Pipedrive vs folk: Which CRM for agencies wins?

Agencies don’t struggle with “finding tools.” They struggle with keeping pipeline execution consistent while delivery stays on track. When prospect context lives across inboxes, calendars, and spreadsheets, follow-ups slip, handoffs break, and forecasting becomes guesswork. A CRM for agencies has to keep new business moving fast while preserving enough account history to support renewals, upsells, and referrals.

Pipedrive and folk tackle this challenge from unique perspectives. Pipedrive emphasizes a visual pipeline and activity-driven follow-ups, designed to accelerate deal progression with minimal administrative burden. On the other hand, folk employs an AI-driven approach to consolidate contact information, communication history, and deal context, making it perfect for agencies juggling multiple client relationships without the hassle of intricate setups.

The right choice between Pipedrive and folk hinges on your agency's workflow complexity, the level of customization needed, and the resources available for ongoing system management and optimization.

What is Pipedrive?

Pipedrive is a sales CRM focused on visual pipelines and activity-based selling. It's particularly popular among agencies seeking straightforward deal tracking, clear next steps, and minimal process enforcement. You can manage multiple pipelines to distinguish between new business, renewals, or partnerships, while activities ensure follow-ups remain scheduled and visible. Additionally, automations can streamline administrative tasks by handling repetitive updates and reminders, making it ideal for teams that value swift pipeline execution over a comprehensive suite of tools.

What is folk?

folk is an AI-driven CRM that centralizes contacts, conversations, and deal context without complicated setup. It caters to agencies managing numerous parallel relationships with clients, partners, and prospects, where context is often dispersed across emails, calendars, and messaging platforms. Features like contact enrichment and deduplication ensure that records remain functional even when sourced from various locations. Pipelines and tasks assist in systematically tracking new business, renewals, and referrals, making it an excellent choice for agencies that need a CRM focused on coordination and follow-up without the complexity of an extensive operations stack.

Feature comparison of Pipedrive and folk

Multi-pipeline and custom stages

Pipedrive allows the creation of multiple deal pipelines from the pipeline view, each with its own unique set of stages. You can edit stage attributes such as the name and probability, and stages can be added or removed as needed. This flexibility enables agencies to differentiate between various processes like new business, renewals, and partnerships by organizing them into distinct pipelines, while ensuring that stage definitions are tailored to each specific workflow.

folk empowers agencies to structure their pipelines around various revenue streams, including retainers, projects, partnerships, and hiring. Stages can be customized to accurately reflect real handoffs and qualification rules, ensuring that the pipeline truly represents the movement of deals. By maintaining separate pipelines, agencies can achieve cleaner reporting by service line and avoid compromising one process for the sake of another across the team. Updates remain streamlined, allowing the CRM to evolve as the agency grows.

Client and Deal Activity Tracking

In Pipedrive, activities represent scheduled actions associated with people, organizations, leads, deals, or projects, including calls, meetings, and follow-ups. You can configure calendar sync as either one-way or two-way, ensuring that Pipedrive activities and external calendar events remain aligned. Logged activities are displayed on the relevant records, facilitating the tracking of past actions and upcoming events for each account or deal.

Folk maintains relationship context by consolidating communication history and activities into a single timeline linked to the appropriate contact and deal. Notes, tasks, reminders, and previous interactions remain visible where the team collaborates, minimizing “where is the context” moments during handoffs. This approach enhances agency workflows, allowing multiple team members to engage effectively with the same account throughout sales, onboarding, delivery, and renewals. The objective is to provide quick access to past events, important details, and future actions.

Automation and Workflows

Reporting in Pipedrive is managed through Insights, featuring custom reports, dashboards, and goals. Dashboards can be shared with teammates internally, and public links can be generated with the right permissions, enabling stakeholders to view a dashboard without needing direct account access. Goals within Insights monitor progress across deals, activities, and forecasts, tailored to your configuration and plan limits.

Folk facilitates automated follow-ups and internal handoffs using workflow rules and connectors that trigger actions based on specific stages or activities. Agencies can streamline repetitive tasks such as assigning owners, creating tasks, sending reminders, or updating fields as a deal progresses. This approach minimizes administrative overhead and ensures consistent execution among team members. Workflows are crafted to remain practical, allowing automation to enhance speed without introducing unnecessary complexity.

Reporting and Analytics

Pipedrive's reporting is managed through Insights, featuring custom reports, dashboards, and goal tracking. Dashboards can be shared with teammates, and public links can be generated for stakeholders to access without needing direct account credentials, provided permissions are set appropriately. Insights enables tracking of goals related to deals, activities, and forecasts, tailored to your configuration and plan limits.

Folk offers pipeline visibility to monitor deal progression, stage health, and overall momentum, allowing leaders to identify risks early. Agencies can analyze conversion patterns and cycle lengths at a macro level and then delve deeper to understand what is stalled and why. Reporting facilitates discussions on forecasting, capacity planning, and performance by source or service line, emphasizing clarity and informed decision-making over cluttered dashboards.

Integrations and Data Hygiene

Pipedrive integrations can be accessed through the Pipedrive Marketplace, featuring apps and integrations that users can easily install within their accounts. To maintain data hygiene, the Merge Duplicates feature identifies potential duplicate contacts and organizations, providing a streamlined workflow for merging records. Pipedrive also clarifies that its duplicate identification adheres to rules aligned with its import logic, influencing how duplicates are detected and suggested for merging.

folk prioritizes clean records by offering enrichment, deduplication, and structured fields that minimize manual data entry. With integrations connecting popular agency tools, contact and activity data remain consistent across various channels, effectively combating the common issue of CRM decay caused by duplicates, outdated information, and missing context that can compromise reporting. A cleaner database enhances automation reliability and ensures the pipeline remains effective at scale.

Conclusion

In summary, while Pipedrive excels with its visual pipeline and activity-driven approach for straightforward deal tracking, folk stands out as the superior choice for agencies needing a comprehensive, AI-driven solution that consolidates client context and maintains seamless communication. Pipedrive may suit teams prioritizing simplicity, but folk's focus on coordinated follow-ups, data hygiene, and minimal administrative workload makes it the ideal CRM for agencies managing multiple client relationships effectively. Choose folk for a CRM experience that truly aligns with your agency's daily operations.

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