Desk.com (discontinued) vs. Insightly

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Desk.com (discontinued)
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Desk.com was a helpdesk, ticketing, and customer support product offered by Salesforce, and oriented towards the needs of small businesses. It is no longer sold and support has been discontinued. Salesforce recommends its modern Service Cloud as a replacement.N/A
Insightly
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Insightly is presented as a modern, affordable CRM that is easy to use, simple to customize, and that scales with companies as they grow, designed to solve common pain points that legacy CRMs can't. Available in any vertical, Insightly CRM customers can add companion products for marketing automation, customer service, and integrations in the same platform. Insightly has more than a million users worldwide.
$29
per month (billed annually) per user
Pricing
Desk.com (discontinued)Insightly
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Plus
$29
per month (billed annually) per user
Professional
$49
per month (billed annually) per user
Enterprise
$99
per month (billed annually) per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Desk.com (discontinued)Insightly
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Desk.com (discontinued)Insightly
Considered Both Products
Desk.com (discontinued)
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
With the help of the Salesforce Desk, we can get smarter services, especially for small companies as a part of customer support. This leads to increased productivity. Adding applications from AppExchange is an awesome feature where we can integrate with a number of other …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
We have not used any products like Desk.com
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
I would say it is a best product when you have to take up the customer calls as well as deep dive customer details while addressing their complaints and issues. It is one of the best tools out there in the market and so many multinational companies are taking benefit of the …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Wix Answers was much better compared to Desk.com. It had more excellent and much better and more tools and was very customizable. Luckily it also had a search tool and also the sort and filter tools. The only thing better than Wix Answers on desk.com was that we could keep …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
We liked it as a tool because of the ease and advantages offered by the tool compared to the other solutions evaluated.Due to its ease of implementation and ease of use it adapted very well to the needs of the company, that was the reason why we chose desk.com.
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
We would have stayed on desk.com if Salesforce did not force us to move off the platform. To be honest it was a great platform at a reasonable price. I was the administrator and our agents were very happy with how things worked. I would go back to them in a heartbeat if I …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Zendesk is much more light and setup friendly. This system does not require a lot of Salesforce knowledge or certification to set it up. Zendesk is better suited to small to medium-sized businesses.
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Desk.com and Salesforce Service Cloud can be very easily implemented, administered, and scaled across support teams within the organization. It is truly an industry gold standard as it has a lot of great out-of-the-box functionality and does not require as much customization …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
This one seemed to have the best salesforce integration and seemed to be the best for having all of our different teams (sales, retention, support, marketing, SRM, etc.) in one place. Also, we were able to get a very good price. The other platforms seemed like they would be too …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Desk connects directly with Salesforce with many other teams in the business use. This tool did take longer to set up because of all the customization possibilities. There is a good amount of customization that needs to be completed in order to make it function correctly and …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Overall, it performs a lot better than all three combined, with a lot fewer glitches and a lot more user-friendly and user experience efficiency. Any new link that needs to be done, takes a lot less time to execute on desk compared to the three others. Simply advanced when it …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
We have used Amazon Connect and it's one of the worst systems we've ever used. It will hang up mid-call or just refresh the whole call and go mute the system was horribly designed we prefer Desk.com and will continue to use desk.com at this office company.
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Salesforce Desk is a lot easier to use than Zoho. Zoho has way too much going on, within the software, to be easily manageable. However, SysAid is the easiest, for users, to use because it is extremely basic and straightforward. Our users prefer the easiest method of opening an …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
In my opinion, Intercom is more customer oriented, using chat and real time marketing features. Desk.com is a more old school solution focused on tickets and cases. Desk.com does not have much integration capacities with your platform, Intercom has lots of features around this, …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Lower pricing per user. That's about it! Other companies have all-around better features and easier user interfaces, but Desk can beat them on pricing even at higher account tiers. Included knowledgebase tools are a plus, and fairly easy to manage.
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
The big turn off to this product was the price and poor integration to existing systems. We were in the process of launching a new CRM and needed a tool that would work well with this new tool. Desk.com is a partner and works closely where Zendesk did none of that
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
We have not used any other products and probably will not. It's cost effective and easy to use.
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Desk.com is comparable, on a smaller scale. We went with Desk.com because it provided the functionality we needed and was more affordable.
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Originally, I was using Salesforce to keep track of students and their progress through the system (with an end goal in mind). It was really great for handling students on a case by case basis with the different fields and and sections for multiple people to complete as the …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
I was not involved in the selection process of Desk.com vs. competitors but we are discontinuing our Desk.com subscription this month and instead opting to use Service Cloud as our new ticketing system. It allows better integration with Salesforce.com and also is more client …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
  • Kayako
    • Interesting, but really clunky and unstable at the time.
Insightly
Chose Insightly
SFDC is over complicated and certainly not user friendly. It is also very expensive per user.
Chose Insightly
I have used a large amount of CRMs in the past but many of them are not on your list. Most of them have been great but have not allowed us to have as much customization as we have had with Insightly. We chose Insightly because it had most of what we needed and a way for us to …
Chose Insightly
Insightlty is a great tool in that it is customizable and affordable. I think that its strength is in the cost of the service.
Chose Insightly
I chose Insightly because I loved the dashboards, but I couldnt do all the work required to get our info into their system for the dashboards to mean anything for me.
Chose Insightly
Blackbaud Raiser's edge is very robust and not as user friendly. Greenlight CRM is fine but doesn't have as many features as Insightly. Insightly seems to be a good inbetween.
Chose Insightly
Insightly had overall way more flexibility then I had with NetSuite. NetSuite didn't have the creative pipeline abilities that Insightly had. Insightly had better data manage and tracking clients were way better and efficient then what NetSuite could deliver. NetSuite was …
Chose Insightly
We transitioned away from NetSuite to Insightly and it was a significant upgrade as we do not have programming capabilities. Unfortunately, we need a document management system as we handle large volumes of all types of data and Insightly came up short. We switched to TaxDome …
Chose Insightly
I am not sure if we have tried others. To my knowledge we have just used Insightly and quickbooks which we find both pretty useful.
Chose Insightly
Insightly actually have many different fields and customization options for data management. Other programs do not have the ability to organize data in this way. It is easy to manage customer contact information, phone call and email tracking, company management and many other …
Chose Insightly
There was a lot of flexibility and the cost factor was good, but I wasn't sure how comfortable the team felt with "Zia" the ai in the CRM. Zoho seemed like it was fully equipped for marketing automation and campaigns but there was a little confusion between this and the plus …
Chose Insightly
We swapped across from HubSpot as it was too difficult and over the top. Insightly had all the positive features from Hubspot, without the complications.
Chose Insightly
I have used no other CRM programs and my company is too ingrained in Insightly to switch to a different program at this point.
Chose Insightly
I wasn't involved in the selection of which CRM my client chose. Insightly was already implemented when I started working with my client.
Chose Insightly
I did not select Insightly for our company as I am a user but not a decision maker, but compared to Chronus, Insightly is a much more organized CRM. Chronus also had technical issues that slowed or prevented our work, and I have rarely run into that in my time using Insightly.
Chose Insightly
Although the SFMC cost us very high, but we like the platform because it covers everything which we wants. Its different studios and builders helps us to create our own custom emails and automations.

We also like its journey builder and mapping of customer data. Its something …
Chose Insightly
Insightly has just worked much better. The thing about Insightly that really sets it apart is the email linking. Having the ability to read all of the emails sent and received during the project let's you see the full story of the projects inception to its completion. …
Chose Insightly
I have forgotten the names of the softwares because we did the scoping over a year ago, but insightly was the best by far for our needs. The other two were focused on a different side of property services and had a lot of features that were not applicable. Without insightly, we …
Chose Insightly
Insightly is significantly better than Zendesk. It is easy to use, pleasant to look at, and makes sense. However, I don't think Insightly is fair now compared to Salesforce. Insightly can do many of the same things as Salesforce, but I've only started on some of these features. …
Chose Insightly
I did not select Insightly; my executive team selected Insightly. I would rate Insightly below any other CRM or marketing platform I've used based on its inefficiencies, lack of intuitive work processes, poorly functioning mobile app, and even the design, which is not appealing …
Chose Insightly
Insightly can be easily navigated and is straightforward. Based on my experience, it is more intuitive, and the menu buttons are self-explanatory, unlike the salesforce I have experienced. There are just a lot of buttons to click from, or sometimes, it could be a drop-down box …
Chose Insightly
These have higher prices and offer more extensive products we wouldn't utilize at our growth stage.
Features
Desk.com (discontinued)Insightly
Sales Force Automation
Comparison of Sales Force Automation features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Insightly
7.3
Ratings
8% below category average
Customer data management / contact management00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Workflow management00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Territory management00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Opportunity management00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Contract management00 Ratings6.50 Ratings
Quote & order management00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Interaction tracking00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Channel / partner relationship management00 Ratings7.70 Ratings
Customer Service & Support
Comparison of Customer Service & Support features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Insightly
7.1
Ratings
9% below category average
Case management00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Call center management00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Help desk management00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Marketing Automation
Comparison of Marketing Automation features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Insightly
7.0
Ratings
11% below category average
Lead management00 Ratings6.50 Ratings
Email marketing00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
CRM Project Management
Comparison of CRM Project Management features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Insightly
6.7
Ratings
14% below category average
Task management00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Billing and invoicing management00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Reporting00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
CRM Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of CRM Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Insightly
7.5
Ratings
3% below category average
Forecasting00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Pipeline visualization00 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Customizable reports00 Ratings7.70 Ratings
Customization
Comparison of Customization features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Insightly
7.4
Ratings
4% below category average
Custom fields00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Custom objects00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Scripting environment00 Ratings6.80 Ratings
API for custom integration00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Insightly
7.5
Ratings
12% below category average
Single sign-on capability00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Role-based user permissions00 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Social CRM
Comparison of Social CRM features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Insightly
7.4
Ratings
2% below category average
Social data00 Ratings6.80 Ratings
Social engagement00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Integrations with 3rd-party Software
Comparison of Integrations with 3rd-party Software features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Insightly
6.3
Ratings
18% below category average
Marketing automation00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Compensation management00 Ratings5.10 Ratings
Platform
Comparison of Platform features of Product A and Product B
Desk.com (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Insightly
5.5
Ratings
33% below category average
Mobile access00 Ratings5.50 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Desk.com (discontinued)Insightly
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Salesmate
Salesmate
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Creatio
Creatio
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
SysAid
SysAid
Score 8.9 out of 10
Creatio
Creatio
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Desk.com (discontinued)Insightly
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(0 ratings)
7.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.4
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(0 ratings)
7.6
(0 ratings)
Availability
1.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(0 ratings)
7.9
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.8
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Desk.com (discontinued)Insightly
Likelihood to Recommend
Desk.com and the Salesforce Service Cloud provide a sophisticated suite to easily create and track cases coming in, along with automatically routing and escalating issues as they arise. It allows me to configure my own workflows and customizes consoles with easy drag and drop functionality. It is the perfect help desk software, which integrates with the Salesforce Sales and Commerce clouds seamlessly. The in-app and mobile support is also very expedient and helpful.
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If a business has a simple workflow for purchasing a product or service for a customer and they want to keep track of this workflow then Insightly is very useful. The more complex a business operation is then Insightly starts to become difficult to use. I would recommend Insightly for small and medium sized businesses. Large businesses might have issues delegating tasks across many different users in a large company
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Pros
  • Help Center. Desk has worked endlessly with us to perfect our Help Center. They are dedicated and willing to work in order to make your product right.
  • Customization. Though we exceeded the rule limitation for Desk, they have still allowed us to take their product and make it our own. We have our own labeling, and priority system which help us hit important SLAs.
  • User education. Whenever there is a new feature released, I feel like I'm in the know about it which is extremely important when we've been requesting certain features for a long period of time. Their communication is on point.
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  • As mentioned, Insightly integrated with Google Suite so all of our communications, and especially our analytics and metrics, didn't miss a beat.
  • Slack integration was helpful too, as a number of tools I investigated prior to choosing Insightly, had third party apps used for integration. This is better than nothing, but Insightly's native integration was a real relief.
  • The project management feature was a life saver, not just for the DEV team, but also for the Sales team. This allowed us to skip service tickets and go right from us or a client, directly to DEV. The clients just got a much more personal touch and the turn around time was increased.
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Cons
  • Internal knowledge tools are clunky and annoying to access, outside the regular workflow of everyday staff
  • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in business rules and custom fields
  • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in case handling - for example, if you begin a case as a phone call you CANNOT email the customer from the case. As though no one working at Desk has ever sent a follow-up email...?
  • Not very good for B2B, mid-to-large businesses. Difficult to set business rules based on company information (for example, service level/tier) and nearly impossible to track key stakeholders and get clear insight into the relationship at a high level
  • Reporting tools are clunky, slow, and just all-around pretty useless
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  • Customization has both positive and negative aspects. Some fields cannot be customized, and I've run into some issues because of this.
  • Misleading features. I suppose it is the quickest way to describe it. I'm trying to get my team away from having five windows open simultaneously to go through one process, and Insightly's "reply to email" function is misleading. You can't reply to the email; it creates an entirely new email without the previous thread. Due to this feature not working as expected, my team has to return to their inbox and reply to the email.
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Likelihood to Renew
We will be very likely to renew our contract with Desk.com. It is easy to use, and provides us with everything we need to keep our customers and employees happy. They have also been very helpful in catering the application to our specific and unique needs, including working across brands and adding specific content for our products
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Insightly offers a great product; it's the right fit for our company at this time. We were, however, considering moving to Contactually due to their cost effective automation features. However, they lacked the project management capabilities of Insightly. As our company grows, we would love to stay with Insightly - and if they can nail the automation and add the ability to customize a little bit more, it would be the perfect solution for us. For a larger company with a more involved sales team, you might find the metrics/reporting to be a bit basic. Insightly offers great customer service even to free customers
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Usability
Once it is fully set up with all of the unique and necessary customizations for your organization, it becomes easier to use, but before that, it is not very user-friendly and there are not a lot of training resources available. You likely need a Salesforce admin for initial set-up who is experienced with customization.
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Some items are not easily accessible as an admin, and the number of available resources is outdated (video from 2017). For basic tasks such as updating prospects or contacts, it is fine. However, when you change the screen size, the system becomes less responsive, with tables often being difficult to read.
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Reliability and Availability
We've never had a problem with Desk.com's availability.
Read full review
The provider is 100% available, with no downtime, maintenance, or unexpected outages. We have been able to perform solid continuous services for 12 months without any interruptions. We have backups as well, unlike the in-house backup that they keep on their end. I believe they have a very good redundancy and backup infrastructure in case they get any outages.
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Performance
Fast, responsive, gorgeous, and fun. It's always run like a thoroughbred for me.
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Pages normally load quickly, but every now and then, as entering updates to fields, it take a while to update. Sometimes even after refreshing the screen, we have to exit and go back in to get the fields or queries to update.
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Support Rating
I always get the support and needed answers in a timely manner. Whether by email, ticket, or call. There's always a solution available or a potential one available. Everything is clear and straight to the point in customer support from Desk. I didn't face any difficulty so far with that.
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We have used Insightly for almost 2 years now. We have always been able to get in touch with support for a variety of reasons and they have never disappointed us. The support staff have always been very understanding. They have assisted with answers to our questions and have provided great tech support. We would highly recommend them.
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In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
Well, we didn’t get the chance to do this in-person training but rather one-on-one online training with HR in-house. There were PowerPoints to discuss as well as video instructions on how to use the app, so it was okay. We were able to play around with it during the training or onboarding session.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
I've used Insightly's online training &/ or learned as I went. I've found the blogs and online written material helpful. I've also attended a few webinars, which can be useful if you use a J-I-T approach so as not to overwhelm you (or your staff) with functionality that you are using just yet. The fact that it's all available on their website and you can learn at your own pace is invaluable
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Implementation Rating
As I stated earlier, implementation of Desk.com went more smoothly than most. The resources in the "Support Center" are fantastic, and I never ran into anything that left me stumped, angry, or disappointed.
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did not participate in the implementation of this product did not participate in the implementation of this product did not participate in the implementation of this product did not participate in the implementation of this product did not participate in the implementation of this product did not participate in the implementation of this product
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Alternatives Considered
Wix Answers was much better compared to Desk.com. It had more excellent and much better and more tools and was very customizable. Luckily it also had a search tool and also the sort and filter tools. The only thing better than Wix Answers on desk.com was that we could keep internal communication records by adding notes on tickets, and it saved a lot of time.
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I have used a large amount of CRMs in the past but many of them are not on your list. Most of them have been great but have not allowed us to have as much customization as we have had with Insightly. We chose Insightly because it had most of what we needed and a way for us to customize the database as we needed it
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
(+) Being able to download my LinkedIn connections was a huge benefit. (+) I use the task function to stay on top of my follow-up activity which is another positive feature. (+) The sorting capabilities also help me pinpoint the contacts that I need to stay on top of. (-) When I add a new lead from an existing organization, I would like the organization's information to automatically populate the fields like address, website, description. I enter all that information manually. (-) My mass mailing experience has been tedious due to the email function being interrupted and crashing due to bad email addresses in some of my records. (-) Many of my leads do not have current email addresses. I wish Insightly offered a tool to help find email addresses. I spend too much time researching to find email addresses.
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Return on Investment
  • It has definitely had a positive impact by helping our team quickly address issues people are having with our product.
  • Desk.com has helped our team and company get better by addressing customer and tester issues faster, and tracking data so that our team can improve the quality and speed of all of our outgoing communications.
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  • While I am working in a capacity that does not involve my input into the licensing or cost side of us having Insightly I can see that there is certainly a good ROI.
  • With 9 account managers utilising the system at any one time we can instantly keep track of our own sales and client data while also being able to see what others do.
  • Being able to track key KPIs as well with graphs and charts enables us to see where we sit within our targets and easily adapt to areas that need more attention.
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ScreenShots

Desk.com (discontinued) Screenshots

Screenshot of Desk.com ConsoleScreenshot of Desk.com Issue ScreenScreenshot of Desk.com Reporting and Analytics

Insightly Screenshots

Screenshot of Insightly's lead status and activity tracking, available so that nothing falls through the cracks.Screenshot of the reporting feature, which provides insight into sales and productivity performance.Screenshot of the Insightly Opportunities dashboard.Screenshot of Insightly on mobile.Screenshot of Screenshot of