Affinity to Attio migration: Why fund managers are making the switch
If you run an investment fund and you are weighing up whether to move from Affinity to Attio, the short answer is that most firms make the switch for three reasons. Affinity struggles to model the relationships between investors, entities and trusts.
Its data model is rigid once you push past simple deal tracking. And the cost climbs quickly under an annual, per-seat contract. Crawl Walk Run (CWR), Australia's first certified Attio Expert partner, has run these migrations end to end, including a move of more than 80,000 records for Melbourne fund manager River Capital.
Here is what is actually driving the shift, and how an Affinity to Attio migration works in practice.
What Affinity does well, and where it starts to strain
It is worth being fair to Affinity before we get into the nuts and bolts. As a relationship intelligence tool, it is genuinely strong. It passively captures your email and calendar activity, maps who in your firm knows whom, and surfaces warm introductions without anyone typing a thing. For a deal team focused on sourcing, that is a real capability.
The strain shows up when a boutique fund tries to use Affinity as the core CRM for the whole business, not just deal sourcing. One Melbourne fund manager described it to us neatly: Affinity is set up more for the deal team than as a CRM for investor relations, so you end up trying to make a system work for you that was not structured to do what you need. Once you are managing investors, holdings, book builds, transactions and reporting in one place, the gaps become hard to ignore.
Problem 1: Affinity struggles with complex relationships between data points
Fund managers live in a web of relationships. A single investor might sit inside a family office, hold units through one or more trusts, have participated in several past book builds, and hold positions across multiple funds. To do their job, your team needs to see all of that on one record, at a glance.
Affinity is built around lists, and lists are flat. Relating an investor cleanly to their entities, trusts, holdings and past raises is difficult, so the information ends up scattered across separate lists with no single, connected view. To give you a bit of an idea: before their migration, one customer we worked with had each book build living as its own list. There was no consolidation, so seeing an investor's past participation at a glance meant a lot of manual cross-referencing. We see the same pattern elsewhere. A Singapore-based venture capital firm we are working with had notes split across Affinity and Notion, with a weak link between the two, so the full context on a company was never in one place.
This is where Attio's custom objects change things. Rather than forcing everything into flat lists, we model the entities that matter to your firm as proper, related objects. The nuts and bolts of it: an investor record can show associated entities, book builds and transactions directly, so past participation in a raise sits on the person record without muddying their current holdings.
Problem 2: Affinity's data model is rigid
The deeper issue is flexibility. With Affinity, you tend to adapt your workflow to the tool rather than shape the tool around your firm. Modelling entities, trusts, book builds and transactions as first-class objects is not straightforward, which is limiting for a fund whose whole operation runs on those structures.
Two specific frustrations come up again and again. The first is that deal lists and the master investor database are not cleanly independent. A Melbourne property investment group we spoke with raised this directly: when a deal list is drawn from the main investor database and the two are coupled, editing the deal list risks changing the master record. Strip a family office back to two contacts for a particular raise, and you do not want those other six contacts disappearing from the core database.
The second is enrichment you cannot control. Affinity's automatic enrichment will sometimes overwrite your own fields with values that are simply wrong, and correcting it is awkward. The same firm told us they had investors whose location had been auto-filled as a city on the other side of the world, so they had given up and rebuilt their own fields to stop the system overriding them.
In Attio, you keep control. Custom objects let you model your world as it actually is, out-of-the-box enrichment still runs, and you can always override an enriched value with your own. What I'd normally suggest is designing that data model up front, so the structure scales with the firm rather than fighting it later.
Problem 3: the cost, and the contract that comes with it
Affinity sits at the premium end of the market, and it does not publish its pricing. It is quote-based, charged per user per year, with seat minimums and annual contracts. Public reviews commonly report figures from around US$2,000 to US$2,700 per user per year, which puts a team of five to fifteen in the region of US$12,000 to US$45,000 a year before implementation. For Australian firms there is an added sting: those prices are in US dollars, so you wear the exchange rate on top.
The structure works against exactly what a growing fund wants to do. The per-seat model penalises adding users, so getting the whole team onto the system, the investor relations group, the deal team, management, becomes a budgeting exercise rather than a quick decision. And an annual lock-in leaves little flexibility if the fit is not right. More than one fund manager has told us the cost was the thing holding them back from rolling Affinity out across the business.
Attio publishes its pricing, sits materially lower per seat, and also offers monthly billing options. To be honest about the trade-off: if your firm is large, well funded, and your entire pipeline runs on warm introductions, Affinity's relationship graph can justify the spend. For a boutique SMB fund, the maths usually points the other way.
Affinity vs Attio at a glance
| Consideration | Affinity | Attio |
|---|---|---|
| Core Strength | Relationship intelligence and deal sourcing | Flexible CRM you shape around your firm |
| Data Model | List-based, flat structure | Custom objects with rich relationships |
| Modelling Entities, Trusts & Book Builds | Difficult | First-class objects |
| Enrichment Control | Can overwrite your fields, awkward to correct | Runs automatically, can be overridden, with custom AI enrichment attributes |
| Pricing Model | Per seat, per year, seat minimums | Published per-seat pricing with a lower entry point |
| Contract | Annual, quote-based, USD pricing | Transparent pricing with annual or month-to-month options |
| Best Suited To | Large, well-funded dealmaking teams | Boutique funds, VC and PE firms wanting flexibility and AI |
The River Capital migration
River Capital is a multi-asset boutique fund manager based in Melbourne, managing capital across public and private markets. Their operations involve complex relationships between investors, entities and trusts, and in Affinity that data was siloed. Tracking holdings and recent transactions at a glance was difficult, which slowed decision-making and made comprehensive reporting harder than it should have been.
CWR planned and delivered a full Affinity to Attio migration built around a data model tailored to fund management. We created custom objects for Entities, Bookbuilds, Transactions and Trusts, with proper relationships back to investors, which resolved the visibility problems they had lived with in Affinity. We migrated more than 80,000 records, including people, organisations, holdings lists, bookbuild data and transaction histories, matching on unique identifiers such as email addresses and investor IDs, and running a test migration on a subset before the full production load.
From there we built workflows for book builds and transactions, designed intuitive investor views and forms, and integrated email, OneDrive and call recording. A recorded administrator training session left the team able to manage and extend Attio themselves. Post-migration, River Capital can see associated entities, book builds and transactions directly on a person record, which means real-time visibility of holdings and transactions, less time hunting for information, and an improved investor experience. You can read the full River Capital case study here. [link]
How an Affinity to Attio migration actually works
A migration like this is very doable, but the order of operations matters. What I'd normally suggest is this sequence:
Design the future-state data model first. We map how you use Affinity today and how you want to operate, then agree the object structure in Attio before any data moves.
Export the core records. People, organisations and holdings export cleanly enough, though people data usually needs reshaping into separate columns before it will import.
Handle the notes carefully. Notes are the trickiest part. Affinity attaches them in a way that takes work to export and relink to the right people and companies. This is the step most DIY migrations come unstuck on.
Match and test. We match on unique identifiers such as email and investor ID, then run a test migration on a subset to confirm accuracy before the full load.
Build, integrate and train. We set up workflows, views and integrations, then train your team so they can run and extend the system themselves.
To give you a bit of an idea on timing: most firms are up and running within two to four weeks, and a migration-only engagement can be done in a week or two.
Is Attio the right Affinity alternative for your firm?
Attio is a strong fit if you are a boutique fund or a VC or PE firm that wants to model your own world, keep costs sensible, and lean on AI for research and automation. If the one thing you cannot live without is Affinity's proprietary relationship-strength scoring and warm-intro graph, weigh that carefully, because those scores are proprietary and do not migrate. For most Australian boutique funds we speak with, the flexibility and cost of Attio win out.
Frequently asked Attio questions
Can you migrate notes from Affinity to Attio?
Yes. Notes are the trickiest part of the move, because Affinity stores them in a way that needs work to export and relink to the right people and companies, but it is a step we handle on every migration.
How long does an Affinity to Attio migration take?
Most firms are up and running within two to four weeks. If you only need the data moved across, a migration-only engagement can be completed in a week or two.
Is Attio cheaper than Affinity?
Generally yes by a wide margin. Attio publishes its per-seat pricing and sits well below Affinity's quote-based annual contracts, which commonly run from around US$2,000 per user per year with seat minimums.
Is Attio a good CRM for venture capital and fund managers?
Yes. Its custom objects suit the way funds work, letting you model investors, entities, trusts, book builds and transactions as related records, and its AI research tools help with diligence and investor relations.
What happens to my Affinity lists?
We usually rebuild list-based processes as custom objects in Attio. That gives you stronger relationships between records and cleaner reporting than flat lists allow.
Who can help me migrate from Affinity to Attio in Australia?
CWR, Australia's first certified Attio Expert partner, based in Sydney and serving clients across Australia and APAC, plans and runs Affinity to Attio migrations end to end.
