Close vs Zoho CRM
Close
Inside sales CRM with calling built in $9/Zoho CRM
The most fully published API allowance of any CRM here $14/Close if the team is an inside sales team that dials all day, because the dialer, recording and SMS are the product and an API key gets a script running in minutes. Zoho CRM if you want a published daily allowance, a free edition and the breadth of a suite at $14 a seat. Close vs Zoho CRM on the API is a trade between simple keys with unpublished numbers and a fully published allowance behind hour-long OAuth tokens. Both ship MCP servers, so pick the gap you can live with.
Where they actually differ
Every value comes from the same record that drives the CRM and sync APIs listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not.
| Compare | Close | Zoho CRM |
|---|---|---|
| What sets it apart | API on every plan, and the org limit is three times the key limit | Concurrency instead of a rate limit, and credits by the day |
| Entry price | $9/seat/mo annual | $14/user/mo |
| Unit cost | Not sold by the unit | Not sold by the unit |
| Billing model | Per seat Subscription | Per seat Subscription Free tier |
| Free tier | No free tier. Free trial, and $9 a month on Solo billed annually, for one user. | Free edition for up to 3 users, with 5,000 API credits a day. |
| GTM motion covered | Sync Engage | Sync Engage |
| Data returned | CRM recordsWork emailFirmographics | CRM recordsWork emailFirmographics |
| MCP server | Yes https://mcp.close.com/mcp | Yes Four scoped servers, OAuth |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async n8n node |
| Auth | API key, or OAuth 2.0 for user-facing integrations | OAuth 2.0, with per-scope consent |
| Rate limits | Per endpoint group. Published as a structure rather than as numbers; read the RateLimit header. | No per-second limit. Daily credit pool plus concurrency of 5 to 25 per org. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA CCPA | GDPR DPA HIPAA |
| Best for | Inside sales CRM with calling built in | The most fully published API allowance of any CRM here |
Pick each one when
Close
- The reps live on the phone and want a power or predictive dialer inside the CRM.
- You want an API key for scripts rather than an hourly OAuth token.
- You want the API on a single-user seat at $9 billed annually.
Zoho CRM
- You need to forecast API capacity on paper before building.
- A free edition for up to three users is useful.
- Inventory, quotes, portals or HIPAA support matter to the business.
There is no match rate to test here, so the bake-off is about shape and headroom. Build the object you actually sell on in each of them, using one free tier and one trial. Write a thousand records through the API, and watch which one needs a custom object and which one needs a plan upgrade to take the write rate. It takes an afternoon, and it surfaces the data-modeling work before it is in production rather than after.
What each one costs, tier by tier
Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. Close lists 4 tiers and Zoho CRM lists 4. Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, and the pages they came from are listed at the foot of this one.
| The short version | Close | Zoho CRM |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan with the API | Solo, $9 | Standard, $14 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 4 |
| Free tier | No free tier. Free trial, and $9 a month on Solo billed annually, for one user. | Free edition for up to 3 users, with 5,000 API credits a day. |
| Unit cost at entry | Not sold by the unit | Not sold by the unit |
The cheapest paid plan is rarely the plan you end up on, because what moves you up a tier is usually volume rather than a feature. The two rate cards below are what you are choosing between.
Close
Close publishes 4 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $9 to $139.
Solo
- One user only; API access and the event log
- 500 AI credits a user a month
- Calling, email and SMS built in
Essentials
- Same API access
- Shared pool of 1,000 credits a user, up to 10,000
- Pipelines and team visibility
Growth
- Same API access
- Shared pool of 1,500 credits a user, up to 15,000
- Close marks this the most popular plan
Scale
- Same API access
- Shared pool of 2,000 credits a user, up to 20,000
- Predictive dialing
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $14 to $40.
Free
- 5,000 API credits a day
- Concurrency of 5
- No credit card required
Standard
- 50,000 + 250 credits per license, capped at 100,000
- Concurrency of 10
- HIPAA compliance and custom modules
Professional
- 50,000 + 500 credits per license, capped at 3,000,000
- Concurrency of 15
- Zoho marks this the most popular edition
Enterprise
- 50,000 + 1,000 credits per license, capped at 5,000,000
- Concurrency of 20
- Developer sandbox
What Close and Zoho CRM cost at your volume
Put your own volume in. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers it on each side, which is the question a rate card cannot answer and the one that decides the bill.
Close
Priced per seat, so the bill moves with headcount rather than with volume.
Zoho CRM
Priced per seat, so the bill moves with headcount rather than with volume.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices on the billing term each vendor publishes, annual where that is how it prices, before any discount you negotiate.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for.
Close and Zoho CRM are priced per seat, so one row says it all: the figure is 3 seats for a year.
| A year at | Close | Zoho CRM |
|---|---|---|
| At any volume | $1,260 Essentials | $504 Standard |
These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, on the billing term each vendor publishes, so they are the number before you negotiate.
How this plays out once it is running
Both include the API in the seat. Close Solo is $19 a month, or $9 billed annually, and API access and the event log are on all four plans up to Scale at $149. Zoho CRM has a free edition for three users with 5,000 API calls a day, then Standard at $14, Professional at $23 and Enterprise at $40. Both have calling: Zoho lists built-in calling on Standard, and Close builds its plans around the phone, with a power dialer from Growth and a predictive dialer on Scale.
The developer surfaces differ in what they publish. Zoho states everything: a daily pool of 50,000 credits plus 250 to 2,000 per license by edition, a credit cost for each operation and a concurrency limit of 10 to 25 per org, with no time-based limit at all. Close limits per endpoint group, per key and per organization, with the organization limit three times the per-key one, and leaves the rate itself to the RateLimit header. Both ship MCP servers: Close one, Zoho four split by job, from a read-only server up to one that changes fields and layouts.
What each one is genuinely good at
These are the things that keep somebody paying after the first month, which is a different question from what the marketing page leads with.
Close
No price per operation
API access and the event log are on all four plans, and a call is a call: Close does not charge a lead conversion or a bulk job more than a read. Zoho prices operations from 1 credit up to 500 for a Bulk Write initialize, so the cost of an integration depends on which calls it makes as well as how many.
The phone is the product
The power dialer arrives on Growth at $99 a seat billed annually and the predictive dialer on Scale, with call recording retention of 30, 90 or unlimited days by plan. Zoho has built-in calling from Standard, and Close is the one designed around it.
API keys or OAuth
An API key for a script, or OAuth 2.0 for an integration other accounts install. Zoho has no static key at all: every call carries an OAuth access token that lasts one hour, so even a script needs a client, a stored refresh token and a header of its own, Zoho-oauthtoken rather than Bearer.
Zoho CRM
Every number is published
Daily credits by edition, a credit cost per operation and concurrency by edition, all in the developer documentation. An upsert of 100 records costs 10 credits, so a 50,000-record load is 5,000 credits. Close publishes the structure and not the rate, so the same plan there is an estimate.
A free edition
Up to three users with 5,000 API calls a day, indefinitely. Close has a trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee but no free plan, so there is nowhere to leave a prototype running.
A suite around the CRM
Inventory, CPQ, portals and AI agents on Professional, and HIPAA support listed on Standard. Close is deliberately a sales CRM, so a business that wants those has to buy them elsewhere.
Where each one falls down
Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
Close
You cannot size a job in advance
The requests per second are left to the RateLimit header. Three keys at full rate reach the org limit, which is useful to know, and the absolute numbers are not published, which is what a capacity plan needs.
No free tier, and calling costs extra
Calls are charged on usage, most outbound around $0.02 a minute with lines from $1 a month, and recording with transcription is $50 an organization a month plus $0.02 a minute. The $9 Solo seat is the floor of a phone-heavy month.
Zoho CRM
Concurrency is the binding limit
Ten concurrent calls on Standard, 15 on Professional and 20 on Enterprise, plus a sub-concurrency limit of 10 shared by heavy operations such as lead conversion and large upserts. A parallel backfill hits this long before the credit pool.
Some calls are dear, and Standard has a ceiling
Credit costs vary: Send Mail is 20 credits, Bulk Read initialize 50 and Bulk Write initialize 500, so a forecast means pricing each operation. Standard also caps the daily pool at 100,000 credits however many licenses you add.
Using Close and Zoho CRM together
Teams comparing these two often end up running both, and the arrangement below is the one they settle on.
Running both happens when an inside sales team picks Close for the dialer inside a business that already runs on Zoho for everything else. That is a reasonable split as long as Zoho stays the system of record and Close owns the calling activity.
Write the sync one way, from Close into Zoho, and make it cheap on the Zoho side. Batch the writes into 100-record upserts at 10 credits each, keep within the concurrency limit rather than parallelizing hard, and read Close's RateLimit header on every response, because that is the only place its ceiling is stated.
If you are choosing one, the phone decides it. A team that dials all day will get more from Close than from any amount of Zoho breadth. A team that mostly emails and wants a suite, a free edition and published limits will find Zoho the better home at $14.
Close or Zoho CRM, for you
Two questions, answered from the same records as the rest of this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no result to email yourself.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your workload, and the one test that does is the bake-off on this page: your own rows, queries or records, run on the cheapest entry each side offers.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Moving between Close and Zoho CRM
Most readers of this page are already on one of these two, and the order below catches the expensive mistakes while they are still free.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Export a count of every object and custom field in Close, and the API calls your integrations made last month. That inventory is the size of the job, more than the seat price, and it is the baseline the new system has to match.
Check which fields change
Zoho CRM returns every field Close does, so nothing downstream has to change shape. Confirm the values rather than the keys: the same field can be named, typed or formatted differently on the other side.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Close authenticates with an API key, or OAuth 2.0 for user-facing integrations. Zoho CRM uses OAuth 2.0, with per-scope consent.
The limits are the part that bites later. Close's limits: per endpoint group. Published as a structure rather than as numbers; read the RateLimit header.
Zoho CRM's limits: no per-second limit. Daily credit pool plus concurrency of 5 to 25 per org. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because the limits and the overage rate only show up under a real month's load, and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date
Annual seats and prepaid usage rarely refund mid-term. Check what the contract says about the time you have already paid for, and time the switch to the renewal date.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new one against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your workload looks like a provider that is fine.
The wider field for both
Sometimes the answer is neither, and the reason you are comparing these two points somewhere else entirely: Close alternatives and Zoho CRM alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
Close alternatives
4Close is a CRM built around the phone. People leave it for reasons that have nothing to do with the phone.
See the alternatives →Zoho CRM alternatives
4Zoho CRM publishes more about its API than almost any CRM here. People still leave, and it is rarely the price.
See the alternatives →Everything in Sync
11The full category these two sit in, filtered by data returned, billing model and entry price.
Browse the category →Related comparisons
The 52 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: Attio vs Close, Freshsales vs Zoho CRM and Close vs Pipedrive.
And: Salesforce vs Zoho CRM and HubSpot vs Close. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
HubSpot API vs Zoho CRM
A free tier with a per-10-second limit against a $14 seat with a daily credit pool and no rate limit at all.
Compare them →Pipedrive vs Zoho CRM
Two cheap CRMs that both meter the API daily, and only one has a free tier.
Compare them →Salesforce vs Zoho CRM
The same daily-pool idea at nine times the price, and only one of them makes you buy the API.
Compare them →Testing providers one at a time? Run the waterfall in Clay.
Clay runs a waterfall across 150+ data providers from one table, without a separate contract with each. A lookup that finds nothing costs no data credit, and the free plan includes 500 actions a month.
Frontal is a Clay Elite Studio Partner.
Close and Zoho CRM, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Close or Zoho CRM cheaper?
Zoho CRM is cheaper to start, because its free tier carries the API: free edition for up to 3 users, with 5,000 API credits a day. Close starts at $9/seat/mo annual.
Can I try Close and Zoho CRM for free?
Close: No free tier. Free trial, and $9 a month on Solo billed annually, for one user. Zoho CRM: Free edition for up to 3 users, with 5,000 API credits a day.
What are the rate limits on Close and Zoho CRM?
Close: Per endpoint group. Published as a structure rather than as numbers; read the RateLimit header. Zoho CRM: No per-second limit. Daily credit pool plus concurrency of 5 to 25 per org.
Do Close and Zoho CRM both have MCP servers?
Both do. Close: https://mcp.close.com/mcp. Zoho CRM: Four scoped servers, OAuth.
Which is better, Close or Zoho CRM?
Close if the team is an inside sales team that dials all day, because the dialer, recording and SMS are the product and an API key gets a script running in minutes. Zoho CRM if you want a published daily allowance, a free edition and the breadth of a suite at $14 a seat.
What are the downsides of Close and Zoho CRM?
Close: you cannot size a job in advance; no free tier, and calling costs extra. Zoho CRM: concurrency is the binding limit; some calls are dear, and Standard has a ceiling. The Limits section above has each one in full.
Can you use Close and Zoho CRM together?
Running both happens when an inside sales team picks Close for the dialer inside a business that already runs on Zoho for everything else. That is a reasonable split as long as Zoho stays the system of record and Close owns the calling activity.
Can I migrate from Close to Zoho CRM without losing data?
The fields survive: Zoho CRM returns everything Close does. What changes is the auth and the limits. Either way, replay a week of real writes against the new CRM's limits before you switch.