This is one of our top picks in the category so we recommend it over others (you're on the right page), read below to learn why we love and recommend it! ⤵
This is one of the better tools in its category, see below if this tool is right for you! ⤵
folk is one of the best CRMs on the market you are an individual or small team who is heavily focused on relationships and contact management. If you have never used a CRM before or you've used Notion, Airtable, or Google Sheets in the past, folk is a perfect introduction into using a specialized CRM too.
It will feel familiar to how you might use a spreadsheet to manage your contacts and information. For example, you can edit data in-line and even bulk update fields like you would in a spreadsheet.
We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what they do well, and what they could do better. ⤵
folk is a simple yet powerful spreadsheet-like CRM for individuals.
folk is a great CRM if you're an individual or super small team trying to use something like Google Sheets, Airtable, or Notion as your CRM.
They built it in a way to feel familiar to how you might use a spreadsheet to manage your contacts and important information:
folk is a fantastic CRM if you are an individual or a small team who is heavily focused on relationships and contact management. If you have never used a CRM before or are looking for a super low-friction, easy to use tool, folk is a great 🙌
An example of when I've recommended folk to a friend is when they brought up to me all the business concerns they had, which a CRM would traditionally solve, but they are currently a solopreneur (or have a 2-3 person team), or are price sensitive.
Hearing things like "I'm wondering if I could just use Notion to manage all of this" is a great indicator that something like folk is right for you.
If you are planning on scaling or working with a larger team (or expect to integrate with a myriad of other tools), you'll want to use a more business-friendly CRM like Copper.
folk is one of the easiest CRMs on the market to use.
folk is one of the friendliest CRMs on the the market when it comes to adding contacts. They have a chrome extension that will allow you to add contacts to folk with one click from Gmail, Linkedin, and X.
And once you've added contacts from to folk, you can use their enrich feature to help fill in gaps like finding correct email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, addresses, and onwards.
You can then bulk email a group of contacts or set reminders to follow-up one-on-one. And of course, like any good CRM, folk will ingest all of your teams emails and calendar events so you can avoid contacting the same person twice.
Setting up folk is incredibly easy, they have dozens of templates that you can chose from that already give you suggested pipeline processes that other companies use, so you already have a foundation to work with out of the gate.
They have some cool CRM features baked in like mail merge (for sending out personalized templated emails in bulk), as well as quick access via a Chrome extension when on Gmail and LinkedIn.
folk has built a new custom field type called "Magic Fields" which allows for an AI prompt to do a bit of legwork, whether it be generating a personalized email across groups of contacts, or even more complex data sanitizing functionality. Of all the CRM's we've seen on the market, folk has taken an incredibly unique approach to how their choosing to implement AI to improve their tool:
This is one of the main areas that we struggle heavily with folk. While they have a basic Zapier connector, it's incredibly limited in the functionality. For example, certain custom field types aren't yet supported (like number fields), which makes it nearly impossible to build more complex integrations. While this will be built out over time, they still have a long way to go before having any level of feature parity to that of a more business-focused CRM.
Usually this isn't as big of a deal because if you're more technical you can just fallback on their API, and even use Zapier's Webhook functionality to build out some custom endpoints. The problem though is that they don't actually have an Dev API accessible at the moment, making building any meaningful integration quite limited and difficult.
If you're an individual using Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 and you're looking to make the upgrade to the CRM world from that of a basic Spreadsheet, folk will be your best option. It's like a more opinionated version of Airtable and Notion, that is actually built with proper CRM features like Email and Calendar activity tracking.
On the other hand, if you're working on a team or looking to scale your company behind a handful of team members, we highly recommending a more powerful CRM like Copper, Pipedrive, or HubSpot, if nothing more than just to have a properly fully-featured API as you scale (you're going to need this). That said, if you're in any way considering Airtable or Notion as your CRM, we highly recommend you use folk instead.
Try folk for free. (Use code FOLKXEFFICIENT for 10% off your first year)
Yes, folk has basic email automation, allowing you to bulk send emails to a group of people or automatically when people hit certain criteria.
Just note that the email will send from your email account, so if you're doing bulk cold emails, you'll want to avoid it in-case of being marked as spam which can destroy your domain and deliverability.
Out of the box, no CRM really integrates with iOS and Android SMS and phone calls due to the API and privacy limitations on these phones.
That's where you really need a VoIP (you can see our top recommended VoIP solutions) for which have an API and have the ability to integrate with your CRM.
That said, if you need SMS and phone calls to be logged in your CRM, it's definitely more of a business feature need, so you'd probably be better off looking at a more business/team CRM like Copper CRM which have native integrations with some VOIP solutions on the market.
We've tracked and verified the above companies are using this software in their team's stack.