Compare / Follow Up Boss
Follow Up Boss vs run for you
Follow Up Boss is the CRM of record for real-estate teams: it organizes leads, routes them, and reminds your agents to follow up. It does not write the reply. agentplain connects to it. You paste your Follow Up Boss API key once, and Plaino reads your new and updated leads every hour, sorts each one as hot, warm, cold or nurture, and drafts a first reply for each lead that has an email address, for you to edit and approve. It reads your Gmail too, and drafts the replies and follow-ups there. Nothing goes out until a person on your team approves it. If your leads are a mess, buy the CRM first. If the writing is what eats your evenings, that's the work we run.
The shared pain
The week this page is about.
You run a Georgia brokerage. Portal leads arrive at nine and ten at night, and the first useful reply usually wins the client. Your CRM logs every lead and fires a task at the right agent. The reply itself still has to be written by a person, and so does the follow-up when a buyer goes quiet on email. That writing is the part of the desk no CRM does.
The honest trade-off
Where each one is the right call.
Where Follow Up Boss wins
- The pipeline of record. Lead routing, deal stages, and agent accountability in one place — Follow Up Boss does this as well as anything in the category.
- Lead-source coverage: portals and lead providers forward into it with an email swap, and its own docs put basic setup at minutes, not weeks.
- Automation at volume once built — Automations 2.0 fires templates, tasks, and record updates on triggers your team defines.
- Phone-first team workflows, with a dialer add-on and calling reports.
Where agentplain wins
- The writing around the records: a first reply for each new lead that has an email address, set by how hot the lead is, for you to edit and approve, and replies and follow-ups drafted from your Gmail threads in your voice.
- A service team sets it up and adjusts it when you ask. Nobody at your brokerage becomes the software administrator.
- A person approves every draft before anything goes out.
- Connected to the two places the work lands: your new leads in Follow Up Boss and your email in Gmail.
The gap
What Follow Up Boss can't do.
Write the follow-up.
Follow Up Boss fires the task and the template. The 9pm buyer who asked about schools, financing, and a Saturday showing gets a merge-field email until a person writes back. When that conversation is in your Gmail, the fleet drafts the specific reply from the thread; your agent reads it, edits if needed, and sends.
Run itself.
Action plans, automations, and routing rules are built and maintained by someone at your brokerage — its own plans reserve richer onboarding for the higher tiers because setup is real work. With run-for-you, setup and tuning are our job, not a role you staff.
Hold every send for a human.
Its automation sends what you pre-wrote. One fair-housing slip in an auto-sent drip is a first-offense civil penalty of up to $26,262 (HUD, 24 CFR 180.671). Our architecture is the reverse: real-estate drafts get a fair-housing phrase check, and nothing leaves without a person approving it.
Read your inbox.
A CRM works its own database. Much of the real conversation happens in email: the buyer who replies to a listing alert, the seller asking about timing. The fleet reads your Gmail, drafts replies to the emails that need one, and drafts a nudge when a contact goes quiet, then queues each draft for approval.
The other half
What “run-for-you” means.
Run-for-you means the service does the work and you do the deciding. You connect Follow Up Boss by pasting its API key once, and Gmail by signing in with Google. We set the rest up for how your brokerage actually runs.
Every hour the fleet reads your new and updated Follow Up Boss leads, sorts each one as hot, warm, cold or nurture, and drafts a first reply for each lead that has an email address. Through the day it reads your Gmail and drafts the replies and follow-ups a person would otherwise type. Each draft waits in your approval queue. Nothing sends on its own. You, or the agent you assign, approve and send from your own email.
When something needs tuning, tell us by email or chat and we change it, and each quarter your service team sends a check-in on what the fleet drafted and what to change. You never configure the fleet yourself.
Side by side
Line by line.
| Follow Up Boss | agentplain | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup time | Self-serve in minutes; automations and action plans are yours to build | Installed and configured by a service team in days |
| Ongoing labor | An admin or team lead owns automations, templates, and routing | You approve drafts; we run and tune the fleet |
| Personalization | Templates and merge fields your team writes ahead of time | Gmail replies drafted from the live thread, in your voice |
| Cost predictability | Per-user pricing, with add-ons like the dialer billed per user on top | From $99 a seat a month, less per seat as your team grows, published in full |
| When you need help | Help center and support, with richer onboarding on higher plans | Priority email and chat support, plus a quarterly check-in |
Choose Follow Up Boss if
Your problem is lead organization — routing, accountability, pipeline visibility — and someone on your team will own building and maintaining the automations. Follow Up Boss is a strong CRM of record, and nothing about agentplain asks you to leave it.
Choose agentplain if
Your leads are already organized and the bottleneck is the writing: first replies to new leads, answers to the emails that need one, follow-ups when a contact goes quiet. We run that work alongside the CRM you keep.
Questions worth asking
The honest version.
Do I have to replace Follow Up Boss to use agentplain?
No. Keep it. Follow Up Boss stays your CRM of record, and agentplain connects to it: Plaino reads your new Follow Up Boss leads and drafts a first reply for each one that has an email address, for you to approve, and drafts replies to the email in your Gmail too.
How do I connect Follow Up Boss?
In your agentplain workspace, open Connections, choose Follow Up Boss, and paste the API key from your Follow Up Boss profile. We check the key with Follow Up Boss and store it encrypted. The first check for new leads runs right away, then every hour, and the draft reply for each lead with an email address waits in your approval queue.
Follow Up Boss has automations. How is run-for-you different?
Its automations fire templates and tasks on triggers someone at your brokerage builds and maintains. The fleet writes the message itself — a specific draft for the specific lead or email thread — and a person approves it before it goes anywhere. Automation sends what you pre-wrote; run-for-you drafts what you would have written.
Does the fleet send anything on its own?
No. Every draft, whether a reply or a follow-up, lands in your approval queue as a pending item. The fleet drafts; you approve it and send it from your own email. It never auto-sends, moves money, or makes commitments on your behalf.
Bring your real week.
Twenty minutes with a person, not a demo script. We walk through what the fleet would draft for your shop and where you stay in control. If it isn't a fit, we say so.