Insightly and Pipedrive are two of the most popular CRMs on the market for their affordable costs and accessible interfaces. Beyond those similarities, these CRMs shine for different reasons. Insightly is renowned for its quality project management tools and sales automation, while Pipedrive stands out for its excellent pipeline management features and 24/7 user support. Comparing Insightly vs Pipedrive will help you decide if either CRM is right for your business.
Here are the situations in which each of these CRMs excels:
Insightly: Best for small and medium businesses that want rich project management capabilities plus ample flexibility in workflow automation (free to $99 per user, per month)
Pipedrive: Best for budget-conscious small businesses seeking a strictly sales-focused CRM that’s easy to implement and use ($14.90 to $99 per user, per month)
Insightly and Pipedrive are each solid CRM software — but there’s a possibility that neither will suit your unique business needs. If that’s the case, we suggest you broaden your search by reading our articles on the best overall CRMs and the best industry-specific CRM solutions. Otherwise, continue below for our full breakdown of Insightly vs Pipedrive.
Insightly vs Pipedrive at a Glance
Price Range (Annual)
Free to $99 per user, per month
$14.90 to $99 per user, per month
Core Features
Largely focused on project management
Primarily centered around the sales process
Ease of Use
Low barrier to entry but not overly simplistic
Clean visual interface is perfect for beginners
Reporting
Broader parameters but not easy to navigate at first
Easy-to-build reports but parameters are quite limited
Sales Automation
Allows for more flexibility in creating custom workflows
User-friendly approach to basic sales automation
Mobile App
Built-in business card scanner collects contact data
Integrates with WhatsApp and other third-party apps
App Integrations
Tools for social media, operations, project management
Tools for lead generation and marketing automation
Insightly and Pipedrive are both easy to use and relatively inexpensive — but they’re vastly different CRMs otherwise. Insightly features solid project management, lead generation, and workflow automation tools; Pipedrive is laser-focused on sales with deep pipeline management tools. We scored Insightly vs Pipedrive based on five categories businesses prioritize most when choosing a CRM: cost, features, ease of use, customizability and apps, and user support.
Evaluation Criteria
We chose the five key factors to a quality CRM and prioritized them according to how important they are to most salespeople and teams. Then, we organized the categories into weighted subcriteria, assigned subscores, and totaled the scores to determine the winning CRM for each category.
Pricing:
25%
Features:
25%
Ease of Use:
20%
App Integrations & Customization:
15%
User Support:
15%
Pricing Overview
This includes monthly per-user starting costs, free plans and trials, add-ons, and monthly/yearly billing options.
We also separated three core CRM features into individual categories: reporting, sales automation, and mobile app. Most businesses rely on CRM software to optimize their workflow and make informed sales decisions — areas where those three specific features play an instrumental role.
Winner: Pipedrive is the more efficient option overall. Despite not offering a free-for-life platform, its entry-level plan includes a solid suite of features for a nominal per-user fee.
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. All paid plans have a 14-day free trial and come with contact and project management tools; upgrades include lead routing and advanced workflows.
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 three 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.
Winner: Insightly gets the edge for having a deeper feature set overall, especially since its lead generation tools come standard with most plans (not as add-ons).
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.
Winner: Pipedrive is made for salespeople, by salespeople, resulting in an intuitive UI that’s easy for most people to learn quickly.
Insightly may have broader appeal than Pipedrive since it’s simple enough for beginners but with a layer of complexity that’ll intrigue more experienced CRM users. It’s also quite rigid, which hinders its customizability but also makes it tougher to mess up the system. However, access to customer support is limited without purchasing a separate support plan, which is quite expensive — important to keep in mind should something go awry during CRM implementation.
Pipedrive touts itself as a CRM made for sales professionals, by sales professionals. The result is a clean, intuitive interface that’s easy to learn. A lack of customization and advanced features may be a turn-off for businesses that prioritize those elements in a CRM, but for teams that are generally new to CRM software, Pipedrive will make an excellent starting point. And for businesses that need guidance during setup, Pipedrive offers 24/7 user support with every plan.
Winner: Insightly is a better choice for sales teams that want the option to pull more detailed custom reports.
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 two 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.
Winner: Insightly is victorious here as it’s more flexible in the variety of automations possible.
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 sales automation, 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.
Winner: The Pipedrive mobile app takes this category for its offline data access and integration with WhatsApp, Google Maps, and other top third-party phone apps.
Insightly’s free mobile app features the main CRM’s renowned project management tools while adding 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. The Insightly 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.
Winner: Although Insightly has more integrations than Pipedrive, both provide easy-to-navigate marketplaces that allow you to install a variety of apps for a number of use cases.
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.) Businesses can use Zapier to link non-native apps; those with Insightly Enterprise can build custom APIs.
The Pipedrive Marketplace currently 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.
Winner: Pipedrive offers around-the-clock support plus sufficient self-serve resources as standard with every plan.
Every Insightly plan includes access to its knowledge base plus email-based help. For more support channels (phone and community forums), quicker turnaround times, and onboarding assistance, Insightly offers premium support plans starting from $1,500 per year. Although Insightly’s support team has a great reputation, that expense may be too much for smaller companies to bear, especially if they’ll need more hand-holding during CRM implementation.
Meanwhile, Pipedrive offers 24/7 live chat and email support as standard with all of its plans. Phone support is also available but only for Enterprise subscribers. Pipedrive even offers numerous self-service channels such as a vast knowledge base, an active community forum, and Pipedrive Academy, which hosts tutorials and certification programs. Pipedrive support is quite accessible and considered to be very good, but it’s not always the most timely.
Insightly and Pipedrive are clearly two solid CRM platforms, but neither is a one-size-fits-all solution. Below are a few scenarios in which Insightly and Pipedrive may not be the right choice for an organization or sales team.
Who Shouldn’t Use Insightly
Insightly might not be the best fit in the following situations:
Teams That Need Sufficient Hand-Holding With CRMs: Insightly isn’t terribly difficult to use, but support is limited unless you’re willing to pay a large price for it.
Field Professionals Who Need Offline Data Access: Insightly’s mobile CRM, while very good, lacks the ability for users to access data offline, a glaring omission.
Small Businesses Looking for a Scalable Free CRM: Insightly’s limited free platform may only suit a solopreneur for so long; burgeoning companies will outgrow it quickly.
If you identify with one of these and you decide not to use Insightly, don't simply sign up for Pipedrive. First, ensure it's actually right for you.
Who Shouldn’t Use Pipedrive
These companies may want to look beyond Pipedrive for their CRM needs:
Businesses Wanting Advanced Features: Enterprises, in particular, may find that Pipedrive doesn’t offer enough flexibility in automation, reporting, and customization.
Companies Needing Sales and Marketing Tools: Pipedrive is made for salespeople by salespeople; thus, it’s centered on sales and lacking in marketing features.
Data-Driven Companies Seeking In-Depth Reporting: Pipedrive is great for basic reporting, but when it comes to deeper analytics, it falls short.
For a full breakdown of who should and shouldn't use Pipedrive, check out our full Pipedrive review. There, you'll find an independent analysis as well as a roundup of user reviews. Should neither Insightly nor Pipedrive meet your requirements in terms of price and/or features, there are alternatives out there that may do a better job.
3 Best Alternatives to Insightly & Pipedrive
After much deliberation, you may learn Insightly and Pipedrive aren’t the right CRMs for your business. Of course, that doesn’t take away from what either can do, but there’s a chance you may need something that neither CRM can adequately provide. Whether you want software with a more versatile set of features or a free CRM that’s scalable, consider these three alternatives to Insightly and Pipedrive:
Freshsales
HubSpot CRM
Zoho CRM
Freshsales is a sales-focused CRM rated our top overall CRM for salespeople. Up to three users can take advantage of its Growth plan for free, which is great for contact management but doesn't offer a visual pipeline. Upgrade into its premium tiers for advanced sales forecasting tools and more customization features. Freshsales’ lower tiers lack advanced marketing features, so if you’re looking for a robust mix of sales and marketing tools, check out Zoho CRM.
HubSpot CRM is our best-rated free CRM software offering the most robust free mix of sales and marketing features along with usability. Upgrade into its paid tiers for advanced sales tools, however, its paid tiers lack some marketing features and they may be too expensive for solo-users or small teams. If this sounds like you, check out Zoho CRM instead.
Zoho CRM is a solid sales tool offering a basic free tier and advanced paid tiers with some of the more robust marketing and sales features on the market. For example, it's one of the only CRMs available offering social media management, and also boasts advanced sales tools like AI-powered automation. However, it may have too many features for some, and HubSpot CRM's user interface is better.
Check out our list of the best Pipedrive alternatives to learn about the other options and pick which is best for your business based on pricing, feature sets, use cases, and more.
Bottom Line: Insightly vs Pipedrive
Insightly stands apart from Pipedrive for its deep suite of features, flexible sales automation, and strong reporting capabilities. However, Pipedrive is a better choice for companies seeking an affordable CRM with an easy-to-learn interface plus all-hours access to user support. Of course, the best CRM for your business should meet your specific goals and budget; this breakdown is meant to provide additional clarity in making your final decision — whatever that may be.
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