Pipedrive vs Freshsales：ソーシャルセリングに最適なCRMはどちらか？

Contact management determines whether a CRM remains functional or devolves into chaos. Pipedrive and Freshsales

Social selling thrives at the intersection of your CRM and your network. If your tool struggles to keep pace with LinkedIn activities, comments, and warm introductions, you not only lose visibility but also risk losing deals to teams that maintain closer connections with their relationships.

folk and Clarify both position themselves as modern, relationship-focused CRMs. Clarify emphasizes converting unstructured interactions into organized records, while folk offers teams a flexible, social-selling-friendly workspace to manage contacts, signals, and pipelines all in one place.

This comparison will explore how each CRM facilitates genuine social selling workflows, helping you determine which one aligns best with how your team cultivates and nurtures relationships.

Why is a social selling CRM essential in 2026?

Most B2B deals originate not from cold emails or demo requests but from LinkedIn comments, reposts, DMs, or even quiet profile visits. If your CRM cannot capture these signals and connect them to real people and pipelines, your team operates in the dark while competitors build relationships right before your eyes.

A social selling CRM provides a centralized platform to transform these interactions into structured, actionable insights: identifying who engaged, their source, their interests, and their proximity to making a purchase. Rather than viewing LinkedIn as merely a 'nice-to-have awareness' tool, it becomes a quantifiable, repeatable component of your revenue generation process.

With a social selling CRM, your team can:

✔️ Identify buying signals from likes, comments, and profile views, turning them into follow-up opportunities

✔️ Track which prospects are familiar with your content versus those from outbound efforts, allowing for tailored messaging

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

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

What is Pipedrive?

Pipedrive is a sales-centric CRM that revolves around a visual pipeline, enabling sales representatives to track deals from initial contact to closing. The email synchronization integrates seamlessly with Gmail, Outlook, and various other IMAP providers, ensuring that every email is automatically logged to the appropriate contact and deal. Featuring a built-in sales inbox alongside tracking and basic campaign functionalities, Pipedrive allows teams to manage outreach and pipeline updates all in one convenient location, eliminating the hassle of using multiple tools.

What is Freshsales?

Freshsales, developed by Freshworks, is a comprehensive CRM that consolidates contacts, deals, email, telephony, and basic automation into one user-friendly platform. It caters to sales teams seeking an integrated solution without diving into enterprise-level complexities. Depending on the selected plan, configuration and feature depth may vary, and some setup time might be necessary.

Feature comparison of Pipedrive and Freshsales

Profile Enrichment & Lead Insights

Pipedrive seamlessly syncs with Gmail and Outlook (with IMAP support for other providers), capturing every inbound and outbound message linked to the appropriate contact or deal record. With the Smart Email BCC option, you can log messages directly from your email client by simply adding the dynamic BCC; Pipedrive takes care of the rest. Plus, native calendar integration for Google and Microsoft ensures that all your meetings automatically appear on contact timelines, providing you with a comprehensive view of every customer interaction.

In contrast, Freshsales lacks native enrichment for social profiles, requiring users to manually update contacts or rely on third-party tools like Clearbit or Lusha for this purpose.

Social Listening & Real-Time Alerts

Pipedrive’s email sync with Gmail and Outlook operates every few minutes, striking a balance between immediacy and system performance. Outbound and inbound messages are captured and linked to contacts or deals in under five minutes, ensuring that you rarely face missing or delayed logs. Additionally, the IMAP fallback adheres to standard IMAP IDLE protocols for push notifications, providing near-instant updates for compatible providers.

In contrast, Freshsales does not include social listening or engagement tracking, concentrating solely on email, SMS, and phone channels.

Social Selling: Which channels?

Pipedrive's Group Emailing feature, available on Advanced plans and higher, allows you to select up to 100 contacts from any list to send bulk messages complete with merge tags and reply tracking. Additionally, Pipedrive Campaigns (an add-on) offers a specialized module for crafting email journeys, segmenting audiences, and analyzing open and click rates, with all replies automatically linked to the appropriate deal or contact. However, it's worth noting that the Campaigns add-on comes with an extra cost, and its reporting capabilities are more limited compared to dedicated email marketing platforms.

On the other hand, Freshsales supports multichannel outreach through email, phone, and SMS; however, it lacks native support for interactions or monitoring on social platforms.

In‑Context Messaging with Templates & Sequences

With Advanced plans and higher, Pipedrive’s Group Emailing feature allows you to select up to 100 contacts from any list to send bulk messages, complete with merge tags and reply tracking. Additionally, Pipedrive Campaigns (a paid add-on) offers a specialized module for creating email journeys, segmenting audiences, and analyzing open and click rates. Importantly, all replies are automatically mapped back to the corresponding deal or contact. However, keep in mind that the Campaigns add-on comes with an extra cost, and its reporting capabilities are more limited compared to standalone email marketing platforms.

On the other hand, Freshsales does not provide in-context messaging or social automation, as all sequences are restricted to internal channels like email and calls.

Activity & Engagement Tracking

Pipedrive offers 'Track email opening' and 'Track link opening' features that log every sent message, capturing opens and clicks along with their counts and timestamps in the Mail tab. You can easily enable or disable tracking for each email and view exactly who clicked which link directly within the deal view. However, it's worth noting that Pipedrive’s reporting is limited to basic open and click rates—there are no built-in funnel visualizations or heat-map insights unless you export the data to a BI tool.

In Freshsales, activity tracking encompasses emails, calls, meetings, and SMS; however, it does not include social engagement, and no social signals are connected to contact records.

folk CRM: The Ultimate CRM for Social Selling!

folk CRM is an innovative social selling CRM that transforms social selling into a streamlined, repeatable process. It quickly captures contacts, keeps conversational context close, and minimizes manual tasks with enrichment and smart fields, ensuring timely follow-ups.

Designed for LinkedIn-driven outreach, folk empowers teams to centralize leads from various sources, organize them in customized pipelines, and monitor every interaction in a single location. Automatic contact enrichment fills in missing information, deduplication maintains a clean database, and shared notes and tags facilitate warm introductions and track relationship history across the team.

For effective daily social selling, folk ensures consistent execution: segment leads, personalize outreach, set reminders, log interactions, and advance opportunities through the pipeline without losing the essential human touch that closes deals.

👉 Try folk CRM for free

結論

In summary, Pipedrive excels in visual pipeline management and email integration, making it ideal for sales teams focused on deal tracking. Freshsales offers a comprehensive solution with integrated communication tools, but lacks social engagement capabilities. In contrast, folk stands out as the premier choice for teams leveraging email integration, automation, and sequencing. It captures social signals seamlessly, enriches contacts, and maintains relationship context, ensuring that social selling becomes a streamlined and effective process. For a hassle-free CRM designed for today's social-first environment, folk is unmatched.

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