Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Close CRM and HighLevel are two platforms tailored for businesses looking to enhance sales and customer engagement, each with a distinct focus. Close CRM is designed for fast-paced sales teams, offering features like call tracking, email automation, and pipeline management to streamline the sales process. HighLevel, on the other hand, specializes in digital marketing automation and client management, making it a popular choice for agencies. In this blog post, we’ll compare their key features to help you determine which platform best fits your needs. Or if folk might offer a more flexible alternative with user-friendly contact management.
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.
What is HighLevel?
HighLevel is a comprehensive platform designed to streamline digital marketing efforts for agencies and businesses. It offers features such as lead capture, automated booking, customer nurturing, and membership site creation. The platform provides tools to help agencies build their digital marketing engine, automate workflows, and drive business growth. It also includes a white-label option for agencies.
Key features of HighLevel
- Lead capture tools: HighLevel provides customizable forms, surveys, and landing pages to help businesses effectively capture and manage leads.
- Automated workflows: Automate tasks like follow-ups, appointment scheduling, and reminders, saving time and ensuring consistent communication.
- Customer nurturing tools: Engage with leads through email campaigns, text messages, and automated drip sequences to convert them into loyal customers.
- Membership site creation: Build and manage membership sites directly within the platform, offering valuable resources or courses to clients.
- White-label platform: Agencies can fully brand HighLevel as their own, delivering a seamless experience to their clients.
Close CRM vs. HighLevel: Feature Comparison
Let's break down the key features of Close CRM and HighLevel to take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, user experience and more.
1. Sales Pipeline Management
Close CRM's pipeline offers a streamlined, visual approach to managing sales processes, making it easy to track deals from start to finish. The Powerful Pipeline View provides a clear snapshot of all active opportunities, enabling teams to focus on what matters most. With features like drag-and-drop deal management, users can effortlessly update the status of leads. HighLevel CRM’s sales pipeline management feature enables businesses to create pipelines tailored to their sales processes. It provides tools to track leads, monitor deal progress, and view opportunities through a dashboard.
2. Ease of use
Close CRM is designed with a user-friendly interface that caters to sales teams, offering intuitive navigation and straightforward functionality. HighLevel, while feature-rich, may present a steeper learning curve due to its extensive customization options, which can be overwhelming for new users without prior experience.
3. Contact enrichment
Close CRM does not provide its own contact enrichment feature. You can only access this using a third-party application, which might incur an additional cost. HighLevel also lacks a built-in contact enrichment feature, necessitating third-party integrations for enhanced data.
4. Outreach
Close CRM's outreach features integrate built-in calling, email, and SMS tools, enabling seamless multi-channel outreach without the need for external apps. HighLevel CRM includes outreach tools such as email campaigns, text messaging, and automated sequences, offering multiple ways to manage interactions directly within the platform, though configuration may take time.
5. Automation
Close CRM's automation features streamline workflows by automating tasks like deal updates and lead assignments. HighLevel CRM provides robust automation tools for tasks such as lead follow-ups and campaign management, though setting up complex workflows may require additional effort to configure effectively.
6. Integration
Close CRM offers integrations with various tools to enhance sales workflows and streamline data management. HighLevel also supports integrations, focusing on marketing and client management tools to expand its functionality.
7. Artificial Intelligence
Close CRM does not appear to have an AI integration. HighLevel CRM does not prominently advertise AI-driven functionalities, focusing instead on manual configuration and automation for workflow optimization.
Price and plans comparison
Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Close CRM and HighLevel.
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.
HighLevel prices
High Levels has two price tiers for you to choose from.
- Starter: $97/seat/month.
- Unlimited: $297/seat/month.
Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Close CRM and HIghLevel
Looking for an affordable alternative? Check out folk. A multi-award-winning CRM platform known for its simple, plug-and-play setup. Folk is highly versatile, designed to support teams across sales, marketing, recruitment, and more with its customizable features. Built to grow with your business, it’s suitable for solopreneurs, small to mid-size teams, and even large enterprises.
Key features
- Contact management: Centralize all your contacts effortlessly, importing from social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and X, as well as email services such as Gmail and Outlook.
- Sales pipeline dashboard: Track your entire sales cycle and leads with a customizable pipeline dashboard, available in both Kanban board and list views to suit your workflow.
- Notes and reminders: Add notes directly to a contact’s profile in Folk and access them anytime, anywhere. Set reminders to stay on top of follow-ups and never miss important tasks.
- 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.
Close CRM vs. HighLevel: What's the verdict?
It's clear that both Close CRM and HighLevel offer robust solutions tailored to different business needs, with Close CRM excelling in sales-focused features and HighLevel providing comprehensive digital marketing tools. However, for companies seeking a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk presents a flexible alternative. It combines ease of use with powerful customization options, making it ideal for businesses looking to streamline their CRM processes. Try folk today, free and experience a CRM that adapts to your unique requirements.
Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses