“Nutshell is super user-friendly and intuitive
“I would highly recommend Nutshell
“Easy to use and... wait for it ... 100% buy in!
“Nutshell is both simple and powerful
Choosing the right CRM is crucial for your business. Explore why Nutshell is the right CRM over Close CRM. Nutshell’s standout features include:
Founded in 2013, Close CRM is a sales and contact management software with features like email and calendar integration, in-app calling, and automated outreach.
The biggest issue with Close CRM is that it reserves essential CRM features for its highest-paying customers. If you want features like multiple pipelines, advanced sales automation, and email marketing features, you have to pay at least $99 per user per month. And Close CRM restricts data storage, forcing growing companies into more expensive tiers.
The number one customer complaint about Close CRM is its lack of features and automation.
Nutshell is an award-winning CRM platform that helps B2B sales, marketing, and customer teams work together to close more deals and retain more customers.
Powerful enough to support any element of your business and simple enough to implement without a paid admin or IT department, Nutshell is favored among businesses from a wide variety of industries and sizes due to its ease of use, flexible set up, and available features.
Furthermore, Nutshell Sales’ features often outshine the competitors in terms of both usability and comprehensiveness, according to customer reviews. Plus, we have a full Marketing Suite and Engagement Suite, with some of our marketing and engagement tools included with your Nutshell Sales license.
Here at Nutshell, we’re dedicated to helping businesses grow their revenue and solve the most critical challenge of sales and marketing software: motivating teams to use it. We’re passionate about our customers’ success, and we love finding new ways to take the frustrations out of selling, marketing, and managing.
Nutshell not only seamlessly syncs with all of Google Workspace (download our Chrome extension), but we also sync seamlessly with all of Microsoft 365 (download our Outlook extension).
If you’re searching for an easy-to-use CRM, you may have encountered Close CRM. But with its lack of essential CRM features and arbitrary limits, is it really the best option for your business?
Nutshell offers multiple pipelines, advanced sales automation, email marketing tools, and unlimited data storage—All in a user-friendly interface and for a transparent and affordable price.
Consider how Nutshell vs. Close CRM compare:
Your sales team has the best chance of success when your marketing team is feeding them high-quality leads. And when your sales and marketing data live on the same platform, it’s easy to create highly targeted marketing audiences to target the right people at the right time.
Nutshell works hand-in-hand with email marketing, our built-in email marketing tool that works seamlessly with your CRM data. You can set up multi-email drip sequences to send automatically to specific leads once they enter a stage in your pipeline. With A/B testing, an AI writing assistant, and email reporting, Nutshell makes it easy to optimize your marketing outreach.
If you want to try out email marketing, you can send up to 150 emails per month for absolutely free!
Close CRM doesn’t have these robust email marketing features. Close customers can only create five email drip sequences, limiting their ability to customize messages to prospects. Users also can’t send personal email sequences or create email campaigns, leaving them without a complete picture of their customer relationships.
Some essential sales and contact management tasks, like moving a lead further down your pipeline or assigning leads to the right sales reps, can take too much time from your team’s work week. Sales automation ensures that everything gets done right in a fraction of the time.
Nutshell’s sales automation features let you put tasks like pipeline distribution, lead assignment, lead advancement, and task reminders on autopilot. And as the best Next-Action Selling CRM, Nutshell lets you provide your team with sales guidance to optimize your sales process.
With Close CRM, customers can only automate task reminders. You’ll have to move leads through your pipeline manually, assign leads to sales reps, distribute leads to the right pipeline, and guide your team through the sales cycle.
Nutshell Pro lets you create up to five fully customizable pipelines, so you can customize your approach to your leads based on the product they’re interested in or your sales processes. With four pipeline views, including list, board, map, and chart view, your team can see their leads in any way that works best for them. Plus, every Nutshell tier comes with unlimited contact and data storage!
Close CRM’s Startup plan only comes with a single pipeline, so you have to work all your leads through the same process. Teams can only see their leads in two ways: list view and board view. And with strict limits on how many leads and contacts you can store, Close CRM limits your company’s ability to grow.
Customization is critical for making your software work for your team. Too much and the platform can become difficult to use—too little and it won’t get used at all.
Nutshell’s customization options make it easier, not harder, for your team to get more done. You can create unlimited custom activity types and email templates to ensure your CRM tracks every action that matters to your business. Design personal email sequences to automate your personalized outreach, unlimited email drip sequences, custom reports, customized web forms, and more.
But Close CRM? They impose limitations on their customers’ ability to customize their CRM. Close CRM Startup customers have limits on the number of drip sequences and email templates they can create, and they don’t get features like custom reporting, activity types, web forms, or personal email sequences.
When making CRM comparisons with Close CRM, Nutshell should be on your radar. That’s because we offer:
We listen to and anticipate the needs of our customers to provide a user-friendly and affordable CRM filled with valuable features.
We regularly add new features and update our software to provide superior service, including:
CRM is Nutshell’s flagship feature that is available in our Sales Suite. Our Sales Suite has 5 plan tiers to help you choose the best plan for your budget and required features. Below, we’re comparing our most popular Sales plan (Sales Pro) to Close CRM’s most comparable plan.
PER USER COST
Comparisons based on similarly-priced packages (Nutshell Sales Pro and Close CRM Startup)
$42 per month billed annually,
$49 per month billed monthly
$49 per month billed annually,
$59 per month billed monthly
SALES AUTOMATION
Streamline your team’s tasks with Nutshell’s automations, including pipeline distribution, lead assignment, lead advancement, task reminders, and team guidance.
Yes!
Only task reminders
UNLIMITED DATA STORAGE
Yes!
Only 25,000 leads and 50,000 contacts
IN-APP PHONE DIALING AND RECORDING
Integrate with your phone system or preferred communication platform and call from within Nutshell.
Free and unlimited
Calls are charged per minute and phones monthly, with call recordings only saved for seven days
MULTIPLE PIPELINES
Up to 5 fully customizable pipelines to better track different products or sales processes
No
PIPELINE MANAGEMENT FEATURES
Flexibility for teams who have multiple processes or to use for other objectives such as Customer Retention or Customer Success.
Drag-and-drop board, list view, map view, chart view
Only list and board view
CUSTOM ACTIVITY TYPES
Customize the activities your team can report on in Nutshell.
Yes
Limited to 1
EMAIL TEMPLATES
Yes
Limited
NATIVE EMAIL INTEGRATIONS
Sync your email with Nutshell to send and receive messages from inside your CRM.
Yes! Sync your Gmail, Outlook, Office 365, or email account from another provider with Nutshell
Yes
PERSONAL EMAIL SEQUENCES
Create and schedule one-on-one sales drips that are more likely to capture attention. Nutshell triggers a sales sequence at the pipeline stage of your choice, remembers the follow-up for you so that valuable prospects don’t float away, and stops the sequence as soon as they reply.
Yes! Nutshell lets you automate your outreach with personal email sequences, which are customizable for your needs.
No
MARKETING EMAILS AND DRIP SEQUENCES
Create and schedule one-on-one sales drips that are more likely to capture attention. Nutshell triggers a sales sequence at the pipeline stage of your choice, remembers the follow-up for you so that valuable prospects don’t float away, and stops the sequence as soon as they reply.
Can send 150 emails per month for free; additional charge per contact above the limit (Paid plans starting at $5 for 100 contacts)
Limited to 5 drip sequences
CUSTOMIZABLE, EMBEDDABLE WEB FORMS
Use our drag-and-drop editor to design simple web forms that capture customer information and automatically create new contacts and leads.
Yes; Nutshell forms are fully customizable, from title text and images to the fields you provide for website visitors to fill out.
None
EASY TO CUSTOMIZE YOURSELF
Most CRMs offer some degree of customization. The question is, what do you really need to change to suit your team’s needs—and how easy is it to accomplish without coding?
Yes—Nutshell is famous for its intuitive design, so you can fit Nutshell to your team’s needs without having to pay for someone to do it for you
No—customization options are limited
INTEGRATES WITH THIRD-PARTY BUSINESS SOFTWARE
Nutshell offers dozens of native integrations, including a native QuickBooks integration, along with thousands more accessible through Zapier.
Yes
Yes
SALES REPORTING AND ANALYTICS
Having an easy-to-use CRM increases adoption among your team and makes it easier to accomplish all your mission-critical tasks.
Yes! Leads and sales reports, plus forecasts, losses, activities, funnels, attribution, custom reports, and more!
No custom reports
FREE WHITE GLOVE DATA IMPORTS
Importing your data accurately into your CRM is critical for getting up and running. And if you’re running into difficulties, it’s great to have free expert help.
Yes—you can get all your data uploaded to your CRM during onboarding – for absolutely free
No
LIVE CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Available on Monday through Friday from 7:30 am to 5:30 pm EST (excluding holidays)
Yes
No
FREE IPHONE/ANDROID APPS
Included mobile app from the App Store or Google Play to access the power of Nutshell anywhere.
Yes
Yes
MOBILE BUSINESS CARD SCANNER
Nutshell’s business card scanner is lightweight and built into the Nutshell mobile app.
Included
No
WEB CHAT TOOL
Sales Pro customers have access to our Nutshell Engagement Foundation tier features, including unlimited Web chat tool usage, chat thread assignment, chat conversation management, and data collection through forms.
Unlimited
No
To compare all of Nutshell’s Sales plans, go to our pricing page and click “compare all plans”.
When making CRM comparisons with Close CRM, Nutshell should be on your radar. That’s because we offer:
Awesome service. The White Glove Important service convinced me to roll this out to my entire company.
Steve K. Speedwagon Properties
A perfect system that meets all our requirements; Flexible and easy to customize.
Vimmi
Nutshell—somehow—made me *want* to use a CRM again. Might be a first.
Lisa L. Generations Now LLC
Nutshell gives us insights into our business through their reporting, and the CRM is easy fr our sales and onboarding teams to use. I highly recommend them for a growing Saas.
Brian S. Testimonial Tree
Your customer service is hands-down the best I’ve seen in a long time. It is greatly appreciated. Keep up the good work!
Ryan M. Reichel Insulation
Find out more about our affordable plans, packed with the features your business needs.
Join 30,000+ other sales and marketing professionals. Subscribe to our Sell to Win newsletter!
