folk – Product Information, Latest Updates, and Reviews 2024

Finding the right CRM can be like something out of a folk tale – an epic journey with no clear destination.

If you go it alone without the right information, it’s easy to get lost along the way (and lose time and money).

That’s where I come in; I’m AJ—here to save the day. I’ve spent the last decade building my business (towards a multi-million dollar exit) using all sorts of customer relationship management tools.

Now, I’m traveling the world with my wife, making our dreams a reality. I started Small Business Bonfire (SBB) to help entrepreneurs do the same (and get a fairy tale ending of their own).

For this review, I wanted to share one of my absolute favorite CRMs on the market—folk CRM.

We climbed the beanstalk, slayed the dragon, and saved the princess to bring you this comprehensive, in-depth look at folk CRM.

Let’s dive in!

folk CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software focused on contact management, collaboration, and productivity above all else.

Essentially, folk CRM makes managing your partnerships, deals, and sales easy while working together as a team.

Some features that folk CRM excels at include:

  • Contact management
  • Deal pipeline tools
  • Contact segmentation (groups)
  • Workflow automation (API)
  • Bulk email
  • Lead prospecting (with the folkX Chrome extension)

folk CRM is fantastic for startups because it offers a free plan for up to 100 contacts and 100 messages/month. Once you pass that threshold, upgrading to a paid plan (which all include unlimited contacts) is incredibly easy.

The CRM platform is also a great choice for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with a ton of clients (did we mention unlimited contacts?) looking for a powerful tool to help manage them.

In fact, at SBB, we think folk CRM might potentially have the best tools for managing your contacts on the market right now. It’s not a folk legend, it’s a folk CRM reality.

Pros and Cons of folk CRM​

Even diamonds have imperfections, just like every CRM has advantages and disadvantages. Let’s go over some of the pros and cons of folk CRM.

folk CRM Pros​

folk CRM Cons​

Who is folk CRM Best Suited For? ​

folk CRM has a ton of applicable use cases where it shines.

Some business types that we think it’s best suited for include:

  • Startups – folk CRM is well suited for startups because it’s both extremely beginner friendly and free to get started with. There’s essentially no real learning curve and, thus, no barrier to entry.
  • Small businesses – the CRM is great for small businesses because it’s built to scale. As your business grows, you’ll have powerful tools to manage contacts on an enterprise level without switching platforms.
  • Midsize businesses – folk CRM is an excellent choice for midsize companies with multiple teams looking to all get on the same page. Plus, they offer some great workflow automation through API and Zapier integrations.

Who is folk CRM Not Suited For? ​

folk CRM is awesome, but it’s not for everyone.

Here are some instances where we think folk CRM might not be the best fit:

  • Marketing Agencies – folk isn’t necessarily the best CRM for you if you’re looking for more robust marketing features like lead scoring, tracking campaigns, and A/B testing.
  • Large sales teams – folk CRM has some great collaboration and productivity tools, but if you’re looking to manage a large sales team with tons of complex leads and deals, other CRMs can offer more.

folk CRM Software Pricing​

folk CRM offers a free plan in addition to three paid plans.

They are as follows:

Free – No Cost

  • 100 contacts
  • 100 messages/month
  • 10 enrichments/month

Standard -$24/month (per user)

  • Unlimited contacts
  • 500 messages/month
  • 100 enrichments/month

Premium – $39/month (per user)

  • Unlimited contacts
  • 2,000 messages/month
  • 500 enrichments/month

Beyond Limits – Custom Pricing

  • Unlimited contacts
  • Unlimited messages
  • Unlimited enrichments
Free:
100 Contacts, 100 Messages/Month, 10 Enrichments/Month
Free Forever
N/A
Standard:
Free + Unlimited Contacts, 500 Messages/Month
$24/Month
14-Day Free Trial
Premium:
Standard + 2,000 Messages/Month, 500 Enrichments
$39/Month
14-Day Free Trial
Beyond Limits:
Premium + Unlimited Messages, Unlimited Enrichments
Custom Pricing
No Free Trial

How Does folk CRM Pricing Compare?​

folk CRM is an affordable and robust platform with a lot to offer SMBs. But how does it stack up against the competition?

For this section, we’ll break down a few of the most popular alternatives on the market regarding price and features. We’ll be referencing the first tier of each CRM.

folk CRM – $24/Month

  • Free plan
  • Robust contact management
  • Unlimited contacts
  • Deal pipelines
  • Lead prospecting

Pipedrive – $21.90/Month

  • No free plan
  • Basic contact management
  • Deal/sales pipelines
  • LeadBooster (an extra $32.50/month)
  • Mobile app

Less Annoying CRM – $15/Month

  • No free plan
  • Basic contact management
  • Unlimited contacts
  • Task management
  • Mobile app

HubSpot CRM – $30/Month

  • Free tools
  • Robust contact management
  • Deal/sales pipelines
  • Lead generation & management tools
  • Mobile app

As you can see, folk CRM comes out on top in pricing compared to all three other options.

The fact that it offers unlimited messages and contacts is just the cherry on top, in our opinion.

The only aspect where we think folk CRM doesn’t necessarily come out on top is the fact that there’s no mobile app yet.

folk CRM Pricing Tips

Annual Plans Save
By paying upfront with an annual plan, users can save up to 25% on plans with folk CRM. That kind of savings can add up over time, in our opinion. Plus, it’s much easier to budget your entire business spend by paying immediately.
Free Plan
As we’ve mentioned, folk CRM offers an impressive free plan for up to 100 contacts, 100 messages/month, and 10 enrichments/month. We love a great free plan, and folk CRM gave us just that!
Free Trial
If you want a better sense of everything the platform offers before committing, folk CRM offers a free 14-day trial (no credit card required). This is a great way to get your feet wet and see if the CRM will work for your business.
Referral Codes
folk CRM also offers referral codes for up to 10% off your order for using the promo code at checkout.

folk CRM Core Features​

Contact Management

When it comes to importing and managing contacts, folk CRM might just be the best in the biz.

This is because of their unique AI-driven contact management system. The software recognizes when new contacts are added and automatically adds them to your database.

You can also easily create the following for all of your contacts:

  • Tags
  • Groups
  • Lists
  • Categories

For our testing, we connected our SBB Google account and were easily able to sync nearly 10,000 contacts within seconds.

We were able to easily add contacts and even create customizable groups for our contacts in a way that no CRM we’ve tested currently has provided.

Here’s the “create contact” interface to help paint a picture.

folk CRM Review - Add Contact

It was so easy and streamlined that we wished some of our other favorite CRMs had the same efficiency level.

Here’s an example of the layout for our affiliate marketing clients.

folk CRM Review - Affiliate Contacts

The best part is that folk CRM offers unlimited contacts with all of their paid plans.

For sales and marketing-based organizations with a ton of leads and contacts, this could be a game changer (especially if your current CRM charges by the number of contacts).

So, if you want to amp up your contact management game, look no further than folk CRM.

What are the Limitations of folk CRM?

Let’s face it, even a beautiful rose has thorns.

There are some limitations to consider when deciding if folk CRM is the right fit for you.

These include:

  • Limited marketing options
  • Not many reporting or analytics capabilities
  • Limited tools for large sales teams
  • No mobile app (yet)

While folk CRM is an impressive platform for managing relationships, it lacks the powerful sales and marketing tools of some larger (and more expensive) platforms.

folk CRM Integrations

folk CRM offers the ability to connect your Google and Microsoft accounts to sync all of the following:

  • Contacts
  • Calendar events
  • Emails

This makes it essentially effortless to import your entire business into folk CRM with just a few clicks.

In addition to Google and Microsoft integrations, folk CRM also integrates seamlessly with Zapier. This allows for thousands of potential apps to easily integrate with folk.

Here are some that we thought were awesome:

  • Slack
  • LinkedIn
  • Stripe
  • Webflow
  • Google Forms

At Small Business Bonfire, we use Slack for pretty much all of our communications between teams. So we were pretty psyched to learn that we could pair our favorite messaging app with folk CRM.

Here’s an example of how pairing Slack with folk CRM works through Zapier.

folk CRM Review - Zapier Integrations

Get Started With folk CRM Today >>

We got it set up within 10 minutes and had the whole team connected.

Ultimately, folk CRM doesn’t offer a ton in the way of innate integrations, but its pairing with Zapier opens up a world of possibilities.

How to Get Started with folk CRM

Getting started with folk CRM was fantastic! We’ll walk you through our journey with folk CRM. Our folk tale, if you will.

We navigated to their website, where we were invited to sign up for a free trial and watch an introduction video.

folk CRM Review - Homepage

We watched the video, which was very informative and helpful, then we signed up for the free trial with our email (shown below).

folk CRM Review - Onboarding

From there, we input the following fields:

  • Name
  • Workspace name
  • How we planned to use folk CRM (team)
  • Our use case (partnerships)

Here’s how the layout looked (to give you a better idea of how great it looked).

folk CRM Review - Onboarding Process

After that, we were prompted to easily invite all of our teammates, which we did without any hiccups.

folk CRM Review - Add Teammates

One takeaway we had from onboarding with folk CRM was how simple and streamlined everything was (without sacrificing style).

We then connected our Small Business Bonfire Google account with the CRM to import our contacts, events, and emails automatically.

Once we were in (just like magic), we were automating workflow, managing partnerships, and updating contacts with our teammates.

Onboarding with folk CRM was honestly one of the best initial experiences we’ve had (in testing dozens of CRMs).

Is folk CRM Easy to Use?

When it comes to using folk CRM, it was like something from legend (we’re still going with the folk story metaphor here, so just run with it).

It was extremely intuitive from start to finish, with virtually no learning curve or barrier to entry.

From automatically syncing our Google contacts to easily creating and managing deals, folk made it easy from start to finish.

The drag-and-drop interface made it super easy to collaborate and manage our pipelines.

We also found that all the features we needed were easily accessible—no hunting around for hidden gems.

Overall, when asked if folk CRM is easy to use, we give a resounding yes!

folk CRM Customer Service Review

Based on our experience, folk CRM delivers exceptional support service.

They offer the following helpful support features:

  • Help center for self-service
  • Tutorial videos
  • Account setup consultations
  • A search bar to navigate tons of articles

During our three months of testing, we had virtually no issues with the platform.

However, to test their support team’s responsiveness, we reached out with a simple question regarding Slack integration.

We received a prompt email the next day (when business hours resumed) from one of their customer service representatives with detailed feedback about how to solve our problem.

Even better, (before we heard back) we solved the issue ourselves by utilizing their incredibly helpful self-service portal.

Overall, we give folk CRM five out of five stars for customer service. One might even say it’s legendary (alright, we’re officially done with the folk puns).

folk CRM Review - Customer Service

folk CRM Alternative Comparison ​

folk CRM provides a one-of-a-kind experience, but it’s not the only option. Here are some alternatives that we love.

Is folk CRM Worth it for Small Business Owners?

At Small Business Bonfire, we’re big fans of folk CRM. We’d even go so far as to say it’s an insanely good CRM. So naturally, when asked if the platform is worth it for small business owners, we’ve got to say—absolutely.

Not only is folk an incredibly user-friendly CRM that makes managing contacts and pipelines easy for teams of all sizes it’s also extremely affordable.

Plus, their customer service team is extremely responsive and knowledgeable, so you can rest assured that you’ll have support no matter what. So what’s not to love? Try it out today to begin your very own folk (CRM) tale.

Get Started With folk CRM Today >>