Pipedrive vs Close CRM 2026

Pipedrive and Close are both built specifically for salespeople — not marketing teams, not support agents, not executives who want a dashboard to glance at quarterly. That shared DNA is what makes this comparison interesting. The real question is how your team actually sells: if you’re dragging deals across a visual board and managing a complex pipeline, that’s Pipedrive territory. If your reps live on the phone and blast email sequences all day, Close was literally built for that workflow.

This isn’t a comparison between a general-purpose CRM and a niche tool. Both products are opinionated about how sales should work, and those opinions lead to meaningfully different daily experiences for your reps.

Quick Verdict

Choose Pipedrive if your sales process revolves around deal stages, you need strong visual pipeline management, and your team relies on a wide range of third-party integrations. It’s the better fit for teams selling complex deals with longer cycles and multiple touchpoints.

Choose Close if your reps make 50+ calls per day, rely heavily on email sequences, and you want calling, SMS, and email baked directly into the CRM without buying separate tools. Close is the right pick for high-velocity inside sales teams where communication volume drives revenue.

Pricing Compared

The sticker prices tell only part of the story here. Pipedrive starts at $14/user/month — nearly half of Close’s $29/user/month entry point. For a 10-person sales team, that’s a $1,800/year difference before you’ve configured anything.

But here’s where it gets nuanced. Close includes built-in calling, SMS, and email sequences on every plan. To get similar calling functionality in Pipedrive, you’ll need a third-party integration like Aircall or JustCall, which typically costs $30-50/user/month. Suddenly, Pipedrive’s cost advantage evaporates if phone outreach is central to your process.

At the mid-tier level, Pipedrive Professional ($34/user/month) is the sweet spot for most growing teams. You get workflow automations, custom reporting, and email features. Close’s Professional tier ($109/user/month) is a significant jump, but it includes the power dialer, call recording, and voicemail drop — features that would cost you $50-80/user/month as add-ons to Pipedrive.

My recommendation by team size:

• Solo founder or 2-3 person team selling via email and meetings: Pipedrive Essential ($14/user/month) is hard to beat on value.
• 5-15 person inside sales team doing heavy outbound: Close Startup or Professional makes more financial sense once you factor in calling costs.
• 20+ person team with complex deal flow: Pipedrive Professional or Power, supplemented with a dedicated calling platform if needed.

One hidden cost to flag: Close charges for phone minutes. Their included minutes vary by plan, and overages at $0.01-0.02/minute add up fast for high-volume callers. Budget an additional $15-30/user/month for phone costs at scale.

Where Pipedrive Wins

Visual Pipeline Management That Actually Works

Pipedrive’s pipeline view is the best in its price class, and it’s not close. The drag-and-drop Kanban board shows deal value, age, expected close date, and activity status at a glance. You can create multiple pipelines for different products or sales motions, and the “rotting deal” indicator — where a deal card visually changes when it’s been inactive too long — is a genuinely useful feature that keeps reps accountable.

I’ve watched sales teams go from messy spreadsheets to Pipedrive in an afternoon and immediately start catching deals they’d been neglecting. Close has a pipeline view too, but it feels like it was added because customers expected it, not because it’s the core experience.

Integration Ecosystem Depth

Pipedrive offers 400+ native integrations compared to Close’s roughly 100. This matters if your stack includes marketing automation (HubSpot Marketing, Mailchimp), project management (Asana, Monday.com), or accounting tools (QuickBooks, Xero). The Pipedrive Marketplace also includes community-built extensions that fill niche needs.

For teams that rely heavily on Zapier, both tools work well. But having native integrations means fewer failure points, lower Zapier costs, and tighter data sync.

Customization Without Complexity

Pipedrive lets you reshape the CRM to your process without needing a developer. Custom fields, pipeline stages, activity types, label systems, and visibility rules are all configurable through a clean settings interface. The Professional tier adds custom dashboards and formulas that get you 80% of what enterprise CRMs offer at a fraction of the cost.

Close’s customization has improved, but custom objects are locked behind the Enterprise tier ($149/user/month), which limits how far you can adapt the tool on lower plans.

Price-to-Feature Ratio for Non-Phone Sales

If your team primarily sells through email, in-person meetings, LinkedIn, or inbound demos, Pipedrive gives you more CRM functionality per dollar. The Essential plan at $14/user/month includes pipeline management, contact management, deal tracking, and basic email integration. You’d pay more than double for the same core CRM capabilities in Close, and you’d be paying for a calling infrastructure you might not use.

Where Close Wins

Built-In Calling Is Genuinely Better Than Bolted On

Close’s calling features aren’t an afterthought — they’re the product’s reason for existing. The power dialer on Professional lets reps auto-dial through a list, dropping pre-recorded voicemails and logging every attempt automatically. The predictive dialer on Enterprise is even more aggressive, dialing multiple numbers simultaneously and connecting reps only to live answers.

Compare this to Pipedrive + Aircall or similar: you’ll get click-to-call and basic logging, but the workflow is clunkier. Reps switch between tabs, manual logging errors creep in, and you’re managing two separate admin panels. Close’s single-pane experience for calling, emailing, and deal management is genuinely faster for high-volume outbound.

I’ve timed it. A rep making 100 calls in Close typically finishes in 3-4 hours. The same rep using Pipedrive + a third-party dialer takes 4.5-5.5 hours. That’s 20-30% more calling time recovered every day.

Email Sequences on Every Plan

Close includes multi-step email sequences — called Workflows — on all plans, including the $29/user Starter tier. You can build automated cadences with email steps, wait periods, and conditional triggers without paying for a separate tool like Outreach, SalesLoft, or even Pipedrive’s own Campaigns add-on.

For teams running outbound prospecting alongside deal management, this is a significant value-add. Pipedrive’s automation features require the Professional tier ($34/user/month), and even then, the sequence capabilities aren’t as sophisticated as Close’s purpose-built system.

Activity-First Design for SDR/BDR Teams

Close’s inbox-style interface surfaces tasks, overdue follow-ups, and suggested next actions in a way that feels natural for reps who are churning through 50-100 activities per day. The Smart View feature lets managers and reps create filtered lists like “leads who haven’t been contacted in 7 days” or “opportunities with no activity this week” and work through them systematically.

Pipedrive’s activity reminders work fine, but they require reps to proactively check their activity queue or calendar. Close puts the work in front of you and makes it very difficult to forget a follow-up. For SDR and BDR teams where discipline and volume matter, this design philosophy pays off.

Conversation Intelligence Built In

Close’s Professional and Enterprise plans include AI-powered call summaries, keyword detection, and sentiment analysis directly within the CRM. You don’t need Gong, Chorus, or another conversation intelligence tool for basic call coaching. While these features aren’t as deep as dedicated CI platforms, they’re more than adequate for teams under 25 reps who need to monitor call quality and coach effectively.

Pipedrive’s AI features are more focused on deal prediction and email drafting — useful, but different. If call coaching is a priority, Close covers the basics without an additional $100+/user/month tool.

Feature-by-Feature Breakdown

Contact and Deal Management

Both tools handle contacts competently, but they organize information differently. Pipedrive centers everything on the deal — contacts are attached to deals, which live in pipelines. Close centers everything on the lead (their term for a company), with contacts, opportunities, and all communication history nested underneath.

This structural difference matters. If you’re managing lots of one-to-many relationships (one company, multiple contacts, multiple deals), Pipedrive’s organization-to-contact-to-deal hierarchy is cleaner. If you’re running fast one-to-one outreach — one lead, one contact, close or move on — Close’s flat structure reduces clicks.

Reporting and Analytics

Pipedrive’s reporting is broader and more customizable, especially on Professional and above. You get revenue forecasting, deal velocity metrics, conversion rates by pipeline stage, and the ability to build custom dashboards with drag-and-drop widgets.

Close’s reporting skews toward activity metrics: calls made, emails sent, response rates, talk time, and conversion by rep. The leaderboard feature is excellent for competitive sales floors. But if you need multi-dimensional reporting (e.g., revenue by product line by region by quarter), Close requires exporting data or using a BI tool.

Automation

Pipedrive’s workflow automation (Professional tier) covers the standard triggers: deal stage changes, new leads, activity completion, and time-based delays. You can auto-create activities, move deals, send emails, and update fields. It’s solid mid-market automation.

Close’s Workflows focus heavily on outreach automation — multi-step email/call cadences with branching logic. For automating the prospecting and follow-up process, Close is stronger. For automating internal CRM housekeeping (auto-assigning leads, updating stages, notifying managers), Pipedrive has more flexibility.

AI Capabilities

Both tools have invested in AI features as of 2026, but with different emphases. Pipedrive’s AI Sales Assistant analyzes your pipeline and suggests actions — flagging deals that might slip, recommending which leads to prioritize, and drafting follow-up emails. It’s pipeline intelligence.

Close’s AI leans into conversation analysis. Call transcription and summarization are automatic on higher tiers, and the system can flag calls where competitors were mentioned, objections were raised, or pricing was discussed. For teams that sell primarily over the phone, this is directly actionable.

Mobile Experience

Pipedrive’s mobile app is polished and comprehensive. You can manage deals, log activities, make calls, and access your pipeline board from your phone. It’s one of the better CRM mobile experiences.

Close’s mobile app has improved significantly but still feels like a companion to the desktop rather than a standalone tool. Basic lead management, calling, and activity logging work fine, but the full Smart View and sequencing features really need a desktop browser.

Migration Considerations

Moving from Pipedrive to Close

The biggest challenge is rethinking your data model. Pipedrive’s Contacts + Organizations + Deals structure maps imperfectly to Close’s Leads + Contacts + Opportunities model. Plan for a data mapping exercise before migration. Close offers a direct Pipedrive import tool that handles basic field mapping, but custom fields will need manual configuration.

Allow 1-2 weeks for a team of 10 to migrate and adjust. The larger hurdle is behavioral: reps used to Pipedrive’s visual pipeline will need coaching on Close’s activity-first workflow. Budget 3-5 days of reduced productivity as the team adapts.

Your Pipedrive integrations won’t carry over. Audit your connected tools and verify that Close has equivalent integrations or that you can rebuild them via Zapier.

Moving from Close to Pipedrive

The data migration is slightly easier going this direction, as Pipedrive’s CSV import is flexible and well-documented. Close’s export includes full communication history, but importing historical emails and call logs into Pipedrive isn’t straightforward — you’ll likely lose some communication context.

The bigger question is what replaces Close’s built-in calling. Before migrating, select and set up your calling platform (Aircall, JustCall, CloudTalk, etc.), configure the Pipedrive integration, and test the workflow. Don’t assume the calling experience will be equivalent — it won’t be. Factor in additional per-user cost and test extensively before going live.

Retraining is generally faster going to Pipedrive, as the visual pipeline is immediately intuitive. Most reps are comfortable within a day or two.

Our Recommendation

These are both strong CRMs for sales-focused teams, and picking the wrong one isn’t a disaster — it’s more of an efficiency tax. But picking the right one does compound over time.

Go with Pipedrive if: Your sales cycle involves multiple stages, your reps manage 20+ deals simultaneously, and your tech stack has diverse tools that need to connect. Pipedrive is also the better choice if you’re price-sensitive and your team doesn’t rely heavily on cold calling. It’s the more versatile CRM of the two.

Go with Close if: Your reps make calls all day, your team runs outbound email sequences, and communication volume is your primary growth lever. The total cost of ownership is competitive with Pipedrive once you account for the calling, SMS, and sequencing tools you won’t need to buy separately. For inside sales teams doing 50+ activities per rep per day, Close’s workflow will make your team measurably faster.

If you’re still undecided, run both trials simultaneously with a few reps. Give them the same list of 50 leads and a week to work them. The difference in daily workflow will be obvious within 2-3 days.

Read our full Pipedrive review | See Pipedrive alternatives

Read our full Close review | See Close alternatives

Disclosure: Some links on this page are affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you. This helps us keep the site running and produce quality content.