HubSpot CRM vs Close: Which is a better fit?

Monica: My name is Monica and I am an administrative and operations manager. Our company consists of 12 people and I would give HubSpot a 4-star rating. We were using Salesforce and the way it was described by my management was as an glorified database. Apparently, we did need support for every step that we needed to follow and support wasn't great, so it just took a lot of work to get simple tasks done. Yeah. I chose HubSpot myself actually. I did some research and I wanted a platform where I could have all of my activities in one place. So not only I have the CRM software, I can also distribute our newsletter and I can also get reports on the activity that I get with my customers and contacts. So initially, I tried it because it was a free platform that offered very sophisticated tools. And I ended up staying with it just because I can have everything in one place, even manage my social media accounts. At first, getting started with HubSpot was very easy. It is very intuitive. It is very well-designed. Later on, I did have some questions. I didn't have the time necessarily to explore the more complex tools, so I did reach out to the sales team. To be honest, it took some time to get an appointment. I got canceled three times so that wasn't great. But the software and the design itself is pretty good where I was able to set it up myself. I would say, if you want to try HubSpot, to watch some videos about all the capabilities. There is even a very short project-oriented course available online. I believe that it's on Coursera. That is very useful. They guide you through every step of the way and they show all the many different free tools that are available which is great because they're not pushing a sale. They are rather just teaching you how to use the software. And yeah, just watch a bunch of videos and do spend some time exploring the many available tools.

Todd Q.: Hi, my name is Todd and I'm an owner. I would give Close.com a rating of five. For more reviews, please click below. Prior to using Close, we were using HubSpot. The reason we switched up HubSpot is it's a little more complex to get started. There are also a lot of other packages you had to buy to make it worthwhile. So I think we ended up switching because we wanted to get started with something more quickly and not have to have such a large capital outlay to get started. We chose Close because it's a lot faster to get started with than some of the other products we had tried. It was very easy to get productive very quickly. It was easy to start simply. Then as our business needs changed or grew, Close was able to grow with us. It was easy to have more advanced searches, more advanced ways of slicing and dicing the data that we needed to find. So it just helped us get started quickly and maintain our growth moving forward. Getting started with Close was very easy. It didn't require a lot of set up, so it was very quick for us to get up and running and get productive with it quickly. I think that's a big reason why we initially went with it because it didn't require all that time and effort setting it up. It was quick to start helping us without having to spend a lot of time on it. Don't feel the need to create lots of different types of opportunities or lead statuses, that kind of thing. Just get started and as simple as you can. Then as your needs or complexities grow, only then start worrying about classifying all your leads and information into all these different buckets because I think once you use it for a while, you'll start understanding the need for those different kinds of classifications. Just don't do it too soon.