Insightly CRM vs Pipedrive | Top CRM Comparison

Insightly is ideal for small and medium businesses seeking an affordable, project management-focused CRM. Its entry-level tier is free but limited to two users and lacks most of Insightly’s key features. Thus, it’s best to opt for any of its three paid tiers, which range in price from $29 to $99 per user, per month. Most paid plans include a 14-day free trial and come with contact and project management tools, lead routing, and customizable sales processes.

Pipedrive may not have a free platform, but all of its subscriptions come with a 14-day trial. Plus, Pipedrive’s entry-level Essential plan is a mere $14.90 per user, per month — a rather small fee to pay for custom pipelines, activity tracking, and an AI-based sales assistant. The rest of Pipedrive’s four paid tiers cost the same (or slightly less) than Insightly’s comparable plans and add features like email marketing tools, 24/7 customer support, and workflow automation.

Insightly’s primary focus is project management. It eases the burden of repetitive data entry for busy sales professionals by allowing them to convert won opportunities into projects directly from the pipeline. Similar to Pipedrive, Insightly has kanban-style pipelines that can be updated through a simple drag-and-drop interface. Other key features of Insightly include contact data enrichment via social media profiles, web-to-lead capture, and sales team management.

Pipedrive’s functionality centers around the sales process. All Pipedrive plans come with unlimited contact records and visual pipelines, which will make it easier for businesses to scale without regular paid upgrades. (By comparison, most Insightly plans impose limits on each of those elements.) Other noteworthy features include idle deal notifications plus an AI sales assistant that makes recommendations for future success based on past performances.

Insightly may have a broader appeal than Pipedrive since it’s simple enough for beginners but with a layer of complexity that’ll intrigue more experienced CRM users. While all users have access to its knowledge base, help center, and webinars, its resources aren’t as comprehensive and transparent as other CRMs. It also doesn’t offer free CRM implementation training, and you need to purchase a relatively expensive support plan to access its community forums.

Pipedrive touts itself as a CRM made for sales professionals by sales professionals, which results in an intuitive and user-friendly interface. Lack of customization and advanced features might be limiting for enterprises, but Pipedrive is an excellent starting point for CRM newbies. It even offers numerous self-service channels, such as a vast knowledge base, an active community forum, and the Pipedrive Academy, which hosts tutorials and certification programs.

Insightly users can use its online chat (subject to availability), and all paid subscribers can access email-based support. For more support channels (phone and community forums), quicker turnaround times, and onboarding assistance, Insightly offers premium support plans starting at $1,500 per year. Although Insightly’s customer support team has a great reputation, that expense may be too much for solopreneurs or smaller companies to bear.

Meanwhile, Pipedrive offers 24/7 live chat and email support as standard with all of its plans. Users can also get updates on service status for system issues on their website. Although phone support is only available to Power and Enterprise subscribers, users can access its free onboarding guides via Pipedrive Learn’s courses, video tutorials, and webinars. Pipedrive support is quite accessible and considered to be very good, but it’s not always the most timely.

Insightly offers a library of nine legacy reports focused on opportunities and contact activities, along with over 40 chart styles to display on the CRM dashboard. For companies that need more specific stats, Insightly includes a custom report builder with all tiers. While generating reports from scratch may be overwhelming at first (relative to Pipedrive), it’ll be worth it for businesses that rely on detailed data to make actionable sales decisions.

Pipedrive comes with a dozen premade report types as standard with every plan. These focus on deal performance, activities, and emails. Custom CRM reporting is available, but only with Pipedrive’s three highest plans. Although it may not be as robust as Insightly when it comes to bespoke reporting, Pipedrive stands out for its visual dashboards, which can display up to 25 reports at a time and are able to be shared with anyone who has access to a link.

All Insightly plans include activity sets, a group of sequences for automating pipeline-related tasks and events. While these activity sets can be tailored to specific triggers, they’re somewhat limited. Upgrading to Insightly’s Professional or Enterprise tiers allows for a wider range of workflows with precise triggers. For even more customized workflows, developers can use multiple coding languages to create actions with lambda functions via Insightly Enterprise.

Pipedrive may not have the same level of flexibility in creating workflows that Insightly does as there’s no developer option, but it does have a more appealing approach to the process. Pipedrive and Insightly both utilize a visual drag-and-drop interface; however, Pipedrive’s automation builder is cleaner and more organized. Build workflows from scratch, modify any of Pipedrive’s 36 premade automation templates, or add recipes made by other Pipedrive users.

Insightly’s free mobile app features the main CRM’s renowned project management tools and several app-exclusive functions. Users can record audio notes up to an hour long and add new contact data via the built-in business card scanner. Insightly’s mobile app also has call logging available at no extra cost — a contrast to the $35 per month required to use Insightly Voice, a similar telephony feature on the parent software. However, there’s no way to access offline data.

Pipedrive’s free mobile app takes a page from its CRM counterpart with an organized visual interface. Unlike Insightly, the Pipedrive mobile CRM allows for offline access to contact and sales data – important for field professionals who don’t always have stable Wi-Fi. Other notable features include an overview of daily tasks and meetings (called Focus) along with integration with Google Maps, WhatsApp, and other third-party productivity and messaging apps.

Insightly AppConnect contains over 1,000 CRM integrations, ranging from social media and customer service to operations and project management. Notable native apps include Facebook, Twitter, ADP Workforce Now, and a selection of Google products (Google Vision image recognition, Google Text-to-Speech, and Google Translate, to name a few). However, you need to subscribe to AppConnect, starting at $249 per account, per month for direct app access.

The Pipedrive Marketplace features over 400 apps across multiple categories, with lead generation, marketing automation, and email marketing among the most prominent. Notable native integrations include Leadfeeder, Jotform, and Ring.io. There are also several integrations built and supported by Pipedrive, such as Dealbot for Slack and Pipedrive for Gmail. Outside of Pipedrive’s native apps, businesses can add integrations via Zapier or develop their own apps.