SalesOutlook CRM vs Insightly: Which is a better fit?

Zach C.: Hi, my name is Zach. I'm a CTO and I give Insightly three out of five stars. For more reviews like this, click below. So before using Insightly, we didn't actually have a CRM platform. We were just using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all of our clients, but we were in a growth phase and we had started to outgrow that and we needed more functionality, more tracking. So at that moment, we decided that Insightly was our best choice. And we used that and it helped us through the next phase, but then we ended up outgrowing that and we were looking for a different CRM. And so, we ended up switching to HubSpot CRM. So we chose Insightly because it was convenient to us for several reasons, for the price point. Since it was our first CRM within our small company, we just wanted something simple and easy to use. We weren't looking for really that much of the advanced tools or automation at that moment. We just wanted to really start keeping track and grouping and tagging all of our growing contact list and growing client base. And a lot of it had to do with the price point. It was a really a great option at that point to get in with Insightly, with just the few number of users that we needed and the number of contacts that we had in our database. It made sense at the time. Overall, I'd say it was a pretty easy process getting started with Insightly. A lot of the difficulties or learning curve just really had to do with our unfamiliarity with CRM software at the moment, but we were able to import our contacts from our Excel spreadsheet, start with that as a base and start adding different contact properties, data points, tagging notes. And yeah, we got all that up and running pretty quickly. If you're considering using Insightly, nowadays, there's so many CRM platforms out there. I think it's really important to consider where you want to go. What's your trajectory? Start trying to think a few years in advance of where you want to grow into, how many contacts you're going to have. Obviously, a lot of the CRMs are based... The pricing plans are based off of a number of contacts, not all of them, but some of them are. And Insightly has integrated a lot more sort of advanced tools and marketing tools and automation since we left them. But it's really important to kind of understand the business use cases that you want to have. Not just what is going to solve today, but try to imagine and be creative of what you could potentially do with this in a couple years. Because changing CRMs is something that is entirely possible and not a huge feat, but still something that is a little bit of a setback for any company. And another thing that I would consider is if you are in some sort of very specific industry, there also might be specialized CRMs solutions that are really targeted at that industry. So Insightly is a all around general CRM that can be adapted and customized really to fit any industry. But sometimes those specialized CRMs, industry specific CRMs, might end being the right solution for you.