CRM > folk Review

Folk

folk

TL;DR Summary

folk is one of the best CRMs on the market you are an individual or small team who is heavily focused on relationships and contact management. If you have never used a CRM before or you've used Notion, Airtable, or Google Sheets in the past, folk is a perfect introduction into using a specialized CRM too. It will feel familiar to how you might use a spreadsheet to manage your contacts and information. For example, you can edit data in-line and even bulk update fields like you would in a spreadsheet. ‍

folk Review

Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

Database

CRM

Database

CRM

folk is a simple yet powerful spreadsheet-like CRM for individuals.

What is folk?

folk is a great CRM if you're an individual or super small team trying to use something like Google Sheets, Airtable, or Notion as your CRM.

They built it in a way to feel familiar to how you might use a spreadsheet to manage your contacts and important information:

Who is folk for?

folk is a fantastic CRM if you are an individual or a small team who is heavily focused on relationships and contact management. If you have never used a CRM before or are looking for a super low-friction, easy to use tool, folk is a great 🙌 An example of when I've recommended folk to a friend is when they brought up to me all the business concerns they had, which a CRM would traditionally solve, but they are currently a solopreneur (or have a 2-3 person team), or are price sensitive. Hearing things like "I'm wondering if I could just use Notion to manage all of this" is a great indicator that something like folk is right for you. If you are planning on scaling or working with a larger team (or expect to integrate with a myriad of other tools), you'll want to use a more business-friendly CRM like Copper. Try folk for free.

Key Features

folk is one of the easiest CRMs on the market to use.

Adding Contacts & Sending Emails

folk is one of the friendliest CRMs on the the market when it comes to adding contacts. They have a chrome extension that will allow you to add contacts to folk with one click from Gmail, Linkedin, and X.

And once you've added contacts from to folk, you can use their enrich feature to help fill in gaps like finding correct email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, addresses, and onwards. You can then bulk email a group of contacts or set reminders to follow-up one-on-one. And of course, like any good CRM, folk will ingest all of your teams emails and calendar events so you can avoid contacting the same person twice.

Magic Fields

folk has built a new custom field type called "Magic Fields" which allows for an AI prompt to do a bit of legwork, whether it be generating a personalized email across groups of contacts, or even more complex data sanitizing functionality. Of all the CRM's we've seen on the market, folk has taken an incredibly unique approach to how their choosing to implement AI to improve their tool:

folk's Magic Field AI Functionality

Sending Emails

They have some cool CRM features baked in like mail merge

(for sending out personalized templated emails in bulk), as

well as quick access via a Chrome extension when on Gmail

and LinkedIn.

folk API

This is one of the main areas that we struggle heavily with folk. While they have a basic Zapier connector, it's incredibly limited in the functionality. For example, certain custom field types aren't yet supported (like number fields), which makes it nearly impossible to build more complex integrations. While this will be built out over time, they still have a long way to go before having any level of feature parity to that of a more business-focused CRM.

Usually this isn't as big of a deal because if you're more technical you can just fallback on their API, and even use Zapier's Webhook functionality to build out some custom endpoints. The problem though is that they don't actually have an Dev API accessible at the moment, making building any meaningful integration quite limited and difficult.

Final Verdict

If you're an individual using Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 and you're looking to make the upgrade to the CRM world from that of a basic Spreadsheet, folk will be your best option. It's like a more opinionated version of Airtable and Notion, that is actually built with proper CRM features like Email and Calendar activity tracking.

On the other hand, if you're working on a team or looking to scale your company behind a handful of team members, we highly recommending a more powerful CRM like Copper, Pipedrive, or HubSpot, if nothing more than just to have a properly fully-featured API as you scale (you're going to need this). That said, if you're in any way considering Airtable or Notion as your CRM, we highly recommend you use folk instead. Try folk for free. (Use code FOLKXEFFICIENT for 10% off your first year)