I tried Streak for three months last year. A friend who runs a small agency swore by it. "It turns Gmail into a CRM," he said. "You'll never lose track of a deal again."
He was right about the first part. Streak absolutely turns Gmail into a CRM. The problem is I didn't want a CRM.
The Streak experience
Streak adds a pipeline view inside Gmail. You create stages, Lead, Contacted, Proposal Sent, Negotiating, Won, Lost, and drag deals between them. It tracks emails, lets you set reminders, has a bunch of custom fields. It's genuinely impressive as a product.
But after three months, here's what happened: I spent more time managing the pipeline than actually emailing people. Every new email meant deciding which stage to put it in. Every reply meant updating the status. Every follow-up meant checking the pipeline, finding the right deal, reading the notes I'd made, then going to the email thread.
For a 5-person sales team with a structured pipeline? Streak is perfect. For a solo freelancer who sends proposals and needs to know who responded? It's like using a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame.
What I actually needed
I didn't need pipeline stages. I didn't need custom fields. I didn't need deal values and probability percentages and CRM reports.
I needed one thing: a list of people who owe me a reply, sorted by how long they've been silent.
That's it. That's the whole requirement.
Every morning I wanted to open something and see: "These 4 people haven't replied in over a week. These 3 opened your email but haven't responded. Here's a button to follow up."
Streak can technically do this if you set up the right pipeline with the right filters and keep everything updated. But that's like saying Excel can technically be a project management tool. Sure, but why would you.
Where Pynglo fits
Pynglo does the one thing I needed and nothing else. Connect Gmail, it syncs your sent emails, and you get a dashboard with four columns: Ghosted, Waiting, Fresh, Replied.
No pipeline to manage. No stages to configure. No deals to drag around. It just looks at your sent emails, checks which ones got replies, and categorizes them by how long they've been waiting.
The morning routine I wanted, "open something and see who needs a follow-up", takes about 30 seconds now. I look at the Ghosted column, click "follow up" on anything over a week old, pick a template, send. Done.
Streak is better if...
You actually need a CRM. If you're managing relationships with dozens of clients across multiple stages, if you need to track deal values, if multiple people on your team need visibility into the same pipeline, Streak is excellent at all of that. The free tier gives you email tracking and mail merge, and the paid plans start at $49/user/month for the full CRM with pipelines.
If you're doing outbound sales with a structured process, qualify, demo, proposal, close, the pipeline view makes total sense. That's what it was designed for.
Pynglo is better if...
You're a freelancer, consultant, or solo professional who sends proposals and invoices, and your "sales pipeline" is basically "did they email me back yet."
You don't want to learn a CRM. You don't want to manage stages. You don't want another tool that adds work to your day. You want to spend less time wondering who owes you a reply and more time doing the actual work.
The best way I can describe it: Streak is a CRM that happens to be in Gmail. Pynglo is a reply tracker that happens to connect to Gmail. They overlap a tiny bit but they're solving different problems.
Price comparison
Streak: Free for email tracking tools, $49/user/month for Pro CRM (annual billing)
Pynglo: Free for 10 emails/month, $9/month for Pro, $129 one-time for Lifetime
If you need a CRM, Streak at $49/month gets you the full pipeline. If you just need reply tracking, Pynglo at $9/month (or $129 lifetime) is probably the better fit.
My honest take
I don't think Streak is a bad product. It's actually really good at what it does. The problem was me, not Streak. I was using a CRM when I needed a reply tracker. Once I made that distinction, the choice was obvious.
If you're reading this trying to decide between the two, ask yourself one question: "Do I need to manage a sales pipeline, or do I just need to know who owes me a reply?"
If it's the first one, get Streak. If it's the second, try Pynglo. It's free to start.