Insightly

Insightly CRM Review: The Only CRM With Native Project Management for Post-Sale Delivery

Insightly occupies a specific niche in the CRM market that no other major platform addresses as directly: the moment when a deal is won and the client transitions from prospect to active project. Most CRMs treat the sale as the endpoint. Insightly treats it as the midpoint — the beginning of a delivery relationship that is as relationship-intensive as the sales cycle that preceded it.

The Deal-to-Project Transition

Insightly's defining feature is the seamless conversion of a won deal into an active project. When a deal reaches Closed-Won, a single click creates a project record pre-populated with: the client contact and company records, the complete communication history from the sales process, all linked files and documents, and the deal value and terms. The delivery team picks up where the sales team left off, with full context available from day one.

In organisations without this native linkage, the deal-to-project transition typically involves: exporting client data from the CRM, importing it into a project management tool, manually summarising the sales history in a project brief, and hoping the PM who receives the handoff can find the relevant email threads. This process introduces errors, delays, and relationship continuity gaps that affect early project experience — often the most sensitive period in a client engagement.

CRM Capabilities

Insightly's CRM features cover the standard B2B sales workflow: contact and company management, deal pipeline with custom stages, email integration and logging, task management, lead tracking, workflow automation, and pipeline reporting. Custom objects allow teams to model business-specific data (for example, a Property object for a real estate firm, or a Contract object for a legal services firm) without requiring developer resources.

The workflow automation engine handles common tasks: auto-assign new leads, trigger follow-up tasks on deal inactivity, send internal notifications on stage changes, and create linked project tasks when a deal moves to a specific stage. For mid-tier features, the depth is competitive with similar price-point tools.

Project Management

Insightly's project management module provides: task lists with assignments and due dates, milestones, Gantt chart view (on higher tiers), project pipeline stages (equivalent to deal stages but for delivery), file sharing, and project reporting. For simple to moderately complex service delivery projects, this is sufficient without a dedicated project management tool.

For organisations managing complex delivery projects — those needing resource allocation, advanced Gantt scheduling, dependency mapping, or budget tracking — Insightly's project capabilities are insufficient. Teams in this situation typically use Insightly for CRM and integrate with a dedicated PM tool like Smartsheet or Monday.com for complex project delivery.

Insightly Marketing Integration

Insightly offers Insightly Marketing (separate product, additional cost) for email campaign management and marketing automation. When used together, campaign engagement data feeds into the CRM contact record, enabling attribution of pipeline opportunities to specific marketing campaigns. For SMBs wanting the HubSpot marketing-CRM combination without HubSpot pricing, this integration provides a credible alternative.

Verdict

Insightly is the best CRM for professional services firms where the post-sale client relationship is managed as intensively as the pre-sale one. The deal-to-project transition feature is a genuinely differentiating capability that no direct competitor matches. Teams whose primary need is sales-focused CRM without delivery management will find better fits in Pipedrive, HubSpot, or Zoho.

Score: 7.4/10 — Unique deal-to-project workflow for professional services; project management depth and interface polish lag behind category specialists.