HelloGrowthCRM vs LionDesk: where to move now that LionDesk has been wound down

What happened to LionDesk, and what it means for your database

LionDesk spent a decade as the affordable answer for individual agents and small teams who could not justify a full real estate platform. Its reputation rested on a few specific things: cheap entry pricing, video texting and video email long before that was common, text and email drip campaigns, and a power dialer for agents who worked large contact lists by phone. It integrated with MLS and IDX partners and slotted in beside whatever website an agent already had. It was never the most polished product on the market, and reviews consistently mentioned outages and rough edges, but it was inexpensive and it did the daily work. Lone Wolf Technologies acquired it in 2021.

In May 2025, Lone Wolf told customers it was winding the product down. Coverage at the time reported that service would continue through September 2025, giving users a transition window, and reports since indicate the platform went offline around the end of that month. Lone Wolf's chief executive was quoted saying the decision was not taken lightly and pointing to technical limitations that prevented LionDesk from scaling with the company's longer-term plans. The practical translation is consolidation: the company preferred to invest in its own CRM rather than maintain an acquired one alongside it. If your account status or data access is unclear, contact Lone Wolf support directly rather than relying on published timelines.

The offer to displaced customers was migration support into Lone Wolf Relationships, including moving contacts, email templates and drip campaigns, at pricing reported to start around $25 a month. For agents already using Lone Wolf products for transactions or forms, that was the low-friction choice and it remains a sensible one. For everyone else, it was a prompt to reconsider the whole stack. A forced migration is annoying, but it is also the only moment most people ever audit what they are paying for. Plenty of agents discovered they were on a real estate platform mainly to store phone numbers, send drips and dial contacts, and were paying add-on fees on top for the privilege.

That audit is the right way to choose your next CRM. Write down what you genuinely used in LionDesk over the last six months. If MLS listing data, IDX search and portal lead ingestion are on that list, go to a dedicated real estate CRM, because HelloGrowthCRM has none of them and will not pretend to. If the list is contacts, calls, texts, drip campaigns and a sense of who is warm, HelloGrowthCRM covers it at $12 per user per month, or $10 annually, with a free forever plan. The dialer, call recording, AI call summaries and AI lead scoring are included rather than sold as add-ons, and setup takes about 15 minutes from your CSV export.