The typical small real estate team is running Follow Up Boss for pipeline, Mailchimp for email, and Kixie or Aircall for calling. Three logins, three monthly bills, three places where data doesn't automatically sync. Here's what that costs — and what the alternative looks like.
The stack most small teams end up with
Follow Up Boss starts at $69/user/month. For a broker and two agents, that’s $207/month — and that’s before Mailchimp ($50–100/month for a list of any size), a power dialer ($50–100/user/month), and whatever texting tool you’ve bolted on.
A 3-person team running the standard stack:
| Tool | Purpose | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Follow Up Boss (3 users) | Pipeline, lead routing | $207 |
| Mailchimp | Email campaigns, drip nurture | $65 |
| Kixie (3 users) | Power dialer, SMS | $180 |
| Total | — | $452/month |
That’s $5,400/year for infrastructure — before lead costs, MLS fees, or anything else.
And that’s assuming everything works together cleanly. In practice, call data from Kixie syncs back to FUB imperfectly. Email engagement from Mailchimp doesn’t show up in the contact timeline. You’re looking at three separate dashboards to understand what’s happening with a single lead.
What Follow Up Boss doesn’t do
FUB is built for lead routing and pipeline visibility. It’s excellent at pulling leads from Zillow, Realtor.com, and Facebook, assigning them to agents, and showing where every deal sits in the funnel.
What it doesn’t do:
- Email marketing campaigns — FUB has basic drip sequences but no real campaign builder. Agents who want segmented email campaigns, broadcast sends, or open-rate tracking need Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign on top.
- Built-in power dialing — FUB integrates with dialers but doesn’t have one. The call workflow is: log into FUB, see the lead, open Kixie, dial, log notes back. Every step is manual or relies on a sync that sometimes fails.
- SMS campaigns — FUB can send texts, but mass SMS, automated sequences, and two-way texting with campaign tracking requires a separate tool or the FUB + Twilio setup, which takes real configuration.
None of this makes FUB a bad product. It makes it the right product for a large team that has specialists for each function and budget for the full stack. For a team of 2–5, the overhead of managing multiple tools isn’t worth what you get.
What consolidation looks like
Tower CRM handles the full workflow in one place:
What Tower replaces for a small real estate team
Pipeline and lead tracking — Visual kanban from first inquiry to closed deal. Lead source tracking, activity timeline, notes and call history on every contact.
Email campaigns — Full campaign builder with segmentation, drip sequences, open and click tracking. Send to your full database or a filtered segment (buyers only, past clients, a specific zip code farm).
Built-in dialer — One-click calling from any contact record. Calls recorded, transcribed, and summarized automatically. Voicemail drop on no-answer. Local presence dialing included.
SMS and two-way texting — Automated sequences, campaign broadcasts, and inbound text routing from a single number that also makes calls.
Lead capture forms — Custom web forms and landing pages that push directly into your pipeline. No Zapier required.
The integration tax
Every integration between tools has a cost: setup time, ongoing maintenance when one tool updates its API, and data that silently stops syncing. You don’t notice the last one until a lead falls through the cracks and you’re trying to figure out why the Mailchimp open didn’t trigger the FUB follow-up task.
The integration tax compounds over time. A team that built their FUB + Mailchimp + Kixie stack 18 months ago is now managing:
- Zapier automations that occasionally break
- Contacts that exist in two or three tools with different data
- Reporting that requires pulling from multiple sources to get a complete picture
Consolidation fixes this structurally. Not by finding better integrations, but by eliminating the need for them.
When Follow Up Boss still makes sense
FUB is the right choice for larger teams — 10+ agents — where lead routing complexity is high, multiple team leads need their own pipelines, and the org has someone dedicated to managing tools. It’s also the right choice if your team is already deep into a FUB setup and the switching cost outweighs the savings.
For a broker with 2–5 agents who are spending more time managing their tools than using them, the math favors consolidation.
The real question
The question isn’t “is Follow Up Boss good?” It is. The question is whether a small team needs a routing-and-pipeline tool, a separate email platform, and a separate dialer — or whether a single platform that does all three is a better fit for the size and stage you’re at.
Most small teams that switch don’t go back.
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15 questions to ask before choosing a CRM for your real estate team — including a full cost comparison of running multiple tools vs. one platform.
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