Email is the foundation of modern sales communication, facilitating deal progression, follow-ups, and relationship building.

As teams increasingly depend on automated outreach, multi-channel engagement, and precise tracking, the competition among CRMs intensifies, particularly regarding their native email integrations.

While both HubSpot and Clarify provide built-in email workflows, their depth, usability, and influence on daily sales operations vary significantly. For teams prioritizing simplicity over complexity and seeking fast, reliable email execution, folk offers one of the cleanest and most powerful email integrations available in any CRM, allowing users to send, track, and automate outreach directly from their workspace with ease.

Why Email Integration Matters?

Effective email integration elevates a CRM from a mere database to a cohesive communication hub. Reps can send messages, automate follow-ups, and track engagement all in one place, eliminating the need to switch tabs or use disconnected tools.

• Centralized communication: Automatically sync all sent and received emails to the appropriate contact or deal.
• Smarter follow-ups: Automated reminders and sequences enable reps to follow up at the ideal moment without manual effort.
• Real-time tracking: Open rates, clicks, and replies are directly fed into the CRM to inform the next steps.
• Cleaner data: Emails enrich contact profiles instantly with context and conversation history.
• Email templates: Reusable and personalized templates help teams maintain consistency and save time.
• Outreach automation: Easily send bulk emails, sequences, or triggered messages based on deal stage or contact activity.

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

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM platform that seamlessly integrates marketing, sales, and customer service into a single contact database. Its email integration allows users to connect personal Gmail and Outlook inboxes, enabling reps to send one-on-one emails, log replies, and initiate sequences directly from the CRM or their inbox. Features like open and click tracking, templates, and shared timelines enhance visibility of email activities across the entire revenue team.

What is Clarify?

Clarify is an AI-native CRM designed for startups and lean sales teams that seek to consolidate email, meetings, and deal context into a cohesive interface. It integrates with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 to automatically sync emails, calendar events, and meeting insights, which are then used to generate timelines and AI-suggested follow-ups. Users can draft and send emails directly from Clarify, ensuring engagement is recorded back to contacts and deals, rather than being scattered across individual inboxes.

Feature comparison of HubSpot and Clarify

Integration Capabilities

HubSpot provides seamless two-way email integration with Gmail, Outlook, and any IMAP-compatible provider, allowing you to send one-to-one emails directly from contact records while automatically logging every reply in your CRM timeline. Its native scheduler also syncs meeting events back into Google Calendar or Office 365, complete with automatic guest invites and timeline entries for comprehensive visibility.

Clarify integrates with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, enabling sales teams to automatically capture Gmail, Outlook, calendar, and meeting activities within the CRM. Additionally, it connects to tools like Zapier, Segment, Posthog, and webhooks to transfer customer and product usage data in and out of the database. A forthcoming integration with Loops aims to send Clarify events to a SaaS-focused email platform without replacing it. Overall, Clarify emphasizes consolidating core inbox and meeting data rather than providing an extensive native marketing ecosystem.

Sync Frequency and Reliability

HubSpot’s email synchronization works in near-real-time with Gmail and Outlook, typically updating changes within seconds to a minute. After connecting your account, HubSpot establishes a continuous connection via OAuth, enabling a seamless push and pull of message data, ensuring your CRM timeline remains current. The reliability of this service is further enhanced by HubSpot’s global cloud infrastructure, which boasts an impressive 99.99% uptime for its core services.

In contrast, Clarify focuses on the automatic ingestion of email and calendar data, eliminating the need for manual logging. Once you connect Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, messages, events, and meeting insights are synced in the background, automatically associating them with the appropriate contacts, companies, and deals. While the product 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 in the early stages compared to legacy CRMs, despite the core email and calendar synchronization being presented as a standard feature.

Two-Way Email and Calendar Sync

HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer powerful one-to-one sequences, allowing users to enroll up to 50 contacts at once and send hundreds of personalized emails daily. Its intuitive drag-and-drop sequence builder simplifies template creation, manages delays, and detects replies, while Marketing Hub expands capabilities to thousands of recipients with features like segmentation, A/B testing, and comprehensive analytics on opens, clicks, and bounces. However, since the most advanced campaign tools reside in Marketing Hub, Sales Hub users lacking this add-on encounter limits on overall sends and basic reporting functionality.

Clarify integrates seamlessly with Gmail and Outlook, enabling the incorporation of inbound and outbound emails into contact and deal timelines, which the AI agent uses for follow-up suggestions. Following the July 2025 update, users will also be able to send emails directly from Clarify, with both sent emails and replies being recorded in the relevant records. Calendar events and meeting summaries from platforms like Zoom or Microsoft Teams are integrated into these timelines, providing teams with a unified two-way view of conversations and meetings. This functionality primarily supports daily sales follow-up rather than intricate marketing automation.

Mail Merge and Campaigns

HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer powerful one-to-one sequences, enabling you to enroll up to 50 contacts simultaneously and send hundreds of personalized emails per user each day. Its intuitive drag-and-drop sequence builder simplifies template creation, incorporates delays, and detects replies, while the Marketing Hub caters to larger audiences, supporting thousands of recipients with segmentation, A/B testing, and comprehensive analytics on opens, clicks, and bounces. However, since the most advanced campaign features reside in the Marketing Hub, Sales Hub users without this add-on face limitations on total sends and access to more basic reporting.

Clarify allows sales representatives to send personalized follow-up emails directly from the CRM, often generated based on context from meetings and emails by its AI agent. Nonetheless, external reviews and Clarify’s own marketing indicate that the product currently lacks full multi-channel sequences or traditional mail merge-style bulk campaigns. Consequently, for nurture streams and onboarding journeys, teams typically turn to external tools like Loops or other marketing platforms through integrations. Thus, Clarify remains focused on enhancing sales communication and maintaining pipeline hygiene, while more established CRMs take on the heavier campaign workload.

Open and Click Tracking

HubSpot Sales monitors opens and clicks for every one-to-one email sent from contact records or through the Sales extension, providing real-time desktop notifications and logging each event on the timeline. Note that click tracking requires a paid Sales Hub seat; free users will only see opens. You can view total clicks per link directly in the email activity feed. Advanced attribution features, such as multi-variant link analysis across campaigns, are available in the Marketing Hub, meaning pure Sales Hub users will need the add-on for enterprise-level click analytics.

Clarify positions itself around CRM email tracking and features its own content focusing on tools that track opens, clicks, and replies on sales emails. The goal is to capture essential engagement signals from emails sent via connected inboxes or Clarify, then display that activity on timelines and in follow-up suggestions. This approach enables sales teams to identify who is engaging and when to follow up without transforming Clarify into a comprehensive analytics solution. Compared to dedicated email platforms, the reporting on these activities is relatively streamlined and focuses more on deal workflows than on extensive marketing reports.

In-Inbox CRM Experience

With the HubSpot Sales extension, you can seamlessly view and edit HubSpot records—contacts, companies, and deals—right from Gmail or Outlook. You can enroll contacts in sequences and log emails with a single click. A user-friendly CRM sidebar appears next to your inbox, allowing you to create tasks, send template replies, and review recent interactions without needing to switch apps. It even displays lead scores and deal forecasts inline, ensuring that every email action contributes directly to your pipeline. However, note that if you don’t have a paid Sales or Service Hub seat, some features like sequences and call logging will be unavailable due to the paywall.

In contrast, Clarify maintains most of its functionality within its web and macOS apps, connecting to Gmail and Outlook but not functioning as a traditional CRM sidebar. Users can check timelines, meeting summaries, and AI-generated follow-ups in Clarify, then send or schedule emails while still using their preferred mail clients. For teams that operate exclusively in Gmail or Outlook, this feels more like an integrated workspace rather than a conventional “CRM inside the inbox” extension. The future roadmap focuses on centralizing tasks and AI actions within Clarify, rather than developing extensive UI add-ons for each email client.

folk CRM: The Best Email CRM

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

Designed specifically for startups, agencies, and scaling sales teams of 20-50, folk makes email operations smooth and manageable.

Extract Intel from Emails

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

• Quickly recap past conversations with a single click using folk's Recap assistant, which gathers information from emails and notes to generate a summary, providing you with context in seconds.
• Follow up at the optimal time, as AI scans conversations to remind you when to check back with a contact and even drafts a response for you.

Email Sequencing & Automation

With folk’s native sequencing engine, creating automated outreach flows directly within the CRM is a breeze. Craft multi-step email sequences, personalize messages using CRM fields, and automatically log every interaction. Whether nurturing leads, executing outbound campaigns, or re-engaging inactive deals, folk offers a powerful yet straightforward sequencing workflow that eliminates the need for additional tools.

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

AI-Powered Follow-Up Reminders

folk’s AI Follow-Up feature ensures 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 ideal time to reconnect. It functions like a built-in assistant, keeping your inbox tidy and your pipeline active—without any manual tracking.

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

Conclusion

In conclusion, while HubSpot excels in comprehensive marketing capabilities and robust tracking, and Clarify focuses on streamlining email and meeting synchronization for lean teams, folk stands out as the premier choice for email-centric sales teams. With its intuitive email integration, powerful automation, and seamless sequencing, folk transforms how teams manage communication and outreach. For organizations that prioritize efficiency and effective email workflows, folk is the ultimate CRM solution, enabling sales success without the complexity.

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