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HubSpot costs a lot very quickly and the user experience is underwhelming, but Close only makes sense if your team is all-in on high-volume phone outreach and willing to pay a premium for its autodialer, otherwise you quickly run into frustrating limits.
Only use Close if your sales team lives for that built-in autodialer; use HubSpot over Close for anything else, especially if you want more CRM flexibility.
HubSpot's email logging is way more finicky and unreliable than Close. With HubSpot, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops for emails to actually show up on a contact's timeline: the original email has to be sent through the CRM or a connected client with the right extension, the log box checked, the sender has to be a contact, the right inbox needs to be connected, and a bunch of other gotchas. If any of those steps go sideways, you're missing a chunk of your communication history, which is a pain for teams that just want everything tracked automatically.
Close, on the other hand, makes email syncing much simpler. When you connect your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account, it pulls in past emails and keeps the conversation history together, no weird prerequisites or manual boxes to check. It's not the most advanced integration out there, but it's way less likely to break or miss important emails compared to HubSpot.
If you want your emails to just show up in your CRM without hassle, Close is the clear pick. HubSpot's setup is fragile and easy to mess up, while Close handles it with fewer steps and more reliability. Go with Close if email logging and activity tracking actually matter to your workflow.
