Choosing the right CRM

Close vs. Hubspot

Have you ever seen a comparison page where the “challenger” comes out better than the company writing the comparison?

Exactly. Neither have we. So when we set about comparing our CRM to others we wanted to take a different approach.

Cost and capability

The comparison we’ve put together is based on whether it’s possible (and how much it costs) to do in HubSpot what you can do in Close.

We're biased, not ignorant

For some of you, HubSpot will be the better option. What we’re trying to demonstrate is when Close is a better fit than our competitor.

A quick summary

When comparing these two products, the main difference that stands out is price and functionality. HubSpot Sales offers no inbound calling, no SMS, no historical import of email conversations & no bulk email features. To top that, HubSpot Sales has additional costs associated in the form of setup fees, third-party apps and a minimum payment for 10 users if you’re on the Enterprise plan ($14,400 annually).


Target sales team size	<100	100+
Pricing	All-inclusive Pricing publicly available	Sales call required Complex pricing with hidden costs
Budget	Best value	Expensive
Customer success	Dedicated success team	Pay extra
Calling	Global calling built-in	Selective countries built-in
Email automation	Built-in	Add-on purchase required
Training & implementation	$0 customized onboarding	Add-on purchase required
GetApp "ease of use" rating	4.7 / 5	4.5 / 5
Admin or developer needed?	No	Yes

After 30 days of evaluating HubSpot & other CRM Systems, we picked Close as our perfect solution! HubSpot's lack of complete email integration and their sadly basic CRM reporting killed them for us. The features that made us choose Close over HubSpot were full email integration, call logging/recording & a good API. Three weeks in, we’re pretty happy with Close. We’ve gotten our integrations done, and our sales team is really loving life right now.

Rival IQ

Close ideal customer checklist

The productivity of your Sales team is your #1 priority

You do (or plan to do) high-volume outreach by email, phone, or SMS

You need to qualify large lead lists quickly

You’re looking for a scalable system to match your team’s growth

You prefer having an all-in-one system over disparate tools

You’re looking for a powerful CRM that at the same time is easy to learn and empowers you to onboard new sales people within a day (no training required)

The rest of this page will help you understand why we think Close is a better alternative to Hubspot both in terms of value and pricing.

What can you not do in Hubspot?

HubSpot is a good standalone CRM, but a lot of the critical functionality required by a high-performing sales team is highly dependent on expensive third party applications.

There are also some key sales functions that, even with a third-party app, you just cannot perform using HubSpot. With Close, they’re all built-in.


Backup Calling Provider
Automatic Call Forwarding
Built-in SMS
Manual data migration service
Historical import of emails
Inbound calls in CRM
Predictive Dialing