Sideways CRM vs Craftt: an honest comparison of two Attio partners

Short answer: Sideways CRM and Craftt are both listed Attio expert partners, but they are not competing for the same job. Sideways CRM is the Attio partner for investors, advisors and brokers, at Advanced tier in Attio's directory with 5.0 from 20 reviews. Craftt is an AI-native Attio agency at Core tier with 5.0 from 16 reviews and 30 implementations, selling a published, flat-priced build — $2,500 for the full seven-day sprint — with six Claude agents included and a live-in-seven-business-days-or-you-don't-pay guarantee. Below is where each one is genuinely the better hire.

color:var(--color-text-heading)]">Disclosure. Craftt wrote this page, and we are one of the two options on it. So everything said about Sideways CRM here comes from their own website and their public [Attio expert directory listing, linked at the bottom — not from our opinion of them. Where they are better than us, we have said so. If you find something here that is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

Who Sideways CRM is

Sideways CRM is a vertical specialist. It positions itself as the Attio partner for investment, advisory and brokerage firms and reports 35+ Attio implementations. It holds Advanced tier in the Attio expert directory with a 5.0 rating from 20 reviews, and describes itself as a Founding Attio Expert Partner.

The work is built around relationship intelligence rather than pipeline mechanics: capturing every connection in a network, surfacing the ones others miss, and compounding them into deals. That framing fits private equity and growth funds, corporate finance and M&A advisory, and multi-sided brokerage where a single deal has five stakeholder organisations attached to it.

Refreshingly for this market, Sideways publishes engagement ranges: around £2.5k for a focused engagement, from £5k for a full build, and £1,000–£1,500 a month for ongoing partnership.

Where Sideways CRM is the better choice

Three things they do that we do not, or do not do as well:

Deep vertical fluency. An advisory firm's data model is not a sales pipeline with different labels. Mandates, stakeholders, intermediaries and multi-sided deals need a structure that a generalist has to learn on your time. Sideways has built it 35 times.

Named ownership. The engagement is with a Founding Expert Partner who owns the outcome and pulls in specialists as needed. For a small advisory firm, knowing exactly who is accountable is worth more than a larger bench.

Published ranges. They put numbers on the page. Most of the directory does not.

Where Craftt is the better choice

A materially lower entry price. A Sideways full build starts from £5k. Craftt's full build is $2,500 flat, with a $700 migration-only route if you just want your data out of the old system first — and the $700 comes off the build if you upgrade within 90 days.

Fixed date, not a range. Seven business days or you don't pay.

Agents rather than retainer hours. Ongoing partnership at Sideways runs £1,000–£1,500 a month. Craftt's optional layer is $900/mo and is explicitly the mechanic for the agents, on your own Attio account — and most clients do not take it, because the agents are doing the upkeep the retainer would otherwise pay for.

color:var(--color-text-heading)]">We do run investment workspaces. Craftt has a dedicated [Attio for VC practice covering deal flow, portfolio and LP tracking. We are not the specialist Sideways is on M&A mandates, but 'generalist' does not mean 'has never seen a fund'.

Side by side

Directory tier and review counts are taken from the Attio expert directory at the time of writing; implementation counts are what each partner reports about itself. Both change, so check the directory before you decide.

What each costs

Sideways is roughly two to three times Craftt's price at the full-build tier, and the vertical depth is what you are paying for. If your firm runs M&A mandates or multi-sided brokerage, that premium is defensible. If you are a fund that mainly needs clean deal flow, portfolio and LP tracking, it is a lot of money for structure Craftt will build for $2,500.

For reference, Craftt's whole ladder is published on the pricing page:

• $0 — 48-hour written audit of your workspace or current CRM. Yours to keep and act on even if you never hire us.
• color:var(--color-text-heading)]">$700 — [standalone migration from your legacy CRM. Deduped before import, verified against your source, three business days. Credited in full against anything you buy next within 90 days.
• $1,500 — tune-up for an Attio workspace you already have. Data model and workflows reconfigured, broken automations rebuilt, up to three Claude agents.
• color:var(--color-text-heading)]">$2,500 — the [seven-day sprint. Full build, six Claude agents, Notion documentation, team training, 30-day post-launch tune-up. Live in 7 business days or you don't pay.
• color:var(--color-text-heading)]">$900/mo — [optional operating layer. Runs on your own Attio account. Cancel any time; nothing to unwind.

How to decide

Hire Sideways CRM if:

• you run M&A mandates or multi-sided brokerage deals
• relationship intelligence across a network is the product, not a nice-to-have
• you are UK-based and want a UK-based named owner

Hire Craftt if:

• you are a fund or advisory firm with a conventional deal-flow, portfolio and LP structure
• budget matters and £5k is out of range
• you want AI agents doing the pipeline hygiene rather than paying a monthly retainer for it

If you are still weighing it up, the cheapest way to test either of us is to make us do something small first. Ours is free: a 48-hour audit of whatever you have now, written up, yours to keep whether or not you ever pay us a cent. If the audit is not sharp, you have lost two days and nothing else.

Also worth reading: every Attio expert partner compared side by side, how to choose an Attio implementation consultant, and what an Attio implementation actually costs.