Close vs HubSpot: Which CRM for agencies wins?

Agencies don’t struggle with “finding tools.” They struggle with maintaining a cohesive sales strategy while ensuring delivery stays on track. When lead information is scattered across emails, calendars, and documents, follow-ups are neglected, transitions falter, and forecasting turns into a guessing game. A CRM for agencies needs to facilitate rapid business development while retaining sufficient historical data to support renewals, upsells, and referrals.

Close and HubSpot tackle this challenge from distinct perspectives. Close is designed specifically for high-volume, outbound sales processes, integrating communication tools directly into the workflow to streamline outreach and follow-ups. HubSpot, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive CRM platform that combines sales, marketing, and service functionalities, making it ideal for agencies that require a unified approach to lead management and pipeline tracking.

The right choice hinges on the agency's specific needs, process complexity, and the level of customization required for effective sales operations.

什么是关闭？

Close is a sales CRM tailored for outbound execution, seamlessly integrating calling, email, SMS, and task management into the daily workflow. It’s ideal for agencies focused on high-volume prospecting, appointment setting, or sales development as their primary service. Pipelines and opportunity statuses monitor progress, while communication history is maintained on each lead record. Sequences and automations facilitate consistent outreach and follow-up routines, making it an effective tool for agencies reliant on ongoing outbound activity and rapid iterations.

什么是HubSpot？

HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform that integrates sales tools with marketing and service functionalities within a unified ecosystem. It is particularly beneficial for agencies that require pipeline tracking alongside lead capture, email campaigns, and lifecycle reporting all in one location. Teams can establish pipelines, log activities, and automate follow-up tasks using workflows, depending on their chosen plan. The app marketplace offers compatibility with commonly used agency tools and client-facing systems, making it a preferred choice for agencies looking to consolidate CRM and related go-to-market solutions with a single vendor.

Feature comparison of Close and HubSpot

Multi-pipeline and custom stages

Close allows the creation of multiple pipelines, enabling different teams or processes to utilize their own unique pipeline configurations. Each pipeline can have a distinct name along with its own set of opportunity statuses, serving as the stage structure. This feature allows for the separation of processes like new business, renewals, or service delivery tracking into individual pipelines, ensuring that statuses do not overlap across different operations. You can easily adjust a pipeline's structure by modifying the opportunity statuses associated with it.

Similarly, HubSpot enables the development of deal pipelines centered around stages, which can be created and managed within pipeline settings. Deals progress through the established stages, and you can edit these stage definitions to align with how an agency qualifies and closes work. Separate pipelines can effectively track various processes—such as new business versus renewals or different service lines—while maintaining distinct stages for each pipeline.

客户与交易活动追踪

With Close, you can easily manage calls, emails, SMS, and tasks directly within the CRM, linking them to the relevant leads and opportunities. All communication occurs within the platform, and activity history is readily accessible, enabling teams to review past interactions and plan next steps. This functionality facilitates effective sales tracking by logging outreach and follow-ups alongside lead and deal records. Additionally, meetings and other touchpoints can be managed within the same workspace, depending on your setup.

HubSpot, on the other hand, organizes activities on record timelines, allowing you to log and connect calls, emails, meetings, notes, and tasks to contacts, companies, and deals. This activity data can automatically update properties like the last activity date based on recorded interactions. You can also filter activity timelines and associate activities across related records, ensuring that a deal and its corresponding contact share the same logged context.

自动化与工作流

Close offers sales reporting that features dashboards and reports centered on pipeline health, activity tracking, lead conversion, and sales performance. Users can filter reports by date ranges and other criteria, while dashboards can be customized to visualize chosen metrics. This reporting leverages CRM data as its foundation, meaning that both activity and pipeline reporting rely on logged information and how opportunities are organized. Additionally, forecasting and pipeline monitoring are facilitated through the reporting framework outlined in Close’s materials.

HubSpot provides workflows to automate actions across marketing, sales, and service processes, with access varying by subscription tier. Workflows can be created using templates or the workflow editor and are triggered by record events or changes in properties. Actions within workflows can encompass tasks, notifications, and record updates, with certain workflow types or actions linked to specific hubs and plan levels.

报告与分析

Close offers comprehensive sales reporting that features dashboards and reports concentrating on pipeline health, activity monitoring, lead conversion, and sales performance. You can filter reports by date ranges and other criteria, while dashboards allow for tailored visualizations of selected metrics. Reporting leverages CRM data as its foundation, meaning that activity and pipeline insights rely on logged information and the structure of opportunities. Close’s reporting materials also support forecasting and pipeline monitoring.

On the other hand, HubSpot delivers sales reporting via dashboards, a robust sales analytics suite, and customizable reporting tools. Users can save reports to dashboards for easy access and share them with authorized personnel. The report builder allows for the creation of custom reports to analyze CRM objects and activities, complete with filtering and dataset selection based on specific reporting needs.

集成与数据卫生

In Close, you can implement integrations via the API and event-based webhooks. Additionally, the help documentation highlights how to connect external apps using tools like Zapier or Make through OAuth or API keys. For data hygiene, Close offers features such as duplicate detection during new lead creation, options to prevent duplicates during imports, and the ability to merge leads when duplicates are found. Import workflows include checks for duplicates against both the uploaded file and existing leads, while merge actions help consolidate records into a designated lead. Detailed documentation on these controls can be found in Close's help center and product update notes.

HubSpot facilitates connections with external tools through its app marketplace, which showcases integrations tailored for sales, marketing, and operations. To ensure data hygiene, HubSpot provides tools for data quality, including deduplication workflows that help identify and manage duplicates, detect formatting issues, and offer enrichment coverage based on the selected plan. These features are categorized under Data Management and Data Quality, allowing teams to review challenges and implement fixes for records and properties.

folk: The Ultimate CRM for Agencies in 2026!

folk is an AI-powered CRM that centralizes contacts, conversations, and deal context without complicating setup. It's tailored for agency teams where multiple members engage with the same account throughout prospecting, onboarding, delivery, and renewals. This system ensures that relationship history is always accessible, eliminating reliance on memory or disorganized notes during handoffs.

• Multi-pipeline and custom stages tailored for various agency workflows
• Comprehensive contact and deal timelines that consolidate interaction history
• Email and calendar sync to link conversations directly to the relevant records
• Tasks, reminders, and follow-up tracking to ensure consistent next steps
• Contact enrichment to populate any missing company and contact information
• Deduplication tools to merge duplicates and maintain a clean database
• Easy pipeline reporting to track stage health and deal progress
• 集成与自动化连接器，以最大限度减少手动更新

For agencies, the key benefit lies in achieving operational clarity across simultaneous relationships. Pipelines can represent diverse revenue streams such as retainers, projects, partnerships, and referrals, while tasks and reminders help ensure consistent follow-ups across the team. Features focused on data hygiene, like enrichment and deduplication, effectively reduce duplicate records and fill in missing fields, ensuring that pipeline reporting remains reliable over time.

结论

In summary, Close excels in high-volume outbound sales with seamless communication integration, making it ideal for teams focused on rapid prospecting. HubSpot provides a comprehensive suite for agencies needing unified sales, marketing, and service functionalities. However, for teams prioritizing email integration, automation, and streamlined sequencing, folk stands out as the best alternative. Its AI-driven approach centralizes interactions, maintains clean data, and ensures operational clarity across multiple pipelines, making it the perfect fit for relationship-driven agencies.

立即开启14天免费试用，或预约产品演示。