Close
The calling-first CRM for inside sales, bootstrapped and built for volume conversations
Close is a sales CRM for small and mid-sized inside sales teams that builds calling, email, and SMS directly into the platform, adds workflow sequences, power and predictive dialers, and an AI sales agent named Chloe, and charges per seat with usage-based telephony, so reps work leads from one screen instead of stitching a CRM to separate outreach tools.
Overview
Close (originally Close.io) came out of the founders' own outsourced-sales startup in 2013: they built the tool their reps needed, a CRM where the phone, inbox, and SMS thread live inside the lead record, and turned it into the product. Thirteen years later that DNA is intact. Close remains communication-first: one-click global calling, a power dialer that chews through call lists, email and SMS sequences, and automatic activity logging so reps sell instead of doing data entry.
The company is a deliberate outlier in a venture-soaked category: bootstrapped, profitable, and 100% remote with roughly 100 employees, serving what it says are 11,500+ sales teams. That shows up in the product as focus. Close does not try to be a marketing suite, a project manager, or a data platform; it optimizes the loop of dial, talk, log, follow up, and it reports having processed over 2 billion calls, emails, and texts.
The 2026 headline is Chloe, an AI teammate embedded in the CRM that can call and qualify leads, book meetings, transcribe and summarize conversations, draft follow-ups, and update records, metered through per-plan AI credits. Pricing runs from a $9 per user per month Solo tier to $139 for Scale on annual billing, with telephony usage (about $0.02 per minute, roughly $1 per month per number) billed on top; that usage meter is fair but means calling-heavy teams should budget beyond the seat price.
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.
Not the right fit for
- Teams that rarely call; if outreach is email-and-LinkedIn only, Close's core differentiator is dead weight and Attio or folk will fit better per dollar.
- Organizations needing deep customization, custom objects, or complex multi-team data models; Close keeps its schema deliberately simple.
- Marketing-led companies wanting landing pages, forms-to-nurture, and campaign attribution in the CRM; Close is a sales tool, not a marketing suite.
- Enterprises with heavy compliance, territory management, and approval-chain requirements; Close tops out at role-based permissions and lead visibility rules.
- Solo users who mainly want free software; the Solo tier is cheap but limited to one user and 10,000 leads, and there is no free plan.
How it works
- 1
You import leads (CSV, API, Zapier, or native migrations), connect email, and provision phone numbers inside Close; every call, email, and text then logs automatically to the lead timeline, and built-in calling works from the browser in 200+ countries without a separate telephony vendor.
- 2
Reps work from Smart Views: saved, dynamically updating lead searches (for example, trial signups not contacted in 3 days) that function as calling queues. The power dialer (Growth tier) dials through a list back to back, and the predictive dialer (Scale) dials multiple numbers simultaneously and routes connected calls to available reps.
- 3
Workflows sequence multichannel follow-up: a lead enters a workflow and receives a mix of automated emails, SMS, and scheduled call tasks over days or weeks, pausing automatically when a reply lands. Chloe, the AI agent, can slot into these workflows to qualify inbound leads by phone, book meetings, and write follow-ups, drawing on plan-included AI credits.
- 4
Reporting covers activity (calls made, emails sent, talk time per rep), funnels, and revenue, aimed at sales managers coaching a team on volume and conversion; call recordings, transcripts, and live coaching tools (listen, whisper, barge on Scale) support the management layer.
Feature breakdown
25 features in 5 modulesCalling and telephony
The built-in phone system that defines the product.- Built-in global calling
- Click-to-call from any lead with numbers available in 200+ countries; usage is billed at roughly $0.02 per minute with numbers around $1 per month, no third-party dialer required.
- Power dialer
- Automatically dials through a Smart View list one lead after another (Growth tier), removing the gap between calls that eats rep hours.
- Predictive dialer
- Dials multiple lines simultaneously and connects answered calls to available reps (Scale tier), built for teams where connect rate, not talk track, is the bottleneck.
- Call recording and retention
- Automatic recording with 90-day retention on Growth and unlimited retention on Scale.
- Live call coaching
- Managers can listen, whisper to the rep, or barge into live calls on the Scale tier.
- Voicemail drop and call forwarding
- Pre-recorded voicemails drop with one click so reps move to the next dial; forwarding and premium numbers ($19 per month per line) round out the phone system.
Email and SMS
The other two channels, native to the same timeline as calls.- Two-way email sync
- Connects Gmail, Microsoft 365, or IMAP so every thread logs to the lead automatically, with send-later scheduling and undo.
- Email templates and snippets
- Shared team templates with merge fields, plus reporting on template performance.
- Bulk email
- Send templated email to a filtered lead list with throttling controls (Growth tier and up).
- Built-in SMS
- Send and receive texts from the lead record in supported countries, with SMS steps usable inside automated workflows; usage billed at cost.
- Centralized inbox
- A shared inbox view unifies unanswered emails, texts, missed calls, and tasks into one work queue per rep.
Automation and AI
Workflows plus Chloe, the embedded AI sales agent.- Multichannel workflows
- Sequenced email, SMS, and call steps with delays and conditions, auto-pausing on reply; available from the Growth tier.
- Chloe AI agent
- An AI teammate that initiates outbound calls, qualifies leads conversationally, books meetings, re-engages cold leads, and updates the CRM; usable inside workflows on Growth and above.
- Call transcripts and AI summaries
- Conversations are transcribed and summarized automatically, with AI-generated lead summaries so a rep can pick up an account cold.
- AI credits
- AI usage is metered: 500 credits/month on Solo, 1,000 on Essentials, 1,500 on Growth, 2,000 on Scale per user, pooling into shared team caps (up to 20,000/month on Scale), with additional credits purchasable.
- CRM auto-update
- Activity capture and AI-driven field updates cut manual logging, the vendor's oldest promise (its tagline is 'manage less CRM').
Pipeline and lead management
A deliberately simple schema optimized for working leads fast.- Smart Views
- Saved dynamic searches over leads that act as prioritized work queues and dialer lists, the organizing concept of daily rep work in Close.
- Multiple pipelines and opportunities
- Drag-and-drop opportunity stages with values, confidence, and per-pipeline reporting.
- Custom fields and activities
- Custom fields on leads, contacts, and opportunities, plus fully custom activity types (Growth tier) for motions like site visits or demos.
- Lead capture forms
- Native forms feed inbound leads straight into the CRM and its workflows (Essentials and up).
- Roles and visibility rules
- Role-based permissions and lead visibility restrictions on Scale keep teams or franchises from seeing each other's books.
Reporting and platform
Manager-grade visibility and the integration surface.- Activity reporting
- Calls, emails, SMS, and talk-time per rep with period comparisons, the bread-and-butter report for managing an inside sales floor.
- Funnel and revenue reports
- Stage conversion, won/lost, and sales velocity reporting across pipelines.
- REST API and webhooks
- A long-standing, well-documented API covering leads, activities, and reporting, plus webhook events.
- Integrations and app store
- Native and marketplace connections including Zapier, Zoom, Calendly, Gong, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Slack, with migration tooling from common CRMs.
Use cases
4 documentedSales manager at a 15-rep lending or insurance shop
Web leads arrive around the clock; whoever calls within five minutes wins the deal, and the current stack of a generic CRM plus a separate dialer loses leads in the handoff.
Inbound leads hit a Smart View instantly, the power dialer keeps reps on the phone all morning, and activity reports show exactly who is making their dials; speed-to-lead drops from hours to minutes (the vendor cites customers going from 2 hours to 1 minute).
Founder-led B2B startup doing high-touch outbound
Two founders and one SDR juggle calls, follow-up emails, and texts across hundreds of open conversations and keep dropping threads.
Every conversation lands on one timeline, workflows automate the follow-up cadence and pause on reply, and the centralized inbox turns each morning into a clear queue instead of a memory test.
Ops lead re-engaging a cold lead database
Thousands of aged leads sit untouched because no rep has time to requalify them, and outsourcing the calls is expensive and off-brand.
Chloe works the cold list by phone, qualifies interest, books meetings onto reps' calendars, and logs transcripts, with the team paying in AI credits instead of SDR hours; results still need monitoring, but the marginal cost per requalified lead drops sharply.
Remote sales team spread across time zones
A distributed team needs shared visibility into calls and pipeline without a sales-ops hire or a six-month CRM rollout.
Close's self-serve setup, automatic logging, and manager reporting give a remote team one source of truth in days, a pattern the vendor itself models as a 100% remote company.
Pricing
from $9/user/mo (Solo, billed annually; $19 monthly)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.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Solo | $9 per user, per month, billed annually ($19 monthly) |
A genuinely cheap entry point, but the single-seat and lead caps make it a starter tier, not a team plan. |
| Essentials | $35 per user, per month, billed annually ($49 monthly) |
|
| Growth | $99 per user, per month, billed annually ($109 monthly) |
The first tier with workflows, which most teams will consider table stakes; treat Growth as the real team price. |
| Scale | $139 per user, per month, billed annually ($149 monthly) |
|
Add-ons
- Calling usage (~$0.02/minute): Passed through at cost; phone numbers roughly $1/month each.
- Premium phone numbers ($19/month per line)
- Call Assistant ($50/month plus $0.02/minute): Enhanced transcription and call AI beyond included features.
- Additional organizations ($50/month): For running separate workspaces under one account.
- Extra AI credits (Usage-based): Purchasable beyond plan allotments; SMS and enrichment also billed at cost.
Billing notes
- Annual billing discounts are unusually large, up to about 50% (Solo drops from $19 to $9); the monthly prices are the ones to compare against competitors if you will not commit annually.
- Telephony is usage-based on top of seats: a rep doing three hours of talk time a day adds roughly $70 to $80 a month in minutes, so calling-heavy teams should model usage, not just seats.
- Workflows do not exist below Growth, which is the most consequential line in the pricing grid; Solo and Essentials are manual-outreach plans.
- AI features draw on per-plan credit allotments with shared team caps; Chloe usage beyond the pool is an additional cost.
- Prices current as of August 2026 per close.com/pricing.
Value assessment: 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.
Strengths & limitations
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.
- Fast self-serve setup with strong migration tooling and a well-documented API; teams are productive in days.
- SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and CCPA compliance are published plainly, unusual clarity for an SMB-focused vendor.
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.
- Reporting is strong on activity and funnel but lighter on customizable analytics than enterprise CRMs; data teams end up exporting via API.
- No native LinkedIn capture or social selling surface, a gap against folk and against sales-engagement tools, relevant for teams whose motion starts on LinkedIn.
Head-to-head comparisons
3 alternativesClose vs Attio
from $29/user/mo (Plus, billed annually; $36 monthly)Close and Attio are the clearest fork in the modern SMB CRM road: Close builds the conversation layer in (dialers, SMS, coaching) on a simple schema, while Attio builds a flexible data platform with AI automation but no phone system. Pick Close if reps' days are measured in dials and talk time; pick Attio if your bottleneck is data, routing, and automation across a non-standard sales motion.
Full Close vs Attio comparisonClose vs Salesflare
from $29/user/mo (Growth, billed annually; $39 monthly)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.
Full Close vs Salesflare comparisonClose vs Copper
from $23/user/mo (Basic, billed annually; $29 monthly)Copper embeds the CRM inside Gmail for Google Workspace teams and adds project management for post-sale work; Close pulls reps out of the inbox into a purpose-built cockpit for calls, texts, and sequences. Relationship-driven service businesses that live in email fit Copper; velocity-driven teams that live on the phone fit Close, and Copper has nothing that answers Close's dialer stack.
Full Close vs Copper comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- 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.
- 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.
- Onboarding
- Self-serve with a 14-day full-feature trial ($5 usage credit included), free migration assistance from common CRMs, documentation, and responsive support; no mandatory paid implementation.
- Migration notes
- Native importers and support-assisted migrations cover HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, and spreadsheets. Historical call recordings from a previous telephony vendor do not migrate; number porting into Close's telephony is supported but should be scheduled to avoid downtime.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Web appDesktop apps (Mac and Windows)iOS and Android appsREST API
- API
- Mature REST API with webhooks covering leads, contacts, opportunities, activities, and reporting; long-standing developer documentation and a public app marketplace.
- Compliance
- SOC 2 Type 2GDPR (controller and processor obligations)CCPA
- Data residency
- Not published in detail; US-based cloud infrastructure.
- SSO
- Standard authentication with two-factor support; no published SAML SSO tier.
- Security notes
- Encryption in transit and at rest with documented incident-response and data-recovery procedures; customer data access is restricted to the customer's organization plus limited support personnel, per the security page.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email supportIn-app chatMigration assistanceHelp center
- Documentation
- Thorough help center plus a large library of sales guides, templates, and courses; developer docs for the API are public and versioned.
- Community
- No big official user forum; the company's blog and sales content function as its community surface, and support is vendor-direct.
Company
- Founded
- 2013
- Headquarters
- Fully remote (US-incorporated); no central office
- Ownership
- Bootstrapped, founder-owned, profitable
- Founders
- Steli Efti (CEO), Anthony Nemitz (COO), Thomas Steinacher (Principal Engineer)
- Employees
- ~100 (company about page, 2026)
- Funding
- No venture funding; famously bootstrapped after early fundraising attempts found no takers. Donates 1% of revenue to Stripe Climate.
Timeline
- 2013Launches as Close.io, productizing the internal tool the founders built for their own outsourced inside-sales startup.
- 2019Rebrands from Close.io to Close as the platform matures into a full multichannel sales CRM.
- 2021Operates as a roughly 100-person, fully remote, profitable company, an outlier identity it turns into positioning.
- 2025Founder interviews put the bootstrapped business around $40M in annual recurring revenue.
- 2026Chloe, the embedded AI sales agent, becomes the platform headline, alongside a claim of 11,500+ customer teams and 2 billion+ communications processed.
Integrations
- Gmail / Google Workspace
- Microsoft 365 / Outlook
- Zapier
- Zoom
- Calendly
- Slack
- HubSpot
- Mailchimp
- Gong
- Segment
- REST API and webhooks
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat is Close CRM?
Close is a sales CRM for small and mid-sized inside sales teams that builds calling, SMS, and email directly into the platform, with power and predictive dialers, multichannel workflow sequences, and an embedded AI agent (Chloe). Its pitch is that reps work every conversation from one screen instead of bolting outreach tools onto a passive CRM.
How much does Close cost?
Four per-seat tiers: Solo at $9 per user per month, Essentials at $35, Growth at $99, and Scale at $139, all billed annually (monthly billing runs $19, $49, $109, and $149). Calling minutes (about $0.02 per minute), phone numbers, SMS, and extra AI credits are billed on top as usage.
Does Close have a free plan or trial?
There is no free plan. Close offers a 14-day free trial with full feature access, no credit card required, and $5 of calling and enrichment credit, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee after purchase.
What is Chloe in Close?
Chloe is Close's built-in AI sales agent. It can place outbound calls, qualify leads in conversation, book meetings, generate transcripts and summaries, draft follow-ups, re-engage cold leads, and update CRM records. It runs on plan-included AI credits (500 to 2,000 per user per month depending on tier) and can be inserted into automated workflows on Growth and Scale.
Which Close plan do most teams actually need?
Growth ($99 per user per month annually). It is the first tier with automated workflows, the power dialer, bulk email, and custom activities; Solo and Essentials lack workflows entirely, which most teams treat as essential. Scale adds the predictive dialer, permissions, and live coaching for larger floors.
Does Close include phone calling, and what does it cost?
Yes, calling is native: numbers in 200+ countries, click-to-call, recording, voicemail drop, and dialers, with no separate telephony vendor. Usage is billed at roughly $0.02 per minute and about $1 per month per number, with premium numbers at $19 per month, so heavy callers should budget usage on top of seat fees.
Is Close good for cold email outreach?
It handles sequenced sales email well (workflows, templates, bulk email from Growth up), but it is not a cold-email volume platform: no mailbox rotation, warm-up, or deliverability infrastructure. Teams doing high-volume cold outbound typically pair Close with a dedicated sender and use Close for calls, pipeline, and the conversations that convert.
Who owns Close and how big is it?
Close is bootstrapped and founder-owned, led by co-founder and CEO Steli Efti with co-founders Anthony Nemitz and Thomas Steinacher. It is a fully remote, profitable company of roughly 100 people, founded in 2013, with founder interviews placing revenue around $40M ARR as of 2025.
Is Close secure and compliant?
Close publishes SOC 2 Type 2 certification and states compliance with GDPR (as controller and processor) and CCPA, with encryption in transit and at rest and documented incident-response procedures. There is no published SAML SSO or formal data-residency option, which is worth checking for regulated buyers.
How does Close compare to Salesforce or HubSpot for a small team?
Close trades breadth for velocity: it sets up in days, includes the phone system those platforms outsource to add-ons, and costs less to operate for a calling team. It gives up enterprise customization, ecosystems, and marketing tooling. For an SMB inside sales floor, that trade usually favors Close; for a complex org or marketing-led motion, it does not.
Editorial verdict
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.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.