Wend vs folk (2026)
Two ways to keep the people you know. What decides it is what an AI assistant may change once it is connected.
Quick verdict
Disclosed: we make Wend. These are different purchases. folk is a good team CRM: shared lists, pipelines, sequences, priced per member. If two or more people work the same contacts, buy folk. Wend is one person's memory, flat priced, read by whichever assistant you already use, and it does not do sequences on purpose. The deciding difference is the container: a folk workspace is administered by your employer, and a Wend graph is administered by you.
Published by Wend. Competitor claims come from their own material, with the date we checked them.
Wend, measured
92
people from one WhatsApp read, before you grant a single permission.
0.63s
to read 69,000 messages and find the people in them. No model call.
2.4s
for one extraction on the Mac itself, at no cost.
Measured on a real Mac running macOS 26.4.1. On-device extraction needs Apple silicon with Apple Intelligence turned on.
Side by side
| Dimension | Wend | folk |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A private memory of the people you know, on your own Mac, read by whichever AI you use. It builds itself from what the machine holds, keeps a source on every fact, and plans your day around the people in it. | A well-designed team CRM with shared lists, pipelines, email sequences and enrichment, priced per member, which shipped an MCP server in July 2026. |
| Pricing | $29/mo or $290/yr, flat at any network size | From about $24 per member per month (checked 2026-08-06) |
| Free tier | None. One price, and nothing is deleted if you stop paying | None. The account is blocked when the trial ends |
| Availability | A Mac app. Cursor, Claude Code and other local agents connect automatically; Claude, ChatGPT and anything that speaks MCP points at one link. Google sign-in only | Shipping: web plus extension |
| Built for | One person's private memory | A team sharing contacts, pipelines and outbound |
| Pricing model | Flat. $29/mo at any network size | Per member, from about $24/mo |
| When you stop paying | Nothing is deleted. Your graph stays on your Mac and you can export all of it | The account is blocked when the trial ends |
| Agent access | MCP across Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Gemini, with writes arriving as proposals | MCP server, shipped July 2026 |
| Capture | Mail, calendar, contacts, LinkedIn archives, your Mac, files, and anything you hand your agent | Manual entry, integrations and enrichment |
| Outreach | Individual drafts, approved by you before anything sends | Email sequences, built for team outbound |
| Your day | Tasks, and a day laid out around the meetings in your Google Calendar. Time for a person carries the reason it was held | Shared lists and pipelines, worked by the team |
| Privacy | Solo-private by default | A shared workspace your employer administers |
Competitor facts and pricing last checked August 2026, from published vendor material. Verify on each vendor’s site.
Who should pick which
Pick Wend if…
- The network is yours and should outlast the job.
- Per-member pricing for one person is the wrong shape.
- You want your own assistant answering questions about your contacts.
- You want your record of a person to still name its source a year later.
Pick folk if…
- Two or more people need to work the same list.
- You run pipelines with stages, or shared outbound sequences.
- You want an established tool with a long track record.
The argument, in order
folk shipped an MCP server in July 2026, and so did most of this category. Agent access is commodity, so it is not the reason to pick either one.
Ownership is the first real question, because these are different containers. folk is a workspace your company administers, right for a pipeline the team works together and wrong for relationships that should outlast the job.
That moves the real question one step down. Your assistant can change the record of the people you know in any of these products. What keeps that memory worth trusting is whether a person saw the claim before it landed, and whether the fact says where it came from afterwards.
Measured there, the category is close to uniform, and you can check this part. A scan of all 47 published Dex tool schemas on 2026-08-06 returned nothing for provenance, propose, audit, approve or conflict. Attio's per-call prompt comes closest, with no queue to review later and no source on what it wrote.
The gap stays open because it is a data model, not a feature. A fact carries a source only if the source was recorded the instant the fact was created, on every write path and every import. Ship the queue next quarter and the old facts still have nothing under them.
So Wend recorded the source on its first row and on every row since, and every agent write waits in a queue you approve. Every fact has a source, and you approved it.
Wend vs folk: FAQ
Is Wend a personal alternative to folk?
Yes, for one person. folk is a collaborative CRM priced per member, from about $24/mo as of August 2026. Wend is a single person's memory at a flat $29/mo, living on their own Mac and read by the assistant they already use.
Does Wend do email sequences?
No, deliberately. Wend drafts individual messages and nothing sends without your approval. If you need bulk sequences, folk or a sales tool is the right purchase.
Can a team use Wend?
Wend is solo-private by design and each person's memory is their own. Shared team access is a custom arrangement rather than a plan on the pricing page.
A digital brain for the people in your life.
It installs on your Mac, builds the graph out of what is already there, and answers from the AI you already use. Every fact keeps its source. $29 a month, flat at any network size.
Access is invite only right now.