Email remains the backbone of modern sales communication, serving as the platform where deals advance, follow-ups occur, and relationships strengthen.

As teams increasingly depend on automated outreach, multi-channel engagement, and precise tracking, CRMs are competing more on the quality of their native email integrations.

While Freshsales and Clarify both provide built-in email workflows, their depth, usability, and influence on daily sales operations vary significantly. For teams prioritizing simplicity and seeking fast, reliable email execution, folk offers one of the cleanest and most effective email integrations in any CRM, streamlining the process of sending, tracking, and automating outreach directly from your workspace.

Why Email Integration Matters?

Effective email integration elevates a CRM from a mere database to a cohesive communication hub. Instead of toggling between tabs or using disjointed tools, representatives can send messages, automate follow-ups, and monitor engagement all from a single interface.

• Centralized communication. All emails—both sent and received—automatically sync to the appropriate contact or deal.
• Smarter follow-ups. Automated reminders and sequences enable representatives to follow up at the ideal moment without manual input.
• Real-time tracking. Open rates, clicks, and replies feed directly into the CRM to inform next steps.
• Cleaner data. Emails instantly enrich contact profiles with context and conversation history.
• Email templates. Reusable, personalized templates help teams maintain consistency and save time.
• Outreach automation. Send bulk emails, sequences, or trigger messages based on deal stages or contact activities.

When a CRM manages email seamlessly, representatives can stop juggling tools and concentrate on conversations that generate revenue. This distinction sets apart a good CRM from one that truly accelerates sales!

What is Freshsales?

Freshsales is Freshworks’ sales CRM specifically crafted for small and mid-sized teams looking for a user-friendly interface and robust automation features. Users can easily connect their Gmail or Microsoft 365 accounts and select between one-way or two-way sync, ensuring that conversations remain aligned between their email and the CRM. Alongside email templates, bulk email capabilities, and activity timelines, this integration makes email a fundamental component in managing leads and opportunities effectively.

What is Clarify?

Clarify is an AI-driven CRM designed for startups and agile sales teams that need to integrate emails, meetings, and deal context into a single, efficient platform. It seamlessly connects with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 to automatically sync emails, calendars, and meeting insights. This information is utilized to enhance timelines and generate AI-suggested follow-ups. Users can compose and dispatch emails directly from Clarify, ensuring that engagement is tracked back to contacts and deals instead of getting lost in separate inboxes.

Feature comparison of Freshsales and Clarify

Integration Capabilities

Freshsales provides native plugins for Gmail and Outlook, enabling seamless access to email threads, scheduling tools, and relevant contact information directly within your inbox. Once connected, Freshsales automatically scans incoming emails for recognized contact addresses and logs conversations, allowing you to streamline your workflow by selecting which folders to sync and minimizing clutter.

Clarify integrates with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, enabling sales teams to effortlessly capture Gmail, Outlook, calendar, and meeting activities within the CRM. It also connects with tools like Zapier, Segment, Posthog, and webhooks to facilitate the transfer of customer and product usage data to and from the database. An upcoming integration with Loops aims to send Clarify events to a SaaS-focused email platform without replacing it. Overall, Clarify prioritizes consolidating core inbox and meeting data in one place rather than offering an extensive native marketing ecosystem.

Sync Frequency and Reliability

Freshsales establishes a seamless connection through native plugins, ensuring a constant link to your Gmail or Outlook account while syncing emails and calendar events in real-time. Incoming messages from known leads are displayed within seconds, and any outgoing emails logged in the CRM are instantly reflected in your email thread. Calendar events are updated immediately as well, guaranteeing that meetings scheduled in Freshsales appear in your personal calendar without delay.

Clarify focuses on the automatic ingestion of email and calendar data, eliminating the need for manual logging. After linking with Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, messages, events, and meeting insights are synced automatically in the background, associating them with the appropriate contacts, companies, and deals. While the product copy highlights features like “auto-capture,” “auto-sync,” and continuous CRM updates, it does not provide detailed, user-facing sync schedules. As a newer tool, Clarify’s integrations are still evolving and may not yet be as robust as those of established CRMs, despite the core email and calendar sync being presented as standard functionality.

Two-Way Email and Calendar Sync

Freshsales offers a comprehensive Marketing Campaigns module—simply go to Campaigns > Email to craft blasts or set up automated Journeys based on user behaviors. With drag-and-drop templates, dynamic segments, and analytics dashboards that track delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes, it provides a robust toolkit. Additionally, built-in retry logic and ISP throttling enhance deliverability. However, note that advanced features like heat-map click analysis or AI-driven send-time optimization necessitate an upgrade to Freshmarketer.

Clarify seamlessly integrates with Gmail and Outlook, allowing both inbound and outbound emails to be incorporated into contact and deal timelines. This information is then utilized by the AI agent for follow-up suggestions. Following the July 2025 update, users will be able to send emails directly from Clarify, with both sent emails and replies recorded in the relevant records. Calendar events and meeting notes from platforms such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams are also linked to these timelines, providing teams with a cohesive two-way overview of conversations and meetings. This functionality primarily supports everyday sales follow-up rather than sophisticated marketing automation.

Mail Merge and Campaigns

Freshsales features a comprehensive Marketing Campaigns module—simply go to Campaigns > Email to create email blasts or automated Journeys based on user behavior. With drag-and-drop templates, dynamic segments, and analytics dashboards, you can easily track delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. The built-in retry logic and ISP throttling enhance deliverability. However, note that advanced features like heat-map click analysis and AI-driven send-time optimization require upgrading to Freshmarketer.

Clarify enables reps to send personalized follow-up emails directly from the CRM, often leveraging its AI agent to draft messages based on meeting and email context. Nonetheless, external reviews and Clarify’s own positioning indicate that the product currently lacks full multi-channel sequences and traditional mail merge-style bulk campaigns. For nurture streams and onboarding journeys, teams are expected to utilize external tools like Loops or other marketing platforms via integrations. Consequently, Clarify remains focused on sales communication and pipeline management, while more robust CRMs take on heavier campaign responsibilities.

Open and Click Tracking

Freshsales allows you to enable 'Track opens and clicks' in Settings > Email Settings, ensuring that every email sent through the native plugin logs open events and link clicks in the contact timeline. You can view delivery, open, and click metrics in both the Deal dashboard and the Campaigns module. Keep in mind that open rates depend on image-based pixels; if a recipient blocks images or views links in preview panes, the stats may be underreported.

Clarify positions itself as a CRM email tracking solution, featuring content focused on tools that monitor opens, clicks, and replies for sales emails. The goal is to capture essential engagement signals from emails sent via connected inboxes or directly from Clarify, displaying that activity on timelines and in follow-up suggestions. This enables sales teams to identify who is engaging and determine the optimal time to follow up, all without transforming Clarify into a comprehensive analytics tool. In contrast to dedicated email platforms, the reporting on these events is relatively simple and geared towards deal workflows rather than in-depth marketing analysis.

In-Inbox CRM Experience

Freshsales' native Gmail and Outlook plugins integrate your CRM sidebar directly within your inbox, allowing you to access lead profiles, deal values, and previous email threads while composing or reading messages. You can easily log emails, schedule meetings, and initiate sequences with a simple one-click sync back to Freshsales. Additionally, by incorporating calendar events into the same view, it provides a seamless combination of messages and appointments. However, if you prefer another mail client, you'll need to use IMAP sync instead of enjoying the full plugin experience.

On the other hand, Clarify primarily operates within its web app and macOS app, connecting to Gmail and Outlook, rather than functioning as a full CRM sidebar inside your inbox. Users can examine timelines, meeting summaries, and AI-suggested follow-ups in Clarify, then send or schedule emails while still using their preferred mail clients. For teams that rely entirely on Gmail or Outlook, this approach creates a connected workspace rather than a traditional 'CRM inside the inbox' extension. The development roadmap aims to centralize work and AI functionalities within Clarify itself, rather than creating extensive UI add-ons for every email client.

folk CRM: The Best Email CRM

folk provides teams with the seamless, interconnected email workflow they’ve long been missing. It consolidates communication, automates follow-ups, and simplifies sequencing—all within a clean and intuitive CRM interface. With an impressive 4.5/5 rating on G2, folk is recognized as one of the top lightweight CRMs for modern sales and partnership teams.

Designed specifically for startups, agencies, and growing sales teams of 20-50, folk streamlines email operations without overwhelming users.

Extract Intel from Emails

One of folk’s standout features is its ability to centralize communication, transforming every email and call into actionable insights. With native email synchronization for Gmail and Outlook, along with AI-driven analysis, teams can:

• Quickly recap past conversations with a single click using folk's Recap Assistant. It extracts intelligence from emails and notes to provide a summary, giving you context in seconds.
• Follow up at the right time, as AI scans conversations to notify you when to reconnect with a contact and even drafts a response for you.

Email Sequencing & Automation

folk’s integrated sequencing engine simplifies the creation of automated outreach flows right within the CRM. Build multi-step email sequences, personalize messages using CRM fields, and automatically log every interaction. Whether you’re nurturing leads, launching outbound campaigns, or re-engaging inactive deals, folk offers an effective yet straightforward sequencing workflow without the need for separate tools.

Set conditions based on your CRM variables to automatically send emails, such as when a deal is closed or when you acquire a new lead.

AI-Powered Follow-Up Reminders

folk’s AI Follow-Up feature guarantees that no conversation slips through the cracks. By analyzing your email history, folk notifies you when a contact hasn’t responded, highlights cold conversations, and pinpoints the optimal moment to re-engage. It functions like an in-built assistant, keeping your inbox organized and your pipeline active—without any manual tracking.

folk starts at $20 per user per month, includes native email integration and sequences, and offers a 14-day free trial—no credit card required.

Conclusion

In summary, Freshsales excels with its user-friendly interface and robust automation for small teams, making email an integral part of lead management. Clarify offers a streamlined solution for agile sales teams, focusing on integrating email and meeting insights with AI-driven follow-ups. However, for teams heavily reliant on email integration, automation, and sequencing, folk stands out as the best alternative. Its seamless email workflows, AI-powered follow-ups, and intuitive interface empower sales teams to enhance communication and drive revenue efficiently.

Start your 14-day free trial or book a demo today.