
A few things to understand up front:
- We upsert using Affinity’s legacy IDs. Imports are keyed on Affinity record IDs, not Attio identifiers like email or domain. This preserves relationships, lets us run multiple passes without creating duplicates, and makes completeness checks deterministic. You can’t replicate this with Attio’s CSV import, so we use custom tooling and improve it every time.
- We merge at the end. Merging records removes legacy IDs. If we merge early, we lose our upsert keys and our ability to verify that the final import is complete. Our sequence is: import everything, confirm coverage, then merge.
- The first import is intentionally “static.” We bring over all data and validate structure, but we don’t wire up file linking, reporting, or integrations yet because the workspace is still evolving and you’d end up redoing that work.
Planning note: we recommend starting ~60 days before your Affinity renewal/termination date. That gives enough time to migrate, train, and stabilize before you have to give notice.
The migration workflow
1. Attribute audit
We pull every field, list, and custom attribute from Affinity via API and produce a spreadsheet with type, location, and sample values. You decide what stays and what gets retired.
2. Schema build and static import
We script the Attio schema, then run a full static import. You review the data in Attio, validate the model, and give feedback.
3. Configuration, training, and feedback
We set up lists, views, reports, and the integrations you need on day one. The team connects inboxes/calendars (email history starts backfilling), and we help them configure email-sharing preferences (full visibility, metadata-only, or existence-only), which maps cleanly to Affinity’s tiers.
4. Final cutover
We schedule a short blackout window (often Sunday), run a fresh Affinity export, and upsert into Attio to capture all changes since the static import. Legacy IDs remain intact so we can verify completeness across objects.
5. Deduplication and merge
After we confirm the final import, we dedupe and merge records, clean up edge cases, and finalize the workspace. At that point, Attio becomes the source of truth.
6. Phase two (optional)
Anything that isn’t required for day one: additional integrations, deeper automation, and advanced reporting. Most teams run Attio for a few weeks before scoping this, and we can support it ongoing if it’s useful.
Timeline: typically 2–4 weeks from kickoff to go-live if the attribute audit and training scheduling move quickly.
Ready to migrate?
Book a 30-minute discovery call and we’ll sanity-check your schema, flag the data risks (email history, attachments, interactions), and outline a cutover plan.