| Functionality | 8 <p>Close offers most of the functionality that SMB sales team will need. Besides allowing you to manage contacts, leads and your sales pipeline, Close also allows you to create automated sales sequences (email, calls, SMS), and best-in-class call functionality.</p><p>However, it lacks some advanced features such as automated lead scoring, and being able to directly add contacts from LinkedIn.</p> | 4 <p>On paper, Monday offers most of the functionality SMBs will need, including contact and pipeline management, email sequencing, and basic reporting and automation. However, a lot of it seems half-baked e.g. adding multiple pipelines, tracking engagement rates of emails in sequences, or filtering contacts by interaction are either impossible, or only achievable via hacky workarounds.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 7 <p>Close is designed for power users, so you need to know what you're doing. Setting up filters to target the right leads can feel overwhelming due to the extensive options, and there are no templates for automation workflows. Once familiar, Close becomes user-friendly with standout features like smart views, which keep targeted lists accessible via one-click. You can easily create workflows, edit deal cards without extra clicks, and get AI summaries of all contact activity, which will all save a lot of time for sales reps.</p> | 4 <p>As an offshoot of Monday's Project Management tool, many things require workarounds, which is cumbersome and frustrating. Associating leads with contacts requires adding a “mirror column", moving leads into customers requires "data mapping". The terminology is also confusing, contacts are called "items".</p> |
| Look and feel | 6 <p>We find Close visually acceptable, though the lack of colour-coding and labelling of icons can make it a bit plain at times. Page loads are acceptable (~2 seconds per page).</p> | 6 <p>The platform is visually acceptable, though the emphasis on bright, engaging colours and customisable icons can make some pages seem cluttered and busy at times. Page loads also aren't the best (2-3 seconds).</p> |
| Customisability | 8 <p>Close offers significant customization for fields, workflows, and pipeline stages. You can create custom data objects to track items beyond people and companies, such as partnerships. It also supports extremely granular custom filters to target contacts and leads. However, Close is squarely a CRM for sales teams, and we don't think you can adapt Close to other use cases.</p> | 5 <p>Although you can customise some parts of Monday, the inability to add multiple deals boards and sales pipeline is a major restriction on customisability. It's also lacking some intuitive filters to create useful custom views e.g. see contacts you've recently interacted with and contacted.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 6 <p>Close offers a free trial without need to speak to sales. Completing basic setup is simple, taking around 10 minutes to import contacts and set up pipelines. However, fully setting up the platform and upskilling your reps can take up to a week, given Close's powerful and rich outbound functionality.</p> | 4 <p>Although Monday offers a self-serve free trial, we found the initial setup (takes >15 minutes) rather challenging during testing. Import was clunky - contacts import as simple text strings rather than structured data objects, requiring time-consuming fixes. Unlike standard CRMs, Monday lacks default relationships between deals and companies - these connections must be manually configured through workarounds. These structural limitations, combined with other quirks, make fully customisation a lengthy process.</p> |
| Customer Support | 7 <p>You can only contact Close's support team via email, however the team is often helpful and replies within 15 minutes. Close also offers a lot of helpful onboarding guidance and high quality self-help resources.</p> | 7 <p>Monday offers live chat support within its platform. Although you have to chat with an AI chatbot, handoff to a human agent is extremely quick. We've found the support we've been given inconsistent - at times, agents give unhelpful advice and direct you to help centre articles, other times, agents are extremely helpful and go above and beyond with personalised loom videos.</p> |
| Integratability | 5 <p>Close's library of pre-built integrations lacks a few key integrations. For example, Close has no pre-built integrations with Zendesk and Intercom for Customer Support, or Mailchimp for Email Marketing.</p> | 8 <p>Monday offers 200+ pre-built integrations, however, these seem to be geared more towards its main offering - Monday Work Management. Although it integrates with most reasonably relevant software, it's missing some CRM-specific connections e.g. prospecting tools like Apollo and Surfe. It does offer an API for custom integrations.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 8 <p>Close allows users to export key data via self-serve. Export of most other data is also available via API or on request.</p> | 5 <p>Basic information such as contacts, leads, deals can be exported into an Excel file. However, the restriction is that dashboards can only be exported as an PDF, though all other info can be exported via an API.</p> |
