Are you confused between Smartlead, Folderly, and Close.io for lead generation and sales engagement?
We get it–choosing the right platform for your business growth can be quite challenging (and confusing). Review sites can be, infamously, deceiving sometimes. That’s why we’re here to offer you an in-depth comparison of these three tools.
We’ll look deep into the features, best use case, customer reviews, pros & cons of each tool, and last but not the least, their pricing plans. Whether you are a small business, a sales leader, a lead generation/marketing agency, or an individual marketer trying to scale their outreach, we’ll help you pick the right tool that perfectly fits your needs.
Let’s get right into it.
Folderly is a comprehensive email deliverability platform that ensures your email outreach campaigns always land in your recipients’ inboxes. This powerful tool is a one-stop solution for boosting mailbox health. It can supercharge your inbox rate, analyze email content, and fine tune email infrastructure. Besides, you can also run domain health checkups in Folderly. Folderly offers integration with most of the major email service providers (ESPs) and supports custom integrations as well.
Close.io is a sales enablement and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform that helps sales/marketing teams streamline their processes and close deals more effectively.
It’s an all-in-one platform with a range of features. This tool helps sales professionals to manage leads, make calls, send emails, and track activities, all from a single platform.
With Close.io, you can organize and prioritize your leads, communicate with prospects through integrated calling and emailing tools, and gain valuable insights through real-time reporting and analytics.
Close.io has a 4.6 rating on G2.com. Here are some of its best features.
Smartlead is a comprehensive cold emailing tool for omnichannel outreach. With its unlimited mailboxes and automated email warmups, this sales engagement tool ensures your emails always land in your prospects’ inboxes.
It offers auto-rotating email accounts, so you don’t need to worry about daily sending limits and sender reputation. Smartlead’s omnichannel outreach lets you automate your entire sales flow with LinkedIn activities, cold emails, and follow-up emails. You get a full whitelabel experience at Smartlead. Moreover, its useful integrations and the master inbox for managing all conversations makes it an all-in-one cold outreach tool.
By now, it’s quite evident that Folderly, Close.io, and Smartlead fit in for most of the use cases lead gen & marketing agencies and sales leaders look for. However, there are some differences on how these SaaS tools execute the use cases to address (execute) them.
So if you are still reluctant to pick the right tool for your business, let’s have a quick look at two major deciding factors – pricing and the customer reviews.
If you are not sure which plan fits your needs, Folderly offers a 30-minute demo call to help you choose the right plan based on your business needs.
Close.io provides a 14-day free trial and has options for both monthly and annual billing.
Smartlead offers four pricing plans for marketing agencies, sales teams, and lead generation agencies. You can start for free with its 14-day free trial (no credit card required and email warm ups included) and choose the right plan based on your needs.
Additionally, as add-ons, you can avail 1 client at $29/month and 1 LinkedIn at $59/month. Smartlead offers a great money-traction for all kinds of businesses among all its competitors. And the pricing differentiation happens mostly on service level (e.g., custom CRM, webhooks, API access and integrations, active support, unlimited seats, etc.).
In this article, we analyzed how Folderly, Close.io, and Smartlead vary in terms of the features, product use cases, pricing plans, and customer feedback. We have also discussed the best features and pros & cons of each of the platforms.
We hope this comprehensive comparison makes decision-making easier for you. If you are looking to grow your business at scale and nail outreach and 7x your chances of meeting bookings, we recommend giving Smartlead a try.
You can avail a 14-day free trial (no credit cards required) to explore the platform and only pay for what you actually need.
Active leads are the contacts you upload in Smartlead, similar to contacts in HubSpot; if you upload 1000 leads to a campaign, they are considered 1000 active leads. If you upload similar leads to a new campaign, they are not considered a “new active lead” as they already exist in our system.
We don’t offer mailboxes yet. You need to get your own dedicated list of mailboxes using popular providers like Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, and others that exist in the market. Once you get them, follow our detailed guides to connect them quickly.
Absolutely, one of our most popular guides can be found right here. It's been used by a large percentage of users to go from zero to cold emailing experts. Covering all topics from email infrastructure to copywriting and lead sourcing.
No, Smartlead has over 200,000 highly reputed mailboxes connected. The advantage you get along with naturalized AI conversations is access to aged domains you will never find in any warmup tool.
It is used popularly by agencies to automate their entire lead generation process as well as to connect Smartlead to external tools to push and pull data from. You can also connect to 1000s of apps using Zapier.
Anyone that can close deals from demos will succeed with Smartlead. It works for Sales companies, Marketing agencies, SaaS businesses, Recruitment, and offline companies (like construction).
We do not provide you with leads. You will need to use other data providers. These leads can be automatically added to Smartlead using our API or bulk uploaded via our CSV upload system.
We're building native integrations with Hubspot, Salesforce, Close, Pipedrive, and many more. The best part, due to our open API and Webhook infrastructure, you can connect to any CRM in the world without an issue.
You can add an unlimited number of team members, as well as assign them roles and authority access.
Yes, it's common for many people to move to Custom plans after a few weeks. You can view all the options for up to 10M leads on the subscription page once you sign up for free.
