folk vs Close: Which CRM for startups wins?

Early-stage startups often face a common challenge: the struggle to keep track of crucial follow-ups amidst a flurry of emails, spreadsheets, and team chats. A CRM for startups addresses this issue by ensuring that every interaction, next step, and responsible owner is easily accessible and visible to the entire team, streamlining workflow and enhancing communication.

Folk and Close offer two distinct approaches to solving this dilemma. Folk caters to startups with a focus on clean contact data, seamless integration with everyday tools like Gmail, and a user-friendly interface that minimizes administrative burdens. Close, on the other hand, adopts a sales-centric philosophy, emphasizing high-velocity communication through integrated calling and efficient activity tracking.

This article delves into the key differences between Folk and Close, focusing on aspects that can impact daily operations such as contact management, pipeline organization, automation capabilities, team collaboration, and overall cost-effectiveness as your startup evolves.

Was ist Folk?

folk is a CRM tailored for startups seeking clean contact data without the hassle of administrative work. It seamlessly integrates with Gmail and Google Calendar, ensuring that every interaction is linked to the appropriate record. Teams can manage relationships through flexible views, enrich contact details, and automate follow-ups with minimal setup. Designed for early-stage teams, it prioritizes speed, clarity, and user adoption while scaling into structured pipelines, dashboards, roles, and API access as the team expands.

Was ist „Schließen“?

Close is designed for high-velocity sales teams that thrive on calls, emails, and sequences. It suits startups engaging in outbound or hybrid strategies and emphasizes robust activity tracking, integrated calling, and rapid workflows. The user interface minimizes tab switching, keeping sales representatives focused on execution. Additionally, Close facilitates automation for follow-ups and pipeline maintenance without requiring extensive configuration. It's less focused on complex account hierarchies or enterprise-level reporting compared to larger platforms.

Feature comparison of folk and Close

E-Mail- und Kalendersynchronisierung

Folk seamlessly connects to Gmail and Outlook in just one step, automatically capturing both inbound and outbound emails directly on each contact's timeline. With calendar sync supporting both Google and Microsoft calendars, meetings remain linked to the corresponding email threads. This creates a continuous interaction history that updates without the need for manual logging, ensuring that sales, partnerships, and success teams are always aligned with the latest context. This setup is ideal for startups that operate primarily in their inbox and require a CRM that reflects real-time activity.

Close integrates with Gmail or Microsoft email accounts to automatically sync communications with the appropriate leads and contacts. Calendar connectivity allows for meeting synchronization, ensuring that scheduled events appear in Close alongside the relevant records. This consolidation keeps outreach history and meeting context in one location, preventing information from getting scattered across inboxes and calendars. It's perfect for dynamic teams that seek to capture activity effortlessly, making the timeline valuable for coaching, handoffs, and pipeline reviews.

Kontaktdaten bereinigen mit Anreicherung und Deduplizierung

Folk enhances new contacts with essential company and profile data, ensuring records remain useful as your database expands. Its built-in enrichment minimizes missing fields that can hinder routing, segmentation, and follow-ups. The duplicate management system features intelligent merging capabilities and duplicate detection during imports and data entry. Prompts assist users in merging or skipping duplicates before the CRM becomes cluttered, maintaining clean lists across various sources and preventing fragmented account context.

Close promotes data hygiene by preventing duplicates during imports and offering native merge functions for leads. The importer checks new rows against existing leads, handling duplicates proactively to avoid database pollution. If duplicates do occur, leads can be merged directly within the app, consolidating all activity into a single record. Close also offers AI Enrich to populate lead and contact fields within the CRM, significantly reducing the burden of manual data entry. This ensures records are comprehensive enough for effective routing, personalized communication, and accurate reporting.

Flexible Pipelines und Ansichten

folk facilitates collaboration within the record, ensuring that context remains intact and isn't lost in Slack threads or separate documents. Shared pipelines empower teams to coordinate ownership, next steps, and status updates without the risk of duplicating efforts. Meeting events synced from calendars are displayed as timeline entries, keeping everyone informed about past events and upcoming schedules. This single contact record contains conversation history and essential details, minimizing handoff errors—a perfect fit for startups where multiple team members engage with the same account in quick succession.

Close is designed for effective sales execution, featuring flexible organization through Lead Status and Smart Views. Teams can define pipeline stages using statuses and then create Smart Views that highlight the right leads based on specific filters and sorting criteria. These views can serve as operational queues for outreach, reviews, and prioritization. This method remains lightweight while still accommodating structured processes as business volume increases, making it ideal for startups seeking clarity without complex configurations.

Teamzusammenarbeit

folk enhances collaboration by centralizing everything within the record, preventing context from being lost in Slack threads or disparate documents. Shared pipelines enable teams to synchronize ownership, next steps, and statuses without the risk of duplicating efforts. Meeting events synced from calendars are displayed as timeline entries, ensuring everyone is informed about past activities and upcoming schedules. The same contact record retains conversation history and essential details, minimizing handoff errors—ideal for startups where multiple team members engage with the same account in a short timeframe.

Close fosters team collaboration by providing shared visibility into lead timelines, activities, and ownership. Records consolidate calls, emails, SMS, notes, and next steps into one location, ensuring context remains intact without scattering across different threads. Assignment workflows can direct new leads or status changes to the appropriate owner, reducing the chances of missed follow-ups. Teams can standardize their processes by aligning on statuses, views, and activity expectations, thus maintaining consistent execution as the team grows.

Leichte Automatisierung und Integrationen

folk seamlessly connects with external tools via Zapier and a comprehensive API, enabling workflows to function across the entire stack without the burden of custom admin tasks. Zapier's triggers and actions can effortlessly push contact and group updates to other systems or create and modify records in folk based on external events. This capability streamlines common startup processes, such as routing leads, syncing forms, notifying Slack, and maintaining list consistency. For more nuanced control, the API accommodates custom integrations tailored to internal rules, ensuring that automations remain manageable as the stack evolves.

Close automation focuses on Workflows and Sequences, allowing follow-ups to occur repeatedly without ongoing manual effort. Triggers can enroll contacts into sequences or initiate steps when lead conditions align, promoting consistent outreach throughout the sales funnel. Additionally, Close integrates with Zapier for no-code connections to other tools and provides an API for more advanced custom integrations. Bulk actions facilitate updates or tasks across numerous leads as processes scale, making it simple to start with basic automation and gradually expand as the startup grows.

Schlussfolgerung

Folk and Close each offer unique advantages for startups. Close excels in high-velocity sales environments with integrated calling and strong activity tracking, ideal for teams focused on rapid outreach. In contrast, folk prioritizes clean contact data, seamless integration with Gmail, and user-friendly collaboration tools. This makes it the best choice for early-stage teams looking for a CRM that enhances communication, minimizes administrative tasks, and scales effortlessly as their needs evolve. Choose folk for a streamlined, effective approach to managing customer relationships.

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