Lark is genuinely good at what it was built for: team communication, document collaboration, and internal workflows. If your team lives in shared docs, wikis, and a unified chat interface, Lark delivers. The interface is clean, the ecosystem is solid, and the onboarding is painless. But here's the problem: if you're also trying to run a sales pipeline, invoice customers, manage contracts, or track customer interactions in Lark, you're forcing a tool past its design boundary. Lark doesn't have a native CRM. It has no invoicing. It doesn't handle e-signatures natively. And when you try to bolt customer management onto a docs-and-chat platform, you end up with spreadsheet chaos, manual data entry, and deals slipping through the cracks. This post is for teams that have outgrown Lark because they need to *sell*—not just communicate internally. What Lark actually does well (and who should stay) Let's be fair: Lark isn't broken for the right use case. Internal-only workflows. If you're documenting processes, sharing meeting notes, running async standups, and organizing knowledge across a growing team, Lark's unified interface and full-featured wiki work. Cross-functional collaboration without external integrations. Lark's native document editing, commenting, and approval workflows are thoughtfully designed for teams that don't need third-party plugins. Companies where customer touchpoints are rare. If you sell contracts infrequently, invoicing is handled elsewhere, and customer communication is light, Lark doesn't feel like a gap. Organizations with heavy Chinese market focus. Lark (built by ByteDance) integrates naturally with WeChat Pay and Alipay, making it simpler for Asia-based teams. If this describes you: stay on Lark. The problem isn't the tool; it's the fit. Where Lark breaks down for sales and customer teams The moment you're running a repeatable customer-facing business—whether SaaS, services, or high-volume B2B—Lark stops working. Not because it's poorly built, but because it was never designed for this. No native CRM or pipeline management Lark has no customer contact database built in. No lead stages. No deal pipeline. You can create a Lark database or spreadsheet to *pretend* you have a CRM, but you're managing customer state manually—no way to track interactions, set follow-ups, or see deal progress at a glance. This means: Deals live in email chains or chat threads, not a single source of truth. Your team can't see what the previous person said to a customer without scrolling. Sales reps forget to follow up because there's no persistent task system tied to customer records. You have no pipeline visibility—no forecasting, no stage analysis, no bottleneck detection. No invoicing or billing integration If you quote a customer in Lark and need to invoice them, you're jumping to a separate tool. There's no connection between a deal and an invoice, no payment tracking, no aging reports. Your finance team has no way to see what's been quoted, what's been signed, and what's actually owed. No native contract or e-signature capability Lark has no contract templates, no approval workflows for commercial documents, and no way to e-sign directly. You're exporting PDFs and jumping to DocuSign or similar, losing the connection between contract status and deal progress. Customer data stays scattered When deals, conversations, invoices, and contracts live in different tools, data entry becomes manual and error-prone. Your sales team documents interactions in Lark chat, but that data doesn't flow into a contact record. Your finance team receives an invoice request via email. No one has a unified view of the customer relationship. The hidden cost of staying on Lark for sales Most teams don't realize the price they're paying until they try to scale. Wasted time. Sales reps spend 30 minutes a day hunting for customer context across tools. Finance spends hours manually reconciling what's been quoted, signed, and invoiced. Lost deals. Follow-ups fall through because there's no reminders tied to customer records. Sales cycles lengthen because there's no visibility into what's blocking progress. Errors. Manual data entry between systems means quotes contain wrong prices, invoices are sent to the wrong contact, contracts get signed but never recorded. No playbook enforcement. Without a structured pipeline, your sales process is whatever each rep decides to do. No consistency, no repeatability. At a 5-person agency, Lark + spreadsheets might be tolerable. At 15 people with consistent revenue, it becomes a tax on growth. Evaluating Lark alternatives: what actually matters When you're shopping for Lark's replacement, focus on what Lark won't give you. Built-in CRM with pipeline and contact management You need a proper customer database with contact records, deal stages, and activity history—not spreadsheets or workarounds. The CRM should be the center, not a side feature. Unified messaging—especially WhatsApp, SMS, and email