Close CRM vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Close CRM
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Close.io is a customer relationship management (CRM) software with call management and sales workflow automation capabilities.
$49
per month includes 1 user
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a platform for sales with a community of Sellers, Sales Leaders, and Sales Operations, who use the solution to grow sales and increase productivity. The AI CRM for Sales features data built right in, so that companies can sell faster, sell smarter and sell efficiently. Salesforce Sales Cloud is used for, and supports: Buyer Engagement Sales Engagement Enablement Sales AI Sales Analytics Team…
$25
per month
Pricing
Close CRMSalesforce Sales Cloud
Editions & Modules
Startup
$49
per month Includes 1 user
Professional
$299
per month Includes 3 users
Business
$699
per month Includes 5 users
Starter
$25.00
Per User/Per Month
Professional
$80.00
Per User/Per Month
Enterprise
$165.00
Per User/Per Month
Unlimited
$330.00
Per user/Per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Close CRMSalesforce Sales Cloud
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional Details15% discount on annual pricing in addition to the month-to-month prices listed here.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Close CRMSalesforce Sales Cloud
Considered Both Products
Close CRM
Chose Close CRM
All the same features and more in a much better user experience. Lots of integrations of Salesforce require a dedicated employee just to manage Salesforce and make changes. Close just works out of the box and is easy to change and customize.
Chose Close CRM
Salesforce was actually a good platform but it was a bit expensive for an organization that is in a growing stage. Close is relatively cheaper and has almost the same functionality as Salesforce. We've also tried a few other platforms, but nothing has been very beneficial or as …
Chose Close CRM
Close.io strikes an important balance between power (features / functionality) and simplicity, making it an enjoyable and powerful platform to use. It's also priced favorably to Salesforce.
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Chose Salesforce Sales Cloud
I pick Salesforce because this was what my customers are using. Previously I was using Close.io however, the reports were very poor. Also the call phone numbers were also wrong as the default numbers were US +011 vs. IE +353.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Close CRMSalesforce Sales Cloud
Sales Force Automation
Comparison of Sales Force Automation features of Product A and Product B
Close CRM
8.9
8 Ratings
15% above category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.7
237 Ratings
0% above category average
Customer data management / contact management8.18 Ratings8.5237 Ratings
Workflow management7.88 Ratings7.9228 Ratings
Territory management8.01 Ratings7.4182 Ratings
Opportunity management10.06 Ratings8.4231 Ratings
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)9.48 Ratings7.4216 Ratings
Contract management10.01 Ratings7.0188 Ratings
Interaction tracking8.48 Ratings7.4202 Ratings
Channel / partner relationship management9.73 Ratings7.6164 Ratings
Quote & order management00 Ratings7.5172 Ratings
Customer Service & Support
Comparison of Customer Service & Support features of Product A and Product B
Close CRM
8.5
6 Ratings
13% above category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.4
79 Ratings
1% below category average
Case management8.03 Ratings7.679 Ratings
Call center management7.55 Ratings7.363 Ratings
Help desk management10.02 Ratings7.366 Ratings
Marketing Automation
Comparison of Marketing Automation features of Product A and Product B
Close CRM
9.1
6 Ratings
19% above category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.6
216 Ratings
1% above category average
Lead management8.86 Ratings7.8211 Ratings
Email marketing9.45 Ratings7.4181 Ratings
CRM Project Management
Comparison of CRM Project Management features of Product A and Product B
Close CRM
8.0
6 Ratings
5% above category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.4
219 Ratings
2% below category average
Task management8.45 Ratings7.4209 Ratings
Billing and invoicing management10.01 Ratings7.056 Ratings
Reporting5.75 Ratings7.7172 Ratings
CRM Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of CRM Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Close CRM
7.6
6 Ratings
0% below category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.7
232 Ratings
1% above category average
Forecasting10.01 Ratings7.3201 Ratings
Pipeline visualization8.26 Ratings7.7220 Ratings
Customizable reports4.74 Ratings8.1229 Ratings
Customization
Comparison of Customization features of Product A and Product B
Close CRM
8.6
8 Ratings
13% above category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
8.0
223 Ratings
5% above category average
Custom fields10.07 Ratings8.1221 Ratings
Custom objects10.02 Ratings8.1211 Ratings
Scripting environment8.03 Ratings7.9157 Ratings
API for custom integration6.57 Ratings8.0184 Ratings
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Close CRM
8.1
8 Ratings
3% below category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
8.7
225 Ratings
4% above category average
Single sign-on capability8.03 Ratings8.8192 Ratings
Role-based user permissions8.26 Ratings8.6198 Ratings
Social CRM
Comparison of Social CRM features of Product A and Product B
Close CRM
10.0
1 Ratings
32% above category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.4
142 Ratings
2% above category average
Social data10.01 Ratings7.5141 Ratings
Social engagement10.01 Ratings7.3138 Ratings
Integrations with 3rd-party Software
Comparison of Integrations with 3rd-party Software features of Product A and Product B
Close CRM
6.5
4 Ratings
9% below category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.7
192 Ratings
8% above category average
Marketing automation6.54 Ratings7.8188 Ratings
Compensation management00 Ratings7.7128 Ratings
Platform
Comparison of Platform features of Product A and Product B
Close CRM
10.0
1 Ratings
29% above category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.0
203 Ratings
7% below category average
Mobile access10.01 Ratings7.0203 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Close CRMSalesforce Sales Cloud
Small Businesses
Salesmate
Salesmate
Score 9.8 out of 10
Salesmate
Salesmate
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Creatio
Creatio
Score 9.1 out of 10
Creatio
Creatio
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Creatio
Creatio
Score 9.1 out of 10
Creatio
Creatio
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Close CRMSalesforce Sales Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
9.4
(8 ratings)
8.4
(369 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(56 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(3 ratings)
7.5
(120 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.8
(27 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(18 ratings)
Support Rating
9.4
(3 ratings)
5.7
(91 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.9
(11 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(15 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(18 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(9 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(28 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(8 ratings)
User Testimonials
Close CRMSalesforce Sales Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
Close
Excellent software to increase sales and follow up with existing and new customers. Email and SMS handling are really easy for the sales team, managing leads is really great, and Close merges duplicate leads to help our Data Leads avoid repetitive and unnecessary calls. As mentioned in some comments before, must improve in reports, Close is not appropriate to handle or track agents' hours making it necessary to implement additional software to cover this area.
Read full review
Salesforce
Salesforce Sales Cloud is, in my experience, well suited to large B2B businesses who are driving demand and lead generation, and tracking customers through the funnel. It is a system we needed for a long time and has made a huge difference. However, I think it would have been more appropriate for a smaller business / a business who sets this up earlier on. There are great advantages to having historical data. It is really useful for allowing all commercial teams to work together, including sales, new business, marketing, client success etc. However, it relies too much too often on human error. If more things were automated and simpler, perhaps with AI queries, it could be easier to use
Read full review
Pros
Close
  • Email sequences. Create and send a sequence of emails until the sequence finishes or the contact replies to your email. You can also pause the sequence manually.
  • Email sync. Syncs in real time with your email account, which is huge.
  • Zapier integration. We've automated a lot of our pipeline management through the Zapier integration. This saves us soooo much time.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
  • Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
  • API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
  • Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.
Read full review
Cons
Close
  • Make it so one can set the time at which the emails go out.
  • Make it easier to set up my workflow.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • I have hard-coded the auto-update of the phone number format and state format from some codes shared by the community, but I do not know where to do it. I cannot reset it either.
  • It is unclear what functionalities each version has. We use the enterprise version, and it seems we can only have one design of the pipeline. But different business segments would have very different sales cycles, and hence, pipeline tracking would be different. It would be nice to have this available in our version.
  • It seems I cannot create a report to pull notes logged at the account levels.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Close
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.
Read full review
Usability
Close
It's my favorite CRM to recommend to sales organizations. Robust Telephony options including a Power Dialer, SMS, and Voice Drop, are completely integrated into the CRM. The kicker is you can have "Unlimited" contacts where many platforms charge based on the number of users. This can make a huge difference in monthly billing.
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Salesforce
Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.
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Reliability and Availability
Close
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.
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Performance
Close
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure
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Support Rating
Close
I haven't really had the need to use their support, but the only time I had an issue with the platform, the Close team was very attentive and responded in a short span of time. Also they take minimal time to solve issues. The only con here is there is no way to reach out to them apart from email.
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Salesforce
The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.
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In-Person Training
Close
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business
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Online Training
Close
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this
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Implementation Rating
Close
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.
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Alternatives Considered
Close
Pipedrive was great for us for a long time. We used it for over 4 years. Our product and process was simple. When things got more complex, we needed something that could handle our growing needs and Pipedrive kept falling short. We built our own custom solution in Airtable and though it worked, we spend a lot of time managing it. Close was able to solve all our issues and save us hours per week in admin work.
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Salesforce
The thing that puts Sales Cloud above the top is its simple user interface, which is easy to interact with. The visuals and automation are also quite amazing. Given its attention to data and customer relationship management, Sales Cloud is tough to beat. Of course, Microsoft Dynamics integrates nicely with other Microsoft products, and Monday is a tool everyone is familiar with, so it is hard to compete with those.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Close
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.
Read full review
Scalability
Close
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Salesforce sales cloud implementation can give you the desired outcome for your business. Its workflow, approval, sync, and file-sharing features help automate the process. The Macros feature helps business to shorten their sales cycle. Sales Cloud also allows businesses to make the right decision with its real-time business insights and analysis.
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Professional Services
Close
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.
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Return on Investment
Close
  • Positive - It's much easier now with Close.io to make sure that no deal falls through the cracks. Therefore helping us recover lost revenue.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • All tools we've implemented with Salesforce had a pretty quick positive ROI with the exception of CPQ & Billing. That was a very large project that I would only suggest for businesses with many SKUs that tend to be packaged together.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Close CRM Screenshots

Screenshot of All-in-one Close inboxScreenshot of Sales Funnel Report in CloseScreenshot of Call Assistant automatic transcription and summaryScreenshot of Built-in calling in Close

Salesforce Sales Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of