Insightly Reviews

Pros

Insightly CRM is itself a very reliable tool which allows the user to gain the most of the advantage with its easy to use features and efficient tools. We can also easily integrate it with other tools to improve the overall productivity. It's super responsive when dealing with the customers. We can easily maintain our sales cycles and ongoing customer service to provide extra care for the clients. The user-interface is also quite easy and manageable than other such tools.

Cons

Chrome extensions are bit of a clunky addition which further complicated the working procedure so mostly avoid it. The other tools integration is right on point but the social media integration misses few of the parts and continues to be a wastage of time for us. In the end, it proves to be much effected on our overall work and improves the efficiency of our work routine.

Pros

The thing that I like most about Insightly is that it allows me to document everything from start to finish with each customer. For example, if I send an email to a lead/customer, all I have to do is add that as an attachment in Insightly and I can go back at any time and see anything that was linked with that particular person. This helps track progress when passing off to other team members, too. In a sense, Insightly brings all of the "record-keeping" together and puts in one simple platform.

Cons

The project management function is pretty basic. Unlike a couple other CRM software that I've tested, Insightly does not offer many of the graphical views that the others do. Being someone who has an easier time seeing data in the visual realm, this was a feature that I wished Insightly would add.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Insightly

Salesforce was not transparent in their pricing. Also, my colleague told me that she heard Salesforce is difficult to set up.

Pros

I really like how Insightly can be customized and scaled to fit the needs of the business. We are a mid size company and other CRMs were too robust and complicated. Insightly is just right.

Cons

I think it is kind of expensive per user. I would like to see a lower monthly cost per user.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Insightly

Insightly was the right sized product for us and our needs. Salesforce was too expensive and had to many features we didn't need.

Pros

Great CRM and Pipeline Management out the box!
Contact Syncing for Google is great - despite minor issues.
Good simple project lists.
Links nicely to Mailchimp and Xero.

Cons

Very very poor project management. You will need to use other packages for almost anything. No resource management. No Gantt charts. No visibility.

Email integration is rudimentary. Task integration is non-existent.

No Office 365 contact synchronisation.

Pros

Insightly Helps small and mid business manage their leads and projects online, through a fully fledged cloud based tool that provides an abundance of smart features, including customer insights from internet sources, and structured project/opportunity management platform.

Cons

It is probably requiring some advanced knowledge from our end, but integrating Insightly with e-mail services, social media and other 3rd parties seemed to be complex. We've been using Insightly in its early times, and I'm sure that things went better afterwards with the continuous improvements by Insightly amazing teams.

Alternatives Considered

Vtiger CRM, Zoho CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Retail CRM, Bitrix24 and HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Switching to Insightly

In its first launch, Insightly shown more functions for small businesses that attracted me, especially for individuals with no previous experience of online software CRMs. Nevertheless, each of the other competitors on the market has its competitive advantage, and addresses the needs of a particular niche. Each consumer needs to know first what features make sense to their business before choosing a CRM.

Pros

The software offers many free features that others charge. It is excellent for a small business on an operational budget but can easily enhance when necessary. Automated marketing email templates are effective and easy to use. The system also integrates well with other marketing products. The dashboard gives a snapshot of your sales opportunities and the user can customize.

Cons

Documenting phone call attempts and connects take too many steps. The Task portion is a bit complicated and again requires too many steps.

Alternatives Considered

Pipedrive, Nimble and Bitrix24

Reasons for Switching to Insightly

More enhanced features are included without additional costs.

Pros

easy to customise pipeline, good online information support

Cons

unable to customise reports to the extent we need

Alternatives Considered

Trello, Basecamp and Asana

Reasons for Choosing Insightly

hunting for a product that could automate our reports

Switched From

Wrike

Reasons for Switching to Insightly

price was very competitive initially

Pros

Insightly is easy to set up and quite intuitive even for new users.

Cons

It didn't offer the robust features that other more specialized CRMs offer so as much as we liked it, we had to shift to something with more options. The project management features were also less useful as compared to some of the other options we tried out.

Pros

It's relatively easy to use and good if you are a startup / small uncomplicated business. The google mail integration and auto contact creation is a real time saver.

Cons

Google Sync does not work as advertised. You cannot export / import event data.
Insightly feels slow. Expensive for what you get.

Pros

The free plan. With it we managed to educate our clients on the software at no cost on us. Then they upgrade their accounts.

Cons

It doesn't integrate with Google analytics, doesn't offer online forms or enable creating landing pages and all that is extremely important at the media startups and companies.

Alternatives Considered

Pipedrive

Switched From

Bitrix24

Reasons for Switching to Insightly

There is free plan in Insightly

Pros

I absolutely love the to-do list. It makes it so much easier to assign tasks to my employees. I always prefer to have tasks written down to verbal tasks, so this program helps so much in that aspect. I also really like the clean, efficient look to this program. It makes it very easy to use and is not as cluttered as other similar programs. I loved the training videos that helped my employees learn the ins and outs of the program. The fact that there is tech support readily available is also a plus. I hate having only email or only phone support available, but Insightly has both!

Cons

It’s rather pricey. The free version does not provide all of the features that make this product worthwhile over the competitors’. To get all of the features, you have to pay more, which makes sense, just not for small business owners. The fact that a higher plan is required to forward emails is a big minus. It’s something that almost all businesses need but paying the amount for the professional version is not necessarily a cost that can be justified. I believe that if this program were a little bit less expensive it would be more useful for small and new businesses.

Pros

They offer a free version to evaluate. Since it is without a time limit I used it and gradually became totally dependent on it. During a planning meeting with staff it was determined we could increase our efficiency by adding the professional version that includes email marketing tools and an easy interface with MailChimp. Now they have my paid business. It is with confidence that I agree to pay them for a monthly service that will be used by all members of my company. The program can accommodate the growth curve in a company such as mine. We started out simply needing contact management software. Later as our sales and marketing needs became more our focus adding these features was an easy decision. There are many videos to quickly bring a new user up to speed. The experienced user can use the videos to explore the many functions that may yet be used by a company as needs and goals change. The reporting function has recently become important as we need to know the results of our marketing and sales efforts. The tool is there and ready for us to implement. I think the more our company commits to using Insightly the more our communication between owners and employees improves. We openly share information on Insightly and our feedback has been positive. In the past before Insightly, communication was dispersed informally and sometimes led to bad feelings due to the inefficiency of word of mouth. Insightly is constantly making changes and updates to its software.

Cons

Its not visually pretty. I know that is silly but staff has to look at it all day and they like pretty.
When a new user/employee first looks at program they make the mistake of thinking it is an old program. While I am able to bring them along and show them it isn't true, their first impression is a temporary detriment to their learning curve and acceptance of the program. In order for Insightly to be the awesome tool it is, requires employee and leader acceptance. Everyone on the team has input and others depend on that input to do their job. Sloppy work seems to come from lack of acceptance. Part of this is my responsibility as a leader to insist everyone use the tools as intended but again, if the program had a new interface and pretty colors it might make a difference. Personally I always choose function first and then presentation but input from staff is a factor I have to consider. One other area I would mention is the difference between leads and contacts. They are not intuitive to some people and I think a better explanation and reinforcement in training videos would make it easier for the new user. This confusion has lead to some mistakes by my users that require a bit of corrective action by more experienced users. There is very little for me to find wrong with Insightly that isn't based on personal style and preferences.

Pros

Having worked with clients using a variety of CRM’s we’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. I often times refer to insightly as the sports car of CRM’s because it allows companies to manage sales, contacts, projects, opportunities and client fulfillment in a very clean, efficient and user-friendly way. Some of the features I love best are their pipelines and activity sets. For companies that are managing lots of clients at different stages of fulfillment, Insightly’s pipeline feature helps all the players involved know exactly what they need to do and when.

The client profile makes it easy for me to link contacts to organizations or note other important relationships. The ability to save my email communication and related tasks to a contact has become an essential part of how we use Insightly and it’s intuitive ability to save any attached files I send is another feature I love.

Other favorite features are their mass emailing tool within the CRM. I can send a personalized email to a group of clients without having to write individual emails. A task management feature that allows me to see on one screen what I’m working on for each of my clients and in all areas of my business. With one click I can see what each of my employees is working on, what’s been done. You can create custom tagging systems to easily sort and find clients in your database. In one place see all of the projects you’re currently working on and where they are in the process of completion. Insightly’s Gmail gadget makes it easy to assign tasks, create projects, save emails, add or update contact email easily from within your email. No more switching back and forth from program to program. Insightly University provides a good training source for new users in addition to their highly responsive customer service team. I also have to mention all the strategic partnerships that makes using Insightly with other programs really seamless. For example, Mailchimp, evernote, DropBox and Google Apps for Business to name a few.

Sure, there are lots bigger more robust CRM’s out there, but I don’t want to drive a Mack truck every day. I like my sports car. :)

Cons

Insightly's calendar doesn't work for me, but I use google calendar and haven't missed it. I wish you could customize what you want to see on the home page. Right now it's just a running list of the activity on your accounts, but not super helpful in my opinion. Right now you have to manually advance pipelines. It would be nice to set them to advance to the next stage once all the activity sets are complete.

Pros

Insightly is a very powerful toolkit, and incorporates both CRM and project management into the same application.  This makes it easier to keep track of status, and gives a single list of tasks which can show everything that needs to happen organized by person or by project.

Insightly has more powerful sales pipeline management, strong task management, and integrates CRM and projects.  

I use Google Apps for Business. Insightly has a direct integration with Google Apps.  This makes user management simple, and allows me some "extras" because their tool works nicely with Gmail.

Cons

On the negative side, the permissions are more "liberal" than some competitors making it harder to block people from access to project information. You need to have a user account for every person working on each project, which may mean you have to buy a larger number of users than are in your organization.

Pros

Everything! There is so much here that makes things so much more organized! I have a virtual assistant that keeps it updated and I just roll through every day and continue with the projects. I'm in the field and upload pictures in real time that tie together. Projects run smoothly with all of the contact info for all of my subcontractors is right there in the project. My favorite feature is that insightly creates a unique email for every entry and I can CC: that email address whenever I email a client or subcontractor and it automatically stores under that entry. I can link projects to contacts and files and notes, and organizations. I can't say enough about this software!
Oh yeah, automations and auto creation of tasks based on stages in the project. I create activity sets that automatically create and assign tasks with start dates and due dates with the click of a button. SUCH A TIME SAVER!
Integration with my Google Drive, integration with my calendar, integration with my Quickbooks, integration with...... ..... ......

Cons

It has so much to offer that it can be a bit overwhelming to set up, but they offer a setup service. It works just great.

Pros

What I like most about Insightly is its simplicity. It's rather easy to get up and going with it. It's also easy to train new users on the system.

Cons

I find that Insightly hasn't fully developed their developer-centric features. I do have to say though that they are always working on improving in this area, but coming from a Salesforce background I find that there is quite a bit lacking. In Insightly's defense, they simply haven't been around long enough or had enough time to build up to the technical capabilities that something like Salesforce has.

Pros

I previously used a version of Salesforce for small companies called Salesforce IQ. It didn't link contacts to leads, projects and companies well. It synced too much information from email and most of it wasn't relevant. Insightly solved all of these problems and made it easy to connect the dots between a person, lead, project, etc.

Cons

The software graphics were somewhat childish initially, but they have updated the graphics over time. It would be great if the software provided analysis / charts on some of the data that is stored there without forcing the user to do it themselves manually in excel.

Alternatives Considered

DealCloud, Zoho CRM and Pipedrive

Reasons for Choosing Insightly

Comments above

Reasons for Switching to Insightly

Insightly was best for linking contacts, companies, leads and projects. They also had an email syncing tool which was helpful.

Pros

I was looking for a G-Suite CRM and stumbled upon Insightly. I decided to give it a go and try out the free trial upon reading a few reviews. The main area I was interested in and found to be good was Insightlys e-mail tracking. I sent a test e-mail to both Gmail and Yahoo e-mails and found the tracking to be accurate. I can see how Insightly would be a value add for monitoring sent e-mails, and then creating an automation workflow to auto-add any leads who reply to a pipeline, but I wasn't able to figure out a workflow for it. I do believe it's possible however to not only add to a pipeline but even export the contacts who replied and save to perhaps something like Mailchimp for another customer-journey.

Cons

My first thought was that it looked really in terms of the feature set but I was a bit overwhelmed with the setup and it took me about 2 times to connect to GSuite although, it could have been a bug on my end rather than theirs. After connecting my GSuite account, I started to play around right away, setting up the leads section as I plan to use Insightly for Sales Tracking and lead scoring. I found the UX/UI a bit sluggish, and creating pipelines with custom attributes a bit cumbersome. I was hoping for a rich data-enrichment where all Company/People info would be filled out, but that aspect wasn't there.

Pros

Inexpensive with basic functions that are easy to use

Cons

No easy way to get answers to questions

Pros

Very simple, non-intimidating interface. Tries to be homey and welcoming to very small businesses. Earnest effort to serve up helpful hints. Looks like it doesn't require a lot of time to use.

Cons

Not particularly business-like, visually. Cutesy. Not as intuitive an interface as expected. Glyphs and symbols are not immediately intuitive. More clunky when it came to integrating with Outlook, Google contacts and calendar.

Pros

We have been using Insightly for many years and have seen it grow. While there is now a lot of very advanced functionality on it, the application is still simple and intuitive to use. It still appeals to small businesses but at the same time has a lot of functionality that you would expect on a much larger CRM system. For example it is possible to create custom objects and pages in order to adapt Insightly to your business' needs. There is a an API that allows for integrations with other applications and a workflow module to apply longer running processes.

Cons

Insightly started out targeting smaller businesses but can see the value in larger paying clients. As such the development contributions made to the lower tier subscriptions appear to be lacking. There has been a lot of new functionality aimed at the higher subscriptions whereas a few smaller but obvious wins have been ignored. This irritates the longer term loyal but smaller client base.

Pros

Here are just a few pros:
* Easy to use and learn
* Integrated Light Weight Project Management
* Fast Response
* Great note taking
* Easy task tracking
* Great for sales cycles and customer service alike
* Useful Integrations
* Better User Interface than most (every tried Salesforce and couldn't find anything?)

Cons

A couple of Cons:
* Service - The guys and gals at Insightly need to learn to listen and pass information 'up the management chain'
* Task and Event Handling need improvement as reported by many clients
* Need fully functional 2-way sync with Google Calendar
* Need real workflow functionality instead of clunky Project Management (to their defense, lots of systems 'miss this one')

Pros

Insightly CRM has the most intimidating interface with easy to understand and quite productive features. It is a perfect tool for the customer relation for mid-size and small organizations. We can easily customize the tool in order to get it properly synchronized with our working and requirements.

Cons

From the initial look, it is not very much professional but rather seems to be a visually appealing tool. The integration with the other tool is also not so easy and reliable and affects the overall performance. The project collaboration tools also gives me a tough time so there needs to be some improvements required.

Pros

I love Insightly because it has a clean look that is easy on the eyes, and it is a very intuitive CRM, unlike many others that can overwhelm or be confusing.

Cons

Hard to think of many drawbacks with this CRM. Sometimes I wish the community pages and discussion boards were more lively.

Pros

Great cost. Fairly powerful CRM system and reasonably intuitive to use.

Cons

Whenever you push events from your Google calendar to Insightly, the Insightly calendar makes it private with no display of time, so nobody else can see it. It just disappears for everyone else. Likewise, any event you put on Insightly marked private doesn't show on the calendar as busy. It just disappears for everyone else. So, this bug makes the calendar essentially useless for showing team member availability and for scheduling. It also prevents other scheduling app integrations from functioning properly.

Tasks are simply Events that don't have a start and end time. Events should act just like Tasks and be reported the same way. A simple solution is to scrap Events altogether and simply take the code used to create beginning and ending times on Events and apply that to Tasks as an option. The Task reports and all its functionality are great. Events is a little better, but generally poor. It's not needed if the features of Events are simply added to Tasks. This would make managing tasks and events in projects incredibly easy and much better than now. Right now, you have to use another program to manage simple workflows because this is so inadequate and inflexible. To fix this and make it far better only requires a couple of simple tweaks.

Project management is not great.

They haven't figured out the advantages of drag and drop.