| Functionality | 7 <p>Close is primarily a CRM. That being said it does offer fairly strong multi-channel (email, phone, SMS) outbound capabilities. It's native dialer and adjacent functionalities are particularly strong. Additionally, given its focus as a CRM, it excels in areas such as pipeline tracking and deal management.</p> | 3 <p>As a sales engagement tool, Instantly is extremely lightweight. The only channel you can configure in outbound sequences is email (however, you can configure calls and texts from their CRM manually). Therefore if multi-channel outreach is important to you you're better off looking elsewhere. That being said, we were pleased to find a native contact database and lightweight CRM provided.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 7 <p>Though Close is focused on power users, we were pleased by how intuitive the platform is to use. It's core sequencing interface is very well presented and familiar. Additionally, even more advanced features such as call transcript analysis are very well presented and not overwhelming. It would take an average SMB employee around 30 minutes to master its use.</p> | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Instantly's web app is intuitive and easy to navigate. Additionally, its onboarding was simple and not overwhelming. It's core sequence building and analytics pages are intuitive and easy to get acquainted with. It would take an average SMB employee less than 30 minutes to master its use.</span></p> |
| Look and feel | 8 <p>When compared with most tools in the sales engagement space, Close presents itself as one of the best designed and easiest to use tools on the market. Though lacking in colour, we appreciated its modern aesthetic and fast page load times.</p> | 8 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Instantly's design aesthetic is modern and clean. Unlike many competitors, we found most pages to be well laid out and not overflowing with information. When tested, we find its page load times to be fast (often <1s) and core interfaces such as the sequence builder to be slick and intuitive.</span></p> |
| Customisability | 8 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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 when setting up sequences.</span></p> | 6 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Instantly offers a number of channels for customisation, including basic ways such as creating custom searches in the prospecting database or adding custom fields to individual leads. There are also some deeper levels which you can customise your experience such as by connecting to OpenAI via API and creating custom prompts to do small tasks such as cleaning company names or guessing company pain points. </span></p> |
| Ease of Setup | 6 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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.</span></p> | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Instantly offers a simple, self-serve free trial for their platform. When tested, we found the initial setup to be simple (taking <10 mins). Additionally, connecting email addresses to their outbound platform was relatively trivial too - with a one click connect feature for popular providers like Google and Outlook. However, when choosing a paid plan, their pricing model is very complex with varied plans depending on if you need standalone lead generation or need some outbound sequencing functionality too.</span></p> |
| Customer Support | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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.</span></p> | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">You can contact Instantly's support agents via a live chat widget within their web app. When tested, we find it relatively easy to contact a real agent (<30 minutes). However, we find agents to be relatively unhelpful at times, often referring to unhelpful help centre documents instead of answering questions directly. Additionally, though Instantly does provide a help centre, its articles are often light on detail.</span></p> |
| Integratability | 4 <p>Close lacks native integrations with a lot of tools we'd like to have seen such as Apollo or other prospecting databases. That being said, we did appreciate the integration with Zapier through which you are able to connect to a much broader array of tooling.</p> | 4 <p>Though instantly does provide integrations with core CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive), automation platforms (Zapier) and email providers (Gmail, Outlook) - we would like to have seen native integrations with more established lead sources such as Apollo.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Close allows users to export key data via self-serve. Export of most other data is also available via API or on request.</span></p> | 6 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Instantly offers self-serve export functionality via their web app. Additionally, Instantly offers an API through which businesses are able to interact with their database directly - however, documentation for this remains relatively light.</span></p> |
