Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Effective contact management is the key to determining whether a CRM serves its purpose or becomes overwhelming noise. With folk CRM and HighLevel,
social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool fails to keep pace with LinkedIn interactions, comments, and warm introductions, you risk losing not only visibility but also deals to competitors who maintain closer connections.
folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-driven CRMs. Clarify emphasizes transforming unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk offers a versatile, social-selling-friendly workspace for teams to track contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one place.
This comparison will explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, enabling you to determine which one aligns best with your team's approach to building and nurturing relationships.
Why is a social selling CRM crucial in 2026?
Most B2B deals begin not with cold emails or demo requests but through LinkedIn comments, reposts, direct messages, or even subtle profile visits. If your CRM cannot capture these signals and link them to real individuals and pipelines, your team operates in the dark while competitors cultivate relationships openly.
A social selling CRM consolidates these interactions into structured, actionable insights: identifying who engaged, their origins, interests, and purchase readiness. Instead of viewing LinkedIn as merely a tool for awareness, it transforms into a measurable, repeatable process within your revenue engine.
With a social selling CRM, your team can:
✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile visits, converting them into follow-ups
✔️ Differentiate which prospects discovered you through content versus outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging
✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers—not just listing contacts
✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity rather than attributing all credit to last-click channels
What is folk CRM?
folk CRM is a sleek, modern CRM designed for teams that operate across email, LinkedIn, and spreadsheets while desiring a unified workspace. It seamlessly integrates with Gmail and Outlook to automatically log emails and meetings, and its Chrome extension delivers a comprehensive CRM sidebar directly in your inbox for swift updates. Users can easily send personalized sequences, monitor engagement, and maintain a record of every interaction linked to contacts, companies, and deals.
What is HighLevel?
HighLevel is a comprehensive marketing and sales platform primarily tailored for agencies. It combines funnels, email, SMS, automation, and CRM within a single ecosystem that agencies can either resell or manage for their clients. While its extensive capabilities are impressive, the interface and initial setup may be daunting for new users.
Feature comparison of folk CRM and HighLevel
Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights
folk CRM offers a seamless one-click setup for both Gmail and Outlook—simply authenticate, and all incoming and outgoing emails are automatically associated with the relevant contact or deal record. Its integrated scheduler logs events straight into Google or Microsoft calendars and updates folk’s task list, providing a cohesive timeline of emails and meetings. You can send personalized bulk sequences, monitor opens and clicks, and use folk’s CRM inbox for replies without needing to switch tabs. This streamlined experience reduces context-switching and ensures your team remains coordinated on every conversation. folk CRM stands out as one of the top CRM solutions for Email Integration!
In contrast, HighLevel does not enhance contacts from social media; it depends on form captures, manual entry, or API-based integrations.
Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts
folk CRM establishes a seamless OAuth connection with Gmail and Outlook, ensuring effortless and continuous synchronization. Emails are automatically logged to the appropriate contact or deal the moment they are sent or received, eliminating the need for manual input. Meetings arranged through folk’s native scheduler are immediately updated in both your calendar and the CRM timeline. On the backend, folk utilizes push-notification webhooks from Google and Microsoft to reduce latency, ensuring that every interaction is recorded within seconds.
In contrast, HighLevel lacks a social listening feature, and its real-time alerts are confined to email/SMS replies or incoming form messages only.
Social Selling: Which channels?
Folk CRM’s email sequences feature acts as an integrated mail-merge and campaign tool, allowing you to create multi-step sequences with customizable templates and scheduling rules. You can easily enroll contact lists directly from folk’s interface. Opens and replies are instantly synced back to each contact’s timeline, and in-depth performance reports help you optimize subject lines and content for maximum engagement, all without the need for add-ons!
HighLevel facilitates messaging through WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram DM for both inbound and outbound communication but does not support LinkedIn or Twitter.
In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences
folk CRM’s email sequences feature acts as an integrated mail-merge and campaign tool, allowing you to create multi-step sequences with personalized templates and scheduling rules. You can easily enroll contact lists directly from folk’s interface. Opens and replies are instantly synced back to each contact’s timeline, and detailed performance reports enable you to refine subject lines and content for maximum engagement—all without the need for additional add-ons!
While sequences are available through SMS and email, they are not supported on social platforms. In-browser automation and messaging templates are also unavailable.
Activity & Engagement Tracking
folk CRM automatically integrates open- and click-tracking pixels into all outgoing emails, providing real-time metrics on contact timelines and campaign dashboards. You have the option to disable tracking across your workspace to enhance deliverability, but with tracking enabled, you'll receive consolidated reports, link-level CTR data, and detailed engagement histories for each contact—no external add-ons required.
HighLevel monitors emails, SMS, calls, and web chats, but it does not log interactions from social posts or profile activities.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while HighLevel offers a robust all-in-one marketing suite ideal for agencies, its complexity can hinder new users. Conversely, Clarify excels at organizing unstructured interactions but may lack the intuitive workflow of folk. For teams prioritizing email integration, automation, and seamless sequencing, folk stands out as the best option. Its user-friendly design captures valuable social signals, enhances engagement tracking, and fosters collaboration—all within a single workspace tailored for the demands of modern social selling.
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