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

Insightly offers many products and features to be a one-stop-shop in the administrative world. It allows a company to keep all of their client information in one location and access quickly and easily. It allows emailing clients directly in the software as well as filing previously sent emails to a client.

Cons

The way that some of the fields are set up, they are not made for quick editing, copying, etc. The phone number fields do not have an automated template, the number can be input anyway. The address fields, specifically state, do not have preset options and either can be an abbreviation or spelled out. It would be nice if these were preset so that it is uniform when printing reports, etc. Lastly, once you create a lead, even after converting to a contact, the lead still shows up when that specific client is searched for. It can be confusing when you need to click quickly.

Pros

It is easy to use and easy to navigate.It does not take much time to get used to all features and to understand how the features work.The best part of Insightly, is the customer support is very responsive and always follows up on requests.They also helped us all the way to achieve our goals as a company.

Cons

Some parts of the software need more work and also new features like Service has too many glitches and some functions do not work properly even though have been revised and "fixed" many times.I wish it was more seamless to work with.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud and monday.com

Reasons for Choosing Insightly

The main reason was the other product was more expensive and we also wanted to expand and connect all of our platforms in one place.

Switched From

Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Switching to Insightly

Insightly offered a less expensive package overall and they offered a more personalized customization to our business. One of the big factors apart from the price was the initial presentations of the Insightly products were very professional and helpful.

Pros

I like the collaboration capabilities with API via Appconnect, AutoCAD, BricsCAD, Loveland Innovations IMGING, etc

Cons

The cap of fields in a custom object, the automations not triggering correctly -> you have to delay triggers so that automations do not overlap and contradict each other. Sometimes automations to not trigger at all. There are a lot of holes and catch reports that need to be created.

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

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 does a pretty reasonable job as a CRM. It's quite easy to use and pretty. It has some integrations out of the box and is easy to customize.

Cons

No significant draw backs to it. I would say it's a middle of the road CRM system that is neither great nor terrible.

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

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

It can be used in simple form or allows us to enable more features as our needs grow.

Cons

There are certain limitations with customizability, but Insightly often addresses these and rolls out features updates.

Alternatives Considered

Zoho CRM and HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Choosing Insightly

Cardscan was outdated and no longer able to flex to our needs

Reasons for Switching to Insightly

Since we don't use a traditional sales pipeline, insightly's system allowed us to either utilize or not utilize certain features. All other systems continued to push us into a traditional sales pipeline process.

Pros

The self-served ability to customize our pipeline by service offering.

Cons

Service after the sale to help us understand the other suite of services that we are not using well or at all.

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

The software looks good, and easy to use.

Cons

The software stuck a lot when multiple users use at same time.Software stuck when we edit 2 things fastly and jumping to another option.When we upload leads most of the time leads upload twice which makes duplicate leads.There is no option of task reminder.There is no option of timing when the notes added at that particular date.

Alternatives Considered

NetSuite and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Switched From

NetSuite

Pros

First, the simplicity of Insightly has been key in internal adoption of the tool for the company. Insightly is my go to tool for keeping my day planned with tasks. Secondly, the customization Insightly allows with the custom objects has really allowed a level of visibility within the company that we simply did not have prior to partnering with them. This tool is quickly becoming a key focus for the organization as it allows for the operational team to automate key operational processes which in turn increases quality, decreases risk, and decreases labor costs.

Cons

Expanding the automated workflow options would be of great value to organizations. Additionally, the limitation on page layout rules can be challenging. Making this unlimited would be a preference for the organization.

Pros

Easy enough to use for small business owners, if you can see your way out of getting tons of unsolicited spam.

Cons

Responsive customer service that doesn't seem well informed to deal with anything beyond the most basic of questions.

Pros

We've been using it for 5 years. Small Retail online/brick mortar for customer follow up. 3 users, it makes it easy to follow and get updates about tasks. the gadget that interfaces with gmail is convenient.

Cons

My staff that are in their 20's say the new UI is confusing and harder to use, so we stay with the older UI.
The side bar chrome extension was suppose to make things easy but after trying it for a month my staff avoids it.

Customer service is mediocre , they only wanted to help if I were going to upgrade to a higher level. I wanted to fist resolve over 700 contact dups. They said I had to do it manually!

Emailing - Bcc'ing insightly each time I send an email seems so old style. When I get a rely the email does not go into the same thread, seems to me that is standard now a days.
I've been using it so long I know what it's missing so we take extra notes or have links from the email in the notes so other staff can see or find the thread.

Pros

The dashboard interface is convenient and graphically easy to navigate, and it is an attractive interface. Some of the sections are simple and understandable by anyone first using the software.

Cons

It is difficult to generate reports unless those reports have been pre-configured. To generate a new report requires a substantial amount of input in fields which are not easy to understand. Though the dashboard is easy to understand and navigate, many of the other opening pages are not. And it offers some very confusing pop-ups, such as in "Projects" it asks you to "Check out the Kanban view for projects" without explanation of what exactly the "Kanban" is. Additionally, if you enter a sales lead, it is very difficult to convert it to an "opportunity." Also, when you create a new contact and associate it with an existing company or account, you wold expect it to give you the option of importing the account's address and phone numbers to the new contact's fields -- but it doesn't, and you have to enter those again. Finally, I do wish there were more "help" menus (question marks) surrounding some of the entry fields that you could click for an instant explanation or guide.

Pros

Connectivity of all its functions. Speed of accessing data

Cons

Too many pebbles in the shoe! They move on with the sizzle, but ignore the steak.

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.

Pros

Insightly is a great contender in the small business CRM market. I had looked at many others (there are a TON of CRM out there), basing my criteria on integration with accounting software, ease of managing client information, and ease of managing client projects. Unfortunately, none of the CRM I looked at has strong integration into the accounting software that I ultimately went with. Insightly seems to have some great automation to help out with managing projects, but where it got beat out was the managing of client information. Since a lot of my business is conducted through social media, another software beat it in ease of integration with those applications.

Cons

As with some of my other reviews, I don't find much not to like with Insightly. It does what it does very well, it just isn't as integrated into social media as some of it's competitors. If I were doing less prospecting and research on clients- such as if I had a business where people were coming to me to get something made or repaired, then Insightly would be the winner. As it is, I spend most of my day finding prospects to put in the pipeline, and that would be more work with this product.

Pros

Easy user interface
The InSightly University provides lots of quick, well made instructional videos
Free for a limited number of users
Great for tracking grants, related documents, & timelines

Cons

If you have over a certain number of records the platform begins to charge a fee - this would be fine if there was an easy way to delete "records". For example, if I'm working on a grant that is finite and generates 200 "records" -- if I only desire to keep the final project and do not need the records generated along the way; I have to go in and delete each one. As a non-profit with a relatively small budget, this is a great tool, but is too time-consuming to go back and individually delete. Right now, we are a small growing non-profit. I would pay for this service eventually but cannot do so at this time. So freeware platforms will end up with my business now where InSightly delivers on quality - affordability isn't there.

Pros

I've using Insightly for years. It is a very easy process to import prospect lists. Since I am the main user in my organization I've been able to use the basic functionality without needing the reporting and audit capabilities.

Easy to cc outgoing mails to the prospect listing.

Simplicity is the biggest benefit for Insightly. Anyone can import without needing IT support. Search function is incredibly simple. Setting follow up is a click and done.

Cons

If I don't set up a next step or follow up for a prospect, it is easy to lose track of the prospect forever.

I don't use the formal opportunity function as I found it easier to keep track of progress by setting unique follow up listings.

Pros

I really like how it tracks relationships among the records and makes it easy to pull a list using tags. It also has robust features like project management. Data entry is simple and I like the way it uses actions/tasks. And it is very awesome the way it manages social media account information.

Cons

I get frustrated with the poor report features and when I want to download and manipulate in Excel, I get all the tags in one field, so essentially I can view the tag list nicely online but I can't export that (for example to send an email to the group). I'm also frustrated with the limitations on standard contact information. I work with business people and while I start with employment contact, getting personal contact signifies a much deeper relationship. Not having standard personal contact info spots is troublesome.