Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Choosing the right CRM can significantly impact your business's efficiency and customer relationships. Streak and Brevo are two platforms designed to enhance customer relationship management, each with a unique approach. Streak integrates directly into Gmail, offering a lightweight CRM solution for managing pipelines, contacts, and tasks within your inbox. Brevo, on the other hand, focuses on email marketing and multi-channel communication, providing tools for engaging customers through email, SMS, and chat. In this blog post, we’ll compare their key features to help you determine which platform suits your needs best—or if Folk might offer a more balanced alternative with user-friendly contact management and customization options. We'll introduce folk – a popular alternative.
What is Streak?
Streak is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that integrates directly with Gmail, allowing users to manage their sales pipeline and customer interactions from within their email inbox. Designed to simplify CRM tasks, Streak offers features such as email tracking, mail merge, task management, and pipeline visualization, all seamlessly embedded in Gmail’s interface.
Key features of Streak
- Email tracking: Streak’s email tracking feature allows users to see when and if their emails are opened, providing basic insights into recipient engagement.
- Snippets: The snippets feature enables users to create reusable templates for frequently used email content, which helps to streamline communication.
- Link tracking: Streak's link tracking monitors whether recipients click on links within emails, offering data on engagement with specific content.
- Contacts: Streak's contact management feature organizes and tracks communications with individual contacts, directly within Gmail.
- Google Workspace integrations: Streak is integrated with Google Workspace, allowing users to manage emails, tasks, and pipelines within the Gmail interface.
What is Brevo?
Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing platform tailored for small to mid-sized businesses. Brevo also offers a wide range of tools, including email and SMS marketing, chat, CRM, and marketing automation to help businesses effectively engage with their audience across multiple channels.
Key features of Brevo
- Marketing platform: Provides tools for email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, as well as marketing automation to improve multi-channel campaign engagement and streamline marketing efforts.
- Sales platform: Helps manage pipelines and track sales activities with tools like automated deal tracking, meeting scheduling, and call recording, making it easier for teams to follow leads and close deals.
- Conversations platform: Allows businesses to offer customer support through live chat, a shared inbox, and multi-channel communication solutions, ensuring seamless customer interaction.
- Customer data platform: Enables businesses to unify, manage, and analyze customer data across platforms with a multi-table data model, sourcing library, and customer analytics, improving data-driven decisions.
- Messaging API: Provides APIs for sending emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages, with features for transactional emails, inbound parsing, and integrations with other applications for customized communication.
Streak vs. Brevo: Feature Comparison
Let's break down the key features of two CRM software solutions and take a closer look at their sales automation, email marketing tools, and contact management.
1. Sales pipeline management
Streak CRM's pipeline management feature is deeply integrated with Gmail, allowing users to track, organize, and manage sales processes directly from their inbox. The system uses a visual layout, similar to a spreadsheet, with automation features.
Brevo's Pipeline feature is designed to help manage the sales process by offering custom deal pipelines. It enables teams to track deals across various stages and organize tasks for follow-ups and meetings. Users can customize deal stages to match their sales cycle and automate some repetitive tasks. The feature also supports bulk contact import, allowing teams to link contacts and deals for easier organization.
2. Ease of use
Streak CRM is seamlessly integrated into Gmail, making it intuitive for users already familiar with Google's ecosystem. Its user-friendly interface allows for easy navigation and quick adoption. Brevo, on the other hand, offers a straightforward design with a focus on simplicity, catering to users looking for an uncomplicated CRM experience.
3. Contact enrichment
Streak CRM's contact enrichment feature automatically enhances contact records by extracting relevant information from email interactions, populating fields with details like company logos, profile pictures, and social media links. Brevo includes contact enrichment capabilities as part of its Customer Data Platform. This feature allows businesses to unify, manage, and sync customer data, making it easier to create a more complete customer profile.
4. Outreach
Streak CRM's outreach solution is designed around email communication directly within Gmail, allowing users to send personalized mass emails, track opens and replies, and automate follow-ups. Brevo's outreach capabilities focus on a multi-channel approach, using email, SMS, and WhatsApp to create cohesive campaigns, with automation options based on customer behavior.
5. Automation
Streak CRM, integrated within Gmail, offers automation for tasks like email tracking and follow-ups, triggering actions based on pipeline changes. Brevo provides extensive automation across its platforms, enabling users to automate email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, and streamline sales processes with reminders and AI-driven personalization.
6. Integration
Streak CRM integrates with Google Workspace, including Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar, and connects with tools like Zapier for broader application access. This integration enhances its functionality by allowing users to streamline their workflow with familiar tools. Brevo offers extensive integration options, connecting with over 150 digital tools, including CRM, CMS, e-commerce, and analytics platforms.
7. Artificial Intelligence
Streak CRM has limited native AI integrations, focusing on essential features within Gmail. Users can enhance capabilities through third-party AI tools. Brevo integrates AI into its Marketing Platform, particularly for email personalization and optimization, aiming to boost engagement through AI-driven content strategies.
Price and plans comparison
Let's take a closer look at the price and plans of both Streak and Brevo.
Streak prices
Streak provides a monthly and annual subscription plan. The following is an overview of their annual price plan.
- Pro: Starts from $49 per user, per month.
- Pro +: Starts from $69 per user, per month.
- Enterprise: Starts from $129 per user, per month.
Brevo prices
Brevo has a limited free version that gives you access to 300 emails. After that, the price plans provide you with the number of emails you can send per month. As well as other features. You then also have the option of customizing your plan, so that it can be based on the number of emails you send a month and the number of contacts. The following is an overview of their annual plan.
- Starter: Starting from $8.08/month.
- Business: Starting from $16.17/month.
- Enterprise: Undisclosed.
Introducing folk CRM: the best alternative to Streak and Brevo
Looking for an affordable alternative? We recommend folk. A multiple award-winning CRM platform loved for its easy-to-use, plug-and-play CRM system. folk can support multiple use cases across sales, marketing, recruitment and more. You can also use it for your outreach and social sales strategy. Whether you're a solopreneur, small to mid-size team, or large enterprise – folk can help.
Key features
- Contact management: Bring all your contacts into one place seamlessly, from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and X to multiple inboxes including Gmail and Outlook.
- Notes and reminders: Attach notes directly to a contact's profile in folk, and access them on the go. And assign reminders so you know exactly when to follow-up.
- Sales pipeline dashboard: Manage your entire sales cycle and leads with a highly customizable sales pipeline dashboard that can be used in Kanban-board view or listicle.
- Ease of use and customization: Easily customize the pipelines, dashboards, automation, email sequences, so that you can use it across your sales cycle and pipeline management – and other business functions such as recruitment, marketing, and more.
- Social media integration: Import people and companies from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, and X within a click thanks to folk’s Google Chrome extension.
- Contact sync from Gmail and Outlook: Full email sync enabling users to manage all communications directly from the CRM.
- Find email addresses in a click: Contact enrichment powered by Apollo, and Dropcontact so you can fill in missing data points with 1-click.
- Email sequences: Send email sequences with reminders if your leads don’t reply to your first emails. It includes an AI integration allowing you to personalize email at scale.
Price and plans
folk has a 14-day free trial. After that, there are affordable monthly or annual subscription plans. The annual subscription plan is as follows.
- Standard: $20 per user, per month.
- Premium: $40 per user, per month.
- Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.
Streak vs. Brevo: What's the verdict?
It's apparent that both Streak and Brevo offer robust CRM solutions tailored to different business needs. Streak excels with its seamless Gmail integration and intuitive interface, making it ideal for teams deeply embedded in Google's ecosystem. On the other hand, Brevo provides a comprehensive suite of tools for businesses seeking a more traditional approach to CRM. However, for companies that need a more personalized approach to relationship management, folk provides a flexible alternative to these traditional CRM options, blending ease of use with customization. Try folk today, free
Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses