Insightly

Insightly occupies an interesting niche: it’s one of the few CRMs that genuinely tries to handle what happens after you close the deal. If your business sells a service and then needs to deliver it — think consulting engagements, agency projects, or implementation work — Insightly’s built-in project management makes it a legitimate contender. If you’re purely a product sales shop that hands off to fulfillment, you can probably find a better CRM for less money.

I first implemented Insightly for a 12-person marketing agency back in 2018 and have deployed it for four more clients since. The platform has matured considerably, but it still carries some frustrating gaps that you should know about before signing a contract.

What Insightly Does Well

The deal-to-project conversion is the headline feature, and it actually works. When an opportunity closes, you convert it to a project with one click. All the linked contacts, organizations, emails, and files carry over. You set up project pipelines with stages and milestones, assign tasks to team members, and track progress. For a consulting firm I set this up for, it eliminated the 30-minute “project kickoff data entry” ritual their team dreaded. The salesperson’s notes, the client’s contact details, the proposal documents — everything was already there.

Relationship linking sets Insightly apart from most CRMs in its price range. Most CRMs give you contacts and companies with a one-to-many relationship. Insightly lets you define custom relationships between any records. I set up a VC firm where they needed to see which portfolio companies shared board members, which advisors were connected to which founders, and which LPs had co-invested. In Pipedrive or Copper, you’d need workarounds and custom fields. In Insightly, the data model supports it natively.

The Google Workspace integration is tighter than most competitors. If your company runs on Gmail and Google Calendar, Insightly’s sidebar widget works well. You can create contacts from emails, link emails to records, and see CRM data without leaving your inbox. It’s not quite as deeply embedded as Copper, which was built Google-first, but it’s significantly better than what Salesforce offers without paid add-ons.

AppConnect deserves credit as a genuinely useful feature. More on this below, but the short version: Insightly bundles an integration platform starting at the Professional tier that connects to QuickBooks, Slack, Shopify, and hundreds of other apps. You don’t need a separate Zapier subscription, which saves $20-50/month depending on your usage.

Where It Falls Short

Reporting is Insightly’s weakest link, full stop. At the Plus tier, you get a handful of canned reports and basic chart widgets. At Professional, you can build custom reports, but the builder feels like it was designed in 2015 and hasn’t been touched since. Filtering is clunky, cross-object reporting requires workarounds, and you can’t schedule report delivery until Enterprise. I’ve had two clients move their reporting entirely to Google Looker Studio connected via the API because the native options weren’t cutting it. If reporting is critical to your workflow, budget for the Enterprise tier or a third-party BI tool.

The project management, while unique, isn’t deep enough for complex work. There are no Gantt charts. No dependency tracking between tasks. No resource allocation or capacity planning. No built-in time tracking. For straightforward project workflows — “Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, done” — it’s fine. But the agency I mentioned earlier eventually added Asana alongside Insightly because their projects had too many interdependencies. At that point, you’re paying for two tools and the “all-in-one” advantage disappears. If your project management needs are genuinely complex, Monday CRM handles both sides with more depth.

Support has been a recurring complaint from clients at lower tiers. One client on the Professional plan submitted a ticket about a broken workflow automation and didn’t get a substantive response for four business days. Enterprise customers get a dedicated specialist and faster turnaround, but that’s a $99/user/month commitment. The knowledge base and community forums are decent for self-service, but if you need hand-holding during implementation, factor in the cost of a consultant or the Enterprise tier.

Pricing Breakdown

Insightly dropped its free plan a few years ago, which was disappointing. The entry point is now Plus at $29/user/month (billed annually — monthly billing bumps it up). At this tier, you get core CRM functionality: contact and organization management, opportunity tracking, project management, email templates, and up to 250,000 records. You’re limited to 2,500 mass emails per day and basic dashboards. Honestly, for a team under 10 that just needs to organize contacts and track deals, it’s competitive with Pipedrive’s Professional tier.

Professional at $49/user/month is where Insightly starts to justify itself. You get workflow automation (up to 100 rules), AppConnect (the integration platform), custom page layouts, and the record limit jumps to 500,000. Workflow automation alone is worth the upgrade — you can auto-assign leads, trigger email sequences, and update fields based on pipeline stage changes. Most teams I work with land here.

Enterprise at $99/user/month unlocks unlimited records, unlimited custom validation rules, serverless lambda functions for custom logic, and priority support with a dedicated specialist. The lambda functions are interesting — they let you run custom code triggered by CRM events without maintaining a server. But realistically, only teams with a developer on staff will use them. For most businesses, Professional covers the need.

There’s no setup fee for any tier. Insightly also offers Insightly Marketing and Insightly Service as separate add-on products, each with their own per-user pricing. Marketing starts at $99/month (not per user) for up to 10,000 contacts. If you’re comparing the full stack cost, make sure you’re pricing the complete bundle against HubSpot’s all-in-one plans.

Key Features Deep Dive

Project Management Integration

This is the feature that makes or breaks the Insightly decision. Here’s how it actually works: you define project pipelines just like sales pipelines. Each pipeline has stages — say “Kickoff,” “Discovery,” “Execution,” “Review,” “Closed.” Within each stage, you can set activity sets that auto-create tasks when a project enters that stage. Move a project to “Kickoff” and the system automatically creates tasks for “Schedule kickoff call,” “Send welcome packet,” and “Create shared folder,” assigned to the right team members with due dates.

The task management itself is basic. You get task assignment, due dates, categories, and priority levels. No subtasks, no recurring tasks natively. You can view projects in a kanban board, list view, or calendar view. For teams currently tracking projects in spreadsheets or email threads, it’s a massive improvement. For teams coming from Asana, Monday, or Jira, it’ll feel limited.

AppConnect

AppConnect is Insightly’s built-in integration platform, powered by Workato under the hood. It comes with 500+ pre-built connectors and a visual workflow designer. You create “recipes” — if-this-then-that automations between Insightly and external tools.

Real example: I set up an AppConnect recipe for a client that triggered when a deal closed in Insightly. It automatically created a project in Insightly, sent a Slack notification to the delivery team, generated an invoice in QuickBooks Online, and added the client to an onboarding email sequence in Mailchimp. Four steps, zero manual work. The whole setup took about 90 minutes.

The catch: AppConnect is only included at Professional and above. At Plus, you’re back to using Zapier or native integrations, and the native integration library is small. Also, while the connector count is impressive, some connectors are read-only or limited in their available triggers and actions. Test your specific use case during the trial period.

Relationship Linking

Most CRMs think in simple hierarchies: contacts belong to companies, deals belong to contacts. Insightly lets you create custom link types between any objects. You define the relationship label (“is advisor to,” “invested in,” “referred by,” “former employer of”) and then link records accordingly.

On a contact record, you see every linked relationship at a glance. For a nonprofit client, we mapped donors to board members to grant-making organizations to beneficiary programs. The relationship web became a visual map of their ecosystem. This is genuinely hard to replicate in most sub-$100/user CRMs. Salesforce can do it with junction objects, but that requires admin work. Insightly makes it point-and-click.

Email and Communication Tracking

Insightly tracks email opens and clicks when you send through the platform or via the Gmail/Outlook sidebar. Templates support merge fields and can be shared across the team. You can schedule sends for specific times.

The limitation: there’s no built-in email sequence automation at the CRM level. If you want multi-step drip campaigns triggered by deal stage, you need either Insightly Marketing (additional cost) or a third-party tool connected through AppConnect. Compare this to HubSpot, which includes basic sequences in its Sales Hub Starter plan. See our full HubSpot vs Insightly comparison for a detailed breakdown.

Custom Objects

Starting at the Professional tier, you can create custom objects beyond the standard contacts, organizations, opportunities, and projects. A real estate firm I worked with created custom objects for “Properties,” “Showings,” and “Offers,” each with their own fields, pipelines, and relationship links. This flexibility means you can model Insightly around your business process rather than forcing your process into a rigid CRM structure.

Custom objects support their own list views, dashboards, and automation rules. The builder is straightforward — no code required. The Enterprise tier removes limits on the number of custom objects you can create.

Kanban Pipeline Views

Both sales pipelines and project pipelines render as drag-and-drop kanban boards. You can customize which fields show on each card, filter by owner or date range, and color-code by category. It’s not as visually polished as Pipedrive’s pipeline view — Pipedrive still sets the bar here — but it’s functional and fast. You can also switch between kanban, list, and calendar views without losing your filters.

Who Should Use Insightly

Professional services teams of 5-50 people who sell engagements and then deliver them. If your sales team closes a deal and then hands it to a delivery team that needs the same client context, this is exactly what Insightly was built for. Consulting firms, marketing agencies, accounting practices, architecture firms — I’ve seen it work well in all of these.

Organizations with complex relationship networks that need more than a basic contact-company hierarchy. Venture capital, private equity, nonprofit development offices, commercial real estate brokerages — if you regularly answer the question “how is person A connected to organization B through person C,” Insightly handles this natively.

Google Workspace shops that want a CRM embedded in their existing workflow without paying Copper’s higher per-user prices or Salesforce’s integration add-on costs.

Budget range: Plan on $49-99/user/month for a team that’ll actually use the differentiating features. If you’re only using it at the $29 Plus tier, you’re paying for features you won’t fully access, and competitors like Pipedrive or Zoho CRM offer more at that price point.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

High-volume sales teams focused purely on pipeline velocity. If your business is about making 100 calls a day and moving deals fast, Pipedrive or Close will serve you better. Insightly’s sales automation is competent but not optimized for speed-focused sales motions.

Teams that need serious marketing automation bundled in. Insightly Marketing exists but costs extra and isn’t as mature as HubSpot’s marketing tools. If marketing-sales alignment is your primary concern, HubSpot’s integrated platform is a stronger choice. See our HubSpot review for details.

Enterprises above 200 users with complex security and compliance needs. Insightly has grown, but it doesn’t match Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365 for enterprise-grade territory management, advanced forecasting, or regulatory compliance tooling.

Teams that need deep project management. If your projects involve Gantt charts, dependencies, sprint planning, or resource leveling, Insightly’s project features will disappoint you. Use a dedicated PM tool alongside a simpler CRM, or look at Monday CRM for a platform that takes both sides more seriously.

The Bottom Line

Insightly does one thing that almost no other CRM in its price range does well: it bridges the gap between winning a client and delivering for them. If that handoff is a real problem in your business — if deals close and then context gets lost, files go missing, and delivery teams start from scratch — Insightly solves it. Just go in knowing that the reporting needs work, the project management has a ceiling, and you’ll likely want the Professional tier at minimum to get real value.

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