Marg Insightly

The only good thing I can say, and it is the main reason we selected this platform, is that the ability to save emails and files to a specific customer "folder" (they call it an Organization from within GMail is extremely easy.

Once anything is associated with a customer account, it is incredibly difficult to find anything that you've stored. There is no ability to search within the items you've stored for a particular client. The only search capability is global. So, if, for example, you wanted to search for IRS issues experienced by a particular customer, there is no way to do it. You are basically limited to sequential order by date.

Even worse, as you are searching by date, there are a limited number of records per page. So if you are searching for an email that happened a couple of years ago, you might have to go several pages back before you find a record that MIGHT be what you are looking for. If it turns out said record is not what you are looking for, when you go back to other records, the system dumps you back to page 1, where you have to again begin looking through every record for the particular bit of information you are searching for.

Bottom line: it takes forever to find anything, and forget about searching for something while you are on the phone with a customer!

Run away! Once they've got you, switching is incredibly difficult. No easy way to take your data.

Just trying to provide a tool that allows our support reps to service their customers efficiently.

The sidebar navigation makes a lot of sense, and that is about it.

The dashboard capability is awful! Onboarding was terrible. Seems like it a product that would be a step up from an excel sheet but a giant step down from any other CRM. Charts often contain different number forms so understanding them at a glance is very challenging. Their "SmartMerge" is the worst dedupe tool I have ever seen, it looks only at first and last name, and if they are the same, it recommends the contact be merged.

If you are looking for a CRM that provides basic, opportunity tracking Insightly will be great for you. If you are looking for a tool that also provides business intelligence data. Stay away.

I am trying to solve the problem of implementing a CRM to manage our sales pipeline as well as the projects we are helping our clients with.

The sidebar navigation makes a lot of sense, and that is about it.

The dashboard capability is awful! Onboarding was terrible. Seems like it a product that would be a step up from an excel sheet but a giant step down from any other CRM. Charts often contain different number forms so understanding them at a glance is very challenging. Their "SmartMerge" is the worst dedupe tool I have ever seen, it looks only at first and last name, and if they are the same, it recommends the contact be merged.

If you are looking for a CRM that provides basic, opportunity tracking Insightly will be great for you. If you are looking for a tool that also provides business intelligence data. Stay away.

I am trying to solve the problem of implementing a CRM to manage our sales pipeline as well as the projects we are helping our clients with.

It's simple and very easy to get started. Just avoid putting too much info into the system untill you're sure you can overcome its weaknesses.

It fails at many basic procedures. If you're searching for Benjamin James - and type in Ben James. Insightly can't find it. Looking for Jim, but you entered James into the database, he's lost forever. Good luck with hyphenated names! You'll never find them again...

The world is filled with greener pastures. Try everything else first.

The only reason I'm even reviewing this is in hopes they might begin making some of these basic improvements.

Managing appointmensts, phone calls, scheduling emails - client relationship management

It was a great way to get our feet wet with a CRM. We are a small business <10 people and 2 in our sales force, and weren't using any form of CRM. After vetting a few with trials, I recommended Insightly to our CEO. We gave it a try, and once we realized what we wanted to do with it, we needed to move on to something more robust. If you're looking for a simple CRM to try, check it out for free.

There is a lot to dislike about Insightly. First: support. While they were generally timely in their response time, the customer support member could not answer my question, kept answering a question I wasn't asking, and finally just stopped responding to my emails in the open ticket. So I went to their "community help boards." Generally, I found that I was out of luck on their "community help boards." If nothing else, it was a place to find others with whom to commiserate over the terrible product.

Insightly lacks a lot of features that are basic in other CRM tools. For example, there is no lead scoring, for the longest time there wasn't bulk updating with a csv file. This is a basic need of anyone who manages sales operations. After many months of asking on a community board with no response, we stopped begging for this feature and switched to Freshsales. The bulk email tool is terrible. There weren't decent metrics to be able to see and follow up with leads who opened our emails. It was difficult to get a read on our ROI with Insightly.

Finally, Insightly does not back up its data, and they are totally unhelpful and unwilling to work with you if you need help retrieving your data. In sum, you get what you pay for.

Find other businesses like yours who used this software before you sign on. We are a marketing firm and it did not fit the bill for us.

We got our feet wet using a CRM and were able to learn what we needed, what we didn't, and what we wanted to achieve with our CRM. It became clear pretty quickly that we needed something more robust than what Insightly provides. It was a lot of work to change CRMs from Insightly to Freshsales, but worth it. With Insightly, it was a stepping stone and we learned a lot, even if it caused us some hindrance to our productivity.