The sales CRM built for calling, emailing, texting, automation, and action.
Grade: A — Score: 95/100
Close is a powerful sales CRM that combines various communication channels such as calling, emailing, and texting into a single platform, enabling sales teams to manage their interactions seamlessly. With built-in features like pipeline management and reporting, it allows teams to act on their sales data effectively.
At the heart of Close is Chloe, an AI sales agent that automates lead qualification, follow-ups, and meeting scheduling. This integration means that sales representatives can focus on closing deals while Chloe handles routine tasks, ensuring that no lead falls through the cracks.
While Close offers significant advantages in terms of automation and efficiency, organizations must consider the potential risks of relying heavily on AI for customer interactions. Balancing automation with personal touch is crucial to maintaining strong customer relationships.
Solo: $9/seat/month (billed annually)
Essentials: $49/seat/month (billed annually)
Growth: $99/seat/month (billed annually)
Scale: $139/seat/month (billed annually)
Consider switching to Salesforce: Salesforce offers a more traditional CRM experience with extensive customization options.
Close is purpose-built for inside sales teams at small and mid-size businesses, while HubSpot is an all-in-one platform covering marketing, sales, service, and CMS, and Salesforce is an enterprise CRM with extensive customization. Close's key advantage is built-in calling (VoIP with Power and Predictive Dialers), email, and SMS directly inside the CRM — HubSpot and Salesforce require add-ons or third-party integrations for native calling. Close claims to perform 50% faster than HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce in speed tests. However, Close lacks marketing automation, help desk, and customer service features that HubSpot and Salesforce include. Close is best for teams whose primary workflow is high-velocity outbound calling and emailing; HubSpot is better for teams needing marketing + sales alignment; Salesforce is better for large enterprises with complex customization needs.
Close includes native VoIP calling directly in the CRM — reps click to call from any lead record and all calls are automatically logged with duration, notes, and optional recording. The Power Dialer (Growth plan, $99/seat/month) automatically dials through a list of prospects sequentially, advancing to the next number when a call ends or goes to voicemail. The Predictive Dialer (Scale plan, $139/seat/month) dials multiple numbers simultaneously and routes live answers to available reps, maximizing talk time for high-volume calling teams. AI Notetaker transcribes and summarizes calls automatically. Call recording is available on all plans with unlimited recording on Scale.
Close offers four AI features: AI Notetaker automatically transcribes and summarizes every call and meeting directly inside the CRM. AI Enrich pulls real-time customer information from across the web to populate lead records without manual Googling. AI Summaries surface the most important details from calls, emails, meetings, and overall lead activity. AI Email Rewrite Assistant helps reps improve outbound email copy. These AI features are designed to eliminate manual note-taking, research, and email drafting so reps spend more time selling. The AI Email Assistant is available on the Growth plan; other AI features may require specific plan tiers.
Yes. Close launched a Solo plan at $9/seat/month (annual) or $19/month on monthly billing. It includes everything in the Essentials plan but is limited to 1 user and 10,000 leads, and does not include workflow automations. Solo includes the full CRM with unlimited contacts, multiple pipelines, built-in email, calling, and SMS, centralized inbox, and advanced filters. This makes it one of the most affordable full-featured CRMs with built-in communication tools for individual salespeople, founders, and freelancers doing their own outreach.
Yes, but only on the Growth plan ($99/seat/month annual) and above. Workflow automations allow you to automate follow-up emails, task creation, lead routing, and stage changes based on configurable triggers and conditions. The Solo and Essentials plans do not include any workflow automation capability. This is a notable price jump — teams that need automations must commit to $99/seat/month, which is significantly more than competitors like HubSpot (automations at $20/user/month on Starter) or Pipedrive (automations at $34/seat/month on Advanced). For teams where automation is essential, this cost should be factored from the start.
Close meets SOC 2 standards across all five trust service principles: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. The company is GDPR compliant with a dedicated Data Privacy Officer (DPO) and Chief Cybersecurity Officer (CCO) reachable at dpo@close.com. Close is also CCPA compliant. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified sub-processors. Close provides Data Processing Agreements with standard contractual clauses for international data transfers. The company conducts annual vendor reviews and maintains incident response processes that are reviewed and tested annually.
Yes. Close offers a 14-day free trial on all plans with no credit card required. The trial gives access to the full feature set of the selected plan so you can test calling, email, SMS, pipeline management, and (on Growth+) workflow automations before committing. There are no contracts — all plans are cancel-anytime. Close also offers a 'demo site' product tour and live demo options for teams evaluating the platform. Annual billing saves approximately 20-30% compared to monthly billing across all tiers.
Close was co-founded by Steli Efti (CEO), a Greek-German entrepreneur and Y Combinator alum who is widely known as one of Silicon Valley's most prominent sales leaders. The company evolved from ElasticSales, a sales-as-a-service agency, when the team realized the CRM tool they built internally had more demand than the agency itself. Close is a 100% remote company with 125+ employees, bootstrapped and profitable with over $50M in annual revenue. The company has never taken significant venture funding — it raised only a small angel round early on and has been self-funded since. Steli Efti has authored 9 books about startup sales and is an active investor and advisor.
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