Insightly CRM Reviews

Insightly CRM is a customer relationship management software. It is primarily used for businesses ranging in service to manufacturing, accounting, and health care. It can be used quite well in multiple industries because it also has a project management function, not to mention several other enterprise-level features, along with an open API where you can integrate other tools. It can be used as not only a CRM, but it does its management application as well. I have used the standard, professional, and enterprise versions of the solution.

I don't use Insightly CRM as a software developer or architect. I use a solution called monday.com, which is a little more flexible in terms of project management. When it comes to my clients and their use cases, I primarily service the financial or accounting tax consulting industries, and the clients have used Insightly CRM to grow their business by 500% and 1000%. We are able to handle thousands of clients using Insightly CRM and dozens of employees for these accounting firms. We take advantage of all the modules, lead management, opportunity management, sales, project management, custom objects for tracking employee time, tracking the budget hours per week per employee, etc. 

We track assets such as computers, software, and programs so that we can perform security audits as a part of a written information security plan, which is obligatory for accounting firms to have now as a part of the IRS and FTC regulations. In addition, we use it for human resources to manage employees, which is another type of asset but a more valuable one. So we expand Insightly CRM not only to its core functionality but also to make custom objects to manage other parts of the company that are just as valuable.

The most valuable feature is the speed of adoption, the simple user interface, and the flexibility of use. Tax professionals, mainly accountants, use the program regularly to make it the one source of truth. Instead of storing data in other applications, we try to put everything into Insightly so that we can get the best value out of it.

In terms of areas for improvement in Insightly, it would be the project management functionality. It can be integrated with other applications to make it more flexible, but it requires a lot of work redoing the framework from Insightly and creating more custom objects to make it do what you want. For example, in the software developer world, we use the Agile or Scrum methodology, which has a completely different project management system than Insightly. Sadly, Insightly doesn't support that well. You would need to create some custom objects in order for that to work correctly. Also, even without the Scrub methodology or other types of project management styles, Insightly needs support with how it manages its pipelines and activity sets. The access to making templated tasks is very limited. If Insightly could expand access to activity sets and create more flexible project management features, that would be a big win for the CRM. The things I would like to see as a developer and as a consultant for my clients would be more integration and more updates with the project management.

When it comes to additional features, I would like to see the ability to connect other data sources inside the dashboard reporting. For example, if you would like to see your sales organization and how many activities you made on a contact, how many phone calls, emails, text messages, etc., Insightly should be able to show that information in the opportunity or the sales report. That would be very valuable, to get data from the contact, not from the opportunity, and see those data points together. Right now, they are silent. There is just a data opportunity report and a contact report. Insightly should put some type of API connection or integration to update the activity into the opportunity record to link it so you would be able to see it. 

Right now it is siloed but it would be useful to create API connections to automate that so that salespeople don't have to link it to the contact and the opportunity. The AI connection of automation should do that for you like in other software systems.

I have been using Insightly CRM for eight years.

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. It had some issues in the past, but now the product is much more mature and stable than when it was when it was the only CRM plugin for Google. It even has an auditing functionality where you can see what was done to records by what user at what time by IP address. It has this nice backup and automation feature. 

In terms of scalability, I would rate it a ten out of ten. It is probably even better than Salesforce because of the user adoption value add. Salesforce is not very user-friendly in comparison to Insightly. Insightly can have a thousand users, I don't think there is a limit. It has the enterprise plan and HIPAA. It does business associate agreements and is SOC type two compliant and it is an EU and US framework compliant with that regulation. Insightly is very secure and very fast.  It has the enterprise functionality that most enterprises need to be scalable. It has OpenAPI and all other connected apps, such as Insightly Marketing, Insightly Service, and AppConnect. All in all, Insightly is a highly scalable, highly easy-to-use enterprise-level software.

When it comes to technical support, as a consultant who is doing something at a deep level for the client and looking for high-level technical support, I would rate it an eight out of ten. You have to know who to talk to and what to say to get them to escalate it if it's something that's an issue. Moreover, I think that goes for most support teams because they hire college-level grads right out of college, and they don't really know what they are doing. They don't speak the IT language and sometimes it is a bit difficult to get them to understand what the issue is. You really have to get through the first line of support to get to level two or engineers. Once you get to the level two engineer, they'll know exactly what you need, and they will help you out very quickly and very well. If you are just looking for general support, I would rate it a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of the basic objects, tasks, reports, lead, opportunity contacts, organizations, and projects is straightforward. It can be made very complex, similar to a Salesforce implementation, because of the enterprise features and the open API. In general, the initial implementation is very simple and you will start seeing user adoption within two to four weeks.

I have seen a huge return on investment for my clients. They are able to have a lean team since they don't have to hire more employees, which usually costs them $50,000 to $200,000 a year for their salary. We are able to reduce their clicks to as close to zero as possible with Insightly and the API. As long as you integrate other applications, you will take advantage of the full functionality of Insight Professional or Insightly Enterprise with automation. There are reports where you can see the health of your business. Clients are able to keep a lean team with thousands of clients. They don't have to go over 15 employees and that's incredible. Having an umbrella that does most of what you need to do is incredibly useful. We had another client who took advantage of the marketing. They were able to increase their revenue by half a million, and now they are doing over two million or more. That is 400% more revenue while having a healthy profit margin that is stable. 

The pricing of Insightly is great. If you buy annually on enterprise, it's $100 per user monthly, so the limit is $1200 for enterprise per user. That is how high it goes and it's fair. It is affordable in comparison to Salesforce or HubSpot since their offers can go into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars very quickly if you have, for example, ten users.

It is worth mentioning that Insightly has a product suite and it serves just one component. It also has Insightly Service, Insightly Marketing, and App Connect. App Connect is a wall backup and Insightly Service is more of a help desk. We have a knowledge base and a ticketing system and it works really well the way it is. Insightly Marketing is email marketing, and they do a great job at that as well. They do have a platform that manages a lot of other parts of project management but serves more in ticketing and service management. They make updates and do a good job.

My advice to people who are considering Insightly is to think about user adoption as your primary need, but if you have other needs such as HIPAA Compliance, Insightly is compliant with them as well. Insightly does business associate agreements. Think about scalability as well and if you can grow inside of it. In terms of compliance, consider what kind of data you wanna store in there because that's also highly important. You don't want to do anything illegal. Insightly is not a GLBA Act. If you are a financial adviser, you can't use Insightly. You can't store that data in there except basic sales data. Think about the industry run and compliance you have to meet. Overall, you should focus on: Is it easy and secure? Does it put the data in the right place? Is it scalable? You should take advantage of Insightly Marketing and Service App Connect. Those are wonderful products that will give you a great return on your software investment. In general, I would rate Insightly CRM a nine out of ten.