Close

Close is the sales CRM built for founders and small sales teams who actually call prospects. Where HubSpot and Salesforce optimise for marketing automation and enterprise admin, Close optimises for the sales rep dialling 50 prospects a day. Built-in calling, SMS, email sequences, and pipeline management in one tool — without the per-seat enterprise pricing or the half-day setup. The founder, Steli Efti, has been preaching 'outbound is alive' since 2013 when most of Silicon Valley wrote it off, and Close is the product expression of that worldview. Every feature exists because a real founder running real outbound campaigns asked for it. The killer feature for founders is the integrated dialer. Click a phone number anywhere in Close → call connects through your browser → recording starts automatically → after the call, you log notes and dispositions inline. No tab-switching between Aircall and HubSpot, no '$50/seat per month' for the calling add-on, no copy-pasting numbers into your phone. For a founder doing their own sales, this collapses the dial-call-log cycle to under a minute per call. The email sequencing is solid (multi-step, branching, A/B testable) and the SMS support is rare among CRMs (text from the same workspace, conversation threading with email/calls). The reporting is sales-team-focused: activity dashboards, leaderboards, pipeline health by stage. For founders the practical use case is: you're doing direct outbound (cold email, cold calling, LinkedIn outreach), you have 1-5 reps, and you want a CRM that makes the calling/messaging workflow fast. Close is the cleanest answer. The pricing is honest. Base at $19/user/month (annual) for very small teams, Startup at $59 for 3 users included, Professional at $109 for 5 users, Business at $149 for 10 users — all with the built-in dialer included. Compared to HubSpot Sales Hub Pro at $100/seat/month (where calling is extra), Close is dramatically cheaper at any team size. Where Close loses ground: marketing automation (use HubSpot or Customer.io), service/ticketing (use Intercom or Plain), and very complex deal pipelines with custom objects (Salesforce). It's specifically a sales engagement CRM, not an all-in-one platform — which is the point. My take: if you're a founder doing direct outbound, install Close instead of HubSpot. The integrated calling alone saves you the cost of a separate dialer. If your sales motion is inbound and marketing-led, HubSpot's free CRM is harder to beat. Match the tool to the motion, not the buzz.