Close vs Salesforce Agentforce: pricing, features and which to choose

Close is a hosted CRM and sales engagement platform made by Close, a company founded in 2013 by Steli Efti, Anthony Nemitz, and Thomas Steinacher. The product launched publicly as Close.io in January 2013 after the founders worked at Elastic Sales. Close adopted its current name after acquiring the close.com domain in 2019. Y Combinator lists Close in its Winter 2011 batch and identifies the company as active. Close describes its growth as bootstrapped, while contemporaneous coverage reported an early 2013 seed round. The company sells to sales teams that want customer records, outreach, calling, and sales operations in one hosted application instead of separate CRM and engagement products.

Close organizes sales work around leads, contacts, opportunities, and activities. A typical workflow begins with importing or creating leads, adding contacts, and recording email, call, or SMS interactions on each lead record. Reps can use built-in calling, texting, email sequences, forms, and workflows for follow-up. Growth adds Power Dialer, bulk email, custom activities, and broader automation. Scale adds predictive dialing, live call coaching, permissions, lead visibility rules, custom objects, and user groups. Reporting covers pipeline and activity performance. Developers can connect external systems through the REST API, OAuth 2.0, webhooks, event logs, pagination, rate limits, and the MCP server. This keeps communication history close to opportunity data.

Close does not offer a self-hosted or open-source edition, and heavy calling, SMS, or AI use can make the total cost harder to predict. Avoma is a closer fit for meeting recording, transcription, conversation intelligence, scheduling, and revenue insights across conferencing tools. Salesforce offers broader enterprise customization and administration, while HubSpot combines sales with larger marketing and service products. Close instead concentrates on native sales communication, pipeline activity, and programmable CRM workflows. Its one-user Solo plan also limits the cheapest entry point for teams. Small and midsize teams that want CRM records, calling, messaging, and sales automation in one focused workspace should pick Close.

Salesforce Agentforce is an active AI agent platform for customer and employee work across sales, service, HR, marketing, commerce, websites, apps, phone, messaging, and CRM. Salesforce presents agents that answer questions, retrieve business knowledge, take actions, and transfer work to people when required. Its components include Agent Builder, job-specific subagents, prebuilt actions, Salesforce context, Agentforce Voice, observability, and multi-agent orchestration. The product is a practical choice for organizations already treating Salesforce as the main record for customers, permissions, workflows, and engagement. Before adoption, buyers should confirm which Salesforce edition they have, assign administration ownership, review data access, test production scenarios, and plan monitoring. Foundations is listed at $0, while other options use credits, conversations, licenses, or editions.

Teams create agents with Agent Builder, Agent Script, prompts, actions, instructions, and guardrails. Existing Flows, Apex, JavaScript, MuleSoft APIs, CRM data, and Data 360 context can support agent behavior. Documented tasks include answering questions, resolving cases, updating records, scheduling appointments, recommending products, qualifying leads, booking meetings, employee support, and event assistance. Agentforce Voice extends delivery across telephony, mobile, and web channels. MCP Client, MCP server support, and A2A patterns provide connections to external tools and agents. A sensible rollout starts with one bounded workflow, a defined permission set, approved actions, test conversations, and a human handoff. Data, workflows, and permissions split across Salesforce organizations or other systems require an orchestration design rather than assuming one agent can reach everything.

Agentforce fits organizations where Salesforce records, permissions, workflows, and channels anchor business operations. It offers CRM-native actions, connections through MCP and A2A patterns, testing, observability, audit trails, and usage controls, but it is not a self-hosted product or a standalone assistant with one predictable price. Constraints include Salesforce administration, data quality, separated-organization boundaries, external MCP contract changes, and privacy requirements for A2A connections. Administrators should begin with a limited workflow, document escalation rules, forecast consumption, and measure outcomes before expanding. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales agents suit Microsoft CRM deployments, ServiceNow AI Agents suit IT and service operations, HubSpot Breeze Agents suit HubSpot teams, Intercom Fin centers on support, and Google Vertex AI Agent Builder fits Google Cloud services. Choose Agentforce when Salesforce is central; otherwise compare those alternatives first.