Learn what features to expect & how each CRM stacks up
For most people in sales, email is the #1 most important way to communicate with leads and customers.
So you’re definitely not wrong to expect a great integration between your emails and CRM.
With all the different CRM possibilities out there however, it can be hard to figure out what to expect from such an integration between email and CRM, so first, we’ll tackle that for you and give you a list of useful features to look out for. 👀
After this, we’ll use this same feature list as well as review scores from two leading sites to compare 7 different top email CRMs that closely integrate with your email inbox.
Here we go! 👇
Before we start: are your needs more specific?
In case your needs are more specific, we’ve made separate overview rankings for:
- CRMs that integrate well with Gmail & Google Workspace
- CRMs that integrate well with Outlook & Microsoft Office 365
If you don’t have a Google or Microsoft inbox however, just keep reading below!
Also, if you’re using LinkedIn a lot, make sure to check out our dedicated breakdown of LinkedIn-CRM integrations.
What features can you expect from a CRM with email integration?
Here are 10 core features you can expect from a CRM that is well integrated with your email inbox:
- Update and use your CRM from within your email inbox
- Live sync your emails & calendar meetings to the CRM
- Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
- Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
- Send automated, personalized email sequences from your email inbox
- Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM
- See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
- Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail or Outlook
- See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
- Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet
That’s a lot of useful stuff to follow up your leads better and boost your productivity! 😄 We’ll detail below which of these features come with each CRM.
How can you define what is the best CRM with email integration for your company?
If you’re looking for a CRM that integrates well with your email inbox, the above set of features can significantly boost your productivity. We’ve researched which of the current email CRMs offer which features and have detailed them for you below.
It is however important to keep the bigger picture in mind when comparing CRMs, because you need to make sure your team will actually use that CRM as well. Getting a CRM that nobody uses is pretty useless as well. 😏
Because of that, we’ll include the current scoring for each CRM on G2 so you get a better idea of how each CRM stacks up. It’s broken down as follows:
- Ease of Use
- Ease of Setup
- Meets Requirements
- Quality of Support
- Ease of Doing Business With
- Ease of Admin
And to top it off, we also incorporate the review score each CRM’s mobile app gets on Google Play. That way it isn’t only great for your email inbox, but handy on the phone too! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
We then take the average of the email integration feature score, the average G2 review score, and the Google Play score for the mobile app, to calculate… the final score! 🥇
The 7 Best CRMs with Email Integration ranked
Don’t want to read the whole comparison? 🤓
Here’s a quick overview of how each CRM performs:
- Salesflare: 9.7/10 🏆
- Copper: 8.5/10
- HubSpot CRM & Sales Hub: 8.2/10
- Freshworks CRM: 7.2/10
- Streak: 6.7/10
- Zoho CRM: 6.4/10
- Pipedrive: 5.7/10
Want to dig into the details? Read on!
1. Salesflare [9.7/10] 🏆
It’s no surprise that Salesflare stacks up so well against other CRMs with a strong email integration: it’s built from the ground up to make following up leads more productive, starting from your email inbox.
Salesflare (founded in 2014) is used by thousands of small and medium-sized businesses who sell to other businesses (incl. agencies, consultancies, development houses, tech companies, …). It’s top ranked across review platforms and is the #1 CRM on Product Hunt, the leading community for product enthusiasts.
Salesflare’s plugins for Gmail and Outlook don’t just offer a really tight integration (more on that below). What’s absolutely unique about them is that they bring 100% of the CRM functionality into your email inbox, so you never need to switch apps while selling (although if you want to use Salesflare separately and do all the same things from there, that is fully possible too 👊).
Note that many CRMs are only focused on integrating on with Google Workspace / Gmail and Office 365 / Outlook. Salesflare however also integrates with most other types of email inboxes and synchronizes those perfectly (not through the email inbox plugin, but through a direct connection with the inbox).
Without further ado, here’s an analysis of how Salesflare stacks up:
Features Salesflare offers: 10/10
- Update and use your CRM from within your email inbox
- Live sync your emails & calendar meetings to the CRM
- Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
- Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
- Send automated, personalized email sequences from your email inbox
- Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM
- See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
- Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail or Outlook
- See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
- Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet
Features Salesflare doesn’t offer: none
G2 review scoring:
- Ease of Use: 9.5
- Ease of Setup: 9.5
- Meets Requirements: 9.3
- Quality of Support: 9.7
- Ease of Doing Business With: 9.9
- Ease of Admin: 9.5
Final result:
- Email CRM feature score: 10/10
- Average G2 review score: 9.6/10
- Google Play review score: 4.8/5 → 9.6/10
- FINAL SCORE: 9.7/10
Pricing to get all of the above (10 features):
$49/user/month (billed annually)
$55/user/month (billed monthly)
Want to see it all in action? You can try Salesflare for free. 👈
It only takes a few minutes to start a trial, connect your email inbox (it’ll be the first thing Salesflare asks you to do) and install the Gmail or Outlook plugin (you can find those in Settings > Applications & Integrations).
We guarantee you won’t find an easier CRM that connects so well with your email inbox! 👌
2. Copper [8.5/10]
Copper is a CRM software company founded in 2011 that fully focuses on serving Google Workspace clients and on closely integrating with Gmail, which is why it deserves its second place in this email CRM ranking.
If you’re not using Gmail, Copper is not for you. It doesn’t even integrate with Microsoft Outlook / Office 365. So just scroll past it if you’re not using Gmail! 🖱️
Copper’s target industries are relatively similar to Salesflare’s, additionally serving real estate clients, as the software is not focused on B2B sales. This allows the company to reach a larger target audience, but inevitably also makes using it a little less straightforward for its B2B users.
When objectively comparing scores, the main differences are a more difficult set-up, lower quality support, and the absence of two email productivity features. Also, the pricing to get all below functionality (8 features) is more than double.
Features Copper offers: 8/10
- Update and use your CRM from within your email inbox
- Live sync your emails & calendar meetings to the CRM
- Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
- Send automated, personalized email sequences from your email inbox
- Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM
- Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail or Outlook (Gmail only)
- See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
- Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet
Features Copper doesn’t offer:
- Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
- See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
G2 review scoring:
- Ease of Use: 9.2
- Ease of Setup: 8.9
- Meets Requirements: 8.8
- Quality of Support: 8.8
- Ease of Doing Business With: 9.1
- Ease of Admin: 9.1
Final result:
- Email CRM feature score: 8/10
- Average G2 review score: 9/10
- Google Play review score: 4.2/5 → 8.4/10
- FINAL SCORE: 8.5/10
Pricing to get all of the above (8 features):
$99/user/month (billed annually)
$134/user/month (billed monthly)
3. HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub [8.2/10]
HubSpot is a marketing automation platform turned everything platform. It was founded in 2005 to make marketing automation easier.
Nowadays, HubSpot’s main selling point is offering an all-in-one solution, including marketing, sales, service and operations. If you don’t like using different apps and integrating them (using tools like Zapier and native integrations), then HubSpot might be what you’re looking for.
To get CRM functionality that is comparable to what you’re getting with the other CRMs in this ranking, you need to get two HubSpot products: its CRM and its Sales Hub.
In terms of its email integration, HubSpot does a fair job, although the pricing to get all this handy functionality (7 features) is quite steep, starting at $450/month billed annually (for 5 users, which is the minimum they impose).
Features HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub offers: 7/10
- Update and use your CRM from within your email inbox
- Live sync your emails & calendar meetings to the CRM
- Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
- Send automated, personalized email sequences from your email inbox
- Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM
- Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail or Outlook
- See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
Features HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub doesn’t offer
- Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
- See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
- Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet
G2 review scoring:
- Ease of Use: 8.6
- Ease of Setup: 8.3
- Meets Requirements: 8.5
- Quality of Support: 8.5
- Ease of Doing Business With: 8.7
- Ease of Admin: 8.6
Final result:
- Email CRM feature score: score: 7/10
- Average G2 review score: 8.5/10
- Google Play review score: 4.6/5 → 9.2/10
- FINAL SCORE: 8.2/10
Pricing to get all of the above (7 features):
$90/user/month (billed annually – minimum 5 users)
$100/user/month (billed monthly – minimum 5 users)
4. Freshworks CRM [7.2/10]
Freshworks CRM (formerly known as Freshsales) is a sales CRM from Freshworks, the company behind / initially called Freshdesk. The company was founded in 2010 to provide a better, cheaper solution for customer service teams.
Freshworks’ main selling point is its feature depth. It has also managed to offer this range of functionality through an easier to use interface than its competitor/predecessor from the same city, Zoho.
While its email integration is not as deep as with better performing CRMs in this ranking, it still deserves a mention in this ranking due to its relatively popular Gmail add-on and integration.
Features Freshworks CRM offers: 5/10
- Update and use your CRM from within your email inbox
- Live sync your emails & calendar meetings to the CRM
- Send automated, personalized email sequences from your email inbox
- Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail or Outlook (Gmail only)
- Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM
Features Freshworks CRM doesn’t offer
- Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
- Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
- See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
- See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
- Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet
G2 review scoring:
- Ease of Use: 9.1
- Ease of Setup: 8.9
- Meets Requirements: 8.9
- Quality of Support: 9.0
- Ease of Doing Business With: 9.1
- Ease of Admin: 9.4
Final result:
- Email CRM feature score: score: 5/10
- Average G2 review score: 9.0/10
- Google Play review score: 3.8/5 → 7.6/10
- FINAL SCORE: 7.2/10
Pricing to get all of the above (5 features):
$69/user/month (billed annually)
$83/user/month (billed monthly)
5. Streak [6.7/10]
When ranking CRMs with email integration, one can not ignore Streak. Streak was founded in 2011 to be the email integrated CRM for Gmail, and it has stayed true to this mission ever since.
Note that, like Copper, this again means that if you don’t use Gmail, Streak is not for you.
Compared to the other CRMs in this list, Streak has historically focused very much on solo users, which is epitomized by its popular free plan without collaboration functionality (and its affordable “Solo” plan upgrade).
Streak runs entirely within the Gmail interface and that’s where it’s strongest. It has no dedicated web application and its mobile apps are a bit limited (getting 2.5 and 3 stars in the App Store and on Google Play).
Still, if you’re a single user and don’t use your CRM on your phone, Streak can be a simple and strong solution to start tracking your leads.
Do note that to get all the 6 below features, you need to get on its Pro plan for teams, which will set you back $59/user/month (billed monthly).
Features Streak offers: 6/10
- Update and use your CRM from within your email inbox
- Live sync your emails & calendar meetings to the CRM
- Send automated, personalized email sequences from your email inbox
- Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM
- Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail or Outlook (Gmail only)
- Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet
Features Streak doesn’t offer:
- Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
- Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
- See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
- See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
G2 review scoring:
- Ease of Use: 8.7
- Ease of Setup: 9.4
- Meets Requirements: 8.8
- Quality of Support: 8.5
- Ease of Doing Business With: 9.4
- Ease of Admin: 8.6
Final result:
- Email CRM feature score: 6/10
- Average G2 review score: 8.9/10
- Google Play review score: 2.6/5 → 5.2/10
- FINAL SCORE: 6.7/10
Pricing to get all of the above (6 features):
$49/user/month (billed annually)
$59/user/month (billed monthly)
6. Zoho CRM [6.4/10]
Zoho is a true household name in the CRM industry, so we couldn’t omit them from this ranking.
Zoho launched its small business CRM product in 2005 and has historically been positioning itself as a cheaper alternative to Salesforce. That is immediately its main selling point.
If you’re looking for a CRM solution, Zoho has many tiers (and products even: Zoho CRM, Zoho CRM Plus, Zoho One, …). To get all three features below, you need to get on the Professional plan of its standard Zoho CRM product. Do note that its add-ons (like the comparable Gmail add-on) usually don’t get the best review ratings.
Features Zoho CRM offers: 3/10
- Update and use your CRM from within your email inbox
- Live sync your emails & calendar meetings to the CRM
- Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM
Features Zoho CRM doesn’t offer:
- Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
- Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
- Send automated, personalized email sequences from your email inbox
- See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
- Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail or Outlook
- See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
- Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet
G2 review scoring:
- Ease of Use: 8.1
- Ease of Setup: 7.6
- Meets Requirements: 8.2
- Quality of Support: 7.4
- Ease of Doing Business With: 7.9
- Ease of Admin: 7.8
Final result:
- Email CRM feature score: 3/10
- Average G2 review score: 7.8/10
- Google Play review score: 4.2/5 → 8.4/10
- FINAL SCORE: 6.4/10
Pricing to get all of the above (3 features):
$23/user/month (billed annually)
$35/user/month (billed monthly)
7. Pipedrive [5.7/10]
Pipedrive is an easy-to-use and easy-to-setup sales CRM for small businesses, and is therefore compared to Salesflare very often.
The company was founded in 2011 to launch a counterreaction to enterprise CRMs like Salesforce, which are built more for enterprise needs than they are for sales teams. Pipedrive set out to change that.
While the company has been doing its best in recent years to build out a closer email integration, it still has some work to do on this front. Its relatively low depth of integration makes it land in last place for this Google CRM ranking.
Features Pipedrive offers: 2/10
- Update and use your CRM from within your email inbox
- Live sync your emails & calendar meetings to the CRM
Features Pipedrive doesn’t offer
- Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
- Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
- Send automated, personalized email sequences from your email inbox
- Use (shared or private) email templates when sending emails through the CRM
- See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
- Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail or Outlook
- See whether these people who clicked email links also visit your website, which pages and for how long
- Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to or customer conversations that have gone quiet
G2 review scoring:
- Ease of Use: 8.9
- Ease of Setup: 8.7
- Meets Requirements: 8.4
- Quality of Support: 8.4
- Ease of Doing Business With: 8.7
- Ease of Admin: 8.6
Final result:
- Email CRM feature score: score: 2/10
- Average G2 review score: 8.6/10
- Google Play review score: 3.3/5 → 6.6/10
- FINAL SCORE: 5.7/10
Pricing to get all of the above (2 features):
$49.90/user/month (billed annually)
$59.90/user/month (billed monthly)
Want to dig deeper into the differences? Just ask our team using the chat on salesflare.com. We’re here to help 😄
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