How long does an Attio migration take? Real timelines for 2026

The data transfer takes hours. The migration takes weeks. Most teams plan for the first number and lose three weeks to the second one.

Attio's own median implementation runs about 16 days. Most public partner timelines land between 2 and 6 weeks, with smaller projects in the 2-week range and Salesforce rebuilds at the high end. The honest answer for 90% of teams is 2 to 4 weeks from kickoff to a workspace the team uses without a partner in the room.

This post breaks the timeline down by source CRM, by team size, by phase, and by what actually moves the dates.

The short answer

Three variables decide where you land in those ranges:

1. Number of custom objects with real relationships. Two is fast. Five with cross-links adds a week.
2. Automation count. Five rules port in an afternoon. Thirty take a full week to rebuild and test.
3. Team size and rollout method. Training one team of 5 in a single session is one hour. Training 50 people across sales, success, and ops in role-specific sessions adds 3 to 5 days.

Everything else is a smaller adjustment around these three.

What every Attio migration actually contains

The technical migration is one phase of five. Skipping any of the others is the most common reason a project that "should take a week" runs three.

Most teams budget for phase 2 and skip the cost of the other four. Phase 2 is the one Import2 ships in hours. Phases 1, 3, and 5 are where the real time goes.

Timeline by source CRM

Pipedrive to Attio: 1 to 3 weeks

The fastest mainstream migration. Pipedrive's data model is close to Attio's: People, Organizations, Deals, Activities. Field types map cleanly. Automations are usually simple.

A clean Pipedrive migration for a 10-person sales team:

• Day 1. Audit Pipedrive, decide which fields and pipelines to keep.
• Day 2. Run Import2 sample migration. Review in Attio. Adjust mappings.
• Day 3. Run full migration. Spot-check 20 records.
• Days 4 to 7. Rebuild pipeline statuses, saved views, 5 to 10 automations.
• Days 8 to 10. Connect Gmail and Slack. Train the team. Cutover.

Two weeks end-to-end is the common landing spot. Smaller teams (under 5) finish in 5 to 7 working days.

For the full playbook, see the Pipedrive to Attio guide.

Close to Attio: 1 to 3 weeks

Same shape as Pipedrive. Close has a flatter data model and heavier email and call data. Import2 covers Companies, Contacts, Opportunities, Notes, and Tasks. Email and call recordings stay in Close.

Plan for an extra day on email handoff: connect Gmail to Attio early so new email threads land in the right place from day one. The full guide is in Close to Attio migration.

HubSpot to Attio: 2 to 4 weeks

The most common migration. Also the one most likely to slip.

HubSpot accounts that have been live for two or more years collect properties, lifecycle stages, deal pipelines, and workflows that no longer match how the team works. Moving everything verbatim makes Attio look like the old account in a different color. The data-model audit is what stretches the timeline, not the import.

Real numbers from public migrations:

• HubSpot to Attio averages 14 business days, with the data transfer itself taking 2 to 3 days and the rest going to workflow rebuild and training.
• A 25-person sales team with one custom object and 8 active workflows: 2.5 to 3 weeks.
• A 50-person team with three custom objects, 25+ workflows, and a marketing automation handoff: 4 to 6 weeks.

The marketing automation handoff is the hidden cost. HubSpot Marketing Hub does not migrate to Attio. If marketing emails, sequences, landing pages, or lead scoring are load-bearing, plan a parallel switch to Customer.io, Loops, or Mailchimp. That replacement project runs in parallel and adds 1 to 2 weeks of coordination time.

Full breakdown: HubSpot to Attio migration guide.

Salesforce to Attio: 4 to 8 weeks

The longest of the common migrations, and the one with the widest range.

Salesforce accounts carry more custom objects, more permission complexity, more legacy fields, and more legacy automations than any other source. The data transfer is still 2 to 4 days. The rest is the rebuild.

A reference point from a public case study: a 500-user media-tech company migrated from Salesforce to Attio in under 4 weeks, including pipelines, fields, workflows, and access control. That is the fast end of the range, with a partner running the project full-time.

A typical 50-seat Salesforce migration with 5 custom objects and 30+ workflows lands at 6 to 8 weeks.

What pulls Salesforce migrations long:

• Permission and role mapping. Salesforce profiles and permission sets do not have one-to-one Attio equivalents. Recreating role-based access takes 2 to 5 days on its own.
• Process Builder and Flow rebuilds. A complex Salesforce Flow can take a half-day to map out before it is rebuilt in Attio.
• Reporting parity. Salesforce reports are deeply customized. Rebuilding the 10 to 20 reports the team actually opens takes 2 to 4 days.
• Apex and integration sunset. Custom Apex triggers and AppExchange add-ons need replacements or graceful retirement.

Full guide: Salesforce to Attio migration.

Folk, Copper, Affinity, Zoho: 1 to 3 weeks

These migrations behave like Pipedrive: smaller data models, lighter automations. Import2 supports each. The variable is the data quality in the source, not the migration mechanics.

Greenfield, no CRM: 3 to 7 days

The fastest path. No legacy data, no opinions to unlearn. A solo founder or 5-person team can have Attio live, configured, and in daily use inside a working week.

The trap is over-building. Attio's flexibility tempts greenfield teams to design 8 custom objects on day one. Start with People, Companies, Deals. Add custom objects only after a real workflow demands them.

Timeline by team size

A partner shortens timelines roughly 30 to 50% on teams over 15 people, mostly by parallelizing the data model audit, the migration, and the integration work that a single internal admin runs sequentially.

For solo founders and teams under 5, the partner gain is smaller. The work is small enough that one focused person finishes inside a week.

A real week-by-week plan for a 15-person team migrating from HubSpot

This is the plan for the most common migration shape. Adjust for source CRM and team size.

Week 1: discovery and data model

• Days 1 to 2. Workshop with sales, success, and ops leads. Whiteboard the objects, fields, and relationships that should exist in Attio. Cut every legacy field nobody uses.
• Day 3. Decide on pipeline structure, deal stages, and naming conventions.
• Day 4. Build the empty Attio workspace: objects, fields, relationships, and pipeline statuses.
• Day 5. Run the Import2 sample migration. Review 20 records in Attio. Note any field-mapping fixes.

At the end of week 1, the workspace is shaped correctly and the team has signed off on the data model.

Week 2: full migration and rebuild

• Day 6. Run the full Import2 migration. Spot-check 50 records.
• Day 7. Run dedupe and cleanup pass. Search by domain for company duplicates, by email for people duplicates.
• Days 8 to 9. Rebuild the 5 to 10 automations the team actually uses. Skip the rest.
• Day 10. Build the 5 to 10 saved views and dashboards the team opens daily or weekly.

At the end of week 2, the workspace is functionally complete.

Week 3: integrations, training, cutover

• Day 11. Connect Gmail, Slack, calendar, and any other native integrations.
• Days 12 to 13. Train the team in two sessions: one for sales reps, one for managers and ops.
• Days 14 to 15. Parallel-run with HubSpot. Reps work in Attio, HubSpot stays read-only as a reference. Ops team triages questions in Slack.

End of week 3: cutover. HubSpot becomes archive. Keep read access for 30 to 60 days as cheap insurance, then cancel.

This plan assumes a focused 15-person team with one or two custom objects, moderate automation count, and no marketing automation handoff. Add a week for a heavier marketing handoff. Add a week for two or three more custom objects with relationships.

What slows the timeline

The same five things show up on every project that runs long.

1. No data-model decision before the import. The team imports everything because nobody decided what to keep. The new workspace looks like the old one. The cleanup pass takes longer than the migration.
2. Marketing automation discovered mid-project. HubSpot Marketing Hub or Salesforce Marketing Cloud is load-bearing for the business and nobody flagged it in scoping. A parallel project starts mid-migration.
3. Slow internal feedback. The data model needs sign-off from sales leadership. Sign-off takes a week instead of a day. The whole project shifts.
4. Custom object sprawl. What started as "two custom objects" became "actually five" once the team mapped real workflows. Each new object adds 1 to 3 days for fields, relationships, and automations.
5. Permission complexity, mostly on Salesforce. Role-based access takes 2 to 5 days to recreate properly. Skipping it leaves the workspace half-built for the team that needs the strictest access.

If a project runs over, one of these five is almost always the reason.

What speeds it up

• A focused project owner. One person, decision rights, inside the company. Migrations stall when there is no internal owner.
• Pre-decided data model. The audit and decisions happen before the technical work starts.
• Native integrations only, at first. Gmail, Slack, calendar. Custom integrations come after cutover, not before.
• A small set of must-have automations. Start with the 5 the team uses every day. Add the next 10 after a month in production.
• Parallel training. Train before cutover, not after. Reps who learn Attio while HubSpot is still live adopt faster.
• A partner who has shipped this exact migration before. A partner with 10 prior HubSpot to Attio projects skips the discovery work that costs an internal team a week.

DIY or with a partner: how each affects the timeline

For teams under 5, DIY is usually faster. The communication overhead with a partner outweighs the gain.

For teams between 5 and 50, a partner typically cuts the timeline by 30 to 50%, mostly by parallelizing work and skipping the discovery costs of a first migration. A 4-week DIY project becomes a 2-week partner project.

For teams over 50, a partner is the realistic path. The number of decisions, integrations, and trainings is too large for one internal admin to run sequentially.

For a full breakdown of cost, including partner pricing tiers, see Attio implementation cost.

When you can go live the same week

A few situations actually finish in 5 days:

• Greenfield team under 5 people. No legacy data, simple data model.
• Pipedrive migration under 10 users with 1 pipeline and a clean property list.
• Close migration under 10 users with no custom objects.
• Folk migration of any size.

Outside of these, plan for at least 2 weeks. The teams that try to compress further usually spend the saved time fixing the workspace in production.

What "go-live" actually means

Three definitions get conflated in migration planning. Pick the one that matches your project.

Most projects hit milestone 1 fast and call it a win. The actual milestone is number 3. Plan to it.

A specific number for your situation

The honest range:

• Solo founder or team of 2 to 3, no legacy CRM. 3 to 7 days.
• Small team (4 to 15) migrating from Pipedrive, Close, Folk, or Copper. 1 to 2 weeks.
• Small team (4 to 15) migrating from HubSpot. 2 to 3 weeks.
• Mid-size team (15 to 50) migrating from HubSpot or Salesforce. 3 to 6 weeks.
• Mid-market or enterprise team (50+) migrating from Salesforce. 6 to 12 weeks.

Anything outside these ranges is either a custom situation or a process problem worth investigating before the work starts.

How I run migrations

The two offers in the pricing page that match this post:

• The Attio Setup at $1,332. 1-day build for a small team that already knows what they want. 14 days of Slack support afterward. Right for a 4-to-15-person team migrating from Pipedrive or Close, or a greenfield setup.
• AI-Native Attio Sprint at $2,997. 7-day migration and rebuild from HubSpot, Pipedrive, Close, or Salesforce. 30 days of Slack support. Right for a 10-to-50-person team that wants the migration done in 1 week instead of 3 to 4.

The Sprint timeline of 7 days is faster than the typical partner range (2 to 4 weeks for the same shape of project) because the data model audit happens before day 1, the team trains in pre-recorded sessions, and the Claude skills automate the dedupe, enrichment, and cleanup work that usually takes a partner a week of manual time.

For a teardown of your current setup before you commit to anything, the free 48-hour audit is the fastest way to see what your specific timeline would look like.

Sources

• Attio: Migrate data from another CRM
• Attio: Onboarding your team
• Attio: Migrating your data
• Import2: Data migration to Attio
• Import2: Attio migration FAQs
• Iteratum: Attio CRM implementation guide
• Sideways CRM: Managed Attio migrations
• Novlini: Complete guide to seamless CRM migration with Attio
• Novlini: Jellysmack Salesforce-to-Attio case study
• Neon Deer Data Labs: Pipedrive to Attio migrations
• How They Grow: How Attio grows

Free audit of your Attio workspace

If you want a second pair of eyes on your Attio setup, I run a free 48-hour audit. You add me to your workspace as an Attio expert, no extra seat and no billing. I send back a one-page written teardown ranked by impact, the three highest-leverage fixes with the exact setting change, and a 5-minute Loom walking through the top fix. No call, no pitch. 5 slots a week.

Get your free Attio audit