5 Best Sales Software in 2026

Gong used to be a meeting recorder. It would record sales calls, transcribe them, and let managers review what happened. But then with the rise of AI they pivoted.

Now recording is just the input layer. Gong captures calls, emails, and meetings, then builds a data model around your deals and customer interactions. On top of that, it runs analysis, surfaces risks, and suggests what to do next.

So instead of being a tool that tells you "here’s your call," it’s trying to tell you "this deal is slipping, here’s why, and here’s how to fix it."

The simplest way to think about it now is: Gong is an AI layer on top of your sales process, and recording is just how it gets the data.

Cal has changed the meaning and expectations when it comes to the standalone scheduler app category as it's the most flexible, and modern scheduling software on the market.

While Calendly was the leader in the meeting scheduling space for the past decade, over the past few years Cal has given them a run for their money, and in our opinion, has overtaken them.

Cal is by far the best overall meeting scheduler for individuals, SMBs, startups, sales & customer support teams, and even enterprises because they are incredibly flexible. Schedule meetings & appointments (checking multiple team members calendars), set up recurring appointments, take payments with scheduling, and create custom workflows.

Where meeting schedulers have become more of a feature of a product, like that of Motion, amongst others in the best calendar apps space, Cal has doubled down on that fact by not only making their tool open source core, but by also giving a robust API, allowing you to use their scheduling infrastructure for your own product. This makes it ideal for our more technical friends, enterprises, educational institutions, or even doctors offices.

That said, if you only need a basic meeting scheduler for 1:1 meetings, Cal is likely more than you need. Many of the best daily planner apps, project management tools, and even the best email clients now have a scheduler built in, so it's worth trying what you already pay for before adding another tool.

• Free: Best for individuals who need simple scheduling with no usage limits.
• Teams: $12/mo per user (billed yearly). Best for small teams and startups that need collaborative scheduling features.
• Organizations: $28/mo per user (billed yearly). Best for larger teams that need more control, security, and advanced routing.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing. Includes dedicated support, SLAs, advanced integrations, and enterprise-grade infrastructure.

Gosh, where do we begin here... Our thoughts on Reply are strong here.

No, really—like we used Reply for years. I'm talking 7+ years. So much in-fact that we got quite close to one of the co-founders that broke off to create a competing service. Yeah, it's a competitive space.

We even met with Reply at Copper HQ back in 2020 to try and convince them (Reply) to build a deep white-labeled integration with Copper directly, because we used them with every single customer of ours:

Founder of Reply (Oleg) on the left, along with me and his team (I'm 2nd from the right)

Spoiler alert: this didn't come to fruition—Outfunnel is who Copper chose as their white-labeled partner in the end.

Reply, like many others, are touting AI all the things—take this with a grain of salt though. Just like everything else, they are trying to use OpenAI to improve email writing.

We will give credit where credit is due though, back in the day, before this AI trend even happened, they did have a pretty nifty email sentiment analysis when writing emails which helped keep you concise and portraying the right tone. It was beyond its time.

They, like Close, integrate VoIP in quite core to their tool—same issues arise as with Close, you're essentially choosing Reply as your VoIP, and none of this SMS or Call information is going to sync over to your CRM (you know, where you'd love to have it).

There's some additional cool features that they do have like email warm-up and email validation baked into the tool (via partners)—this is appreciated, but you'll continually pay for credits to use these things.

Don't let their pricing page fool you—they are incredibly expensive for this tool. Their free tier isn't even the tool, it's just a glimpse into how you can prospect to get leads in the system, so that you can pay them to actually send the outreach.

They charge per-seat (which isn't usually how marketing automation companies charge—again, they are trying to act more like a CRM in some ways, pricing included. This is where we highly recommend just purchasing a single seat and sharing it by adding email aliases if needed (oh, and they charge for that too).

Yeah, they charge for everything additional. Don't expect to get in at what's listed on the pricing page, they will upsell you in every single aspect of their product. To be fair, some of it makes sense since they are external integrations with 3rd party tools offering value, but in other ways, they are just being a bit 😅 (charging for adding email aliases, really?)