Streak

Streak is the CRM you use when you’ve tried three other CRMs and nobody on your team actually logged into any of them. It lives entirely inside Gmail, which means your sales pipeline sits right next to your inbox. That’s its biggest strength and its most obvious limitation. If your team runs on Google Workspace and you need pipeline tracking without the overhead of a standalone platform, Streak deserves a hard look. If you need serious reporting, complex automation, or multi-channel sales engagement, you’ll outgrow it fast.

What Streak Does Well

The Gmail integration isn’t a gimmick — it’s genuinely deep. Most CRMs that claim email integration really just sync emails in the background. Streak is different. Your pipeline literally appears as a sidebar in Gmail. When you open an email from a prospect, you see their deal stage, notes, contact history, and custom fields right there. No switching tabs. No logging into a separate app. I’ve seen CRM adoption rates jump from 30% to 90%+ at small agencies simply because reps never had to leave the tool they already lived in.

Email tracking works consistently well. You get real-time notifications when someone opens your email or clicks a link. The tracking pixel implementation is reliable — I’ve tested it side-by-side with dedicated tools like Mailtrack and Yesware, and Streak holds up. You can see exactly when a prospect opened your proposal at 11 PM on a Sunday, which tells you something about their interest level. The tracking data feeds into your pipeline view, so you can sort deals by recent email engagement.

Mail merge is surprisingly capable for a built-in tool. You can send personalized bulk emails using data from your pipeline columns — names, company details, custom fields. The scheduling feature lets you queue up sends for optimal times. At 1,500 emails per day on the Pro plan, it handles most outreach needs for small teams. I’ve used it to run campaigns of 200-300 personalized emails for consulting clients, and the deliverability has been solid since you’re sending from your actual Gmail account rather than a mass email platform.

The spreadsheet-style pipeline view makes sense immediately. Streak’s pipeline looks and behaves like a Google Sheet, which means anyone who’s used a spreadsheet can manage deals in Streak within five minutes. You can add custom columns, formulas, dropdown fields, and date fields. Drag deals between stages. Filter and sort by any column. There’s almost no training required, which matters enormously for small teams without a dedicated ops person.

Where It Falls Short

Reporting is the weakest link. If you need to pull a report showing conversion rates by lead source, broken down by sales rep, with a trend line over the last six months — Streak will frustrate you. The reporting module has improved over the years, but it’s still miles behind what you’d get in Pipedrive or HubSpot. On the free and Solo plans, reporting is essentially nonexistent. Even on Pro, you’re limited to basic pipeline metrics. Teams that need to present sales data to leadership or investors will find themselves exporting to Google Sheets constantly, which defeats the purpose.

The mobile app is an afterthought. I don’t say this lightly — I’ve used it regularly on both iOS and Android. It’s slow to load, the pipeline view is cramped on smaller screens, and critical actions like editing deal details require too many taps. If your sales team works primarily from phones (field sales, real estate walkthroughs, trade shows), Streak’s mobile experience will be a daily annoyance. Compare this to Pipedrive’s mobile app, which is genuinely excellent, and the gap is obvious.

Scaling past a small team creates real friction. Streak was designed for individuals and small teams, and it shows. When you get to 15+ users, you’ll run into issues with permission granularity, pipeline performance with thousands of records, and the lack of territory or team hierarchy management. The Enterprise plan adds custom roles, but the underlying architecture still feels like a personal productivity tool stretched to handle team workflows. I’ve watched two clients migrate away from Streak at the 20-person mark because the collaboration features couldn’t keep up.

You’re completely locked to Gmail. This seems obvious, but it catches people. If your company uses Microsoft 365, Streak simply doesn’t work. If you hire someone who prefers Outlook or Apple Mail, they can’t use your CRM. If Google has an outage (and it happens), your CRM goes down with it. There’s no web-only fallback that provides the full experience. This vendor lock-in is a strategic risk that small companies sometimes ignore until it bites them.

Pricing Breakdown

Streak’s pricing starts generous and gets expensive quickly relative to what you get.

Free ($0): Legitimately useful for a solo freelancer. You get basic pipelines, 500 contacts, email tracking, and 50 mail merge emails per day. The catch is a single user only and limited pipeline customization. I’d recommend this for freelancers or consultants tracking fewer than 50 active deals.

Solo ($15/user/month): Removes the pipeline limits and bumps mail merge to 800 emails/day. You also get link tracking and basic integrations. This is the sweet spot for individual professionals who’ve outgrown the free tier. No shared pipelines though — this is still a single-player experience.

Pro ($49/user/month): This is where Streak becomes a team CRM. Shared pipelines, advanced reporting, automation (called Workflows), and 1,500 mail merge emails/day. The jump from $15 to $49 is steep, and it happens precisely at the moment you need to collaborate. Most teams of 3-8 people will land here. At $49/user, a five-person team pays $245/month — comparable to HubSpot’s Starter or Pipedrive’s Advanced tier, both of which offer significantly more functionality outside of email.

Pro+ ($69/user/month): Adds AI-powered features like email drafting assistance, smart suggestions, and advanced automation triggers. The AI copilot features are useful but not essential. If you’re already on Pro and don’t feel limited by automation capabilities, the extra $20/user is hard to justify.

Enterprise ($129/user/month): Custom roles, HIPAA compliance (relevant for healthcare), data validation rules, and priority support. At this price point, you’re paying more per user than Salesforce Essentials or Zoho CRM Enterprise, which offer dramatically more functionality. The Enterprise plan only makes sense if HIPAA compliance or specific data governance requirements force you into it.

No setup fees on any plan. Annual billing saves roughly 20%. There’s no contract lock-in on monthly plans.

Key Features Deep Dive

Pipeline Inside Gmail

This is the core product. When you install Streak’s Chrome extension, a panel appears on the right side of your Gmail inbox. Every email thread can be linked to a deal in your pipeline. When you open a thread, the deal context appears automatically. You can update deal stage, add notes, change custom field values, and log activities without opening a new tab. In practice, this means your CRM gets updated as a natural byproduct of reading email. I’ve worked with sales teams that went from zero CRM updates per day to comprehensive deal tracking simply because the friction dropped to near zero.

Email Tracking and Engagement Data

Every email you send through Gmail can be tracked for opens and link clicks. You’ll see a small eye icon in your sent messages showing read receipts. The data aggregates at the contact and deal level, so you can see engagement patterns over time. One thing that caught me off guard: Streak shows you exactly how many times an email was opened and from which locations (based on IP). This is useful for knowing when a prospect has forwarded your proposal to colleagues — if you see opens from three different cities, someone’s sharing your email internally.

Mail Merge

Streak’s mail merge pulls data from your pipeline to personalize bulk emails. You select a pipeline, choose which contacts to include, write your template with merge fields like {{Company Name}} or {{Deal Value}}, and schedule sends. The system sends each email individually from your Gmail account, which means better deliverability than marketing automation platforms that send from shared IPs. The limitation: you can’t build complex drip sequences. It’s a one-shot send, not a multi-step campaign. For multi-touch sequences, you’ll need to pair Streak with a tool like Lemlist or Woodpecker.

Workflows (Automation)

Available on Pro and above, Workflows let you automate repetitive actions. When a deal moves to “Proposal Sent,” automatically create a task to follow up in three days. When a new email arrives from a contact in your pipeline, automatically update the “Last Contact” date. The automation builder is visual and simple. However, it’s limited compared to HubSpot’s workflow engine or Zapier-powered automations. You won’t find conditional branching, multi-step sequences, or cross-pipeline triggers. For basic “if this, then that” automations, it works. For anything more complex, you’ll hit the ceiling.

Meeting Scheduler

Streak includes a built-in scheduling tool that works like a lighter version of Calendly. You share a link, prospects pick a time from your available slots, and the meeting appears in your Google Calendar. The meeting automatically links to the relevant deal in your pipeline. It’s not as feature-rich as dedicated scheduling tools (no round-robin assignment, no payment collection), but it eliminates the need for yet another SaaS subscription for basic booking needs.

Custom Pipelines and Fields

You can create pipelines for anything — sales deals, hiring candidates, bug reports, investor relations, apartment hunting. Each pipeline has custom stages, custom columns (text, number, date, dropdown, formula, tag), and custom views. The formula fields are particularly useful: you can calculate weighted pipeline value, days in stage, or commission amounts directly in your pipeline view. This flexibility is what makes Streak work for non-sales use cases — I’ve seen it used effectively for PR teams tracking media outreach, recruiters managing candidates, and VCs tracking deal flow.

Who Should Use Streak

Solo professionals billing $50-300K/year who manage 10-100 active deals and do most client communication via email. Consultants, freelancers, coaches, real estate agents. The free or Solo tier covers their needs, and the zero-learning-curve aspect means they’ll actually use it.

Small agencies and service firms (2-8 people) where everyone already uses Google Workspace. The Pro plan gives shared pipelines and enough automation to keep deals organized. If email is your primary client communication channel, Streak makes more sense than a standalone CRM that nobody opens.

Startups in the first 12-18 months that need basic deal tracking but don’t want to invest time setting up and configuring a full CRM. Streak can serve as your CRM v1.0 while you figure out your sales process. When you need more, migrate to something like HubSpot or Pipedrive.

Anyone with zero technical skill who needs a CRM. If the idea of configuring Salesforce makes you break out in hives, Streak’s spreadsheet-style simplicity is genuinely appealing.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

Teams larger than 15 people will struggle with Streak’s collaboration and permission limitations. Look at Pipedrive for a sales-focused alternative or HubSpot for a broader platform. See our Pipedrive vs HubSpot comparison for guidance.

Companies using Microsoft 365 or Outlook. Streak simply doesn’t work outside Gmail. Copper is another Google-native option, but if you’re on Microsoft, look at HubSpot or Freshsales instead.

Sales teams that need strong reporting and forecasting. If your VP of Sales needs weighted pipeline reports, conversion funnel analytics, and rep activity dashboards, Streak won’t cut it. Pipedrive or Freshsales give you far better analytics at similar price points.

Multi-channel sales organizations. If your sales process involves phone calls, LinkedIn outreach, live chat, and SMS alongside email, Streak only covers one channel. You need a platform like HubSpot or Zoho CRM that unifies all touchpoints.

Anyone needing marketing automation. Streak doesn’t do lead scoring, landing pages, nurture campaigns, or marketing analytics. If you need marketing and sales in one platform, HubSpot is the obvious choice. See our full HubSpot review for details.

The Bottom Line

Streak solves one problem better than almost any CRM on the market: getting small teams to actually use a CRM. By eliminating the separate login, separate tab, and separate learning curve, it removes the #1 reason CRM implementations fail — adoption. But it trades that simplicity for depth. If your needs grow beyond basic pipeline tracking and email-centric sales, you’ll eventually migrate to something more capable. Use Streak when it fits, and don’t force it when it doesn’t.

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