I bought into Closely when it was available on AppSumo in the past, researching it exhaustively (great reviews here and externally) and then went so far as to expand my purchase to support a client of mine. And to be clear, the basic core functionality (email sequences and LinkedIn outreach) is pretty solid, but they come with some major caveats which ultimately led me to abandon the platform earlier this year.

Let me outline my experience so you can make an informed decision (with the use of + for positives, - for negatives, and / for informational):

+ Onboarding is generally pretty straightforward, at least as far as my main account went. No issues connecting anything and the interface is reasonably attractive.

- Adding my clients, however, was not. They had difficulties getting their Closely accounts set up and, even when we did, they were unable to connect their M365/Outlook email accounts. Closely's workaround was to move them from Clients to Colleagues, meaning, in theory, that they'd have access to any other client I was working with. Since I'm only working with them in the system today, I agreed and it worked. However, the core issue is still unresolved. For any other agencies looking to implement this as a solution for their clients, you need to be aware of that limitation.

+ Closely includes LinkedIn in their sequences (this isn't that common and was a big plus for me). Throughout our usage, I didn't have any issues with the the platform and how it interacted with LinkedIn, though we did not exercise it very heavily. Our focus was on email outreach.

- We discovered a bug in their system that reformatted ALL CAPS names (e.g., IBM) to Title Case (e.g., Ibm). I reported this in early December and the issue is still being "researched" as of Mar. What this meant is that a large number of our prospects could not be contacted using Closely as their name would appear consistently wrong. We had to move to a different platform to finally contact these companies. (From what I can tell, this capitalization issue looks to affect more than just the company name field so be aware of that.)

- Out of office and bounces were inconsistently handled by the system, causing some sequences to stop early and others to continue when they shouldn't have. No fix is planned; we were told to manage this manually

- Yes, there's reporting but it's not very useful. You can get high-level stats for a campaign, but there's no detail on an individual emails' performance. Frankly, it's not very helpful to know you had 20 clicks in a campaign but not be able to tell which links they were, or even which emails they were in. This lack of insight makes it impossible to refine your campaigns or to know what's working.

/ There's no handling of holidays in the scheduling; to be fair, this is a fairly common "complaint" across all outreach systems but I've worked with one or two that could handle local holidays and automatically adjust. It'd be a nice to have

/ The B2B database is okay and a nice addition, but we did not find a lot of quality data from it but there was some. Instead, we found far more value doing our prospect research using other tools and then importing those lists into Closely.

- My biggest frustration with Closely is with their support and lack of responsiveness. In fairness, the front-line team were pretty good at responding to messages, but once you exhausted their knowledge, the answer was universally "this has been escalated to the developers" and that's all I ever heard back in the four months we tried to use Closely. At one point, my clients got so frustrated that I more-or-less demanded a call with these "developers" to see what might be possible to resolve these issues. I got a response, but only that it wasn't a possibility to talk to them and to be patient. I'm still waiting on an update.

Interestingly, and based on the names in the Support chat, this looks to be the same team behind other AppSumo-available tools like LeadRocks and Scanlist, both of which I'd also tried and where I ran into this same pattern of issues being escalated to development that never get resolved. I'm wary to ever purchase a product from this team again because of the continuing disappointment and ultimate frustration across all of them.

Sadly, Closely is the rare AppSumo purchase that I regret making, not just for the "wasted" dollars but, even more so, because of how bad they made me look with my client when the tool consistently failed to deliver what was promised.

If you have simple outreach needs, then Closely might be a viable option for you, but for anyone that has anything that goes beyond the basics, I'd strongly recommend you look elsewhere for a tool that you can depend on.