Zoho CRM vs Clarify: Which CRM is the best for automation?

Deciding between Zoho CRM and Clarify hinges on one crucial question: which CRM genuinely saves time on automation instead of adding to administrative tasks?

For teams that value simplicity, folk offers one of the most efficient and robust automation solutions available in any CRM, enabling users to automate emails based on defined conditions and to perform actions through the API.

Why Automation Is Essential for CRM in 2026

Automation has become fundamental for modern revenue teams. Sales and marketing now need to manage more leads, navigate additional channels, and tackle increasingly complex buying journeys without increasing headcount or compromising personalization. A CRM that still depends on manual data entry, sporadic follow-ups, and spreadsheet-style reporting quietly saps time, energy, and focus away from genuine customer interactions.

Key reasons why automation is indispensable today:

• Buyers anticipate prompt, relevant responses across email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and phone calls.
• Pipelines operate swiftly, and any overlooked follow-up can result in lost revenue.
• The surge in data volume has rendered manual updates impractical and unreliable.
• Leadership requires real-time performance insights rather than end-of-month estimates.

The true value of a CRM lies in how much it alleviates the team's workload, not in the number of fields it can accommodate. The ideal platform is one that automatically captures activity, maintains clean records in the background, and prompts the appropriate next steps at the right moment, allowing representatives to concentrate on nurturing relationships and closing deals rather than managing the tool.

What is Zoho CRM?

Zoho CRM is a versatile, all-in-one CRM designed for businesses seeking extensive customization and a wide-ranging suite of business applications. Its email integration seamlessly supports Zoho Mail, Gmail, Outlook, and other IMAP providers, allowing teams to send, receive, and archive emails directly within the CRM. With shared inbox views, basic tracking features, and automation capabilities, email interactions contribute to a comprehensive omnichannel engagement strategy.

What is Clarify?

Clarify is an AI-driven CRM tailored for startups and agile sales teams, offering a cohesive view of emails, meetings, and deal contexts in a single interface. By integrating with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, it automatically syncs email, calendar, and meeting information, leveraging this data to generate timelines and AI-recommended follow-ups. Users can compose and send emails directly from Clarify, ensuring that engagement is recorded back to contacts and deals rather than getting lost in individual inboxes.

Feature comparison of Zoho CRM and Clarify

Integration Capabilities

Zoho’s Email Insights add-on enables seamless syncing of Gmail, Outlook, or any IMAP provider directly with Zoho CRM, ensuring that messages and attachments are automatically logged against the appropriate records. You can select specific folders to include, effectively filtering out irrelevant threads while capturing every opportunity-driven email. Additionally, Zoho Calendar facilitates two-way syncing with Google, Office 365, or iCal, allowing meeting invites and updates to effortlessly flow into both your personal calendar and CRM timeline.

Clarify connects with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, enabling sales teams to automatically log Gmail, Outlook, calendar, and meeting activities into the CRM. It also integrates with tools like Zapier, Segment, Posthog, and webhooks for transferring customer and product usage data in and out of the database. A forthcoming integration with Loops is designed to send Clarify events to a SaaS-oriented email platform without replacing it. Overall, Clarify prioritizes consolidating essential inbox and meeting data in one location rather than providing an extensive native marketing ecosystem.

Sync Frequency and Reliability

With Zoho’s Email Insights add-on, your mail provider is continuously connected via IMAP IDLE or OAuth, allowing for near real-time message synchronization. Expect emails to show up in the CRM timeline within seconds of being received, complete with attachments and metadata. Similarly, two-way calendar synchronization occurs instantly for Google Calendar, Office 365, and iCal, with Zoho’s robust retry logic addressing any temporary failures.

Clarify focuses on the automatic capture of email and calendar data rather than requiring manual entry. Once connected to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, messages, events, and meeting insights are synced seamlessly in the background and linked to the appropriate contacts, companies, and deals. The product highlights features like “auto-capture,” “auto-sync,” and the continual updating of the CRM, but it does not provide detailed, user-facing sync schedules. As a newer tool, Clarify’s integrations may not yet be as proven as those of established CRMs, even though the fundamental email and calendar synchronization is marketed as standard functionality.

Two-Way Email and Calendar Sync

Zoho CRM’s Mass Email tool allows users to send up to 1,000 emails daily, featuring customizable templates and merge tags for a personalized touch. For more extensive campaigns, Zoho Campaigns integrates effortlessly, providing advanced segmentation, a drag-and-drop design, and analytics on delivery, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. However, since Zoho Campaigns is a separate product, managing billing and user permissions across both systems can introduce additional administrative tasks.

Clarify integrates with Gmail and Outlook, enabling inbound and outbound emails to be incorporated into contact and deal timelines, which the AI agent uses for follow-up suggestions. Following the July 2025 update, users will have the ability to send emails directly from Clarify, with outgoing messages and replies automatically recorded in the relevant entries. Calendar events and meeting summaries from platforms like Zoom or Microsoft Teams are also linked to these timelines, providing teams with a comprehensive two-way view of conversations and meetings. This functionality primarily supports everyday sales follow-up rather than complex marketing automation.

Mail Merge and Campaigns

Zoho CRM’s Mass Email tool allows users to send up to 1,000 emails daily, utilizing customizable templates and merge tags for enhanced personalization. For larger campaigns, Zoho Campaigns integrates smoothly, providing advanced segmentation, a user-friendly drag-and-drop design, and detailed analytics on delivery rates, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. However, since Zoho Campaigns operates as a separate product, managing billing and user permissions across both platforms may increase administrative complexity.

Clarify enables representatives to send one-to-one follow-up emails directly from the CRM, often crafted based on insights from meetings and emails through its AI agent. Nonetheless, external reviews and Clarify’s own marketing indicate that the platform currently lacks comprehensive multi-channel sequences and traditional mail merge-style bulk campaign capabilities. For nurture streams and onboarding journeys, teams are encouraged to use external tools like Loops or other marketing platforms integrated through various methods. Consequently, Clarify remains concentrated on sales communication and pipeline management, while more established CRMs take on larger campaign responsibilities.

Open and Click Tracking

Zoho CRM automatically tracks email opens when you send messages through Gmail or Outlook connectors. For comprehensive click-through data, you can enable link-click tracking via the ZeptoMail integration. Without ZeptoMail, CRM users only see open rates; to access full click analytics, you need the separate transactional email product, which involves additional costs and configuration steps.

Clarify positions itself as a tool for CRM email tracking, featuring content that highlights its capabilities in monitoring opens, clicks, and replies on sales emails. The goal is to capture essential engagement signals from emails sent through connected inboxes or directly from Clarify, displaying this activity on timelines and in follow-up suggestions. This approach allows sales teams to identify who is engaging and determine the best times to follow up, all while keeping Clarify focused on deal workflows rather than becoming a comprehensive analytics platform. Compared to specialized email platforms, its reporting on these events remains relatively simple and aligned with sales processes rather than extensive marketing insights.

In-Inbox CRM Experience

Zoho’s eWidget functions as a sidebar within Zoho Mail, Gmail, or Outlook, allowing you to add leads, view contact details, and log emails seamlessly without leaving your mailbox. You can easily see deal stages, tasks, and meeting notes inline, and with just a click, send predefined templates or create new records. However, it's important to note that this sidebar functionality is limited to those specific email clients—users of Thunderbird or other services will miss out on this in-inbox convenience.

In contrast, Clarify predominantly maintains its functionalities within its web and macOS apps, connecting to Gmail and Outlook instead of serving as a full CRM sidebar within the inbox. Users can access timelines, meeting summaries, and AI-suggested follow-ups in Clarify, and then send or schedule emails while continuing to use their preferred mail clients. For teams fully immersed in Gmail or Outlook, this setup offers a more integrated workspace rather than a typical “CRM inside the inbox” extension. The development roadmap is geared toward centralizing work and AI interactions within Clarify itself, rather than creating extensive UI add-ons for each email client.

folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Automations

folk CRM is a state-of-the-art, AI-driven CRM designed for teams eager to streamline their deal automation without the hassle. It consolidates all relationships—leads, clients, partners, candidates, and investors—into adaptable views that cater to any workflow.

folk is tailored for automation-centric teams. With built-in email and calendar synchronization, teams can scale their follow-ups and outreach effortlessly. The introduction of conditional email automations allows you to trigger emails based on real-time data within folk—for instance, automatically sending onboarding or handoff emails when a contact becomes a client or a deal is marked as signed.

Enhanced by AI, folk enriches your data, crafts icebreakers, personalizes email drafts, and recommends the next best actions. Its open API and webhooks integrate seamlessly with tools like Zapier and Make, facilitating sophisticated workflows across email, WhatsApp, Slack, billing, and internal systems.

With one-click contact capture through the folkX Chrome extension and collaborative pipelines, folk empowers teams with a lightweight yet robust CRM to scale their automation effortlessly while maintaining complete control.

Conclusion

In summary, while both Zoho CRM and Clarify offer valuable features, they each cater to different needs. Zoho excels in extensive customization and multi-channel integration, making it suitable for diverse businesses. Clarify targets startups with its AI-driven simplicity and seamless meeting integration. However, for teams prioritizing email automation, sophisticated sequencing, and flexibility, folk emerges as the superior choice. With its AI-enhanced workflows and multi-channel capabilities, folk is the ideal CRM for those looking to optimize their outreach and streamline communications seamlessly.

Start your 14-day free trial or book a demo today.