Item: Insightly
Rating: 7
Author: Jeff Keeney

Overall Satisfaction with Insightly

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

All in all, Insightly is a solid CRM with a number of features to earn a recommendation, but there was definitely a learning curve. We've been using Insightly for a little over a year now, and overall, it’s been a reliable CRM that does what we need it to do. The biggest plus for us has been how well it integrates with tools like Gmail, Google Drive, and Slack. That’s made adoption across different departments a lot smoother.
The project management features built into the CRM are surprisingly helpful. It’s nice not having to switch between platforms to track deals and manage related tasks. The layout is clean, and once you get the hang of it, organizing pipelines and workflows becomes pretty intuitive. The two areas that it excels in is integration with the rest of our suite - this keeps us from bouncing from platform to platform which is definitely a time saver. The real bonus was the project management features which was especially useful in keeping all of us up to date on issues, resolutions, and rollouts. Kudos on that!

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

Once you are immersed in the platform, for all of its integration kudos, the platform became "intuitive" if that is the right word for it. There was some push back from staff on deployment.
The service and support team at Insightly was very responsive, but it seemed as if they had fielded similar complaints, and slower learning curves than we expected.
Unfortunately, while all has worked out nicely now and we are very happy with the platform, we had to have additional instruction time for all the staff during onboarding as workflows, dashboards, and pipelines were more time intensive than expected on the demo.

Return on Investment

For negative impact, the time setting up the various data fields and making sure the data was right and how it showed was not easy.
Having the integrations available has saved all of us time jumping from platform to platform. Definitely assisted with focus and probably scrubbed at least one meeting.
For the few issues we had setting up and customizing the tool, the ease of adoption across all the departments has been truly spectacular and beyond expectations.
Hoping the team will make it more plug and play for future rollouts and work on the mobile app and then this platform would be 100!

Usability

Again, once all the dashboards, pipelines, and data fields were set up correctly and we were sure the data was accurate, it was a 10 but there were some obstacles getting there. We had numerous departments that needed to report and have all their data included, so from that standpoint this platform was a beast.

Integrated Platform Solution

Having all of our data in one place, while a little scary, has provided a ton of benefits. From saving copious amounts of time jumping from platform to platform, to uniting all teams around data driven decision making, Insightly has helped align our practice with our business analytics. Probably the most surprising, or at least unanticipated benefit, was that all departments are in the CRM and it feels like a family of sorts where everyone is available to assist and realign around our goal of customer first business philosophy.

Alternatives Considered

Zoho CRM

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 tiers.

Key Insights

Do you think Insightly delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Insightly's feature set?

Yes

Did Insightly live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Insightly go as expected?

Would you buy Insightly again?

Yes

Other Software Used

AWS Cloud9, Cloudflare Zero Trust Services, Adobe AIR

Likelihood to Recommend

I put 7/10 or 4/5 as a rating and recommendation for this platform but that may not be everyone's experience and the crack team of support staff had me feeling like the issues that we had would be smoothed out until refined for future clients. It could have just been our team, but the standout features were integration, clean layouts, project management made adoption across departments very smooth. One thing I didn't mention was the mobile app which we felt was not able to handle and deep work so our team used the desktop version almost exclusively. Unfortunately due to the type of data and amount of data, is something I have seen in other CRM mobile apps.

Insightly Feature Ratings

Comments

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Insightly is a Solid CRM with Great Integrations But has a Learning Curvbe

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