folk vs Heli

Neither of these is a sales pipeline with contacts attached. Both start from the person and treat the deal as secondary, which makes them the right shape for agency business development, investing, recruiting and consulting — work where the relationship is the asset. They diverge on almost everything else, including how much can be checked.

What arrives on the first plan

folk's entry tier is unusually complete for its category. US$24 per member per month billed annually buys email, calendar and WhatsApp sync into a single timeline, a browser extension that pulls people in from LinkedIn, contact enrichment that fills in what you did not type, and pipeline management. Those are frequently paid extras elsewhere. What waits for the US$48 tier is custom objects, deals as first-class records, workspace roles, dashboards and API access.

Heli publishes no price for its hosted service at all. What it publishes instead is an AGPL-3.0 licence and a public repository, so the self-hosted route is free and verifiable. The feature set is smaller by some distance: people and companies, a log of every interaction, projects with stages, keyboard-first navigation, enrichment from a pasted link, and CSV export.

Where the records live, and what you can verify

This reverses the first axis. Heli lets you choose the region your data is processed in — the United States, the European Union, Asia-Pacific — or run it on your own server entirely, which is the strongest data position either product offers and one almost nothing at this size matches. folk is a conventional hosted service with no documented region choice.

The counterweight is evidence. Heli is new, with effectively no independent coverage, so nearly every claim about it rests on the vendor's own documentation with nothing to check it against. folk has been around long enough to have been reviewed by other people, and it publishes its pricing in both dollars and euros rather than leaving the number unstated.

Which should you choose?

Choose folk if you need the work to happen now, across a small team, with messaging and calendar coverage that actually reaches WhatsApp. It is the more capable product and the more verifiable one, and the entry price reflects both.

Choose Heli if you are one person, if where your contacts are stored is something you have an opinion about, or if being able to read and self-host the code matters more than breadth. It is the smaller and younger product, and it asks you to take more on trust — but on data control it is the stronger answer.