Free Streak Alternatives for Tracking Deals in Gmail

You used Streak's free personal plan, hit its box cap or the daily mail-merge ceiling, and now you want to know which free tools do the same job without the wall. This is that list, for a solo operator running a pipeline inside Gmail rather than a team scaling a sales org.

One disclosure up front: we build AI Emaily, and we are on this page. AI Emaily is not a CRM — it is an AI email client that handles the drafting, follow-up and filing half of what people use Streak for, and it runs on a 7-day trial rather than a free plan. That distinction is stated in the entry, not smuggled past you.

The sort here is by who funds the thing you are not paying for. That single fact predicts which limit you hit, when it moves, and whether it can be taken away.

The short answer#

If you want a real pipeline with deal stages linked to your Gmail thread history, HubSpot Free CRM is the honest top pick — a permanent free tier from a large vendor whose paid tiers subsidise it.

If you want deal cards on a board rather than a table, Trello's free plan does that with a native Gmail add-on. If you want a database you own, Notion or Airtable both hold pipeline rows on a free tier and connect to Gmail through the Google Workspace Marketplace.

If you do not want another tool at all, a labels-plus-follow-ups workflow inside Gmail itself gets you further than most people expect, and it stays free because it is Gmail.

And if you want the AI drafting and follow-up half of Streak — but not the pipeline half — AI Emaily's 7-day trial covers that, on Gmail, Outlook or IMAP. It is a trial, not a free plan.

Why 'free' means five different things here#

Every option below costs nothing to start, and none of them are free in the same way. Somebody funds the servers your mail passes through, and identifying who takes about a minute per product.

Read the row your candidate sits in before you read its review. The funding model tells you where the wall is more reliably than any feature list does.

How we compared, and what we did not do#

This compares documented capability, provider coverage and the shape of each free offer, read from vendor pages in August 2026. It is not a lab test, and we did not run eight tools side by side for a month, so nothing here is dressed up as one.

The criteria are the ones that decide whether a free option survives a real working week: how deals attach to Gmail threads, whether pipeline stages exist at $0, seat and record caps, whether mail merge or tracking is available, and whether you can migrate out without a rebuild.

The one thing we deliberately do not quote is a competitor's price, rating or review count. Free-tier terms in this category moved several times over the past year, and a stale number causes worse decisions than none. Every packaging note here is qualitative — check the current page on the vendor's own site before you commit.

Free Streak alternatives for Gmail at a glance#

Use this to pick two candidates, not a winner. The last column is the one to read twice — it is where each option stops being free, or where it stops being a real pipeline.

1. AI Emaily — the AI email half of Streak, on a 7-day trial#

We build AI Emaily, so read this as the informed pitch it is, and judge it on what it is not first. It is not a CRM. It has no deal boxes, no pipeline stages, no dollar amounts, no mail merge in the Streak sense. If pipeline tracking with stages is your actual requirement, our concession is straightforward: HubSpot Free CRM below is the better answer, and it stays free.

What AI Emaily is: an AI-native email client that connects Gmail, Outlook or IMAP, triages what arrives, drafts replies you approve before send, and tracks follow-ups the agent has committed to on your behalf. For the solo operator who used Streak mainly to remember 'reply to this by Thursday' and 'file this by client,' that is the actual job — and doing it with an agent rather than a pipeline row is a genuine alternative.

The packaging is a 7-day free trial on the Pro or Autopilot plan, card required, $0 if you cancel before day seven. It is not a permanent free tier and we do not describe it as one — that is the honest packaging shape and it belongs in the row above.

What is in the trial at full strength is the control layer most AI tools skip: Copilot drafts and files, nothing sends until you approve it, actions are reversible inside an undo window, and an audit log records what the agent did. Drafting voice comes from a Personal Context brain and client profiles you write, not from a model reading your old mail, and we do not train on your mail.

The dimension we do not win, stated by name: we do not hold a pipeline. If you need to see fifteen deals ranked by stage with an amount attached, this is not that tool. Use it for the drafting and follow-up half, and pair it with a real free CRM below if you need the pipeline half.

2. HubSpot Free CRM — the actual free pipeline#

This is the tool that most Streak refugees end up on, and it is the honest #1 for the literal query 'free CRM that lives in Gmail with real pipeline tracking.' HubSpot's Free CRM tier is a permanent free plan from a large vendor whose paid Sales Hub subsidises it — that funding model produces a durable free tier rather than a burning candle.

For Gmail specifically, HubSpot ships an official Chrome extension that logs threads to contact records, shows the contact card in a Gmail sidebar, and lets you drop templates and tracked links into replies. Deals attach to contacts, contacts attach to threads, and the pipeline view lives in the CRM rather than inside Gmail — which is a trade Streak users notice on day one.

What free does not include, plainly. One deal pipeline, a capped contact count, and a small seat allowance. Workflow automation, sequences and reporting depth live in paid tiers, so if you want stage-change automations firing behaviour, that is where the wall is. For a solo operator running one pipeline for months, that wall is a long way off.

State the win clearly: if 'free forever with a real pipeline' is the criterion that got you searching, HubSpot Free CRM is the answer, and putting it below AI Emaily on that criterion alone would be dishonest. On the drafting-and-follow-up half we are stronger; on the pipeline half they are.

3. Streak's own free personal plan — the incumbent, and its limits#

Before you leave, check whether you actually outgrew Streak or just tripped one specific limit. Its free personal plan still exists as of August 2026 and includes the pieces most solo users came for: email and link tracking, snippets, mail merge (capped at 50 per day), a thread splitter and Streak Share. The Chrome extension keeps everything inside Gmail rather than a separate app.

The walls people actually hit are three: the personal-use licence terms, the daily mail-merge ceiling, and the way the deeper CRM features — advanced reporting, custom permissions, shared pipelines — live in the paid tiers rather than the free one. If your issue is a single one of those, a lateral move to another free tool may not solve it either.

The one thing to check before switching: whether your Streak boxes hold data you would need to export. Streak has an export path, but a pipeline with hundreds of custom fields and years of history is a real migration project rather than an afternoon. Sometimes the honest move is to stay on Streak and pay for what you are hitting, then pick a fresh tool for the next thing.

4. Trello — kanban that plays well with Gmail#

Trello is the classic answer when a pipeline is really just cards moving through columns. Its free plan gives you a workspace, a small number of boards, and cards you can attach a Gmail thread to via the official Trello for Gmail add-on — the add-on turns a thread into a card on a board of your choice with one click.

For a solo operator running a single pipeline — leads to qualified to proposal to won — Trello's free tier is often enough on its own, and its Butler automation on free covers the small repeated moves you would otherwise do by hand.

Where it stops: Trello is not a contact database. Cards are not people, and a deal that lives on a card does not automatically link to every future email from that person. For a light pipeline it is a genuinely free answer. For anything you would call a CRM, look at HubSpot Free above.

5. Notion — a database, a workspace, and a Gmail button#

Notion's free personal plan holds a pipeline as a database with kanban, table, calendar and gallery views over the same rows. That flexibility is the point: you build the pipeline you actually run, rather than fitting into someone else's schema. The Google Workspace Marketplace add-on lets you save a Gmail thread to a Notion page from inside Gmail.

For freelancers, agencies and solo consultants who already keep client work in Notion, a deals database sitting next to project notes and invoices is often the honest answer — one tool instead of three.

The trade-off is that Notion is a workspace before it is a CRM. Two-way Gmail sync, automated logging of every reply, and native email tracking are not what it does. Use it when your pipeline is small enough that manual filing is fine, and the value is having the pipeline live where the rest of your work already does.

6. Airtable — a spreadsheet that holds a real pipeline#

Airtable's free tier holds a pipeline in a spreadsheet-plus-database structure, with a kanban view over the same records. If Notion is a workspace and HubSpot is a CRM, Airtable sits between them — a database that behaves like a spreadsheet and connects to Gmail through both a Google Workspace Marketplace add-on and a Chrome extension.

The record cap on the free tier is generous enough for a solo pipeline, and Airtable Interfaces on free give you a lightweight dashboard view over the deal table without paying for the higher tiers.

Where it stops: heavy Gmail sync, automation runs and view-count are all bounded on free. If you want every reply to automatically append to a record with no clicks, that is a paid-tier or third-party integration workflow. For a solo operator with a hundred active deals it is a genuinely usable free pipeline.

7. Bitrix24 — the full free CRM most people forget#

Bitrix24 is the option nobody remembers on Streak-alternatives lists, and it is worth naming: its free plan includes a full CRM with unlimited users, deal pipelines, contacts and tasks, plus email connectors for Gmail. As permanent free CRMs go, the seat allowance is unusually large.

The trade you pay for that is interface complexity. Bitrix24 is a suite — CRM, tasks, telephony, drive, chat, sites — and the CRM sits inside the suite rather than being the whole product. For a solo operator that can feel like a lot of tool for one job.

Where it stops: storage caps, feature-depth in paid tiers, and a UX that a Streak user will find heavier. But if 'unlimited users on a free CRM' is a criterion, Bitrix24 is the honest answer, and skipping it on aesthetic grounds is a category error on a page about what is actually free.

8. Gmail labels + follow-ups — the no-extra-tool approach#

Before you install anything, check whether you can do the job with what Gmail already ships. A stage-label system — 'stage/lead', 'stage/qualified', 'stage/proposal', 'stage/won', 'stage/lost' — plus filters that auto-apply them on incoming replies, plus Gmail's built-in follow-up nudges and snooze, covers a surprising share of what people install Streak for in the first place.

The trick is treating labels as a state machine rather than tags. A thread has exactly one stage label at a time. You move it by removing the old label and adding the new one — the multi-select checkbox and the Labels button do this in two clicks. Filters do the initial routing on subject or sender patterns you already know.

For follow-ups, Gmail's own nudges surface threads that have gone quiet, and snooze buries a thread until a date you set. Multiple inboxes turns your inbox into a split view — one pane per stage label — so the pipeline is visible without a plugin. Search operators (has:attachment, older_than:14d, label:stage/proposal) let you interrogate the pipeline in ways a static plugin cannot.

Where it stops: no contact database, no dollar amounts per deal, no report you can send to anyone else, and the whole thing lives in your head as convention. But it is genuinely free, cannot be re-cut by a vendor, and works today.

How to choose for your situation#

Match your row and start with one option. Evaluating eight free tools at once is how people end up still using the paid one they meant to cancel.

The verdict#

The honest top pick for the literal query — 'free Streak alternatives for tracking deals in Gmail' — is HubSpot Free CRM. It is a permanent free plan from a large vendor, it includes a real pipeline linked to contacts and threads, and its Gmail extension keeps the workflow close to where you already work. That is the answer, and putting anything else at that position on that specific criterion would be dishonest.

If your pipeline is really cards on a board, Trello with its Gmail add-on gets you there. If your work already lives in Notion or Airtable, keep it there and add the pipeline as a database. If you want unlimited seats on a free CRM and can accept the interface, Bitrix24 is the sleeper answer. If you want to install nothing, Gmail labels plus follow-ups plus multiple inboxes is a real workflow, and it is what most people should try first before adopting anything else.

AI Emaily's place on this page is narrow and honest: it is a 7-day trial for the AI drafting and follow-up half of what Streak does, not a free CRM and not a pipeline tracker. We build AI Emaily. If those two halves are the same tool in your head, run HubSpot Free CRM and AI Emaily's trial in parallel for a week — that is the combination that actually reproduces what Streak was doing for you.