ActiveCampaign vs Close CRM

ActiveCampaign and Close CRM are two platforms designed to support businesses in managing customer relationships and sales workflows, each with a unique focus. ActiveCampaign combines CRM with advanced marketing automation, offering tools for multi-channel communication, email campaigns, and lead nurturing. Close CRM, on the other hand, is tailored specifically for sales teams, providing features like call tracking, email automation, and pipeline management to streamline the sales process. In this blog post, we’ll explore their key features to help you decide which platform best suits your needs—or if folk might offer a more balanced alternative with user-friendly contact management and customization options.

What is ActiveCampaign?

Active Campaign is a marketing automation platform designed to help businesses of all sizes manage customer interactions and drive growth through personalized and automated communication.

Key features of ActiveCampaign

• Email marketing: Create personalized email campaigns with drag-and-drop templates, advanced segmentation, and automated sequences to engage your audience effectively.
• Marketing automation: Automate workflows for email, SMS, and site messages, based on user behavior and custom triggers, enhancing customer engagement and retention.
• Sales automation: Integrates a CRM with automation tools to streamline the sales process, track leads, manage deals, and automate follow-ups.
• CRM feature: Sales focused CRM to track and manage processes using automation.
  

What is Close CRM?

Close CRM is a sales-focused platform designed to eliminate the complexity of traditional CRMs, offering a streamlined and user-friendly experience tailored for small businesses with ambitious growth goals. Known for its intuitive design, Close provides robust features like automation to reduce manual work, built-in communication tools for faster follow-ups, and powerful integrations to fit seamlessly into any tech stack. Whether you’re managing leads, collaborating with a team, or scaling sales efforts, Close is built to save time and help small businesses succeed.

Key features of Close CRM

• Fast setup: Simple and quick to implement, allowing teams to start using the platform without delay.
• Intuitive interface: Easy-to-navigate dashboard tailored for speed and productivity.
• Built-in communication: Integrated calling, email, and SMS tools for seamless interaction with leads and clients.
• Automation tools: Includes workflows, smart views, and task automation to streamline repetitive tasks.
• Powerful reporting: Customizable sales and activity reporting for actionable insights into team performance and revenue trends.
• Team collaboration: Features like shared inboxes and task assignments to keep teams aligned and efficient.
• Secure and scalable: Designed with robust security and scalability for growing businesses.
• Integrations: Offers over 100 native integrations and Zapier compatibility to sync seamlessly with existing tools.

ActiveCampaign vs. Close CRM: Feature Comparison

Let's break down the key features of Nutshell and Close CRM and take a closer look at their workflows, user experience and key features.

1. Sales pipeline management

When it comes to sales pipeline management, both ActiveCampaign and Close CRM offer robust features that cater to businesses looking to streamline their sales processes. ActiveCampaign integrates its sales pipeline management feature seamlessly with its CRM, allowing businesses to visually manage deals through customizable pipelines. Users can automate tasks such as follow-ups and track every stage of the sales journey, providing a comprehensive overview of their sales efforts. This integration ensures that sales processes are efficient and organized, helping teams focus on closing deals.
Close CRM offers a streamlined, visual approach to managing sales processes with its Powerful Pipeline View. This feature provides a clear snapshot of all active opportunities, enabling teams to prioritize tasks and focus on what matters most. The drag-and-drop deal management feature allows users to effortlessly update the status of leads, making it easy to track deals from start to finish. Close CRM's intuitive design ensures that sales teams can quickly adapt to changes and maintain momentum in their sales activities.

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2. Ease of use

ActiveCampaign is known for its user-friendly interface, which simplifies email marketing and automation tasks. Close CRM is also designed with ease of use in mind, offering intuitive navigation and a straightforward setup process that makes it accessible for sales teams to manage their workflows efficiently.

3. Contact enrichment

ActiveCampaign does not appear to have a contact enrichment feature. This might limit users who rely on automated data enrichment to enhance their contact profiles. Close CRM also lacks a dedicated contact enrichment feature, which could be a consideration for businesses needing comprehensive contact data.

4. Outreach

ActiveCampaign’s outreach capabilities are functional, offering email, SMS, and some social media tools for multi-channel communication. However, the SMS functionality is quite basic. Close CRM's outreach features integrate built-in calling, email, and SMS tools, enabling seamless multi-channel outreach without the need for external apps, allowing for streamlined follow-ups.

5. Automation

ActiveCampaign's automation features allow users to create workflows that automate tasks using a visual drag-and-drop builder, supporting a range of triggers. Close CRM's automation features focus on streamlining workflows for sales teams, with custom workflows and Smart Views to organize and prioritize leads, enhancing efficiency.

6. Integration

ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of integrations with over 900 third-party applications, allowing users to connect the platform with tools like Shopify, WordPress, Salesforce, and Google Analytics. This extensive integration capability ensures flexibility and adaptability for various business needs. Close CRM offers integrations with various tools to enhance sales workflows and streamline data management.

7. Artificial Intelligence

ActiveCampaign integrates AI features to enhance its platform, including predictive sending and content optimization. These AI-powered tools help in analyzing contact behavior and optimizing messaging strategies. Close CRM does not appear to have an AI integration, which may limit advanced automation and personalization opportunities.

Price and plans comparison

Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both ActiveCampaign and Close CRM.

ActiveCampaign prices

ActiveCampaign's price plans are based on the number of contacts you have. The following is based on a plan for 1,000 contacts.

• Starter: Starting from $15/month.
• Plus: Starting from $49/month.
• Pro: Starting from $79/month.
• Enterprise: Starting from $145/month.

Close CRM prices

Close CRM offers a monthly and annual payment option. The annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Startup: $49/user/month.
• Professional: $99/user/month.
• Enterprise: $139/user/month.

Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to ActiveCampaign and Close CRM

Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system. folk can support multiple business functions including sales, marketing, recruitment, and more. You can use folk as a solopreneur, small to mid-size team, and large enterprise.

Key features

• Contact management: Bring all your contacts into one place seamlessly, from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and X to multiple inboxes including Gmail and Outlook.
• Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.
• Sales pipeline dashboard: Manage your entire sales cycle and leads with a highly customizable sales pipeline dashboard that can be used in Kanban-board view or listicle.
• Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
• Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
• Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
• Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
• Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.

Price and plans

folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Premium: $40 per user, per month.
• Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.

ActiveCampaign vs. Close CRM: What's the verdict?

It's apparent how choosing between ActiveCampaign and Close CRM ultimately depends on your specific business needs. ActiveCampaign excels in marketing automation and integrated sales processes, making it ideal for businesses prioritizing customer engagement through personalized campaigns. Close CRM, on the other hand, offers robust sales-focused features, perfect for teams that need a streamlined pipeline management system. However, for companies that need a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free