We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what this software does well, and what they could do better. ⤵
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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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