HubSpot vs Close: Which CRM for startups wins?

Early-stage startups often find themselves in a whirlwind of activity, where deals can slip through the cracks due to disorganized follow-ups scattered across various platforms like inboxes, spreadsheets, and collaboration tools. A CRM for startups steps in to provide a crucial solution: ensuring that every interaction, next step, and owner remains visible and easily accessible.

In this landscape, HubSpot and Close offer two distinct approaches to address the challenges startups face. HubSpot operates with a suite-first strategy, emphasizing deep automation, marketing alignment, and comprehensive reporting capabilities. On the other hand, Close adopts a sales-first mentality, providing a streamlined pipeline, rapid setup, and a focus on activity discipline.

This article explores the key differences between HubSpot and Close, highlighting how they impact everyday operations: from contact capture and pipeline hygiene to automation depth, reporting clarity, and the overall cost as your team scales.

O que é o HubSpot?

HubSpot is a comprehensive go-to-market platform that seamlessly integrates CRM, marketing automation, sales tools, and customer service. It’s an ideal choice for startups seeking a single system to manage their funnel from acquisition to retention, featuring robust segmentation and reporting capabilities. The user-friendly CRM allows for easy initial adoption and can evolve into advanced workflows and attribution as business needs expand. It enjoys widespread usage in the US and offers compatibility with most modern SaaS tools. However, be mindful that costs can escalate quickly when utilizing multiple hubs and higher tiers.

What is Close?

Close is designed specifically for high-velocity sales teams that thrive on calls, emails, and sequences. It serves startups engaged in outbound or hybrid sales motions, delivering robust activity tracking, built-in calling, and rapid workflows. The user interface minimizes tab switching, keeping representatives focused on execution. Additionally, Close automates follow-ups and maintains pipeline hygiene with minimal configuration. It is less suited for complex account hierarchies or enterprise-level reporting than some larger platforms.

Feature comparison of HubSpot and Close

Email and Calendar Sync

HubSpot seamlessly integrates with Gmail and Office 365 through the HubSpot Sales integration, allowing emails to be logged directly from your inbox while tracking opens and clicks. The calendar sync feature supports both Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar, ensuring that meetings created in your calendar appear on the relevant record timeline when the invited contact is in the CRM. You can also schedule meetings directly within HubSpot and have them automatically pushed to your connected calendar. This creates a unified activity history for email and meetings, keeping your records up-to-date with minimal manual effort.

Close connects with Gmail or Microsoft email accounts, automatically syncing email communications with the appropriate leads and contacts. Calendar connectivity enables meetings to sync, displaying scheduled events within Close alongside their related records. This integration consolidates outreach history and meeting context, preventing fragmentation across inboxes and calendars. It is ideal for fast-paced teams seeking efficient activity capture without the need for manual logging, ensuring the timeline remains effective for coaching, handoffs, and pipeline reviews.

Clean Contact Data with Enrichment and Deduplication

HubSpot offers built-in data enrichment that automatically fills in company and contact details, minimizing incomplete records and the need for manual research. Its enrichment and buyer intent features operate on a credits model, where HubSpot Credits are required for certain premium data capabilities. Duplicate management identifies potential duplicates, allowing for easy review and merging of records, which helps maintain a clean database. This process reduces fragmented activity histories across multiple contact entries, leading to improved segmentation, routing, reporting, and automation reliability.

Close enhances data hygiene by preventing duplicates during imports and facilitating native merge actions for leads. The importer cross-checks incoming entries against existing leads, ensuring duplicates are addressed before they compromise the database. In cases where duplicates do occur, leads can be merged directly within the app, consolidating activity into a single destination record. Additionally, Close's AI Enrich feature automatically fills lead and contact fields in the CRM, minimizing tedious manual data entry and ensuring records are sufficiently complete for effective routing, personalization, and reporting.

Flexible Pipelines and Views

HubSpot promotes collaboration within each record by incorporating activities such as notes, tasks, calls, emails, and meetings. Users can create tasks directly from a record as part of an activity workflow, ensuring that next steps remain visible and assigned. Mentions in activities or comments notify teammates, facilitating quick handoffs without losing context. Activity association settings determine which linked records share the same activity history, promoting consistent visibility across contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. This framework aids cross-team alignment as workload increases.

Close is designed for effective sales execution, offering flexible organization through Lead Status and Smart Views. Teams can define pipeline stages using statuses and then create Smart Views that highlight the most relevant leads based on specific filters and sorting. These views can also serve as working queues for outreach, reviews, and prioritization. This strategy remains streamlined while still accommodating structured processes as volume escalates, making it ideal for startups seeking clarity without complex configurations.

Team Collaboration

HubSpot enhances collaboration within each record by integrating activities such as notes, tasks, calls, emails, and meetings. Tasks can be generated directly from a record as part of an activity workflow, ensuring that next steps remain visible and assigned. Mentions in activities or comments notify teammates, facilitating quick handoffs while maintaining context. The activity association settings determine which linked records share the same activity history, ensuring consistent visibility across contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. This arrangement fosters cross-team alignment as the workload grows.

Close bolsters team collaboration by providing shared visibility on lead timelines, activities, and ownership. Records consolidate calls, emails, SMS, notes, and next steps in one location, preventing context from being lost in fragmented threads. Assignment workflows direct new leads or status changes to the appropriate owner, minimizing missed follow-ups. Teams can standardize their processes by aligning on statuses, views, and activity expectations, ensuring consistent execution as headcount increases.

Lightweight Automation and Integrations

HubSpot enhances automation through workflows that seamlessly operate across marketing, sales, and service processes, complemented by a user-friendly visual builder for defining triggers and actions. Additionally, the platform integrates with external tools via Zapier triggers and actions for contacts, companies, deals, and custom objects. For those seeking more granular control, HubSpot offers developer APIs to create custom integrations and manage data synchronization. This combination allows for lightweight automations at the outset, followed by more sophisticated orchestration as your tech stack evolves, all while maintaining centralized governance through CRM settings and automation controls.

Close automation focuses on Workflows and Sequences, enabling follow-ups to run automatically without repetitive manual tasks. Triggers can enroll contacts into sequences or initiate steps when lead conditions align, ensuring consistent outreach throughout the sales funnel. Close also supports Zapier integration for no-code connections to other tools, along with an API for more complex custom integrations. Bulk actions facilitate updates or executions across multiple leads as processes scale, making it easy to start with simple automation and expand as your startup grows.

folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Startups in 2026

folk is an innovative CRM designed specifically for startups that manage relationships through Gmail, Google Calendar, LinkedIn, and spreadsheets. It consolidates contacts, companies, deals, notes, files, and every interaction into one streamlined workspace, ensuring that pipeline context is linked to genuine conversations rather than being scattered across multiple tabs.

Key Features Startups Love in folk

• Seamless Gmail and Google Calendar synchronization for an automatic activity timeline
• LinkedIn-enabled contact capture via a Chrome extension
• Contact enrichment to quickly fill in missing data
• Deduplication to maintain a clean database as your volume increases
• Customizable pipelines and fields to align with any go-to-market strategy

For startups, folk stands out due to its speed-to-value and ease of daily adoption. The setup is quick, workflows remain adaptable, and multichannel context is readily available without transforming the CRM into a cumbersome suite. This leads to more consistent follow-up, cleaner data, and clearer revenue visibility with minimal friction.

👉 Experimente o folk CRM gratuitamente

Conclusão

In summary, HubSpot excels with its comprehensive suite, deep automation, and extensive reporting, making it ideal for startups seeking an all-in-one solution willing to invest more as they grow. Close offers a streamlined pipeline tailored for high-velocity sales teams, maintaining efficient activity tracking and quick execution. However, for teams that prioritize seamless email integration, automation, and a user-friendly interface, folk emerges as the best option. Its multichannel capabilities and speedy setup ensure clean data and consistent follow-up, driving real results for startups.

Comece o seu período de avaliação gratuita de 14 dias ou marque uma demonstração hoje mesmo.