HubSpot vs HighLevel: Which CRM is the best for social selling?

Contact management is the crucial point where a CRM either remains effective or devolves into chaos. HubSpot and HighLevel

Social selling exists at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool fails to keep pace with LinkedIn activity, comments, and warm introductions, you not only lose visibility but also risk losing deals to teams that maintain stronger connections.

folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-focused CRMs. Clarify specializes in converting unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk provides teams with an adaptable, social-selling-friendly workspace to monitor contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one location.

In this comparison, we will explore how each CRM facilitates authentic social selling workflows, helping you decide which aligns best with your team's approach to building and nurturing relationships.

Why is a social selling CRM essential in 2026?

Most B2B deals don’t initiate with a cold email or a demo request; they often begin with a LinkedIn comment, a repost, a direct message, or a discreet profile visit. If your CRM cannot capture these signals and connect them to real people and pipelines, your team is navigating in the dark while competitors cultivate relationships in plain sight.

A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to transform those interactions into structured, actionable insights: who engaged, where they originated, what interests them, and how close they are to making a purchase. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely “nice-to-have awareness,” it evolves into a measurable, repeatable component of your revenue strategy.

With a social selling CRM, your team can:

✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile views and convert them into follow-ups

✔️ Track which prospects know you through content versus outbound efforts and tailor your messaging accordingly

✔️ Map relationships across accounts, champions, and influencers—not just contacts in a list

✔️ Report on deals influenced by social activity, rather than attributing all credit to last-click channels

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform that integrates marketing, sales, and customer service into a unified contact database. Its email integration allows representatives to connect personal Gmail and Outlook accounts, enabling them to send one-to-one emails, log responses, and initiate sequences straight from either the CRM or their inbox. Features like open and click tracking, email templates, and shared timelines provide the revenue team with full visibility into email activities.

What is HighLevel?

HighLevel is an all-encompassing marketing and sales platform designed primarily for agencies. It combines funnels, email, SMS, automation, and CRM into a cohesive system that agencies can either resell or manage on behalf of clients. While the extensive features are impressive, newcomers may find the interface and initial setup somewhat daunting.

Feature comparison of HubSpot and HighLevel

Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights

HubSpot provides seamless two-way email integration with Gmail, Outlook, and any IMAP-compatible provider, allowing you to send one-to-one emails directly from contact records while automatically logging every reply in your CRM timeline. Its native scheduler also adds meeting events to Google Calendar or Office 365, complete with automatic guest invites and timeline entries for comprehensive visibility.

In contrast, HighLevel does not enrich contacts using social media; instead, it depends on form captures, manual entry, or API-based integrations.

Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts

HubSpot’s email synchronization works in near real-time with Gmail and Outlook, typically updating changes within seconds to a minute. After connecting your account, HubSpot establishes a persistent connection via OAuth, consistently pushing and pulling message data to ensure your CRM timeline is always current. This reliability is further enhanced by HubSpot’s robust global cloud infrastructure, which guarantees 99.99% uptime for its core services.

In contrast, HighLevel lacks a social listening feature, and its real-time alerts are restricted to email/SMS replies or incoming form messages.

Social Selling: Which channels?

HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer powerful one-to-one sequences, allowing you to enroll up to 50 contacts simultaneously and send hundreds of personalized emails per user each day. Its intuitive drag-and-drop sequence builder simplifies template creation, manages delays, and detects replies. Meanwhile, Marketing Hub enhances outreach to thousands of recipients with features like segmentation, A/B testing, and comprehensive analytics on opens, clicks, and bounces. However, since the most advanced campaign features are exclusive to Marketing Hub, Sales Hub users without that add-on encounter limitations on total sends and more basic reporting.

HighLevel facilitates inbound and outbound messaging through WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram DM, but it does not support LinkedIn or Twitter.

In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences

HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer powerful one-to-one sequences, allowing you to enroll up to 50 contacts simultaneously and send hundreds of personalized emails per user each day. The intuitive drag-and-drop sequence builder simplifies template creation, sets delays, and detects replies, while the Marketing Hub enhances scalability to thousands of recipients with segmentation, A/B testing, and comprehensive analytics on opens, clicks, and bounces. However, since the most advanced campaign features reside in Marketing Hub, Sales Hub users lacking this add-on encounter limitations on total sends and receive more basic reporting.

Sequences can be utilized via SMS and email, but are not available on social platforms. Additionally, in-browser automation or messaging templates are not supported.

Activity & Engagement Tracking

HubSpot Sales monitors opens and clicks on every one-to-one email sent from contact records or through the Sales extension, providing real-time desktop notifications and logging each event on the timeline. Please note that click tracking requires a paid Sales Hub seat—free users can only see opens—and you can access the total clicks per link directly in the email activity feed. For advanced attribution, such as multi-variant link analysis across campaigns, you'll need the Marketing Hub, as pure Sales Hub users won't have access to enterprise-level click analytics without an add-on.

HighLevel tracks emails, SMS, calls, and web chats, but it does not log interactions with social posts or profile activity.

folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!

folk CRM is a contemporary social selling CRM that transforms social selling into a streamlined, repeatable process. It quickly captures contacts, maintains conversation context, and minimizes manual tasks through enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.

Designed for LinkedIn-driven outbound, folk enables teams to consolidate leads from diverse sources, organize them within customized pipelines, and monitor every interaction in one centralized location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in any gaps, deduplication maintains a tidy database, and shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and the management of relationship history across the team.

For effective daily social selling, folk promotes consistent practices: segment leads, tailor outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through a pipeline while preserving the human context crucial for closing deals.

👉 Try folk CRM for free

Schlussfolgerung

In conclusion, HubSpot excels with its comprehensive email integration and robust marketing tools, making it ideal for teams seeking a unified platform. HighLevel offers extensive features primarily for agencies but can overwhelm new users. In contrast, folk stands out as the top choice for teams focusing on social selling, seamlessly integrating email, automation, and sequencing. With folk, teams can quickly capture leads, maintain context, and streamline follow-ups, ensuring that social selling becomes a repeatable and effective process.

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