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Open scheduling infrastructure for everyone.
Cal.com has changed the meaning and expectations when it comes to the scheduler app category as it's the most impressive, flexible, and modern scheduling software on the market.
While Calendly was the leader the the meeting scheduling space for the past decade, over the past few years Cal.com has given them a run for their money, and in our opinion, has has overtaken them.
Cal.com is by far the best 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.
Cal.com also has the most robust round robin functionality on the market so that leads can be directed to the right team members each time (automatically). You can also set up workflows to automate any communication pre-and-post calls.
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.
We can't recommend it enough! Read our full Cal.com Review for our full thoughts.
The CRM for small + medium teams (200 or less) that use Google Workspace.
If your team is using Google Workspace and you haven't yet considered Copper—take a minute right now to do just that.
Copper spends an absurd amount per-month in server costs alone, just to give you the deepest Google Workspace integration of any CRM out there.
As compared to all of the CRMs on the market, Copper has one of the most user-friendly experiences (which helps with team adoption), as well as a fully baked Chrome extension that allows you to use Copper (view tasks, past activity, and easily add new contacts to the CRM), without ever needing to even leave Gmail or Google Calendar.
It allows for powerful functionality like form integration and email automation functionality. For more details on this, check out the full Copper Review.
We've excessively used the API of all the major CRMs on the market and I'm here to tell you that Copper's API is fantastic. Their API is one of the most powerful and user-friendly to build on, especially as compared to that of HubSpot for which has some incredibly odd API design decisions.
While this might not sound like a big deal, if you ever plan on integrating your CRM (or hiring a company like ours to do it), I'm here to tell you that building the same integration in HubSpot takes 2–3x as long and is more of a pain to maintain. All factors that affect the integration cost at the end of the day, so API design matters and affects you even if you don't think it does. 🤖 Learn more about our top Copper Integrations here.
If you're more technical, they also have a fantastic native Zapier and Make connector which allows you to build custom integrations with other popular tools like PandaDoc and Dialpad.
If you're using Google Workspace at your company and you want a modern CRM for your team, look no further than Copper. Not using Google Workspace? We recommend checking out Pipedrive or HubSpot instead. Just an individual and stumble upon Copper because you were considering either Airtable or Notion as your CRM? Copper would definitely work, but also consider folk in this dedicated Copper vs folk comparison.
For a limited time, we're giving away our paid Copper crash course for free if you use our link to sign up for Copper here. Full details available here: Claim Copper Course.
For small + mid-size teams looking for a truly customer-focused help desk, shared inbox, and live site chat.
We use Help Scout for sales, customer support, admin, receipts (e.g. we forward all of our receipts into an inbox), invoicing, and even recruitment. We've been using Help Scout for over 5 years and we love it!
Help Scout can be best described as a customer-centric tool. They have done an incredible job at building somewhat of a community around their software. For example, when I see a company is using Help Scout (on either the website chat or email response), I have an immediate reaction of feeling that they care deeply about customer support and will have equally caring support reps.
I'm also part of their "Support Driven" Slack community as well and am regularly seeing teams of all sizes (big and small) actually switching over to Help Scout from Zendesk, Intercom, and Front, amongst others.
Rating: B+
They have a nice implementation of live chat in their product, as it's actually thoughtful (and further customer-focused). How you might ask? Expectations matching. For one, you have to mindfully to mark yourself as "available", and if you aren't actively in Help Scout for a long enough period of time, it will automatically mark you as "away" (wait that's a feature...? hold on, let me explain).
There's nothing worse than having a "live chat" on your website that gives the impression that you'll get an immediate response, but in reality, you just get a bot that asks for your email address because "the team is away". It's a bad expectation mismatch. Help Scout doesn't allow this to happen.
They have more of an "email first" approach, with a "we might be live though" as a secondary. So when the live chat shows on your website, you can be sure that there's actually a human on the other end. Great expectation matching, which as a small team, I appreciate a lot. Now take that, versus Intercom, which simply upon seeing the logo, you and everyone else expects to speak to someone immediately, and if you aren't on the other end, they get frustrated - you're set up to lose versus surprise and delight (which is what Help Scout constantly allows for). If you're a small or mid-size team, why not set yourself up for success and delight out of the box?
One of the areas that got me obsessed with Help Scout many years back was their robust workflows functionality. You can set up either automatic or manual workflows. Automatic is great when you can set up some type of consistent trigger, like when a due date is today and the conversation is active or pending, then mark it active, set the priority custom field to P1, and add the tag "due":
Pair this with the API and you can trigger some pretty powerful workflows both inside and outside of Help Scout. Just be careful with that "Apply to Previous" option, we've totally made some pretty big mistakes by accidentally having it enabled with a broad trigger. 😅
The manual trigger functionality can be used for easily triggering many different things to happen with the click of a button. For example, set up a manual workflow for "snooze" and set it to add the tag "snooze", change the status to "pending", and set the due date to a week from now. There's no shortage of things that can be done here.
Help Scout has gone a human-centric approach to AI (unsurprisingly, as it's true to brand). What they've done is things like, automatic summarization of chat threads. So if you're jumping in and out of threads and collaborating with team members on a daily basis, it'll help you get back up to speed, without having to read the entire conversation thread:
We for one appreciate how Help Scout has handled their approach to AI, as when comparing Help Scout to Intercom for example, Intercom tries to rope in AI at every corner, in chat, and trying to automate conversation threads. While this is cool in theory, it does feel a bit like we're back in the "you must first talk to a bot before talking to a human" time period, which still is a bit frustrating. I'm sure Help Scout will do more in this area as AI continues to evolve in time.
Help Scout also has some pretty cool AI assist features coming to the actual compose window, pulling the likes of ChatGPT directly where you're actually responding to messages:
All-in-all, we know that Help Scout will have an excellent customer service-focused approach to any future iterations to their AI capabilities. Help Scout AI Assist actually reminds us a lot of the new AI functionality recently rolled out by Superhuman actually—funny enough, Superhuman actually uses Help Scout as their helpdesk software solution.
Rating: B-
Help Scout has had a pretty similar UI for the past 6–7 years, it wasn't until just recently that they started investing heavily into modernizing the conversation view (which is where you're likely to spend the majority of your time).
To that, they did a good job with it—feeling similar to other modern help desk tools:
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We don't have any major complaints aside from just wishing they would also modernize the main dashboard, along with some tweaks to the new conversation view to allow it to take up more vertical screen real estate when typing longer messages. To that end, you start feeling a bit cramped, because they want you to be able to still scroll up and view the prior conversation. That said, the team is hyper aware of this, and have even shared with us some internal mock-ups on how this could be remedied. 👀
Important note: the UI shown above is as part of an opt-in only alpha/beta group that we're in, so if you were to sign up today, it'd look slightly different from the above (for now).
Rating: B+
Help Scout does most all of the things you'd like a help desk to do for you. From saved snippets, to internal notes, and more. When it comes down to the micro-experiences when using the software, Help Scout does not let you down. It has features like "Collision Detection" to prevent you and a team member from replying at the same time:
In addition to that, you can actually see the emails that your team members are writing, and even jump in to edit them on their behalf if you need to make some tweaks before sending it off. Help Scout is truly a collaborative Help Desk.
They also regularly auto-save messages as you type them, so if your internet cuts out or browser crashes mid response, you'll be totally fine 👌
The updated mailbox and editor also includes a super powerful "/" feature, similar to that of Slack, which allows you to type anything—quickly pulling out an emoji, saved reply, text formatting, or even switching to a note—no keyboard shortcut memorization required:
But on the keyboard shortcut front, they have that too. Press "S" then "C" to quickly close out a conversation and move to the next one. "W" to show all your workflows. Pretty much everything is accessible via a keyboard shortcut which makes navigating Help Scout a breeze.
Rating: B-
Their API is also super flexible! They also have a great Zapier integration which is always appreciated, it is just a bit limited at times in the trigger functionality especially, so you might want to use their webhook functionality instead for trigger events.
We've managed to do a lot with it though, check out the video below to see how we've integrated Help Scout with Asana and Copper.
They do have a native integration with Slack though that we love, pulling in a quick preview of new conversations, with the ability to set a separate channel per mailbox, allowing you to truly prioritize messages:
Pair this with a tool like Dispatch and you can do some incredibly powerful notification/mark as read rules within your and your team's Slack inbox. For example, one of your team members only want to be notified in Slack channels when they're @mentioned inside of a Help Scout note? That can be done. How about marking all channel messages as "read" unless the customer email domain contains xyz.com, you can do that too. Dispatch paired with Help Scout + Slack is amazing.
Rating: B-
I feel they are so close to being great in this area, a real B+ experience. The thing is, the app is a bit buggy from time to time. You can accomplish most of what you'd like to do on-the-go, the thing is, it's missing some core features like the "workflows" functionality. This means, if you rely heavily on workflows when using Help Scout, you're going to be a bit frustrated when on mobile. I'll admit, I've definitely visited the desktop app on my phone every now-and-again to run a quick workflow 😅
On the plus side, the have an iOS and Android app, and both have similar feature-parity. It really just needs that final 20% added to the mobile app to make it great. They have said that they are planning a pretty big re-architecture of the mobile app once the new mailbox (screenshot above) gets publicly launched—mobile comes next!
If you want to hear more of our thoughts about Help Scout and how they stack up against their competitors, check out this post.
Are you a customer-centric organization? Does the idea of automated and templated emails sending to your customers/clients give you pause? If so, Help Scout has you covered.
They enable you to service your customers, without just treating them as a number (unlike that of Zendesk vs Help Scout).
We absolutely love Help Scout, use them ourselves, for hours a day at times—Be sure that if they didn't have an absolutely delightful experience and team, you'd be hearing from us!
folk is a simple yet powerful spreadsheet-like CRM for individuals.
folk is great if you're an individual trying to use something like Google Sheets, Airtable, or Notion as your CRM.
They built it in a way to feel familiar to how you might use a spreadsheet to manage your contacts and important information:
An example of when I've recommended folk to a friend is when they brought up to me all the business concerns they had, which a CRM would traditionally solve, but they are currently a solopreneur or incredibly price sensitive.
Hearing things like "I'm wondering if I could just use Notion to manage all of this" is a great indicator that something like folk is right for you.
If you are planning on scaling or working with a larger team (or expect to integrate with a myriad of other tools), you'll want to use a more business-friendly CRM like Copper.
They do have some cool CRM features baked in like mail merge (for sending out personalized templated emails in bulk), as well as quick access via a Chrome extension when on Gmail and LinkedIn.
folk has built a new custom field type called "Magic Fields" which allows for an AI prompt to do a bit of legwork, whether it be generating a personalized email across groups of contacts, or even more complex data sanitizing functionality. Of all the CRM's we've seen on the market, folk has taken an incredibly unique approach to how their choosing to implement AI to improve their tool:
folk recently released a developer REST API (alongside their longstanding Zapier connector), although it's fairly basic compared to other, more mature CRMs we've covered. That said, for most small businesses we recommend folk to, the existing integration capabilities should be sufficient, especially since you'll likely rely heavily on their Zapier connector anyway.
Just be mindful that the Zapier connector currently has some limitations, with certain field types not yet supported. While the direct developer API offers broader support, utilizing it requires more technical skill (even when leveraging Zapier webhooks).
As a former CRM implementation and integration company, though, we definitely want to point out that more technical users might find folk's API capabilities still quite early-stage for now.
If you're an individual using Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 and you're looking to make the upgrade to the CRM world from that of a basic Spreadsheet, folk will be your best option. It's like a more opinionated version of Airtable and Notion, that is actually built with proper CRM features like Email and Calendar activity tracking.
On the other hand, if you're working on a team or looking to scale your company behind a handful of team members, we highly recommending a more powerful CRM like Copper, Pipedrive, or HubSpot, if nothing more than just to have a properly fully-featured API as you scale (you're going to need this). That said, if you're in any way considering Airtable or Notion as your CRM, we highly recommend you use folk instead.
The marketing automation tool (and CRM) for mid + large teams (200–1,000) who require a robust and all-in-one tool like Salesforce.
If you are considering HubSpot because of price (after hearing things like 50–90% off the first year)—let me stop you right now, you're playing directly into their marketing shtick (you'll see the #1 concern with HubSpot is actually price).
HubSpot was not initially built as a CRM, it was a marketing email automation platform. A powerful (and expensive) one at that—but credit where credit is due. It's just, most companies often need to start with just a CRM to streamline their business operations.
It wasn't until HubSpot realized that acquiring customers for their $20–60k+/yr marketing automation suite was a difficult sell out of the gate, that they decided to built a "free CRM" as a lead magnet (and gateway) to their expensive core product.
So if you're a startup or a team of 20 or less (that will actually be using the CRM day-to-day), we highly recommend looking at a different CRM (we've done a deep-dive on that here). Because after the first year, you will be paying 2-4x more for HubSpot than the competing solutions (even at their proposed "Year 2+ discounts").
Now if your team is quite large and considering Salesforce, we actually do recommend Hubspot in most cases. HubSpot is more user-friendly than Salesforce, and you aren't going to be totally stuck in the expensive enterprise software stack that a tool like Salesforce often requires.
We will also add that we work with HubSpot often, and Copper + Pipedrive have far superior API's to HubSpot (in that we can build the same integration in 1/2 the time), so there is a second-order unseen cost associated to HubSpot.
And finally, there's quite a bit that needs to "go right" in order for emails to automatically log from your team's inbox into HubSpot.
Replies to emails will be logged automatically on the contact's timeline if you have connected your personal email and the following is true:
1. The original email was sent through the CRM or sent from your connected email client with the sales email extension or add-in installed and the Log checkbox selected.
2. The original email was not sent to an email address or domain listed in your Never Log list.
3. The email address is still connected when the reply is received.
4. The reply is sent to an individual's email connected by the user who originally started the thread.
5. The sender of the reply is an existing contact in HubSpot.
(Something that most take for granted when working with a CRM like Copper, where everything just logs automatically with no prerequisites—even if the contact doesn't yet exist in the CRM, it'll go back 1 year through your team's email history and retroactively add those emails)
The CRM for heavy call & sms—focused small and mid-size sales teams
Differentiation in the CRM space is difficult, and that's where Close has decided to be known as the CRM with deep native call/SMS functionality.
While this may sound great out of the gate (especially if you're interested in VoIP integration), let's take a moment to discuss this, because you're most definitely paying the price for this.
They also built Close in a way where they really want you to spend most of your time in Close all day. Syncing in your emails and hoping you'll use their sub-par email client to triage through, versus using a more modern tool like Superhuman, or even Gmail.
This is where competitors like Copper have come in with a super unique approach, building out an exceptional Chromium extension which allows you to access your entire CRM from right within Gmail and Google Calendar.
The first thing to note is that the lowest tier, coined "Startup" starts at $99 and gives you 3 seats (AKA a 3-seat minimum). Now this is reasonable if you actually have 3 seats to fill, only 1 or 2 though? The cost-per-seat is quite high.
With that, it's definitely one of the most restrictive in terms of functionality. It limits you to only one pipeline (which will be fine for many, but if you are planning to use your CRM for additional business processes outside of just sales, it won't be enough).
The one thing it does offer though is a "Power Dialer"—something quite unique to the CRM space of the others we have listed (which we'll go more into in the features section).
All-in-all, you're likely to find yourself on the Professional tier, as we've yet to work with a single company that needs only one pipeline (2 is normally the sweet spot—Sales + Onboarding/Project Management).
So with that in mind, you're again served with the 3-seat minimum, paying nearly $100/seat/mo. This on the other hand would get you the highest tiers of competing CRM's like Copper, not to mention no seat minimum.
So if your 1–2 seats, we highly recommend using an alternative, no questions.
We have to give it to Close, they, unlike HubSpot, actually have decent email syncing functionality (which feels table-stakes for a CRM, but sadly, it's not).
For example, if you add an email address into the system (and you're using Google Workspace or Microsoft 365), it'll actually retroactively sync the emails into the CRM.
While it's not as deep or impressive as what Copper does for Google Workspace accounts (going an entire year back across everyone on your team + pulling in and organizing file attachments and calendar events), it's at least something, which we appreciate as compared to HubSpot.
This brings us to their auto-dialer. You can have it call through numbers in bulk, connect you when it hears something on the other end, and pause the dialer while you take notes. It's impressive in that regard, and we don't really have another tool/solution that we'd recommend for that which integrates in well to a CRM.
That said, you're very much committing to their baked in VoIP solution at that point (which brings with it it's own limitations, like no separate app or mobile VoIP access).
So if you considering something like Dialpad, JustCall, or Aircall alongside your CRM (like many should), think again—you're not getting that with Close.
Because they have their internal VoIP baked in at the core though, it does allow for some cool sequence features which allow you to automatically send out emails, then SMS messages on a cadence. While it can't auto-call in a sequence, it will create a task for you to call:
This is a more complex feature that not many CRM's allow for, because it's getting more into the sales enablement email marketing automation side of things that we've seen more reserved for tools like Reply.
They seem to have only just launched an iOS only mobile app, which again is table-stakes for every other CRM on the market. All competitors such as Copper + HubSpot + Pipedrive have both iOS and Android mobile apps, for which have existed 5+ years at this point.
If you hear the words "autodialer" and get super excited, this is probably the CRM for you. If you have a heavy sales motion that requires mass-phone calls, that's where Close really shines.
Otherwise, it's trying to be too many things baked into one, which might sound good at first, but upon diving in, you'll see that they don't integrate as well with other tools:
"We are your VoIP, you don't get to have a VoIP like Dialpad alongside us!"
The features they have feel more like a v1, more-so to check the marketing box, versus them being more thoughtful and well-iterated.
If you're using Google Workspace and considering Close (or HubSpot for that matter), we highly recommend checking out Copper instead.
The main value here comes from their baked in autodialer, either that's an integrated feature you'd be willing to pay the premium that Close charges for it, or you aren't.
Sales enablement platform for mid to large size teams.
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:
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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.
They focused most of their API on adding leads to the system. They essentially want it to be relatively easy to get data into Reply from other tools, but getting insights out of Reply to your other tools, this becomes way more limited.
For the core things though, their API does work well, and they even have a pretty robust Zapier integration connector.
Gosh, I hate listing their internal tech stack here as a limitation, but they are using quite old tech (.NET) built atop Azure, which shouldn't matter, but we had constant issues with emails actually sending out. They had regular CRON jobs running, and often they just wouldn't even trigger.
It's very much an example of a company trying to bake in all the features instead of actually getting the foundation right.
They'd ideally like you to just live in their tool day-to-day, so keep that in mind when it comes to the type of integrations they have out of the box. They feel more built just to check a marketing box rather than to enable you in your CRM.
We invested hundreds of hours over the years building highly custom integrations to sync data from various CRM's over to Reply, and then back.
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?)
If you're genuinely planning on using a proper CRM core to your business, we'd recommend using a tool that actually encourages this behavior, versus trying to be a CRM of their own (yes, Reply is trying to do everything).
We were incredibly bullish on Reply, it worked well, just required tons of custom integration in order to get it working with Copper, Pipedrive, and HubSpot. Building kludgy workarounds like custom fields specific for Reply for merge fields to work how we needed them.
This was until Outfunnel came onto the scene with the approach of:
Your CRM is your company's lifeblood—what if we helped you not only keep your CRM in-sync with your email automation data, but enrich it as well?
This is where the 2 paths diverged, and Outfunnel came out as the winner actually trying to improve your CRM, whereas Reply is trying to dip their toes into the CRM world, trying to convince you that "your sales team doesn't need a CRM when you have Reply" 🙄
All-in-all, this was a tough one to write... It hits very close to home, and we absolutely adored Reply for half a decade. Oleg and team, if you're reading this, I'm sorry 🫶
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