HubSpot vs Monday CRM: quale CRM è il migliore per l'automazione?

When choosing between HubSpot and Monday CRM, the critical question is: which CRM genuinely enhances automation without adding unnecessary administrative work?

For teams that value simplicity, folk provides one of the most efficient and robust automation solutions in any CRM. It enables users to automate emails based on their defined conditions and execute actions via the API.

Why Automation Is Essential for CRM in 2026

In today's landscape, automation has become the cornerstone for modern revenue teams. Sales and marketing are tasked with managing an increasing number of leads, channels, and intricate buying processes, all while avoiding additional headcount and maintaining personalization. A CRM that still depends on manual data entry, sporadic follow-ups, and traditional reporting methods drains valuable time, energy, and focus away from genuine customer interactions.

Here are the main reasons why automation is now indispensable:

• Buyers anticipate swift, relevant responses across email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and phone calls.
• Pipelines operate rapidly, and any neglected follow-up can lead to lost revenue.
• The volume of data has surged, making manual updates impractical and unreliable.
• Leadership requires real-time insights into performance, not end-of-month approximations.

The true worth of a CRM lies in how much it alleviates the workload for the team, rather than the number of fields it can accommodate. The ideal platform automatically tracks activities, maintains clean records in the background, and prompts the appropriate next steps at the right time, allowing representatives to concentrate on nurturing relationships and closing deals instead of managing the tool.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform that integrates marketing, sales, and customer service into a single contact database. Its email integration allows representatives to connect personal Gmail and Outlook inboxes, enabling them to send personalized emails, log replies, and initiate sequences directly from the CRM or their inbox. Features like open and click tracking, templates, and shared timelines enhance visibility into email activities across the entire revenue team.

What is Monday CRM?

Monday sales CRM leverages the monday.com work management platform, providing teams with a visual approach to managing pipelines alongside their projects. The Emails & Activities app seamlessly connects Gmail and Outlook, allowing users to send, receive, and log emails directly from boards while tracking opens and replies in real-time. With the help of templates and automation, follow-ups can be standardized, keeping lead statuses, tasks, and email histories well-organized and synchronized.

Feature comparison of HubSpot and Monday CRM

Integration Capabilities

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

Monday CRM’s Emails & Activities app allows you to connect up to six Gmail or Outlook accounts for two-way synchronization, ensuring that emails sent or received appear as items on your boards alongside calls and tasks. Although it lacks native in-CRM calendar synchronization, you can easily create simple automations or utilize Monday’s Calendar view to visualize scheduled events.

Sync Frequency and Reliability

HubSpot’s email synchronization functions in near-real-time with Gmail and Outlook, usually reflecting changes within seconds to a minute. Once your account is connected, HubSpot maintains a constant connection via OAuth, continuously pushing and pulling message data to ensure your CRM timeline stays current. The reliability of this system is enhanced by HubSpot’s global cloud infrastructure, which guarantees an impressive 99.99% uptime for its core services.

In contrast, Monday CRM’s Emails & Activities app syncs your inbox every few minutes by default, polling Gmail and Outlook for new messages to convert into board items. Although this results in a slight delay compared to push-based systems, updates typically appear within two to three minutes. If you require quicker updates, you can customize polling intervals or implement webhooks to achieve sub-minute responsiveness.

Two-Way Email and Calendar Sync

HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise offer powerful one-to-one sequences, enabling 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, manages delays, and detects replies, while the Marketing Hub can scale to thousands of recipients through segmentation, A/B testing, and comprehensive analytics on opens, clicks, and bounces. However, since the most advanced campaign features are within the Marketing Hub, Sales Hub users without this add-on encounter limitations on total sends and more basic reporting.

Monday’s Emails & Activities app delivers native two-way email sync for Gmail and Outlook through straightforward integration recipes—new messages and replies automatically turn into pulses on your boards, ensuring your communications are tracked alongside deals. Calendar items sync seamlessly via Monday’s Calendar Sync feature: date or timeline columns can map to Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, or any external calendar, with events appearing on both your board and calendar within minutes.

Mail Merge and Campaigns

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 daily. Its intuitive drag-and-drop sequence builder simplifies template creation, manages delays, and detects replies, while the Marketing Hub can scale to accommodate 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 the Marketing Hub, Sales Hub users without that add-on may encounter limitations on total sends and more basic reporting.

Monday CRM’s Emails & Activities app seamlessly syncs with up to six Gmail or Outlook accounts, along with a Group Emailing action that allows bulk messaging to board items and contact lists. You can automate follow-ups through monday.com automations or integrate with Mailchimp for complete email marketing capabilities. Just remember, without Mailchimp or a similar add-on, you’ll miss out on native campaign analytics, relying only on basic send logs in your boards.

Open and Click Tracking

HubSpot Sales monitors opens and clicks for 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. Note that click tracking requires a paid Sales Hub seat—free users only have access to open tracking—and you can see 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 this add-on.

The Emails & Activities app in Monday logs message opens when emails are sent directly through the board interface, but it does not track which links were clicked by default. To obtain click-through rates, you'll need to embed links with UTM parameters and pull the data into your board using automations or by integrating a marketing tool like Mailchimp.

In-Inbox CRM Experience

With the HubSpot Sales extension installed, you can seamlessly view and edit HubSpot records—contacts, companies, and deals—right within Gmail or Outlook. This allows you to enroll contacts in sequences and log emails with just one click. A familiar CRM sidebar appears alongside your inbox, enabling you to create tasks, send template replies, and access recent interactions without the need to switch between apps. Additionally, it displays lead scores and deal forecasts inline, ensuring that every email action directly influences your pipeline. However, if you don't have a paid Sales or Service Hub seat, certain in-inbox tools, like sequences and call logging, will remain inaccessible behind a paywall.

In contrast, monday.com’s Emails & Activities app operates from your boards instead of within your inbox. By connecting Gmail or Outlook, your emails transform into pulses linked to relevant items, allowing you to reply or add notes directly within monday.com. This is ideal for visual teams that manage everything on boards, but it doesn't offer a true in-inbox sidebar experience; instead, you’ll be working primarily within the monday.com platform rather than your mail client.

folk CRM: The Best CRM for Automations

folk CRM is a modern, AI-native CRM designed for teams seeking to streamline their deal automation without the hassle. It centralizes all relationships—leads, clients, partners, candidates, and investors—into flexible views that adapt seamlessly to any workflow.

folk caters specifically to automation-driven teams. With built-in email and calendar synchronization, it enables teams to automate follow-ups and outreach on a large scale. New conditional email automations allow 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.

Fueled by AI, folk enhances data, generates engaging icebreakers, drafts personalized emails, and suggests next best actions. Its open API and webhooks integrate effortlessly with tools like Zapier and Make, facilitating advanced workflows across email, WhatsApp, Slack, billing, and other internal systems.

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

Conclusione

In conclusion, while HubSpot excels with its deep integration and tracking features, making it great for established teams, and Monday CRM offers a visual workflow approach that suits project-driven environments, folk stands out as the premier choice for teams focused on email integration, automation, and sequencing. Its AI-driven capabilities and flexible workflows empower organizations to automate outreach effectively without the complexities of traditional CRMs. For teams looking to enhance efficiency and streamline communication, folk is undeniably the best alternative. Try folk CRM for free

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