Close vs Nutshell
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentNutshell compared with Close
Close is built for outbound calling volume, with a power dialer, native SMS, and call coaching in the seat price. Nutshell is built for inbound capture and marketing attribution. A team dialling all day gets far more from Close; a team whose leads arrive through the website gets far more from Nutshell.
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 Nutshell if
Small B2B businesses of roughly 3 to 30 people that have no marketing team, want lead capture, campaigns, and pipeline in one subscription, and would rather pay one vendor $42 a seat than assemble a CRM plus a form tool plus an email platform.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Close | Nutshell |
|---|---|---|
| Category | CRM | CRM |
| Starting price | $9/user/mo (Solo, billed annually; $19 monthly) (14 days trial) | $13 per user per month on annual billing (Foundation) (14 days trial) |
| 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-user subscription across five tiers with unlimited contacts on every plan, an AI outcomes allowance per tier, and separate add-ons for marketing depth, SMS and social messaging, prospecting data, and quotes and invoices. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | 14 days, no credit card required, with $5 of calling and enrichment credit included; 30-day money-back guarantee after purchase | 14 days, no credit card required |
| 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. | Small B2B businesses of roughly 3 to 30 people that have no marketing team, want lead capture, campaigns, and pipeline in one subscription, and would rather pay one vendor $42 a seat than assemble a CRM plus a form tool plus an email platform. |
| 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. | A usable CRM in a few hours: import contacts, define pipeline stages, connect the mailbox. Adding forms, landing pages, chat, and an email campaign is another day or two, which is still much faster than assembling equivalent tools separately. |
| 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. The CRM half is conventional and the marketing tools are deliberately simple, aimed at business owners rather than marketing operations specialists. Administration effort is minimal because there is no custom object model to design. |
| Platforms | Web app, Desktop apps (Mac and Windows), iOS and Android apps, REST API | Web app, iOS, Android, Gmail and Outlook integrations |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR (controller and processor obligations), CCPA | SOC 2, GDPR |
| Founded | 2013 | 2010 |
| Headquarters | Fully remote (US-incorporated); no central office | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped, founder-owned, profitable | Owned by WebFX, a privately held digital marketing agency, since October 2022 |
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.
Nutshell
Strengths
- Marketing tooling (chat, AI chatbot, forms, landing pages, email marketing, attribution) is included on every plan, including the $13 tier.
- Unlimited contacts on all tiers, removing the list-size metering that makes competing stacks expensive as you grow.
- The Engagement add-on brings SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram into a unified CRM inbox, which almost nothing else in this price band does.
- Direct SQL read access to your own data on the Enterprise plan, a rare and genuinely useful offering at $79 a seat.
Limitations
- No free plan, and only a 14-day trial, which makes evaluation more time-pressured than with HubSpot, Zoho, or Capsule.
- AI usage is allotted rather than included, with only 10 outcomes a month on Foundation, which makes the AI story feel like an upsell lever.
- No custom object types, and unlimited custom fields require the $79 Enterprise tier.
- The integration ecosystem and developer surface are modest compared with HubSpot, Zoho, or Pipedrive.
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.
Nutshell
Per-user subscription across five tiers with unlimited contacts on every plan, an AI outcomes allowance per tier, and separate add-ons for marketing depth, SMS and social messaging, prospecting data, and quotes and invoices.
- Foundation$13
- Growth$25
- Pro$42
- Business$59
- Enterprise$79
Judged as a pure sales CRM, Nutshell Pro at $42 is fractionally more expensive than Pipedrive Growth and less refined. Judged as a CRM plus a marketing toolkit, it is one of the best-value products in this category: forms, landing pages, chat, an AI chatbot, email marketing, and attribution reporting are included at every tier, and contacts are unlimited. That combination costs several hundred dollars a month elsewhere, or $90 a seat plus onboarding at HubSpot. The value proposition collapses if you already own a marketing stack, so the honest test is simple: count how many subscriptions Nutshell would replace, and if the answer is two or more it is very good value indeed.
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 profileNutshell
Nutshell is the right answer to a specific question: what if the CRM also handled the marketing? Chat, an AI chatbot, forms, landing pages, email campaigns, and attribution reporting are included on every plan, contacts are unlimited, and the SMS and social inbox add-on covers channels most competitors ignore entirely. Buy it at Pro, $42 a seat, where pipelines, sales automation, and real reporting live. The case is strongest for a small B2B company with no marketing hire that would otherwise buy two or three separate tools, and weakest for anyone who already owns a marketing stack, since the bundled value is then dead weight and Pipedrive does the sales half better. The AI allowances and the add-on catalogue deserve scrutiny before signing, but as a consolidation play under 30 people it is one of the best-value CRMs in this directory.
Read the full Nutshell profileClose profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Nutshell last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.