Insightly and HubSpot are customer relationship (CRM) software with free and paid upgrades. Both include contact management, sales pipelines, and email integration, among other features. However, HubSpot CRM is more ideal for startups wanting a basic free CRM with unlimited users while Insightly is a better fit for businesses wanting combined contact and project management.
When to Use HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM has an intuitive user interface with at-a-glance features designed for sales reps who don’t want to spend time finding and adding information. It’s best for startups that want a basic, free CRM to use for prospecting and tracking deals. It’s also a good option for companies that want the potential to add HubSpot’s powerful paid sales, marketing, and service upgrades, as the CRM can connect with these options.
When to Use Insightly
Insightly is tailored to businesses that want to combine contact and sales management with project management. It features many customization options, particularly around data fields, reports, and dashboards, which can be designed to show just about any combination of data from sales and projects. This makes it a good choice for service-related teams that want a tool that will combine their sales and project management functions under one roof.
HubSpot vs Insightly at a Glance
| Pricing | ||
| Project Management | ||
| Contact Management | ||
| Kanban-style Sales Pipeline | ||
| Deals | ||
| Email Tracking | ||
| Integrated Call Dialer | ||
| Live Chat | ||
| Visitor Tracking | ||
| Integrations | ||
| More Information |
How We Evaluated HubSpot vs Insightly
A good small business CRM should be relatively inexpensive and easy to set up and use out of the box. To compare these two CRMs, we tested core functions, such as creating contacts, setting up pipelines, adding deals, and customization. We looked at their ability to track performance with data and other automation features that might be useful for sales and service teams. Finally, we reviewed advanced features like project management and workflow automation.
The criteria we used to evaluate the best include:
- Price: We compared each program’s monthly user fee, add-on costs, and platform upgrades that resulted in additional functionality.
- Contact management: A CRM should have contact management capabilities that make it easy to create, edit, and search for contacts. They should also work well with contact-related activities like email, phone calls, and more.
- Deal and opportunity management: We looked into how each tool tracked a deal’s pipeline stages, what deal data was viewable, and how each tool helped prioritize follow-up activities.
- Additional features: We looked for features that help a sales team perform better, such as visitor tracking, auto-populating data, and even live chat. We also looked at advanced capabilities such as project management and workflow automation.
- Analytics and reporting: A good CRM should offer reports that collect meaningful sales data to help managers make data-driven decisions.
- System integrations: We compared each software’s integration options with other third-party applications.
- Customer satisfaction: Reading through extensive product reviews, we compared technical support offerings and reported ease of implementation.
Based on this criteria, we highly recommend HubSpot for small businesses wanting an all-around, sales-focused CRM. It’s easy to use and comes with added features such as visitor tracking and auto-populating data that make sales reps more efficient. Insightly is a better option if you’re looking for a CRM solution with a strong project management component.
HubSpot vs Insightly: Pricing & Features
HubSpot and Insightly include core CRM features like contacts, deals, pipeline management, reporting, and third-party integration options. HubSpot CRM is free forever with unlimited users, and Insightly offers a basic free plan with paid plans starting at $29 per user, per month. For a look at our top picks, visit our best CRM provider reviews.
HubSpot CRM Pricing
HubSpot’s CRM is free forever and includes unlimited users and up to 1 million contacts. Its core features are contact and pipeline management, shared inbox, live chat, ticketing, and reporting. Additional sales, marketing, and service features can be added for $50 per user, per “hub.”
These are the hubs:
- Marketing hub: A $50 Starter and $800 per month Professional plan are available. Some of the Professional’s advanced features include email marketing, marketing automation, calls to action (CTAs), landing pages, and blogging tools.
- Sales hub: A $50 per month Starter and $400 per month Professional (includes five users) plan are available. Professional features include sales automation, multiple deal pipelines, and custom reporting.
- Service hub: Pricing is the same as the Sales hub. Some Professional features include a knowledge base, customer service automation, and video creation and hosting.
HubSpot CRM Features
The free HubSpot CRM includes contact management, company and contact insights, pipeline management, and email integration with Gmail and Outlook. There’s also built-in live chat and chatbot that are easy to configure, deploy, and manage.
HubSpot CRM includes the following standout features:
Contact Management
Once a contact record is created with a name and email, the record will populate all known company information, including revenue, number of employees, LinkedIn address, phone, and other customizable properties. This saves the sales rep time and gives immediate context. These properties, however, do not auto-populate within Insightly. You also get unlimited users and 1 million contacts (Insightly charges per user and caps records for each plan).
From the record, you can make calls, email, create tasks, schedule events, and see website activity. To perform each task requires one click in HubSpot versus Insightly’s two-click requirement. HubSpot also displays more at-a-glance information than Insightly. For instance, HubSpot’s record shows all contact details, activity timeline, and activity box (e.g., email, call, and task) in one view. With Insightly, the primary screen only shows contact details.
By copying a code snippet in your CMS, you have the ability to track website visitors (even anonymous visitors), giving reps better insight into how a prospect is using their company’s website by showing all pages visited and actions taken. Another tracking feature is Prospects, which shows which companies visit and the pages they visit—more sales intelligence for prospecting reps. These features are not found in Insightly.
Email Integration
Email integrates with Gmail, G Suite, Outlook, and Outlook 365 with a few clicks. The Chrome extension pulls in company, contact, and deal data for contacts and displays this in a column within Gmail. You can add contacts easily from here when prompted with one click. You also have the ability to add previously created documents while composing an email for items such as templates and documents, which is a feature not found in Insightly’s email extension.
Contact records are automatically synced any time you send emails, populating those conversation threads with a refresh of the browser. The Google Calendar sync lets you customize a meeting scheduler and provide that link in your email signature.
Email integration
Image courtesy of HubSpot
Live Chat & Chatbots
For sales and service teams, the included live chat and chatbot features are a convenient way to field both customer and prospect calls. Both chat and chatbot are easy to configure, deploy, and manage from within the CRM. Anyone on your team (registered in the CRM) can be automatically routed chats using predefined rules such as first available, team member online, or using a predetermined schedule.
The bot can collect visitor information, book a meeting with a rep, and create a new ticket. It’s a basic bot, but for startups wanting to collect leads 24×7, it’s all that’s needed to help automate another process. Live chat and bots are both features not found in Insightly.
Live chat
Image courtesy of HubSpot
Insightly Pricing
Insightly offers a basic free plan for two users: the Plus plan at $29 per user, per month, and the Professional at $49 per user, per month. All plans include contact management, deal tracking, and project management with email tracking and customizations offered in the paid plans. Compared to other CRMs, these are competitively priced plans.
Insightly Tiered Features
| Pricing | |||
| Contact Management | m | ||
| Task Management | |||
| Integrated Project Management | |||
| Mass Emailing | |||
| Gmail/Outlook Integration | |||
| Basic Pipeline | |||
| Activity Feed | |||
| Web-to-Lead Capture | |||
| Customizable Pipelines | |||
| Milestone Tracking | |||
| Customizable Reports | |||
| Workflow Automation | |||
| Lead Assignment & Routing | |||
| Custom Object Creation |
Free
The Free plan allows for two users and includes contact management, basic pipeline management, and project management. It also comes with Gmail and Outlook integration and the ability to send mass emails. Project management is the most noteworthy feature included with Insightly and one not found in the HubSpot CRM or many other HubSpot competitors.
However, Insightly lacks the website visitor tracking available in HubSpot CRM, but its absence shouldn’t dissuade most very small businesses. The combination of managing contacts, prospects, and projects with one intuitive platform makes this best for small service companies that want a free, simple CRM with project management capability.
Plus
The $29 per user, per month Plus plan adds features such as customizable pipelines and milestone tracking. Pipelines can be created for projects and sales and will appear under the Projects tab. It includes project reports, sales reports, and dashboards, which are much more customizable and robust than what is found in HubSpot CRM. However, the contact record limit is capped at 100,000 versus the 1 million record limit with HubSpot CRM.
Sales reporting options include tasks, contacts, leads, opportunities, organization, and more. Project reporting includes sorting projects by rep, status, and completed. Each of these can be further narrowed down to show greater granularity. This plan is best for teams that want a high degree of reporting customization to track and report on sales and projects.
Reporting on projects by rep and status
Courtesy of Insightly
Professional
The Professional plan costs $49 per user, per month and adds automation features such as email scheduling, workflow automation, and lead routing. There are also custom objects, which lets you create and store data that is unique to your business. For example, create an inventory list that you frequently sell to particular customers, and then you can link this inventory to contacts or other records.
Custom objects
Image courtesy of Insightly
You also have unlimited roles and permissions that can become as granular as needed for providing user access. If workflow automation—found here—is important to you, know that you’ll have to pay $400 per month to get it (along with other advanced features) in HubSpot’s CRM. Therefore, the Professional plan is best for teams that need workflow automation and more reporting capability, including forecasting and tracking performance by team.
HubSpot vs Insightly: Ease of Use
Both CRMs are easy to use. In general, though, HubSpot makes the daily life of a sales and service rep a little easier than Insightly. For example, creating a task requires just one click with HubSpot versus two clicks with Insightly. And rather than using icons for actions like Insightly, HubSpot spells it out: “Edit,” “Delete,” “Add,” and so on. This eliminates the hovering step until (and if) you memorize all of their icons.
Adding a task in Insightly.
Courtesy of Insightly
Adding a task in HubSpot
Courtesy of HubSpot
HubSpot CRM Ease of Use
As a user for over four years, I found it to be intuitive and easy to perform everyday functions. There are features that are designed to make it easier to use, such as auto-populating contact company details, which isn’t found in Insightly. This makes one less task a sales rep has to perform.
Insightly Ease of Use
Fit Small Business uses Insightly as its CRM and project management software. Though I use it to manage the writing process and not strictly as a CRM, I find it to be intuitive and utilitarian. My main complaint is that some actions that should take one click, take two. I’d also rather see action icons (e.g., create, complete, change records) replaced with the words.
HubSpot vs Insightly: Customer Service
Both HubSpot and Insightly offer different levels of support for their paid user plans. However, if you’re using HubSpot’s free CRM, your only option is using their online community for support. If you want email support, you’ll need to upgrade to one of their paid hubs ($50 per user, per month). When comparing Insightly versus HubSpot CRM in terms of included customer support, Insightly is the better option provided you can make do with email support alone.
HubSpot CRM Customer Service
The free CRM gives you access to HubSpot’s Community for support. It’s not until you pay ($50 per user, per month) for one of the upgraded hubs that you will have access to email support—an upgrade to the expensive Professional includes phone support. However, the inbound community has extensive resources for those who need it. From my experience, HubSpot users tend to like to share their knowledge.
Insightly Customer Service
Insightly offers a help center, community forum, and email support for their paid plans. All of the initial questions I had could be easily answered by the help center. Phone support is included if you purchase one of their pricey customer success plans.
HubSpot vs Insightly: Customer Reviews
Insightly and HubSpot both receive consistently favorable user reviews. HubSpot has even developed what might be considered a cult following—this seems to be driven in part by their own marketers and by their more than 3,000 reseller partners who help market and sell the software. Insightly doesn’t have this same type of following, but their customers are just as happy judging by their many positive online reviews.
HubSpot CRM Customer Reviews
HubSpot CRM gets consistently high marks overall from users. Most find it relatively easy to use and cite its all-in-one potential for sales, marketing, and service as a major advantage. Complaints from users usually point out that it’s expensive ($50 per user, per month, per hub) to increase the functionality from the free platform. For more reviews, visit our HubSpot user review page.
Insightly Customer Reviews
Users generally find the platform intuitive and relatively inexpensive. Some of the phrases used to describe it include “perfect,” “uncomplicated,” “acceptable,” “excellent,” and “no-frills.” Customers like the user interface and its ability as a project management tool integrated with contact management. There were a number of complaints about the level of support (email) and that it could take days to get a response. You can read more on our Insightly review page.
Bottom Line: Insighty vs Hubspot
Insightly and HubSpot are both user-friendly CRMs with similar core features, such as contact and deal management, email integrations, and tasks. Insightly is a great choice for those looking for a contact, sales, and project management CRM. HubSpot CRM is designed with the sales rep in mind to help them sell better.
We recommend HubSpot CRM because it easy to use and provides some additional features that provide more prospect information for sales reps, such as visitor tracking, company information, and prospects. There’s also live chat and chatbot that can schedule sales meetings and collect prospect information. It also offers upgradeable, robust marketing, sales, and service features. Visit HubSpot CRM today.
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