Salesforce vs folk

folk is great if you're an individual 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:

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 incredibly 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.

Functionality

They do 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.

Magic Fields

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:

API

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.

Final Verdict

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.