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Nutshell and Close both sell themselves as CRMs built for small, fast-moving sales teams rather than enterprise deployments — but they’re priced around two different jobs. Nutshell’s tiers are built around a CRM that can also run outbound email marketing from inside the same account. Close’s tiers are built around a CRM only: calling, SMS, pipelines, automation and reporting, with no email-marketing/campaigns product at any price. Figures below are current as of August 2026, pulled directly from each vendor’s own live pricing page — always confirm on nutshell.com/pricing and close.com/pricing before you buy, since CRM pricing changes often.
Tip: try code CASRAI at checkout for 15% off, if the offer is currently active for this program — codes vary by vendor and aren’t guaranteed.
Nutshell CRM pricing plans
As of August 2026, Nutshell runs five per-user, per-month plans on month-to-month billing (annual billing is discounted, though Nutshell’s own page presents the annual saving as a per-month credit rather than a flat annual rate, so confirm the exact annual figure at checkout):
- Foundation — $13/user/month. Unlimited contacts and storage, email and calendar sync, an AI chatbot, a form builder, and landing pages.
- Growth — $25/user/month. Adds activity reports, sales quotas, lead-assignment rules, custom stage goals, and “hot leads” scoring.
- Pro — $42/user/month, Nutshell’s most-promoted tier. Adds five custom pipelines, advanced reporting, sales automation, AI lead recaps, and a meeting scheduler.
- Business — $59/user/month. Adds ten custom pipelines, an audit log, email templates pulled from Gmail/Outlook, and teams & territories.
- Enterprise — $79/user/month. Unlimited pipelines and custom fields, enterprise SSO, direct SQL data access, and phone support.
Every tier also carries an “AI outcomes” allowance (10 on Foundation up to 150 on Enterprise) — Nutshell’s unit for metered AI-assisted actions like lead recaps and chatbot replies, worth checking against your team’s actual usage before assuming a lower tier covers you.
Nutshell CRM cost: what the plan price doesn’t include
The number on Nutshell’s pricing page is the CRM alone. If your team also wants to run outbound email marketing — newsletters, drip sequences, list segmentation, campaign analytics — that’s a separate first-party product, Nutshell Campaigns, billed on top of whatever CRM tier you’re on. As of August 2026, Nutshell’s own pricing page lists Campaigns as its own paid subscription (roughly $49/month at the account level, not per user) rather than something any CRM tier includes free. Third-party aggregators disagree on the details — a few describe campaign-sending as bundled into the Pro tier, others describe a smaller $5/company/month entry add-on with a free-email allowance — which is exactly the kind of discrepancy worth re-confirming on Nutshell’s live pricing and product pages before you budget, since packaging like this is the part vendors change most often.
What’s verifiably true either way: Campaigns lives inside the same Nutshell account as your CRM. One login, one vendor relationship, contact data that’s already shared with the CRM rather than synced from a second system. That’s the real cost math to run — not “is it free,” but “is paying one vendor for both, even as two line items, worth more to your team than the alternative below.”
Nutshell vs Close CRM: the actual difference in what you’re buying
| Dimension | Nutshell | Close |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $13/user/month (Foundation) | $19/user/month (Solo, capped at 1 user / 10k leads) |
| Most-comparable mid tier | Pro — $42/user/month | Growth — $109/user/month |
| Built-in calling | Not a core focus; add-on territory | Native power/predictive dialer from the Growth tier up |
| Email marketing / campaigns | Nutshell Campaigns — separate paid product, same vendor | Not offered at any tier or price |
| Workflow automation | Included from Growth up | Included from Growth up (“automated workflows”) |
| Free trial | 14 days, no credit card | 14 days, no credit card |
Close’s pricing sits meaningfully higher per seat once you’re past the single-user Solo tier — Essentials runs $49/user/month, Growth $109/user/month, Scale $149/user/month (all as of August 2026, direct from close.com/pricing; annual billing brings each down substantially, e.g. Growth to roughly $99/user/month annualized). What that higher price buys is depth on the outbound-calling side specifically: a built-in predictive dialer, call-recording retention, and role-based lead visibility that Nutshell doesn’t compete on. What it does not buy, at any tier, is an email-marketing/campaigns feature — Close is deliberately CRM-and-calling only.
Who should pick Nutshell over Close
If your team genuinely runs both outbound sales and email-marketing campaigns, and you’d rather manage that from one vendor’s dashboard than stitch a CRM to Mailchimp, HubSpot Marketing, or ActiveCampaign, that’s a real reason to choose Nutshell even though it costs more once Campaigns is added. A second integration is a second thing that breaks, a second contact list that drifts out of sync, and a second vendor relationship to manage — for a small team without a dedicated ops person to maintain that plumbing, the “everything in one account” argument is worth real money, not just convenience.
Who should NOT buy Close instead: a team that already runs its email marketing elsewhere and just wants that CRM to talk to it cleanly, or a team that has no email-marketing program at all and doesn’t want to pay for one, is fine on Close. But a team that specifically wants campaign-sending native to the CRM — not bolted on via a third-party integration — should treat that as a genuine point in Nutshell’s favor, not a rounding error. That’s the one honest tradeoff in this comparison: Close’s pricing buys you a sharper calling/dialing product; it does not buy you a marketing-email product, full stop, at any price point.
Compare Close plans and pricing →
Nutshell CRM free trial
Nutshell offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, as of August 2026 — long enough to load real contacts, run a pipeline through a full sales-cycle stage or two, and test whether the AI-outcomes allowance on your likely tier (Growth or Pro, for most small teams) is enough for how your reps actually work. It does not automatically include a Campaigns trial — confirm that separately if email marketing is part of what you’re evaluating. Close’s trial is the same length, 14 days, also no credit card required, which makes a side-by-side pilot straightforward: run both trials concurrently on the same lead list and compare where the friction actually shows up for your team, rather than deciding from the pricing page alone.
Frequently asked questions
What are Nutshell CRM’s pricing plans?
Five tiers as of August 2026: Foundation ($13/user/month), Growth ($25), Pro ($42, the most-promoted tier), Business ($59), and Enterprise ($79). Each tier adds pipelines, automation, reporting depth, and a larger “AI outcomes” allowance; email marketing (Nutshell Campaigns) is priced and billed separately from all five.
How much does Nutshell CRM actually cost?
Budget the per-user plan price plus, if you want native email marketing, Nutshell Campaigns as a separate line item (roughly $49/month at the account level as of August 2026, per Nutshell’s own pricing page — confirm current packaging directly, since aggregators describe this differently and vendors adjust add-on pricing often). A 5-person team on Pro with Campaigns is realistically $42 × 5 + the Campaigns fee, not just $42 × 5.
How does Nutshell compare to Close for CRM?
Close is priced higher per seat past its single-user tier ($19–$149/user/month vs. Nutshell’s $13–$79) and goes deeper on native calling — a predictive dialer, call recording, role-based access — but has no email-marketing/campaigns product at any tier. Nutshell costs less at the CRM layer and adds email marketing as an in-vendor paid option. The right pick depends on whether outbound calling depth or native email-marketing integration matters more to your process.
Does Nutshell CRM have a free trial?
Yes — 14 days, no credit card required, as of August 2026. Close also offers a 14-day, no-card trial, so you can run both concurrently before committing to either plan.
