How does Close stack up against Outreach?

Choosing the right CRM

Close vs. Outreach

Have you ever seen a comparison page where the “challenger” comes out better than the company writing the comparison?

Exactly. Neither have we. So when we set about comparing our sales productivity platform to others we wanted to take a different approach. Here’s the approach we’re taking:

The comparison we’ve put together is based on whether it’s possible (and how much it costs) to do in Outreach what you can do in Close.
We’re biased but we’re not blind: for some of you, Outreach will be the better option. What we’re trying to demonstrate is when Close is a better fit than our competitor.

Cliff Notes

Outreach and Close are often compared, but the two products are designed to service drastically different types of businesses. Outreach is more focused on enterprise-level sales reporting and insights in addition to CRM features, but will require paid consulting and dedicated team members to manage the CRM itself. Close is better suited for small and medium businesses with its more powerful in calling features and outreach. A sales leader can implement Close quickly and easily for a much faster velocity to product use.

Outreach is built more specifically on machine learning and its features lean more toward business insights and intelligence vs. Close’s sales efficiency software goals of improving your team’s daily performance. Outreach also has a core focus on recruiting efforts, which is not a solution area that Close serves.


Target sales team size	<100	100+
Pricing	All-inclusive Pricing publicly available	Sales call required Complex pricing with hidden costs
Budget	Best value	Expensive
Customer success	Dedicated success team	Dedicated success team
Calling	Global calling built-in	Global calling with add-on purchase
Email automation	Built-in	Built-in
Training & implementation	$0 customized onboarding	$0
GetApp "ease of use" rating	4.7 / 5	4.2 / 5
Admin or developer needed?	No	Yes

Comparison data is based on an analysis from Q1 2021

Close ideal customer checklist

You do (or plan to do) high-volume outreach by email, voice or SMS
You need to qualify large lead lists quickly
You aim to close more than ten deals a year
You’re looking for a scalable system to match your team’s growth
You prefer having an all-in-one system over disparate tools

“I have tried: Five9, MOJO, PhoneBurner, Zoho, Freshdesk, and the list goes on. You can finish implementing Close CRM for your business before you finish your morning cup of coffee. For the sales gurus that want to provide an impact to their bottom line, while not over spending, Close is the solution.”

Blair Meyer, Build My Deal Canada

The rest of this document will help you understand why we think Close is a better alternative to Outreach both in terms of value and pricing.

What can you not do in Outreach?

Outreach is a great, modern CRM, but a lot of the critical functionality required by a high-performing sales team is highly dependent on expensive third party applications.

There are also some key sales functions that, even with a third-party app, you just cannot perform using Outreach (such as call coaching, VoIP, and power dialing). Whereas with Close they’re all built-in.


Sales forecasting
Built-in calling
Built-in call coaching
Predictive Dialer
Power Dialer
Territory management

Comparison data is based on an analysis from Q1 2021

In summary

When should you choose Outreach, and when Close

Close is a CRM built to double your sales team’s productivity.
It’s an “all-in-one” platform which you can use standalone without needing any other sales emails tools or calling products.
It has been built with scalability in mind and can handle a high-volume of leads.

Outreach is good if you’re an enterprise level sales team looking for CRM and heavy reporting/AI insights combined into one platform.
Outreach also tends to work best if you have resources dedicated to scaling your CRM and managing third-party applications.