Contact management CRMs

Streak answers the oldest problem in this category, which is that people do not use the CRM. Its solution is to put the CRM where the work already happens: pipelines render as rows inside Gmail, attached to the threads that generated them, and there is no separate application to open or forget about.

For a business whose sales process is genuinely conducted over email, that is a real advantage rather than a gimmick, and it makes setup almost nonexistent — installing an extension is the whole of it. Adoption stops depending on habit change, the correspondence and the deal record cannot drift apart, and the vendor keeps a set of email power tools free with no time limit underneath the paid tiers, so the extension has a reason to stay installed.

The cost is a hard dependency and a steep price. This works if you are on Gmail and does not exist if you are on Outlook, which rules it out for a large share of the businesses reading this. And at US$49 a user a month for Pro, rising to US$69 and US$129, the seat price is high for something that is structurally a browser extension with a strong idea behind it. Scale headroom is correspondingly modest.

folk starts from a different premise to most of this directory. The record that matters is a person, not a deal, and the product is built for work where the relationship is the asset — agency business development, investing, recruiting, consulting. Pipelines exist, but they are a way of tracking people through stages rather than the centre of gravity.

What you get on the entry tier is unusually complete for the kind of thing it is. Email, calendar and WhatsApp all sync into one timeline, a browser extension pulls people in from LinkedIn, and enrichment fills in the details you did not type. Those are frequently the paid extras elsewhere, and here they are the baseline at US$24 per member per month.

The cost shows up in two places. There is no free plan, so the entry price is genuinely the entry price. On scale headroom and integrations it is mid-field — single sign-on, workspace roles, custom objects and an API all exist, and all of them wait for the second tier. And the things a growing team eventually wants — custom objects, deals as first-class records, workspace roles, dashboards and API access — all sit on the second tier at US$48. For one person tracking a network, that is beside the point; for a team of ten, it doubles the bill.

Heli is a deliberately small product and makes no attempt to be otherwise. It is a contact list with a memory: people and the companies they work for, a log of every call and email, and projects you can move those people through in stages. The interface is built for the keyboard, with single-key navigation and a shortcut for everything.

The unusual part is where the data sits. You choose a region — the US, the EU, Asia-Pacific — or you keep it on hardware you own, which the AGPL-3.0 licence and the public repository make a real option rather than a promise. Full CSV export is documented, and the vendor states there is no tracking, no advertising and no third-party access.

The cost is scale and evidence in roughly equal measure. There is no team tooling to speak of, no published catalogue of integrations, and nothing approaching the automation that larger products sell. The hosted service is documented as free for one person during beta, and what it costs after that is not published, which is the one place this entry falls short of the standard this site applies everywhere else. And it is new enough that almost every claim above rests on the vendor's own documentation, with no independent coverage to check it against.

NetHunt belongs to the small group of products that answer the CRM adoption problem by refusing to be a separate place. It renders inside Gmail, so records, pipelines and the correspondence that produced them share one window, and nobody has to be persuaded to log in anywhere new.

What distinguishes it from lighter tools in the same space is structure. This is a real record model with fields, views and pipelines rather than a clever arrangement of labels, and the entry tiers are listed at US$24 and US$34 a seat, with month-to-month rates of US$30 and US$42.

The thing to weigh is the top half of the price list. Business and Business Plus show monthly rates of US$60 and US$84 but are quoted rather than published for annual billing, so a growing team cannot price its own future without a conversation. And like every Gmail-native product, the dependency is absolute: there is no version of this for a company running Microsoft, which settles the question before any feature comparison begins.