Closely Reviews

I run LinkedIn and email outreach for a consulting business. Around 100 prospects, fully personalised: I write every message myself upstream and import them as custom variables, one column per step. Demanding, but exactly what the product advertises. Here is what happened in two weeks.

1. The CSV import puts values in the wrong field. I imported a clean 7-column file: 85 rows, UTF-8, no line breaks, no quotes, every single cell populated. Three of the four message columns landed correctly for all 85 prospects. The fourth, followup, reached custom_followup for only 60. For the other 25, the text was imported but written to custom_email_original (18 prospects) or custom_first_name_original (7). The error is stable per prospect, not per file row, and the affected prospects are scattered through the file with nothing in common.

2. One empty cell stops the campaign for everybody. Because those 25 now had an empty custom_followup, the entire campaign stopped. Not for the 25 — for all 96.

3. Support told me my file was incomplete. It was not. Their diagnosis was that "for some contacts in the CSV file you uploaded, there is no data available for the custom variables". Every one of my 85 rows had all 7 fields populated. I can produce the file. The values were missing from the campaign because their own import had written them to a different column. I was told to fix a problem I did not create, and no one ever looked at the import itself. When I escalated with the figures above, the answer was a fallback-phrase tutorial.

4. A fallback phrase is not a fix, it is a gag. Their recommended solution is to add a fallback so the campaign doesn't stop. That means sending a generic sentence instead of the message I wrote, to the 25 prospects whose content their import misplaced. The campaign keeps running and the damage becomes invisible. That is not a correction, it is a cover-up of their own defect.

5. It displays an email address and simultaneously reports it cannot find one. On a separate email campaign, 51 prospects had their address populated in both the email and found_email columns of Closely's own export, while email_found_error was 1 and email_sent was 0. Three columns of the same row contradicting each other. Those 51 were never emailed, and most were then marked finishedNoReply — recorded as not having replied to a message that was never sent. Addresses I supplied were silently ignored. I only found out by cross-checking their export against my source file.

6. You cannot edit a running campaign. When something is wrong, you cannot fix it. You rebuild from scratch. And you cannot remove a prospect from a campaign either — only stop them.

7. The support chat frequently fails to load, which is a problem when the tool it supports breaks this often.

Verdict. The product can put your data in the wrong field, stop every campaign because of it, and tell you it was your fault. If you run simple campaigns with short variables like first name and company, you may never hit this. If you rely on per-prospect personalised content imported from a file, you will need to export every campaign and compare it column by column against your source. I had to write a script to do that. An outreach tool should not require an audit tool, and a vendor should not blame the customer's file before reading its own.

The software keeps disconnecting; it takes me two hours to send a campaign because I spend an hour and a half just reconnecting multiple times.

It doesn't find email addresses from LinkedIn profiles.

I upload the lead list, but I still have to enter a URL for the campaign.

I don't understand this app.

I wouldn't recommend it and I want a refund.

I haven't tested out the linkedin side. But database is trash, it can only "verify" 5-10% of emails at most, there is not way to save filters so you have to restart your search each time. This is the same owner as "Leadrocks" which is a dead listing here on appsumo that they somehow made a brand new one for with no reviews. It's just a rinse n repeat scam basically, unsure how they are on appsumo.

Can only export 500 at a time. Can't export Valid + not verified. Only valid, valid n risky or the whole list, which is silly since so many not verified and obviously i don't want risky or invalid emails (no yellow or red). Not a very well thought out product, doubt founders even use it themselves as its of no use.

Edit: The amount of "I haven't worked there in over 3 years" emails i'm getting is crazy. What a scam of a product this is.

Bought the lifetime deal, stopped working after less than 2 years — vendor unreachable. Think twice.
I'm writing this as a warning to other buyers, because I wish someone had written it before I purchased.
I bought the Closely lifetime deal on November 14, 2024 (2 codes redeemed). On May 6, 2026 — so after less than two years — the account simply stopped working: it shows "Seats available: 0" and prompts me to upgrade, even though the AppSumo LTD badge is still active. In practice, the product I paid for as "lifetime" is now unusable.
Since then: six weeks of waiting, three escalations from AppSumo support, plus my own direct emails to the vendor. The result? Zero response from Closely, on any channel. Not to AppSumo support, not to me.
Meanwhile, Closely is happily running a new promotion here on AppSumo — so new customers get attention, but existing paying ones don't.
The whole point of a lifetime deal is that the product stays accessible over time. Here it took less than a year and a half to stop working, with no one on the other side willing to fix it. If you're considering this deal, know that "lifetime" doesn't mean much here: if the vendor disappears, what you paid for disappears with them.

To make a long story short, I was looking for a tool that could help me find qualified leads and then send them a simple email campaign with follow-ups.

The number of leads found isn’t particularly impressive, and a large portion of them have Yahoo, Gmail, or Hotmail addresses, which makes them pretty much useless.
Unfortunately, you can’t use the search results directly—you first have to export the list to a CSV file and then import it back into the same tool.

I would really like to see an API for searching leads, or some kind of AI prompt where you could describe the type of leads you want to target.

So, for our needs, it’s not really the right tool