What’s the difference between Lists & Objects in Attio?
In Attio, people often confuse two concepts — List and Object. At first glance they seem similar, but they serve very different roles.
Objects are data types. They define what exactly is stored in your CRM. By default, Attio comes with five standard objects: Company, People, Deal, Workspace, and Users.
With custom objects, you can create entities specific to your business that you want to store in Attio — for example: Invoices, Products, Line Items, Subscriptions, and so on.
Within each custom object, you can create attributes to manage that object properly.
For instance, for the Invoice object, you might create attributes like date of issue, due date, and cost, and then link this object to existing ones through a relationship. This way, you can see, for example, a contact’s email directly within the Invoice object view.
Lists are data views. They show which specific records from an object you want to see. Each list filters, sorts, and groups data for a particular task.
For example, let’s say you’re doing cold outreach via Attio Sequences and you have two sales reps, each responsible for their own audience. You can create two lists — one for each SDR — where they can track their own pipelines.
Another example: if you’re tracking retention deals. Once a deal is marked as won, you may want to continue managing the relationship. The best way is to create a separate list, such as *Deals — Retention*, where you can track all your retention-related deals. You can even layer automation on top of that.
In short:
- Object answers the question “what do we store in our CRM?”
- List answers “how do we view and use it?”
Usually, you start with objects and end with lists — so each team has its own working view of the same data, or if you have different processes for the same object that depend on specific attributes.
A few pros and cons:
Objects — the advantage is that all attributes created at the object level are also available in lists.
The downside: you can’t set privacy settings for an object.
Lists — the downside is that attributes created at the list level are isolated, and you can’t access them from the object level.
The advantage: you can configure privacy settings for each list individually.