Close vs HubSpot Sales Hub
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
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The short answer
Both sides assessedClose compared with HubSpot Sales Hub
Close is built for call volume: native calling, SMS, power and predictive dialers, and Smart Views that turn the CRM into a prioritised queue, at a lower seat price than Sales Hub Professional. For an inside sales floor it will produce more conversations per rep per day. Sales Hub trades that focus for breadth, with branching workflow automation, a custom report builder, forecasting against quotas, and marketing attribution on the same record, and it is the only one of the two that plausibly runs a whole company rather than a sales team. Phone-first teams take Close; platform buyers take Sales Hub.
HubSpot Sales Hub compared with Close
Close is built for teams that live on the phone: native calling, SMS, power and predictive dialers, and Smart Views that turn the CRM into a prioritised queue. For an inside sales floor it produces more conversations per rep per day than Sales Hub will, at a lower seat price. Sales Hub answers a broader question, with the workflow builder, custom reporting, marketing attribution, and an ecosystem behind it, and it is the only one of the two that plausibly runs a whole company. Choose Close for call volume; choose Sales Hub when the sales team is one department inside a larger customer platform.
Choose Close if
SMB inside sales teams (2 to 50 reps) that live on the phone and follow up across calls, email, and SMS: lending, insurance, home services, logistics, agencies, and any high-velocity B2B or B2C motion where speed-to-lead and volume of conversations decide revenue.
Choose HubSpot Sales Hub if
Sales teams of roughly 10 to 200 people who need sequences, branching automation, custom reporting, and forecasting in one system, and whose marketing runs on HubSpot already, so the closed-loop attribution justifies $90 per seat per month plus a $1,500 onboarding fee.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Close | HubSpot Sales Hub |
|---|---|---|
| Category | CRM | CRM |
| Starting price | $9/user/mo (Solo, billed annually; $19 monthly) (14 days trial) | $7 per seat per month on annual billing for Starter, rising to $90 for Professional (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Per-seat subscription across four tiers with steep annual discounts, plus usage-based billing for calling minutes, phone numbers, SMS, and enrichment, and metered AI credits for Chloe and AI features. | Per-seat subscription layered on the free HubSpot CRM. Sales Hub seats carry the sales tooling, Core Seats give shared CRM edit access to other staff, view-only seats are free, AI usage is metered in HubSpot Credits, and Professional and Enterprise carry mandatory one-time onboarding fees. |
| Free plan | No | No free Sales Hub tier. The free HubSpot CRM sits underneath it at $0 for up to two users and includes contacts, companies, deals, tickets, email and calendar sync, meeting links, forms, and live chat, but no sequences at volume and no multi-step workflow automation. |
| Free trial | 14 days, no credit card required, with $5 of calling and enrichment credit included; 30-day money-back guarantee after purchase | 14-day trials of paid tiers; in practice the permanent free CRM underneath Sales Hub is the normal evaluation path |
| Best for | SMB inside sales teams (2 to 50 reps) that live on the phone and follow up across calls, email, and SMS: lending, insurance, home services, logistics, agencies, and any high-velocity B2B or B2C motion where speed-to-lead and volume of conversations decide revenue. | Sales teams of roughly 10 to 200 people who need sequences, branching automation, custom reporting, and forecasting in one system, and whose marketing runs on HubSpot already, so the closed-loop attribution justifies $90 per seat per month plus a $1,500 onboarding fee. |
| Setup time | Days, not weeks: importing leads, connecting email, and provisioning numbers is self-serve, and a small team can be making tracked calls the first afternoon. Porting existing phone numbers and tuning workflows adds a week or two. | Two to four weeks to a working Professional configuration, and four to eight weeks to a good one with lifecycle stages, workflow enrolment logic, lead routing, custom reports, and forecasting in place. The required onboarding fee exists precisely because this is a project rather than a signup. |
| Learning curve | Low for reps; the interface is opinionated and queue-driven. Managers need modest ramp on Smart View logic, workflow design, and AI-credit governance. | Low for reps, who mostly work from the mailbox extension and the prospecting workspace. Moderate to high for administrators: lifecycle stages, workflow enrolment logic, association labels, and permission structures interact in ways that are easy to get wrong and slow to surface. |
| Platforms | Web app, Desktop apps (Mac and Windows), iOS and Android apps, REST API | Web app, iOS, Android, Gmail and Outlook extensions, Chrome extension |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR (controller and processor obligations), CCPA | SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, HIPAA support on eligible higher-tier subscriptions |
| Founded | 2013 | 2006 |
| Headquarters | Fully remote (US-incorporated); no central office | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped, founder-owned, profitable | Public company (NYSE: HUBS) |
Strengths and limitations
Close
Strengths
- Native calling, SMS, and email in one timeline remains the best-executed communication stack in the SMB CRM category, with power and predictive dialers that genuinely raise rep throughput.
- Smart Views turn the CRM into a prioritized work queue, an operational model built by people who ran sales teams themselves.
- Bootstrapped, profitable, and thirteen years old: no pivot risk, no acquisition-driven roadmap whiplash, and pricing that has to make unit-economic sense.
- Chloe is one of the more concrete AI-agent implementations in the category, doing bounded jobs (qualify, book, summarize, update) inside the existing workflow engine rather than as a demo feature.
Limitations
- The simple schema cuts both ways: no custom objects and limited data-model flexibility make Close a poor fit once a business needs to model more than leads, contacts, and opportunities.
- Real costs stack: seats plus calling minutes plus SMS plus AI credits plus add-ons make the effective per-rep price meaningfully higher than the sticker for heavy users.
- Workflows gated to the $99 Growth tier leaves the two cheaper plans without the automation most buyers now expect at entry level.
- Not a marketing platform: no landing pages, nurture campaigns, or attribution, so marketing-led orgs need a second system.
HubSpot Sales Hub
Strengths
- The workflow builder and custom report builder are genuinely excellent and materially deeper than Pipedrive, Capsule, or Freshsales at any tier.
- One shared record across marketing, sales, and service delivers closed-loop attribution that stitched-together stacks rarely achieve without an integration programme.
- Free unlimited view-only seats let the whole company read pipeline without licence sprawl, which almost no competitor offers.
- AI credit consumption is published per action (100 credits per agent-recommended outreach, 50 per resolved conversation, 10 per smart-properties run), so the metered cost is modellable rather than opaque.
Limitations
- The Starter to Professional step is a thirteen-fold per-seat increase plus $1,500 before anyone logs in, with sequences at volume, workflow automation, custom reporting, and forecasting all on the far side of it.
- Onboarding fees are disclosed in a footnote rather than the headline price, so quoted year-one cost routinely surprises buyers who modelled seats only.
- AI is metered rather than included, and a Professional seat's 3,000 credits covers only about thirty agent-recommended outreaches a month at the published rate.
- Custom object types are Enterprise-only at $150 per seat per month, a data-model capability Zoho CRM and Attio both provide far lower down.
Pricing compared
Close
Per-seat subscription across four tiers with steep annual discounts, plus usage-based billing for calling minutes, phone numbers, SMS, and enrichment, and metered AI credits for Chloe and AI features.
- Solo$9
- Essentials$35
- Growth$99
- Scale$139
Judged as CRM plus dialer plus SMS platform, Close is priced fairly: replacing a generic CRM, an Aircall-style phone system, and an outreach tool with one $99-per-user Growth seat is competitive even before counting the integration work saved. Judged purely as a CRM against Attio's $29 Plus tier or folk's $24 Standard, it looks expensive, which is the point: you are paying for the conversation infrastructure. The value case therefore rises and falls with call volume; teams that dial all day get their money's worth, teams that do not are overpaying for a phone they rarely pick up.
HubSpot Sales Hub
Per-seat subscription layered on the free HubSpot CRM. Sales Hub seats carry the sales tooling, Core Seats give shared CRM edit access to other staff, view-only seats are free, AI usage is metered in HubSpot Credits, and Professional and Enterprise carry mandatory one-time onboarding fees.
- Starter$7
- Professional$90
- Enterprise$150
Starter at $7 a seat is fine value for what it is, which is cosmetic. Professional at $90 a seat is the number that matters, and as pure sales software it loses on price to almost everything: Pipedrive Growth does sequences, automation, and forecasting at $39, Zoho Professional at $23. Add the $1,500 onboarding fee and a ten-seat team is $12,300 in year one against roughly $2,760 for Zoho. The defensible case is never the sales features alone; it is that marketing, sales, and service share one record, which turns attribution from an integration project into a default. If your marketing already runs on HubSpot, Professional is the cheapest route to closed-loop reporting. If it does not, you are paying a platform premium for pipeline software and should price the alternatives properly first.
Editorial verdict on each
Close
Close is the best CRM you can buy for a team whose revenue scales with conversations: the dialer stack, unified timeline, and queue-driven workflow remain unmatched in the SMB bracket, and thirteen bootstrapped, profitable years mean it will still be here, unpivoted, in five more. Chloe makes the AI story concrete rather than cosmetic, though credits and telephony usage mean the true per-rep cost sits well above the sticker. If your team does not live on the phone, cheaper and more flexible CRMs like Attio will serve better; if it does, Close is the shortlist and probably the answer.
Read the full Close profileHubSpot Sales Hub
Sales Hub is excellent software with a pricing structure designed to be crossed rather than shopped. The free CRM underneath it is the best no-cost starting point in the category, Starter at $7 a seat is cosmetic, and everything a working sales team actually needs sits at Professional for $90 a seat plus $1,500 before anyone logs in. Judged as pipeline software that is poor value: Zoho Professional does the same job for a quarter of it and Pipedrive Growth for under half. The purchase is defensible on exactly one argument, and it is a strong one when it applies: sales, marketing, and service sharing a single record turns attribution from an integration project into a default. If your marketing already runs on HubSpot, pay it and budget the onboarding fee honestly. If it does not, price Zoho and Pipedrive properly before you sign, because you are otherwise buying a platform premium for pipeline software.
Read the full HubSpot Sales Hub profileClose profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; HubSpot Sales Hub last reviewed 2026-09-07. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
The best in Sales CRM
23 trackedSales CRMs are the system of record for pipeline: they store every contact, company, and deal, and structure the follow-up work that turns conversations into revenue.
The free CRM that defined the modern entry point, with the deepest ecosystem a small business can grow into.
The most capability per dollar in the category, if you are willing to configure it.
The AI-native CRM betting that agents will do the pipeline work, and shipping toward that bet faster than any incumbent.
A CRM that fills itself in from email, calendar, and phone signals, removing the data entry that kills small-team CRM adoption.
Setup under an hour with support staff importing your spreadsheet free, and non-technical users productive on day one make it the gentlest CRM here.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Close and HubSpot Sales Hub?
Close is built for call volume: native calling, SMS, power and predictive dialers, and Smart Views that turn the CRM into a prioritised queue, at a lower seat price than Sales Hub Professional. For an inside sales floor it will produce more conversations per rep per day. Sales Hub trades that focus for breadth, with branching workflow automation, a custom report builder, forecasting against quotas, and marketing attribution on the same record, and it is the only one of the two that plausibly runs a whole company rather than a sales team. Phone-first teams take Close; platform buyers take Sales Hub.
Is Close or HubSpot Sales Hub cheaper?
Close starts at $9/user/mo (Solo, billed annually; $19 monthly) (14 days trial). HubSpot Sales Hub starts at $7 per seat per month on annual billing for Starter, rising to $90 for Professional (free plan available). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Close pricing model: Per-seat subscription across four tiers with steep annual discounts, plus usage-based billing for calling minutes, phone numbers, SMS, and enrichment, and metered AI credits for Chloe and AI features. HubSpot Sales Hub pricing model: Per-seat subscription layered on the free HubSpot CRM.
Does Close or HubSpot Sales Hub have a free plan?
Close has no free plan. Trial terms: 14 days, no credit card required, with $5 of calling and enrichment credit included; 30-day money-back guarantee after purchase. HubSpot Sales Hub has a free plan. No free Sales Hub tier. Trial terms: 14-day trials of paid tiers; in practice the permanent free CRM underneath Sales Hub is the normal evaluation path.
Who should choose Close?
SMB inside sales teams (2 to 50 reps) that live on the phone and follow up across calls, email, and SMS: lending, insurance, home services, logistics, agencies, and any high-velocity B2B or B2C motion where speed-to-lead and volume of conversations decide revenue.
Who should choose HubSpot Sales Hub?
Sales teams of roughly 10 to 200 people who need sequences, branching automation, custom reporting, and forecasting in one system, and whose marketing runs on HubSpot already, so the closed-loop attribution justifies $90 per seat per month plus a $1,500 onboarding fee.
What are the best alternatives to Close and HubSpot Sales Hub?
SaaSTracker profiles 23 products in Sales CRM. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to HubSpot CRM (Category Leader), Zoho CRM (Best Value), Attio (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
