Email is the cornerstone of today's sales communication: it's where deals advance, follow-ups occur, and relationships flourish.

As teams increasingly turn to automated outreach, multi-channel engagement, and precise tracking, CRMs are vying for attention based on the effectiveness of their native email integrations.

While HubSpot and Monday CRM both provide built-in email workflows, their depth, usability, and influence on daily sales activities vary significantly. For teams prioritizing simplicity and efficient email execution, folk offers one of the cleanest and most powerful email integrations found in any CRM, facilitating effortless sending, tracking, and automation of outreach directly from your workspace.

Why Email Integration Matters?

Robust email integration elevates a CRM from a mere database to a cohesive communication center. Instead of toggling between tabs or relying on disjointed tools, sales reps can send messages, automate follow-ups, and monitor engagement from a single platform.

• Centralized communication. All emails—both sent and received—sync seamlessly to the appropriate contact or deal.
• Smarter follow-ups. Automated reminders and sequences empower reps to follow up at the optimal time with minimal manual effort.
• Real-time tracking. Open rates, clicks, and replies integrate directly into the CRM, guiding subsequent actions.
• Cleaner data. Emails instantly enrich contact profiles with important context and conversation history.
• Email templates. Reusable, personalized templates ensure team consistency while saving time.
• Outreach automation. Send bulk emails, implement sequences, or trigger messages based on deal stages or contact interactions.

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

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform that seamlessly integrates marketing, sales, and customer service into one cohesive contact database. Its email functionality connects personal Gmail and Outlook inboxes, allowing representatives to send personalized emails, log responses, and initiate sequences directly from either the CRM or their inbox. Features such as open and click tracking, templates, and shared timelines enhance visibility into email activities across the entire revenue team.

What is Monday CRM?

monday sales CRM leverages the monday.com work management platform, providing teams with a visual method to manage pipelines alongside their projects. The Emails & Activities app integrates with Gmail and Outlook, enabling users to send, receive, and log emails directly from their boards while tracking opens and replies where the work is done. With templates and automation, teams can standardize follow-up processes and keep lead statuses, tasks, and email histories synchronized.

Feature comparison of HubSpot and Monday CRM

Integration Capabilities

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

Monday CRM's Emails & Activities app connects up to six Gmail or Outlook accounts for a two-way sync, ensuring that emails sent or received appear as items on your boards alongside calls and tasks. Although it lacks native in-CRM calendar syncing, you can create simple automations or utilize Monday's Calendar view to visualize your scheduled events.

Sync Frequency and Reliability

HubSpot’s email synchronization works in near real-time with Gmail and Outlook, usually reflecting changes within seconds to a minute. Once your account is connected, HubSpot keeps a constant connection through OAuth, continuously pushing and pulling message data to ensure your CRM timeline is always current. The reliability of this system is enhanced by HubSpot’s global cloud infrastructure, which guarantees 99.99% uptime for its core services.

In contrast, Monday CRM’s Emails & Activities app syncs your inbox every few minutes by default, checking Gmail and Outlook for new messages to convert into board items. Although this results in a slight delay compared to push-based systems, updates typically appear within two to three minutes. If you require faster updates, you can modify the polling intervals or implement custom webhooks for sub-minute responsiveness.

Two-Way Email and Calendar Sync

HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer powerful one-to-one sequences, enabling you to enroll up to 50 contacts at once and send hundreds of personalized emails daily per user. The intuitive drag-and-drop sequence builder simplifies template creation, incorporates delays, and detects replies, while the Marketing Hub scales to thousands of recipients through 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 encounter restrictions on total sends and more basic reporting.

Monday’s Emails & Activities app facilitates native two-way email sync for Gmail and Outlook through straightforward integration recipes—new messages and replies automatically transform into pulses on your boards, ensuring your communications remain aligned with your deals. Calendar items are seamlessly synced with Monday’s Calendar Sync feature: date or timeline columns correspond to Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, or any external calendar, with events appearing on both your board and calendar within minutes.

Mail Merge and Campaigns

HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer powerful one-to-one sequences, allowing 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, manages delays, and detects replies, while Marketing Hub extends capabilities to thousands of recipients, featuring segmentation, A/B testing, and comprehensive analytics on opens, clicks, and bounces. However, since the most advanced campaign features are exclusive to Marketing Hub, Sales Hub users lacking this add-on may encounter limitations on total sends and basic reporting options.

Monday CRM’s Emails & Activities app seamlessly syncs up to six Gmail or Outlook accounts, and includes a Group Emailing action for sending bulk messages to board items and contact lists. You can automate follow-ups using monday.com automations or integrate with Mailchimp for full-fledged email marketing capabilities. Be aware that without Mailchimp or a similar add-on, you'll lack native campaign analytics, aside from basic send logs on your boards.

Open and Click Tracking

HubSpot Sales provides real-time tracking of opens and clicks for every one-to-one email sent from contact records or through the Sales extension, delivering 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 Marketing Hub, meaning that pure Sales Hub users will need the add-on for enterprise-level click analytics.

The Emails & Activities app on Monday logs message opens when you send emails through the board interface; however, it does not natively track clicked links. To obtain click-through rates, you must embed links with UTM parameters and utilize automations to pull data into your board, or integrate a marketing tool like Mailchimp.

In-Inbox CRM Experience

With the HubSpot Sales extension installed, you can seamlessly view and edit HubSpot records—such as contacts, companies, and deals—right in Gmail or Outlook. You can enroll contacts in sequences and log emails with just a click. A user-friendly CRM sidebar appears next to your inbox, allowing you to create tasks, send template replies, and view recent interactions without the need to switch apps. It also displays lead scores and deal forecasts inline, ensuring that every email action contributes directly to your pipeline. The only limitation is that if you don’t have a paid Sales or Service Hub seat, certain in-inbox features—like sequences and call logging—remain inaccessible behind a paywall.

On the other hand, monday.com’s Emails & Activities app operates from your boards rather than your inbox. When you connect Gmail or Outlook, emails transform into pulses on relevant items, enabling you to reply or add notes directly from monday.com. This setup is ideal for visual teams that manage everything on boards, but it lacks a true in-inbox sidebar; instead, you work within the monday.com platform rather than your email client.

folk CRM: The Ultimate Email CRM

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

Designed specifically for startups, agencies, and scaling sales teams of 20-50, folk streamlines email operations, making them efficient rather than overwhelming.

Extract Insights from Emails

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

• Quickly summarize past conversations with a single click using folk's Recap assistant, which gathers insights from emails and notes to create a summary, providing context in seconds.
• Follow up at optimal times, as AI scans conversations to notify you when it’s the right moment to reach out to a contact and even drafts replies for you.

Email Sequencing & Automation

folk’s intuitive sequencing engine allows you to create automated outreach flows directly within the CRM. Build multi-step email sequences, personalize messages using CRM fields, and automatically log every interaction. Whether nurturing leads, executing outbound campaigns, or re-engaging dormant deals, folk provides a robust yet straightforward sequencing workflow that eliminates the need for separate tools.

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

AI-Powered Follow-Up Reminders

folk’s AI Follow-Up feature ensures that no conversation goes unnoticed. By analyzing your email history, folk prompts you when a contact hasn’t responded, uncovers dormant conversations, and pinpoints the ideal time to re-engage. It functions like a built-in assistant, keeping your inbox organized and your pipeline active—without the hassle of manual tracking.

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

Conclusion

In summary, HubSpot excels with its robust marketing integration and real-time email tracking, while Monday CRM offers a visual workflow and decent email capabilities. However, for teams emphasizing seamless email integration, automation, and intuitive sequencing, folk stands out as the premier choice. With its user-friendly interface, powerful automation features, and AI insights, folk transforms email interactions into actionable insights, making it the ideal CRM for modern sales teams.

Experience the difference with folk and streamline your email operations today. Start your 14-day free trial or book a demo.