Freshsales vs folk: Which CRM for agencies wins?

In today's fast-paced digital marketplace, agencies face a common challenge: maintaining a consistent execution of their sales pipelines while ensuring timely delivery of services. With prospect context often scattered across multiple platforms such as email, calendars, and spreadsheets, the risk of missed follow-ups and broken handoffs rises significantly, transforming forecasting into a guessing game. A robust CRM for agencies is essential for driving new business swiftly, while simultaneously preserving the necessary account history to support renewals, upsells, and referrals.

Enter Freshsales and folk, two formidable players in the CRM landscape that tackle these challenges from distinct perspectives. Freshsales is designed with built-in automation and user-friendly capabilities, providing agencies with the tools they need to manage leads and track performance effectively. On the other hand, folk leverages AI-driven solutions to streamline contact management and enhance collaboration across teams, ensuring that no detail slips through the cracks.

Your choice between these platforms hinges on the complexity of your processes, the level of customization required, and the extent of ongoing management your agency can allocate to system setup and administration.

What is Freshsales?

Freshsales is a CRM platform developed by Freshworks, aimed at effectively managing leads, deals, and activities, featuring built-in automation capabilities. It's particularly beneficial for agencies seeking fundamental CRM functionalities, customizable pipelines, and workflow rules that facilitate follow-ups and transitions. The activity timelines ensure that all interactions are linked to the appropriate records within sales and account management. Additionally, the reporting tools enable users to monitor pipelines and evaluate performance based on logged data, making it a popular choice for agencies that prefer a straightforward CRM while still benefiting from automation and reporting.

What is folk?

folk is an AI-driven CRM designed to streamline the management of contacts, conversations, and deal contexts with minimal setup. It is ideal for agencies that handle numerous concurrent relationships with clients, partners, and prospects, where context can be scattered across emails, calendars, and messaging platforms. Features like contact enrichment and deduplication ensure that records remain usable, even when data is sourced from various origins. Structured pipelines and tasks help facilitate the tracking of new business, renewals, and referrals. This makes folk a suitable choice for agencies looking for a CRM that promotes coordination and disciplined follow-up without the need for a complex operational infrastructure.

Feature comparison of Freshsales and folk

Multi-pipeline and custom stages

Freshsales enables the use of multiple deal pipelines, each with its own unique set of stages. These pipelines and stages can be managed through admin settings, allowing users to add, reorder, and customize stages to fit various sales processes. This flexibility lets agencies segregate operations, such as new business, renewals, or partnerships, into distinct pipelines while ensuring that stage definitions remain specific to each operation. The default outcomes for newly created pipelines are set to Won and Lost.

Folk empowers agencies to design pipelines that align with different revenue strategies, including retainers, projects, partnerships, or hiring. Stages can be tailored to reflect actual handoffs and qualification criteria, ensuring that the pipeline accurately represents the progression of deals. By maintaining separate pipelines, agencies can enhance reporting clarity by service line and avoid compromises that might affect the entire team. Updates remain streamlined, allowing the CRM to adapt as the agency grows.

Client and Deal Activity Tracking

With Freshsales, you can effortlessly log activities such as calls, meetings, notes, emails, and tasks, associating them with contacts, accounts, and deals. The recorded timelines provide a clear view of past interactions and upcoming actions, ensuring that handoffs are rich in context and clarity. Additionally, Freshsales allows you to configure activity types, including custom ones, tailored to how your team tracks its work. You can easily filter timelines to focus on specific activity categories while reviewing an account.

folk keeps relationship context seamlessly tied to the appropriate contact and deal by syncing communication history and activities into a unified timeline. Notes, tasks, reminders, and past interactions remain easily accessible where the team operates, minimizing those frustrating “where is the context” moments during handoffs. This approach supports agency workflows where multiple team members engage with the same account throughout sales, onboarding, delivery, and renewals. The aim is to provide quick access to what has happened, what is important, and what comes next.

Automation and Workflows

In Freshsales, you can create reports and dashboards using CRM data such as deals, activities, and stage movements to effectively monitor pipeline status and performance. The analytics features enable you to track progression through stages and analyze conversion patterns over time based on recorded data. Reporting options also allow for scheduling reports to be delivered via email, depending on your analytics setup. The metrics available will vary based on how pipelines, stages, and properties are configured.

Folk facilitates automated follow-ups and internal handoffs through workflow rules and connectors that trigger actions based on specific stages or activities. Agencies can streamline repetitive tasks like assigning owners, creating tasks, sending reminders, or updating fields whenever a deal progresses. This minimizes administrative overhead and ensures consistency in execution across team members. Workflows are designed with practicality in mind, so automation enhances speed without introducing unnecessary complexity.

Reporting and Analytics

Freshsales allows you to create reports and dashboards from CRM data, including deals, activities, and stage movements, enabling you to monitor pipeline status and performance effectively. Its analytics features facilitate tracking progression through various stages and analyzing conversion trends over time based on logged data. Additionally, reporting options include scheduling emails for report delivery, tailored to your analytics setup. The metrics available depend on the configuration of pipelines, stages, and properties.

Folk offers pipeline visibility to monitor deal progression, stage health, and overall momentum, allowing leaders to identify risks early. Agencies can examine conversion patterns and cycle lengths at a high level before delving deeper into what may be causing delays. Reporting fosters discussions around forecasting, capacity planning, and performance assessment by source or service line, maintaining a focus on clarity and informed decision-making rather than overwhelming dashboards.

Integrations and Data Hygiene

With Freshsales, you can easily add integrations through the Freshworks Marketplace, enabling connections between external tools and CRM records or workflows. Its duplicate management features effectively identify and merge duplicate leads or contacts, ensuring that reporting and automation rely on consolidated records. Additionally, import settings can minimize duplicate creation by matching incoming data with existing records. Depending on the edition and configuration, enrichment capabilities may also be available.

Folk prioritizes clean records by facilitating data enrichment, deduplication, and structured fields that minimize manual data entry. Integrations seamlessly link common agency tools, ensuring that contact and activity data remain consistent across various channels. This approach prevents the common issue of CRM decay, where duplicates, outdated information, and missing context compromise reporting. A cleaner database enhances automation reliability and maintains a usable pipeline at scale.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while Freshsales offers built-in automation and a user-friendly interface ideal for straightforward CRM needs, folk excels with its AI-driven approach that enhances collaboration and contact management. Freshsales provides flexibility with customizable pipelines, yet folk tailors pipeline design to agency-specific strategies without complicating setup. For agencies seeking a CRM that seamlessly integrates tasks and relationship history while minimizing admin overhead, folk stands out as the superior choice.

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