Is Close or Salesflare cheaper?

Close starts at $9/user/mo (Solo, billed annually; $19 monthly) (14 days trial). Salesflare starts at $29/user/mo (Growth, billed annually; $39 monthly) (30 days trial).

Close vs Salesflare

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

Both sides assessed

Close compared with Salesflare

Salesflare automates CRM data entry for small email-centric B2B teams at half Close's effective price, but has no built-in calling, SMS, or dialers. Close costs more and does more operationally: it is the right choice the day a team starts doing real phone volume, while Salesflare is the right choice for a lean team that mostly sells over email and wants the CRM to maintain itself.

Salesflare compared with Close

Close is the operational upgrade for teams whose motion includes serious phone work: dialers, SMS, coaching, and workflows justify its higher price the day call volume matters. Salesflare wins the quieter case: email-centric B2B selling where the pain is CRM maintenance, not conversation throughput, at roughly half the effective seat cost. A team unsure which it is should count weekly dials; under a handful per rep, Salesflare's automation is worth more than Close's telephony.

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 Salesflare if

Small B2B teams (1 to 15 people) selling over email with meeting-driven, relationship-style deals: consultancies, software vendors, agencies, and founder-led sales where nobody has time to babysit a CRM and the phone is not the primary channel.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Close	Salesflare
Category	CRM	CRM
Starting price	$9/user/mo (Solo, billed annually; $19 monthly) (14 days trial)	$29/user/mo (Growth, billed annually; $39 monthly) (30 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 three tiers billed monthly or annually (annual saves $10 to $25 per user per month), with lead-finder credits as the only meter and add-on credit packs; 30-day free trial, no free plan.
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	30 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 teams (1 to 15 people) selling over email with meeting-driven, relationship-style deals: consultancies, software vendors, agencies, and founder-led sales where nobody has time to babysit a CRM and the phone is not the primary channel.
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.	Under an hour to a working system: connect mailbox and calendar, watch the CRM assemble itself, then import any CSV remainder and shape pipeline stages. Full team rollout with workflows lands within a week.
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.	Very low; the product is deliberately small, and the automation removes most of what a rep would otherwise be trained on. Admin surface is minimal by design.
Platforms	Web app, Desktop apps (Mac and Windows), iOS and Android apps, REST API	Web app, Gmail and Outlook sidebars, LinkedIn sidebar, iOS app, Android app, REST API
Compliance	SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR (controller and processor obligations), CCPA	GDPR (EU-based vendor), No SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification publicly referenced as of this review
Founded	2013	2014
Headquarters	Fully remote (US-incorporated); no central office	Antwerp, Belgium
Ownership	Bootstrapped, founder-owned, profitable	Founder-owned, near-fully bootstrapped

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.

Salesflare

Strengths

The automated data capture genuinely works and remains the best pure execution of the self-filling-CRM idea at this price; adoption problems mostly disappear because there is little to maintain.
Honest, simple pricing with unlimited contacts, users' features, and workflows where competitors meter, plus a 30-day trial that is twice the category norm.
Email tracking through to website-visit tracking gives small teams engagement signal usually reserved for pricier sales-engagement tools.
Suggested tasks and inactivity detection convert the automation into actual revenue behavior (following up) rather than just tidy records.

Limitations

No built-in telephony of any kind: no dialer, numbers, or SMS, which excludes calling-driven teams outright.
A fixed accounts-contacts-opportunities data model with no custom objects and only light workflow automation caps how far a growing org can stretch it.
Reporting is adequate for small teams but shallow for data-driven managers; expect exports for real analysis.
No published SOC 2 or ISO certification and no SSO story beyond standard sign-in, which complicates procurement above the SMB bracket (GDPR posture as an EU vendor is the main compliance card).

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.

Salesflare

Per-user subscription across three tiers billed monthly or annually (annual saves $10 to $25 per user per month), with lead-finder credits as the only meter and add-on credit packs; 30-day free trial, no free plan.

Growth$29
Pro$49
Enterprise$99

Salesflare's $29 Growth tier delivers the automation core, tracking, campaigns, and sidebars with essentially nothing metered, which is strong value against credit-heavy rivals; Pro at $49 is the honest team price once workflows and permissions matter. What you are buying is time: the self-filling CRM saves each rep real hours weekly, and for a five-person team that arithmetic beats most alternatives. What you are not buying is headroom: no dialer, no custom objects, no deep automation, so if those needs are twelve months away the cheap seat today may cost a migration later. Against Close you save roughly half per seat and lose the phone system; against folk you trade LinkedIn-first capture for deeper email automation at similar money.

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 profile

Salesflare

Innovation

Salesflare is the purest execution of the self-filling CRM in the small-business market, and a decade of bootstrapped focus shows: the automation is real, the pricing is honest, the limits are few, and small email-centric B2B teams get more time back per dollar than almost anywhere else in the category. The trade is ceiling for simplicity: no phone system, no custom data model, thin enterprise scaffolding, and a ten-person company's shipping pace. Teams of two to fifteen selling over email should shortlist it alongside folk and Attio; teams that dial all day, or that expect to be fifty people soon, should buy their destination platform instead.

Read the full Salesflare profile

Close profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Salesflare last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.