Freshsales vs monday : Which CRM for agencies wins?

Agencies don’t struggle with “finding tools.” They struggle with ensuring pipeline execution remains consistent while delivering projects on schedule. When prospect information is scattered across emails, calendars, and spreadsheets, follow-ups can be missed, handoffs may falter, and forecasting becomes a guessing game. A CRM for agencies must facilitate speedy movement of new business while maintaining sufficient account history to support renewals, upsells, and referrals.

Freshsales and monday CRM address this challenge from unique perspectives. Freshsales offers a streamlined approach to lead and deal management with built-in automation and robust reporting capabilities, making it ideal for agencies that value simplicity and effectiveness. Conversely, monday CRM provides flexibility and customization, allowing users to tailor their workflows and pipeline stages to fit their specific operational needs.

The right choice hinges on the complexity of your processes, the level of customization you require, and the amount of ongoing commitment your agency can allocate to setup and administration.

What is Freshsales?

Freshsales is a CRM solution from Freshworks designed to manage leads, deals, and activities, complete with built-in automation features. It’s ideal for agencies seeking standard CRM functionalities, customizable pipelines, and workflow rules for efficient follow-ups and transitions. Activity timelines ensure that all interactions are connected to the appropriate records in sales and account management. Additionally, reporting tools allow for effective pipeline monitoring and performance evaluation based on recorded data. Agencies typically choose Freshsales for its straightforward approach while still offering essential automation and reporting capabilities.

What is monday?

monday CRM is a flexible solution built on monday.com boards, allowing users to customize columns and views for sales and account workflows. It serves well for agencies already utilizing monday.com for project delivery, enabling seamless representation of sales, onboarding, and client operations within a collaborative workspace. Pipeline views and dashboards enhance visibility, while automation features facilitate handoffs and reminders triggered by status updates. Integrations with marketing, forms, and communication tools can be customized according to the agency's tech stack. This CRM is typically favored when flexibility and workflow customization are prioritized over conventional CRM features.

Feature comparison of Freshsales and monday

Multi-pipeline and Custom Stages

Freshsales enables the use of multiple deal pipelines, each equipped with its own unique stages. Administrators can manage these pipelines and stages in the settings, allowing for the addition, reordering, and customization to suit various sales processes. This flexibility makes it possible to differentiate agency activities like new business, renewals, or partnerships into separate pipelines while maintaining specific stage definitions for each. The default outcomes for new pipelines remain Won and Lost.

In monday CRM, pipeline setup generally occurs on the Deals board, where deals transition through a predefined set of stages. These stages can be tailored to align with the agency's sales process, and the pipeline view effectively illustrates progression by stage. Different workflows can be created by organizing separate boards and customizing stage structures, depending on the account's requirements. The logic of stages is closely linked to the configuration of the board and its columns.

Client and Deal Activity Tracking

With Freshsales, you can effortlessly log activities such as calls, meetings, notes, emails, and tasks, linking them to contacts, accounts, and deals. The recorded timelines provide insights into past interactions and outline upcoming actions, ensuring that handoffs are informed and include clear next steps. Additionally, Freshsales allows for customizable activity types, accommodating the unique ways teams track their work. You can filter timelines to focus on specific activity categories while reviewing an account.

In monday CRM, activity tracking is streamlined through Emails and Activities, which integrates with Gmail or Outlook to log communications and display them on a timeline. This feature not only supports email logging and tracking but also includes various activity types such as meetings, call summaries, and notes. You have the option to add custom activities, ensuring that the activity log accurately reflects how your agency documents client interactions. Consequently, the timeline serves as a comprehensive overview of past events and future plans.

Automation and Workflows

In Freshsales, you can create reports and dashboards from CRM data, including deals, activities, and stage movements, to effectively monitor your pipeline's status and performance. The analytics features enable you to track progression through various stages and analyze conversion patterns over time using the logged data. Additionally, reporting options allow for scheduling reports to be delivered via email, tailored to your analytics setup. The metrics available will vary based on the configuration of your pipelines, stages, and properties.

In monday CRM, automation rules utilize trigger action recipes that respond to changes such as status updates, due dates, item creation, and board movements. These automations can send notifications, assign owners, update fields, and create items based on specified conditions. This functionality is particularly useful for standardizing handoffs when a deal transitions between stages or generating follow-up tasks as important dates approach. The precise behavior is determined by the selected recipe and the setup of your columns.

Reporting and Analytics

In Freshsales, you can create reports and dashboards using CRM data, including deals, activities, and stage movements, to effectively monitor your pipeline status and performance. The analytics features allow you to track progress through various stages and analyze conversion trends over time based on recorded data. Additionally, reporting options include scheduling email delivery for reports, contingent upon your analytics setup. The metrics available will vary according to how pipelines, stages, and properties are configured.

In monday CRM, reporting is primarily created using dashboards that aggregate data from one or multiple boards, presenting it through various widgets such as charts and tables. Dashboards facilitate real-time monitoring, whereas reports offer in-depth analysis generated on demand based on your workflow. The visibility of pipelines is influenced by the structure of the Deals board and the metrics displayed on the dashboard. Access and sharing capabilities are governed by account permissions and dashboard settings.

Integrations and Data Hygiene

Freshsales allows users to enhance their CRM experience by integrating external tools through the Freshworks Marketplace, seamlessly connecting them to CRM records and workflows. Its duplicate management features efficiently identify and merge duplicate leads or contacts, ensuring that reporting and automation rely on consolidated data. Additionally, import settings help minimize duplicate entries by matching incoming data with existing records, while enrichment capabilities may vary based on the edition and configuration used.

For monday CRM, integrations can be implemented using native connectors and external automation platforms like Zapier, facilitating the synchronization of items and triggering workflows across various applications. monday.com’s documentation emphasizes that CRM integration involves syncing customer data across different business tools to minimize manual data entry. To maintain data hygiene, monday.com offers a Manage Duplicates feature that identifies and resolves duplicate items on boards, which is crucial when leads are imported or integrated. The cleanliness of the data largely depends on the structure of the board and the design of incoming data flows.

folk: The Best CRM for Agencies in 2026!

folk is an AI-driven CRM designed to centralize contacts, conversations, and deal context without making setup a cumbersome project. It seamlessly supports agency teams where multiple members interact with the same account throughout prospecting, onboarding, delivery, and renewals. This record-keeping ensures that relationship history is always visible, eliminating reliance on memory or scattered notes during handoffs.

• Multi-pipeline and custom stages tailored for various agency activities
• Contact and deal timelines that consolidate interaction history
• Email and calendar synchronization to link conversations to the correct records
• Tasks, reminders, and follow-up tracking to ensure consistent next steps
• Contact enrichment to complete missing company and contact data
• Deduplication tools to merge duplicates and maintain a clean database
• Simple pipeline reporting to track stage health and deal progression
• Integrations and automation connectors to minimize manual updates

For agencies, the main advantage lies in achieving operational clarity across multiple relationships. Pipelines can represent various revenue streams such as retainers, projects, partnerships, and referrals, while tasks and reminders ensure consistent follow-ups across the team. Data hygiene features like enrichment and deduplication help eliminate duplicate records and fill in missing fields, keeping pipeline reporting reliable over time.

Conclusion

In summary, Freshsales offers straightforward lead and deal management with vital automation features, while monday CRM stands out for its flexibility and customizable workflows. However, for agencies that prioritize seamless email integration, automation, and efficient sequencing, folk is the superior choice. Its ability to centralize contact history, support multiple pipelines, and ensure consistent follow-ups makes it an ideal CRM for teams navigating complex client relationships. With folk, agencies can achieve operational clarity and maintain the integrity of their data effortlessly.

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