Highrise vs Capsule CRM (2026)

TL;DR

• Stay on Highrise only if you're an existing customer, your workflow is unchanged, and you accept that nothing new will ever ship. 37signals has promised to keep the lights on, and they've kept promises like that before.
• Pick Capsule CRM if you've ever needed something Highrise couldn't do — mobile, integrations, a real pipeline, active development. It's the closest thing to a spiritual successor, and it's a live product with a roadmap.

Highrise is not a product you can buy

Let's be blunt, because most pages comparing these two are pretending otherwise: Highrise stopped accepting new customers in August 2018. It has not been developed since. If you're evaluating it as a new option, you can stop — there is no signup form to fill in, regardless of how much you like the idea of it.

What Highrise still is: a maintenance-mode product for the 10,000-plus businesses already on it when the door closed. 37signals — the Basecamp people — committed to keeping those accounts secure and online indefinitely, and they are unusually good at honoring that kind of commitment. Existing users also sit on legacy pricing that no longer exists anywhere.

So the only sensible version of "Highrise vs Capsule" is this: you still run Highrise (or you miss it), and you want to know whether Capsule is the right place to land.

Why Capsule is the closest heir

Highrise's defining quality was restraint. It tracked contacts, conversations, notes, and follow-ups, and deliberately refused to do more. Non-technical users could actually use it. It had a point of view — 37signals' calm-software philosophy — and that point of view was "less."

Capsule CRM is the modern product that most nearly holds that line. It's a contact-focused CRM for small businesses: contacts, a sales pipeline, tasks, custom fields, tags, and filters, wrapped in a clean interface that consultants and small teams can adopt in an afternoon. It doesn't try to be a marketing platform, a help desk, and a CMS at once.

Crucially, it's still simple. The main risk in migrating off a deliberately minimal tool is landing somewhere maximalist, spending three weeks in setup screens, and discovering your team quietly went back to a spreadsheet. Capsule doesn't have that problem. Pricing is small-business shaped too: a free plan, with paid starting at $18/month. You're not signing an enterprise contract to escape a dead product.

What you gain in the move

Active development. This is the entire point. Highrise's feature set is frozen at 2018. Capsule is a maintained product that ships changes.

Real mobile apps. Capsule has iOS and Android apps. If you've been getting by with a mobile browser tab for years, this alone justifies the move.

Integrations that exist now. Google Workspace, Outlook, Xero, Mailchimp, Zapier. Highrise's integration story ended when its development did — anything you've built around it survives only because nobody has changed the API since. Capsule connects to the tools your business actually runs on today.

A pipeline you can work. Highrise had deals, but sales tracking wasn't its center of gravity. Capsule's pipeline management is first-class. If your Highrise usage quietly evolved from "address book with notes" into "we run our sales through this," Capsule handles that better.

Segmentation. Custom fields, tags, and filters slice your contact base in ways Highrise's simplicity never really allowed.

What you lose

Be honest about this before you export.

Legacy pricing. Whatever you're paying 37signals, you are almost certainly not going to beat it. Capsule's free plan exists, but a working team will end up on paid.

37signals' uptime commitment. There is something genuinely rare about a vendor saying "this product is done, and we will keep it running for you forever." Capsule is a normal software company subject to normal software company risks — pivots, acquisitions, pricing changes. You are trading a strange kind of certainty for a normal kind of progress.

A specific flavor of minimalism. Highrise was minimal on purpose, by a team famous for saying no. Capsule is simple the way good small-business software is simple, not simple as an ideological commitment. Longtime devotees will notice.

The migration itself. Exporting a decade of contacts, notes, and conversation history out of a frozen product and getting it usefully into a new one is not a click. Budget real time for cleanup — and treat it as the opportunity it is to delete the 4,000 contacts you haven't touched since 2016.

Where Capsule will frustrate you

Capsule inherits the downside of its own restraint: reporting and automation are limited compared to bigger platforms. If you want sophisticated forecasting, multi-step workflow automation, or deep analytics, Capsule is not that product — Pipedrive or Zoho would serve you better. Email integration and advanced features require a paid plan; the free tier is a starting point, not a destination. And it isn't built for complex workflows or large organizations.

None of that will surprise a Highrise user. You already chose the simple tool once.

Bottom line

Highrise is over. If you're on it and content, nothing forces your hand today — 37signals will keep it running, and there's no shame in using a finished product. But every year you stay, the gap widens between what your CRM does and what your business needs, and the eventual migration gets larger, not smaller.

When you go, Capsule CRM is the most natural landing spot: the same contact-first, low-clutter, small-team philosophy, but with mobile apps, live integrations, a working pipeline, and a company still building it. You give up legacy pricing and a uniquely stubborn commitment to keeping the servers on. You get a CRM that still gets better. That's a trade worth making.