Freshsales vs Zoho CRM: which is the best CRM software for you?

If you're in the market for a new shiny CRM, you're in luck. There are a lot of customer relationship management (CRM) systems to choose from.

But with so many options to consider, picking the perfect one for your business can be a bit of a challenge.

In this post, we’ll be taking a deep dive into two popular sales-focused CRM systems, Zoho and Freshsales. We'll also introduce folk, which can be used for sales and more.

Presentation of Freshsales CRM

Freshsales is a sales-focused CRM designed by Freshworks, who have also designed separate CRMs specifically for customer service and marketing.

It offers a very user-friendly interface and provides several features and integrations designed to drive sales growth.

Presentation of Zoho CRM

Similar to Freshsales, Zoho CRM is a CRM system with a strong sales focus. Its got features such as journey orchestration, sales process management and workflow automation. There's also something for marketing teams, including lead hurting, event management and customer segmentation.

Presentation of folk

folk is an all-in-one CRM that helps nurture business relationships across sales, recruiting, fundraising, partnerships, investing and more. You can choose to use it as a personal CRM, or to give your team access to important contact lists and create a more collaborative workflow across your sales and marketing teams. folk is also well loved for its Chrome extension, folkX that lets you import contact information from anywhere on the web, including search lists from LinkedIn.

Comparison of the CRMs and their key features

Let's take a closer look at the features these CRMs have to offer.

Contact Management

All three of the CRM systems offer advanced contact management tools. Let's take a closer look at each one.

Freshsales Contact Management

On top of individual contact cards,  Freshsales' contact management is focused on providing sales insights. You can see exactly which part of the sales cycle each contact is at and automate parts of your workflow.

Zoho Contact Management

Zoho CRM Contact Management is data-driven. Its main goal is to provide a dashboard for sales and support teams to collaborate from. Teams can get real-time notifications from customers, keep an eye on the support tickets that come through and refine their email communication with customers.

folk Contact Management

folk's Contact Management system is loved by users for its Notion-like design. You can choose to organize your contacts as a pipeline view which is built on a Kanban board system, or as a listicle with clear tags and groups to help you keep it organized and clean. It also helps automate manual tasks such as deduplication that can get rather tedious if you've got a large contact list to go through. There is also a contact enrichment feature that automatically helps you fill in missing data.

Integrations

Integrations come in handy if you're after something that is easy to use and truly personalized according to your workflow.

Freshsales Integrations

Freshsales offers a large integrations library built specifically for each Freshworks product. There are categories specifically for Freshsales users, as well as for enhanced productivity, featured apps and popular apps.

Zoho CRM Integrations

Zoho offers a huge range of integrations that are categorized by location and use. There are integrations that are specifically for shipping carriers, payment gateways, marketing, analytics, accounting and taxes, CRM and productivity.

folk Integrations

folk offers seamless integrations with Outlook and Google, syncing to your account so that all your contacts, emails, and calendar events are visible in one platform. If you're after something a little more personalized, you also have the option of connecting folk to thousands of apps with custom Zaps through Zapier.

User Experience

If you're after an easy-to-use CRM, user experience and design can make a huge difference.

Freshsales User Experience

The Freshsales platform is tailored specifically for sales teams, so it might not be for you if you do not have sales-driven goals for your CRM. If you do, it is pretty handy thanks to the Kanban board system, and content-scoring AI feature that helps you get a deeper level of understanding when it comes to customer behaviour.

Zoho User Experience

Like Freshsales, Zoho's user experience is specifically designed for sales teams across small businesses and enterprises. It is data-driven, and easy to understand if you have a sales background. If sales is something you've just started learning, you might struggle and have a steep learning curve as it requires you to have expert knowledge about the sales cycle, forecasting and pipeline.

folk User Experience

folk is well-loved for their Notion-like design that makes it intuitive to use. This is rather rare in the world of complicated CRMs that often require steep learning curves. Unlike Zoho and Freshsales, people from sales teams, and people in other business functions can use folk. It's built for personal user and team collaboration with powerful features at your disposal such as artificial intelligence that helps you send personalized messages to multiple recipients, email templates all designed to save you time, improve performance, get adequate insights and streamline your processes.

Mail Merge

Having access to email marketing tools and your contact lists in one platform can streamline your workflow. Let's take a look at how these email marketing features compare.  

Freshsales Mail Merge

The Freshsales CRM has a handy workflow setup designed for sales teams to save time by automating repetitive tasks. However, setup time can be consuming as you have to create a When + Condition (+ scheduled actions) formula to automate these tasks.

Zoho Mail Merge

Zoho's CRM uses something called Zia which they describe as a built-in sales assistant. Zia helps you to predict sale, and write emails by crawling the web to get customer information. Customers also get access to email parsers that helps collect leads, analytics, and custom email-sharing preferences.

folk Mail Merge

folk provides an all-in-one messaging solution that comes with analytics and can help you send ultra-personalized emails to multiple recipients without leaving the platform. You can save time and write personalized emails effortlessly with their AI feature 'Magic Field' by creating prompts to tell it what data to pull from your notes.

Customer Support

Customer support is often overlooked or gated behind a steep price plan. Let's see how the three compare.

Freshsales Customer Support

Freshsales customers have access to self-learning video library through what they call 'Product Tours'. These videos are more of a showcase for best practices and tips on how to use their CRM. Customers also get 24/5 support.

Zoho Customer Support

Zoho has an extensive range of customer support resources. You can choose from training videos, tutorials and live webinars. For more technical issues, there is the option of user and admin documents, FAQs and e-books.

folk Customer Support

folk also provides an extensive range of customer support resources to choose from. There is a help centre full of useful technical step-by-step guides on top of a resource centre loaded with how-to video guides. For those who need a little more support, premium plan users get access to a dedicated migration service, priority support and a dedicated customer support manager. Beyond Limit plan users get access to personalized support through a dedicated Slack channel and dedicated point of contact to help with onboarding, data migration, and any issues.

Pricing and Plans

Freshsales Pricing and Plans

Freshsales have a lot of price plans for you to choose from. These are split into two categories: Freshsales, and Freshsales Suite.  Both have pay monthly or annual options. A Freshsales CRM plan starts from $18 a month per user, and goes up to $66 for their Enterprise plan. Freshsales Suite plans are identical.

Zoho Pricing and Plans

Zoho have a few price plans to choose from that can be paid monthly or annually. For those after a bit more, there's also the option of choosing some bundles. The annual standard price plan starts from $14.55 a month per user, and goes up to $51 a month per user. There are four options to choose from depending on what your goal is. Bundles are a more advanced option for those who want full integration and comes in two different tieres. The premium bundle comes in at a steep price of $57 a month per user.

folk Pricing and Plans

folk provides affordable price plans that can cater to businesses and teams of all sizes. It's an accessible option for small businesses and startups. Annual price plans start from $18 a month per user for access to unlimited contacts, bulk emailing, AI integration and more. This goes up to $29 a month per user for more advanced features such as migration services, priority support, and the ability to send emails from multiple domains. There are also monthly payment options that start from $24 a month per user and $39 a month per user respectively. For customers who are after more advanced features such as a dedicated point of contact, folk offers the option of a tailored price plan.

Conclusion

The CRM system that suits you best depends on your unique business needs and budget.But after comparing the three CRMs, folk emerges as the best option available. Its pricing structure's affordability, customer service, and combination of contact management, integrations, and efficient Mail Merge make it the smartest choice for freelancers, small businesses and large organizations. Try folk today, free.

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