Strengthening materials such as carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) have the capacity of high strength-to-weight ratio, lightweight, corrosion resistance and therefore can promote the mitigation of flexural crack initial load in reinforced concrete (RC) beams. With the increasing use of strengthening methods in civil engineering, such as externally bonded reinforcement (EBR), there have been concerns raised over their performance for crack control and strips debonding, especially when subjected to flexure. In this work, the flexural and crack propagation behavior of RC beams strengthened by the method of near surface mounted (NSM) with CFRP strips is compared with numerical analysis data by using ABAQUS. The deflection value of CFRP strengthens RC beam in numerical and experimental is 87.59 kN and 53.61 kN respectively meanwhile, control RC beam for numerical and experimental is 63.67 kN and 67.46 kN respectively. These results indicate that CFRP contributes to increasing load-bearing ability, whereas the ABAQUS modelling can accurately predict the flexural behavior of the RC beam. It is suggested that further research should be conducted to study their performance of CFRP retrofitting under environmental conditions (fire, corrosion, and coastal exposure).