Insightly CRM Review 2023: Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

If you’re in the market for a CRM solution that can give your contact database a serious productive upgrade, then perhaps Insightly is one customer management, marketing and sales platform you should check out. 

This Insightly CRM review is going to mainly look at its customer relationship management features, but these days it’s hard to disentangle those from marketing and other departmental tools. Indeed, nowadays, CRM tools operate in a more holistic toolkit which ultimately streamlines the operations across entire companies, whether they be small businesses or massive enterprises.

Of course, what’s a CRM review without talking about Insightly pricing, its ease of use, and what other reviews and ratings are saying. So get ready for some insights on Insightly.

Insightly CRM review 2023: Is Insightly any good?

Insightly CRM is a good customer relationship management solution, especially for startups and small businesses. It’s a very user-friendly CRM software that has a great look and feel. Insightly offers the right amount of CRM tools along with features for marketing automation, project management and customer support.

The question is then, is Insightly among the top 10 best CRM solutions on the market? Obviously, that’s a question we are always dishing out new annual answers to.

And the results are as follows: For many years, Insightly has managed to land in our top 10 CRM software lists, alongside other big names like HubSpot, Salesforce and Zoho CRM. For this year of 2023, Insightly won the category for Top CRM Software for Analytics and Reporting, which are two of the most important features of CRM tools.

Insightly CRM pricing plans 

First of all, how much does Insightly cost? Let’s first review Insightly prices:

How much is Insightly for nonprofits?

Unfortunately, Insightly does not have any special offers for nonprofits, charities, public institutions or other non-governmental organizations. However, if you run a small nonprofit or other such organization alone or with one other person, you can leverage the Insightly CRM free forever plan for two people. 

Otherwise, the Insightly pricing tiers have some very competitive numbers, meaning that you can subscribe to some of Insightly’s less expensive plans to run your nonprofit without breaking the bank.

Are there any Insightly coupon codes or promo discount vouchers?

Who doesn’t love a discount? Well, we’ve really done the research to find out if Insightly offers any such coupon codes or promo vouchers. It seems there are no Insightly coupon codes or discount vouchers at this time. 

If you search for yourself, you’ll likely find some 3rd-party vendors who hawk such promos and coupons. However, we cannot guarantee that what you find will be considered valid by Insightly. We always recommend dealing directly with the vendor for information about promotions, discounts, coupons or vouchers.

Insightly overview: What is Insightly & What is Insightly used for?

In a nutshell, Insightly is for sales, marketing, project management and customer support. To really dig deeper into the ethos of the Insightly system, we’d say the following: Insightly is all about making new contacts, and more importantly, finding the connections between your contacts. This provides deeper insights into who your potential customers are, as well as expands your network of possible leads and opportunities.

With Insightly, you get sophisticated marketing features, including email marketing, web and landing page form builders, and marketing workflow automations. This CRM for business provides insights that allow you to craft better and more personalized marketing messaging, and target that content at the right audience.

Sales features help salespeople monitor and manage the sales opportunities in the pipeline. You get amazing analytics on sales funnel activity, including highlighting success rates or isolating pain points. 

Similarly, customer service tools also help support reps in solving customer issues and problems faster and with fewer steps. All the while, Insightly is gathering and analyzing customer service activity to improve its support constantly.

Insightly free plan vs paid: what’s the difference?

When you visit the Insightly pricing page, you might be forgiven for thinking that there is no free plan. But scroll down and there it is. 

The Insightly free version is not exactly going to run your entire small business. It’s only good for two users. They call it a no-frills plan, which of course is not necessarily a bad thing, as too many frills, bells, whistles and other fancy features could end up being a time-wasting distraction, especially for small teams. You can use the Insightly free version for standard contact management, sales and project management.

Additionally, there is an Insightly free trial, and you can also request a free demo. 

Insightly features list 

The main features of Insightly are:

• Contact management

• Batch record updates

• Standard and custom objects

• Lead management

• Opportunity management

• Project management

• Tasks and events syncing

• Business processes

• Custom app builder

• Email marketing automation

• Email templates

• Email tracking

• Web forms

• Web to lead capture

• Activity sets

• Insightly mobile app

• Business card scanner

• Analytics and insights

• Insightly email integration

• Other Insightly integrations

• Insightly security

Contact management

Insightly CRM doesn’t just gather up all your contact information and present it to you in a neat database. It is able to connect customer data points in various ways to give you deeper insights into each contact. You can link up records via things like emails. This shows you how your contacts are connected to one another, giving you new opportunities to reach out and make new connections.

Batch record updates

Being able to manage and update files en masse is a great time saver. With Insightly, you can do just this. It lets you go through your massive record list and perform actions like filtering, selecting and updating with as few clicks as possible. And, you can do this from any Insightly list viewing option.

Standard and custom objects

All blocks of information in Insightly are called objects. Standard objects are things like names of contacts or names of companies or organizations. Insightly also lets you create custom objects. These let you create new categories for information which might be specific to your business or industry. For example, if you work in construction, a custom object can be a type of building.

Lead management

Lead management is like the next step from contact management, taking the contacts in your database and prepping them for the sales process. You get lead routing, which automatically connects leads to the sales rep best suited to handle the deal. It achieves this by synthesizing each contact’s activity timeline, engagement history via emails, phone calls and meetings, tasks associated with each contact, and purchase histories. On top of that, it does this in real time.

Opportunity management

Once contacts have been transformed into leads, they become opportunities, in other words, deals in progress and potential sales. This feature allows salespeople to manage all open deals and move them along with changes in their status as they go down the sales funnel. This gives all the sales team members a great overview of all the open opportunities and allows for things like collaboration and handoffs.

Project management

When running project management with Insightly, you have two ways of setting things up and overviewing the project. The first is the standard pipeline, which can function like a kanban where you have step by step stages the lead must pass through on the way to conversion. The other is called milestones. With milestones, you organize your projects based on deadlines, targets and goals, and are ideal when teams need to collaborate on projects, and there are less clear-cut tasks for individuals as opposed to groups. Other project management features include permissions, which can be simple or advanced permissions. These control what records or data which users can see or edit.

Tasks and events syncing

Insightly makes it easy to sync up all your calendar events into a single unified view. The same goes with task management, particularly if you need to keep an updated track of tasks, to whom each task is assigned, and task deadlines. You can also sync task sequence templates to leads, opportunities, projects, or companies.

Business processes

Business process tools do a myriad of things and are often the combination of other more granular toolsets. One of the things Insightly CRM does here is to let you set up and customize your own business processes based on your preferred metrics, like sales history, company, potential ROI or churn risk factor. These are automated workflows which take over a lot of the simple back and forth tasks from your sales staff. Business processes are then managed in real-time dashboards.

Custom app builder

The ability to create customizable features is a key factor when choosing a great CRM, and Insightly has got this area covered. It easily lets developers create new apps that can run inside Insightly. It works by allowing you to set up various metrics, like validation rules, custom fields, and automated dashboard reporting. These new apps can easily be deployed and shared to whole sales teams, even remotely. 

Email marketing automation

Email marketing describes a range of functionalities all geared toward finding new contacts and expanding your network using emails. For email workflow automation, there are customer journeys which begin by sending emails and then triggering actions based on the contact’s response to those emails. These can be set up with a visual editor, so no code required. There is also detailed segmentation, so different contacts get different targeted messaging. You also get features like bulk or mass emailing, and A/B testing to try out different versions and see which have better success rates.

Email templates

Insighly’s library of email templates is part of the larger marketing module. These are pre-set email designs on which you can build ads, newsletters and other outreach emails. There are dozens of templates, and you also get a customizable email builder to design them or start from scratch. Everything is done with simple drag and drop functionality. The email builder lets you add text, images, CTA buttons, and even social media links.

Email tracking

Emails and email marketing tools in general are only so good as your ability to gauge how successful these campaigns are doing. With Insightly, you get all the necessary email tracking tools. Some of the actions you can track with Insightly include data on email open rates, bounce rates, click-through rates and more. You also get feedback on your email A/B testing, as mentioned above.

Web forms

While emails are a powerful way to make new connections and add contacts and potential leads into your sales team’s database, let’s not forget about web forms. These can be pop ups when people visit your website or landing page, prompting them to enter their details if they’d like more information. Insightly captures this data and automatically enters it into your customer relationship management database. It also captures contact data if they attend events (virtual or real), give feedback on your products, or download content from your site. 

Web to lead capture

This is a bit similar to what goes on when a user fills out a web form, but it practically skips over the part where the user has to do anything at all. With Insightly, you can capture visitors' information coming to any page and automatically convert those into contacts and leads. What’s more, Insightly is smart enough to filter out the spam and other unnecessary data that might otherwise slip through.

Activity sets

Activity sets are a subset of workflow automations. These are useful workflows for things you or your team find you do so often they might as well be automated. It is a collection of tasks that will all get done simultaneously. For example, when a lead moves through the pipeline, this can trigger an email follow up to the contact, a reminder to the sales rep, and a note to the sales manager all at once.

Insightly mobile app

Many decent CRMs let you use their platform on a mobile device, having designed their interfaces to be dynamic, meaning the interface adapts to screen size. But Insightly does one better, having created dedicated Insightly mobile apps for both iOS and Android. You can access your cloud-based customer data at any time, and update your projects in real time, including tasks, milestones and deliverables. This is key for sales teams that hit the road or work remotely from head office.

Business cards scanner

Using the Insightly mobile app, you can use your phone to scan business cards. It’s as simple as taking a picture with your iPhone or other smartphone. Once you snap the business card, Insightly automatically scans the contact data on it and uploads it to your cloud-based CRM database, organizing the information in categories. And it does all this with just one click.

Analytics and insights

Every business needs to analyze what’s going on with their marketing and sales teams in order to create reports which offer the company deeper insights into what’s working and what’s not. Insightly offers a range of analytics and reporting tools. You can set up customizable reporting dashboards based on your preferred KPIs. This shows you how your workflow automations are doing, the success rates of web form or email marketing campaigns, even how each individual sales rep or customer support agent is performing. Reporting dashboards use a range of visualization tools, like pie charts, bar graphs and bubble charts.

Insightly email integration

Since Insightly offers so many tools that work with email, it’s only natural they have some decent email integration. What this means is that Insightly can live inside your email interface as a sidebar, for example, with Microsoft Outlook or Google Gmail. You can then view your CRM from your Outlook or Gmail and save emails or new email contacts directly back to your Insightly CRM. 

Other Insightly integrations

No single piece of software can do it all (yet). For this reason, Insightly makes it easy for you to integrate its system with other useful business SaaS. Insightly AppConnect is the name of their integration library and setup process. Some great integrations available include Salesforce, LinkedIn, MailChimp, Pipedrive, Slack, QuickBooks Online, HubSpot, and a range of Zoho CRM products like Zoho Creator and Zoho Invoice, and some G-Suite tools like Google Ads, Google Calendar, Google Cloud Storage and way more Google apps. Additionally, there is an Insightly REST-based API for developers to go beyond the standard integrations. 

Insightly security

Since this is a cloud-based platform, it means you need to trust Insightly with your precious data. No worries on that front. Insightly takes extra steps to ensure the privacy and security of your data. This includes 256-bit AES military-grade data encryption during transit and at rest, two-factor authentication, and a single-sign-on using industry standard authentication. It’s got SOC 2 Type II for independent compliance assessment, and finally, it is compliant with US and EU Privacy Shield and GDPR.

Insightly pros and cons

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of Insightly:

Insightly advantages

First off, this is a very user-friendly system that scores top points for ease of use. Onboarding is not much of a problem and there is a quick learning curve. The interfaces also look and feel great which means a lot of the tools are intuitive to figure out and master.

Next, the relationship linking which is  part of Insightly CRM is a powerful tool to show you how your contacts are connected and help you add new contacts to your network. It’s great because it gathers as much useful information on your contacts which help you find the right messaging and manner to reach out.

Moving on, Insightly’s marketing content builders are a lot of fun and produce some great ads, emails and other forms of marketing outreach. These include the email templates as well as the web and landing page form builders. The templates look great, but the customizability is also a huge benefit from the Insightly system.

The Insightly mobile app is a huge pro in comparison to other CRM systems that only have dynamic interfaces for smaller screens. It’s a pleasure to use, and makes for a perfect tool for remote teams and sales reps on the road.

Finally, as we’ve mentioned in our other CRM reviews, Insightly is a big winner when it comes to analytics and reporting. It’s very effective at letting you control your reports to see what metrics and data you find most important. 

Insightly disadvantages

This article has focused mainly on CRM, sales and marketing. Unfortunately, if you want a platform with top-line customer support features, Insightly is not one of the very best. That’s not to say the customer service features are bad or sorely lacking, but it’s just not one of their high selling points. 

Insightly complaints & praise (from real Insightly customer reviews)

You may have had enough of this one writer’s opinion. So what are the Insightly reviews found on the web saying? 

Well, most online reviewers give Insightly anywhere from a 4.0 out of 5 to a 4.9 out of 5, which gives you an average of ‘excellent.’ Insightly CRM reviews are mostly full of praise, especially for its design and its intuitive features. Other praise for Insightly revolves around its robust list of integrations.

When it comes to some complaints about Insightly, you tend to get a mixed bag of reviews. There have been complaints about bugginess within certain web browsers, though bug-related problems are always being resolved. Other complaints revolve around certain features requiring too many steps, which slows down productivity.

Review of Insightly support

Insightly support starts with their basic help page. Here you can search for articles and tutorials. They also offer customer success support programs with individual experts who give Insightly training, guidance and support. 

All plans with Insightly get email support as well. With the more premium plans, you have the option to pay more for things like customized support, professional services, as well as support for developer API.

Finally, if you head on over to YouTube, you can watch a wide variety of Insightly tutorial videos that teach you how to use Insightly. Of course these are free for everyone, which contributes to the positive reviews of Insightly. 

Is Insightly worth it? Our conclusion

We’ve come to the conclusion of this Insightly review, and we hope you’ve all learned a thing or two about this system. So, what’s the final word, is Insightly worth it? Is it better than all the Insightly alternatives?

The thing is, CRM Insightly can go head to head with the biggest names in customer relationship management, like Zoho CRM or even Microsoft Dynamics 365. So, what sets Insightly CRM apart? And is it the best CRM out there?

The answer is never simple and always depends on your business needs, especially if you’re running a small business. This Insightly review can only hold your hand up to a point. Don’t pass up the chance to request an Insightly demo, or spend some time with the Insightly free plan. That’s where your answers are waiting for you. 

Our final Insightly software rating

After all is said and done, we here at CRM.org are happy to lay a solid rating of 4.6 out of 5 on Insightly CRM. It really is among the best CRM solutions for small businesses and beyond.