| 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> | 2 <p>Yesware is very lightweight. It's not a full fledged web app, and is just a chrome extension that provides an overlay over Gmail and Outlook only. Though it does offer support for email, LinkedIn and phone steps in sequences - each of these is very light weight and the interface is clunky. There's also no AI support here on any front.</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> | 4 <p>Yesware is clunky and cumbersome to use. The Gmail overlay is sluggish and annoying clashes with other extension you might have installed for email. It's sequence builder is frustrating and cramped. That being said, its prospecting database (which is provided as a separate web app) is intuitive and familiar.</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> | 2 <p>Yesware feels like it's decades old. It's sluggish and cumbersome to use and the colour palette is particularly 'grey'. There's too much functionality crammed into a chrome extension for it to be pleasant to use.</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> | 3 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Yesware doesn't offer many ways to customize your experience with the product. The basic avenues included are: integrating your CRM (which has to be Salesforce), creating custom templates for your team and tweaking analytics dashboard.</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>Yesware offers a 14 day free trial on almost all of its plans. If you're already using Gmail or Outlook, then setup is trivial as all you'll need to do is download the chrome extension and then sign in. As there's not many additional features, there's little configuration work to be done other than setting up your first sequences.</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> | 3 <p>As Yesware's main interface is not a web app, there's no easy access live chat widget on offer. As such the main interface for support is via email. When tested it took around a day to receive a response - however, once received, responses were generally helpful and complete. Yesware also provides a help centre, however, we find it to be somewhat incomplete and hard to consume.</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> | 2 <p>Yesware doesn't integrate with most tools on the market. The only CRM it works with is Salesforce and if you don't use Chrome as your browser, then you won't be able to use the product. Notably, it doesn't integrate with Zapier either or offer an API.</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> | 4 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Yesware offers self-serve export functionality to CSV for contact lists and other datapoints via their web app.</span></p> |
