Meet Maggie, PCMag'sInsightly provides software for automating marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), and customer service tasks. We focus on its CRM product in this review, which offers all of the tools you need to follow leads through the sales pipeline and, at advanced levels, create detailed quotes and track projects. Its snappy setup process and intuitive user experience are highlights, but every tier is considerably more expensive than comparable ones from top competitors. Zoho CRM remains our Editors' Choice winner thanks to its greater flexibility, lower starting costs, and more advanced AI tools.
Insightly offers three CRM plans, starting with the Plus tier ($29 per user per month, billed annually). This level includes Insightly’s core lead and contact management tools, along with advanced reports and preconfigured business dashboards. You also get customizable sales processes, opportunity management features, project management capabilities, and automated workflow tools. The Plus plan limits you to 10GB of file storage, 2,500 email sends per day, 100,000 records, and two configurable profile and page layouts. This is the appropriate tier for small businesses.
Larger businesses should opt for the Professional tier ($49 per user per month, billed annually). It adds up to 100 real-time insight cards, custom page layouts, and lead assignment and routing features, along with low-code tools for connecting business software for which pre-built integrations aren't available. The plan supports 100GB of cloud storage, 5,000 daily email sends, 250,000 records, and an unlimited number of custom profile and page layouts.
The listed Enterprise plan ($99 per user per month, billed annually) adds tools for product management, pricebook management, and quote creation. It also includes comprehensive audit logging, which helps you keep track of business activities. Account limits increase to 250GB of cloud storage, 10,000 daily email sends, and 500,000 records. Keep in mind that this is one example of an enterprise plan; you need to contact the company to get exact pricing for the tools your business needs.
Similar Products
Insightly's prices are high across the board. The Plus tier costs significantly more than other small business solutions, such as Bigin by Zoho (starts at $7 per user per month, billed annually) and Freshsales (starts at $9 per user per month, billed annually). The Professional level is also expensive compared with what Apptivo ($15 per user per month, billed annually) and Zoho CRM ($14 per user per month, billed annually) charge for equivalent features. The Enterprise plan is less expensive than Creatio's base tier (requires a starting investment of $840 per month for new users). Again, however, you can get similar functionality from higher-end Apptivo ($40 per user per month) and Zoho CRM ($52 per user per month) plans.
Setting up an Insightly account takes just a few clicks and an email address. The site then sends you an email with a setup link. From there, you simply create your password. Once you sign in, Insightly asks you to enter your organization name, the number of employees you have, and your phone number. You also get an opportunity to add team members by entering their names and email addresses.
My only complaint here is that you can’t customize each user’s permissions when you invite them. You have to navigate to the drop-down menu under your profile icon, and then click System Settings > User Settings to modify their permissions, along with their personal and login details. This could be more intuitive, especially since a separate User Settings option in the same drop-down menu leads to options for your own account.
Getting started with Insightly is otherwise more intuitive than with tools like Apptivo. Everything has a clear label, buttons for tasks like importing contacts are easy to find, and most areas offer multiple views you can easily switch between. Once you configure the basics, Insightly takes you to an Opportunities Dashboard, where you can view essential statistics, such as your total sales and the state of your sales funnel. This page gives you quick visualizations and is easy for even CRM software beginners to navigate.
If you subscribe to the Professional or Enterprise tier, you can customize what appears on the dashboard for specific teams and even individual employees. You can also create fully separate dashboards for certain employee types, teams, or individuals. This helps ensure that everyone can quickly answer the data they need most.
If you run into trouble, a detailed knowledge base with tutorials for all common Insightly CRM tasks is available. To access it, click the small customer service link at the bottom of the CRM. I wish this were more prominent, but the tutorials are quite comprehensive.
Insightly offers 24/7 email support for all plans. Phone support is available only between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. PT for subscribers to the first two plans. Enterprise subscribers can negotiate premier support as part of their plans, but this still means phone support only between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. PT. If you pay for the Plus or Professional plans, you can pay extra for this support. Competing services do much better here. Apptivo provides 24/5 phone support for all plans, while Zoho offers a premium option with 24/7 phone support.
Insightly uses a pipeline structure of Leads > Contacts > Opportunities > Projects. You collect leads through email or first contact. Then, you can manually enter those into Insightly. If the first contact occurs through an email address you sync with Insightly, the app automatically adds those details. Alternatively, you can import existing leads via a CSV file or an integration with Mailchimp.
I imported some sample leads from a CSV file. The process works much like that for other CRM software I've tested. Insightly successfully mapped most of my information to the correct fields and uploaded the data in a couple of minutes. Additionally, the app gave me the option to trigger automated workflows for these users. I appreciate this option—one I haven’t seen in other CRM tools—since it lets you instantly move leads into your sales pipeline.
Once you add your leads, Insightly displays them in a table with key information like their name, contact information, and current status (like open or closed). If you prefer a Kanban view over the default table format, you can easily switch to it.
Clicking on a lead opens a card with more detailed information about them, including a visual representation of the pipeline they’re in. This is similar to the lead card in other CRMs like Apptivo, though it doesn’t offer as much room for detail as enterprise-level CRMs like Creatio or Sugar Sell. You can create custom fields to add more information, but the number of custom fields you get might depend on your plan.
The Contacts area is for people with whom you have interacted multiple times and feel confident pursuing a deal. Its functionality is similar to that of the Leads area, with a few key differences, such as the ability to import contacts from a wider range of sources, including Gmail and Outlook.
Selecting a contact reveals a contact card; these have more detail than the lead cards, including information like the contact’s local time and weather. The layout is also different, with the sales pipeline in a sidebar rather than at the top. This level of detail is close to what's possible with contact cards in other tools like Zoho CRM. Moreover, you can create custom fields to fill in details, though a total of 50 custom fields is all you get with the base plan.
You can either convert leads to contacts manually or create automated workflows that handle the conversion once specific actions occur. Similarly, you can manually assign team members and tasks to leads once they become contacts or set up related workflows.
Opportunities (or deals in other CRMs) are the sales you’re actively working on closing. Like Leads and Contacts, Insightly displays Opportunities in a table by default. No kanban view is available for this data, unfortunately, but you can filter the list to show specific opportunity types (such as those that are open or closed).
Selecting an opportunity opens a card with the pipeline progress at the top and key details below it. You can fully customize the default layout, as well as create unique layouts for individual or specific types of opportunities. Insightly lets you add buttons for sending data to integrated software, connected organizations, and related interactions to these cards.
If you subscribe to the Enterprise tier, you can optimize the journey from opportunity to customer by creating products and organizing them into Pricebooks. You can use these Pricebooks—or individual items from within the Pricebooks—to create detailed Quotes and close deals faster.
Once an opportunity is closed, you can convert it into a Project. The Projects section's layout is similar to that of the Opportunities section, with both a table for all projects and detailed cards for individual projects. Projects have a specialized pipeline (from Plan to Completion), and you can move them through as you complete each stage. As with Opportunities, you can develop unique pipelines for individual projects or specific types.
Insightly offers comprehensive tools for creating automated workflows in the System Settings area. You can add an unlimited number of Criteria (triggers) and Actions (resulting processes) to each workflow. You can also set workflows to occur once when someone creates a record or multiple times as necessary throughout the customer journey. For example, you can create a workflow that automatically asks leads to schedule a meeting once they are in your system.
This automation tool isn’t as user-friendly as Pipedrive's visual builder or as complex as Creatio's equivalent. Most people on your team should be able to set up basic workflows, and you can leave more complicated ones to advanced users.
Insightly also lets you create Activity Sets, groups of tasks that it automatically assigns to Opportunities or Projects upon creation. For example, you might create an Activity Set that includes sending an email and scheduling a virtual meeting.
If you pay for the Enterprise tier, you can further automate processes with Lead Assignments. These automatically assign leads to certain employees based on things like when you gathered the lead, what campaign they came from, and their demographics. This can be helpful for ensuring that every lead ends up in the sales pipeline.
Insightly offers tools for sending both individual and bulk emails. These email marketing tools integrate directly into your existing Gmail or Outlook app. As such, you can quickly grab templates from Insightly for specific email types, move notes from your emails into the CRM, and view contact or opportunity data while sending an email. These tools are great for maximizing consistency across your business processes, and one of the major selling points of Insightly. Sugar Sell is one of the few other CRMs I've tested that offers similar email functionality.
Within Insightly, you can view emails and create email templates. The email template creator is HTML-based, which is common for CRM tools, but not as user-friendly as the visual designers in Pipedrive or third-party email marketing services. This is inconvenient for bulk emailing, though it shouldn't be much of an issue for individual emails. A bigger problem is that you can't send emails from within Insightly—choosing to send an email opens your Gmail or Outlook app. For all those reasons, you likely still need a dedicated email marketing tool.
Insightly provides basic AI tools for email, including an AI summarizer that can compile important information from long email strings in a couple of minutes. You can use the Insightly AI to create new emails, too, but these emails are very simple and similar to what you get from generative AI tools in Zoho CRM. If you want to create unique messages that help you close deals, you need to significantly modify the AI-generated content or write the emails yourself.
Insightly has two layers of analytics: Dashboards and Reports. Dashboards provide easy-to-digest visual representations of key data like your total sales and win rate. Insightly automatically creates dashboards for contacts, leads, and opportunities. It also gives you the option to build custom dashboards for things like projects. You can customize each dashboard, changing the types of information it displays and the types of visualizations it uses.
Reports are more advanced data analysis tools that compile information about a highly specific aspect of your business or CRM activity. For example, you can create a Contact Activity report to help you evaluate recent interactions with contacts. You can then schedule it to run once a month and for Insightly to automatically send it to the head of your sales department so they can keep an eye on how your processes are working. This setup is fairly involved, just like reports in Creatio. Therefore, you should leave this to team members with advanced knowledge of data analysis.
Insightly's CRM product offers full integrations with all other Insightly and Unbounce tools, making it easy for you to automate marketing tasks, build effective landing pages, and manage customer support tasks all in one place. You can access these integrations by purchasing an Insightly All-In-One plan (starting at $349 per user per month, billed annually).
It's also possible to integrate the CRM with many popular business tools, like the aforementioned Gmail and Outlook. Other examples include QuickBooks Online for accounting and PandaDoc for contract acquisition.
If you have the Professional or Enterprise plan, you get access to AppConnect, a tool for building custom integrations with minimal code. This makes it possible to connect practically any other software.
Insightly doesn’t offer the deep AI-based insights into customer behavior you might expect from a CRM that costs as much as it does. More affordable CRMs like Zoho CRM are much more advanced in this way.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Insightly)
Insightly CRM
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
Insightly scales to provide all the CRM functionality businesses need, no matter their size. It’s easier to set up than many alternatives with similar functionality, has genuinely useful email marketing features, and supports a wide range of integrations. However, the app is significantly more expensive than others at each level of service it supports, and it can't match the advanced AI tools of top competitors. Insightly is still a worthwhile option if you like its interface conventions and are sure your business can take advantage of the other products within the company's portfolio, but it falls a bit short of our Editors' Choice winner for the category, the more affordable and AI-capable Zoho CRM.
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About Our Expert
I've been building websites and marketing campaigns for small businesses since 2010. I also run two businesses of my own: Hired Gunn Writing & Consulting and the Weeknight Writers group. I'm obsessed with testing new tools to improve and expand these businesses, and I've written about those I've tried for sites like CNET, CodeinWP/WPShout, and WinningWP.
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