Key Takeaways

  • When comparing Insightly vs. Zoho, the two prove to be evenly matched in sales automation and contact management. The two CRM software systems differ most in task management and reporting features.
  • Insightly’s project management feature is a clear advantage for businesses of any size or level of experience. Zoho’s scalability with territory management and add-on modules quickly growing and projects a similar rate of expansion.

Insightly vs. Zoho CRM makes for an interesting matchup. Both sell their products in subscription tiers with affordable rates while offering an impressive amount of contact management, workflow automation, and reporting capabilities.

Also Read: Zoho vs. Salesforce

To help you make a more informed decision, this post will compare the two CRMs based on systems and pricing, features, mobile capabilities, and integrations.

What Zoho Offers

Zoho is an incredibly scalable CRM solution with broad territory management features and add-on modules. This gives Zoho the ability to quickly grow and change in response to rapidly expanding businesses.

If a project taken on by a small business requires new software or a reporting perspective that base Zoho does not include, the broad suite of modules grant small businesses the flexibility to try new things in the pursuit of growth.

Zoho CRM Dashboard
Zoho photo

What Insightly Offers

Insightly is a cloud-based CRM that gives small business teams the ability to collaborate on projects distantly and gives everyone the opportunity to work from anywhere. Insightly comes with a variety of robust automation features that streamline customer pipelines, daily tasks, and optimize workflows.

Insightly Dashboard
Insightly photo

Insightly vs. Zoho: Systems and Pricing

Insightly and Zoho employ the standard software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and offer subscription tiers priced on a per-user, per-month basis.

Zoho’s tiers are divided into Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate, with each tier corresponding to added features that allow Zoho to manage the needs of increasingly larger businesses.

  • Standard includes access to reports and dashboards, a conversion workflow, email marketing insights, and a 100,000 records limit.
  • Professional offers webhooks, inventory management, Google Ads integrations, and unlimited records.
  • Enterprise adds a conversational AI tool, mobile SDK, custom module creation, workflow automation, and custom applications.
  • Ultimate edition provides a dedicated database cluster, automation suggestions, email sentiment tools, and data enrichment.

Insightly offers three subscription types: Plus, Professional, and Enterprise. Each tier includes the CRM basics, such as project management tools that track progress on deliverables, calendar synchronization, and the ability to access Insightly from any device. The professional and enterprise tiers offer access to all of the automation tools.

Enterprise increases the number of templates and mass emails, adds custom fields, space for storing records and files, better business intelligence tools, and unlimited records. It should also be noted that Enterprise is the only tier that includes access to serverless lambda functions.

Both companies also offer free trials with limited functionality.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Contact Management

Zoho has a territory management feature that assigns leads and contacts to different sales teams based on geographical location, product line, and industry. To provide another level of organization, a territory manager can be assigned to act as an admin for the accounts under them.

Insightly, on the other hand, utilizes tags to offer a distinct method for directing contacts once they’re inside the system. Custom tags can be created to represent a geographical region, product line, and any other important information specific to a business’s needs, making it a much more flexible and simple system to organize.

Also read: 8 Zapier Alternatives for Seamless Data Connections

Both systems also include web-to-lead forms which can be embedded on a business’s website. When someone fills out a form, their information will automatically be added to the CRM.

insightly reports dashboard.
Insightly photo

Insightly vs. Zoho: Task Management

To help salespeople develop a better contact follow-up cadence, many CRMs now offer task management features. These tools use automatic reminders to streamline tasks that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. Instead of guessing the best time to call a person, users can set a reminder to follow up after a period of time.

Zoho and Insightly each provide some form of task management, though this is one area where Insightly has a definite advantage.

Insightly uses a horizontal pipeline to visualize sales stages instead of the traditional vertical funnel. This is great for lead management, but the value of the pipeline feature extends beyond sales stages and into full-blown project management.

Pipeline stages can be customized to represent different project stages. Sales opportunities can be managed as projects from end to end. Projects can also be sorted by stage or assigned to a user.

Zoho, on the other hand, offers standard management features like a bulletin board-style view and color-coded bar charts that compare the reported progress of different projects in a clear, but simple manner.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Reporting

The reporting in Zoho vs. Insightly differs significantly, although both products have full capabilities for CRM data reporting, analytics, and dashboards.

Zoho classifies its available reports in sales, marketing, and activity reports. For each report generated, a spreadsheet can also be downloaded as a .csv or .xls. Once these reports run, the data can be visualized in charts or graphs.

Zoho comes with more than 40 pre-built reports, like pivot tables or summary views. The system also allows users to build custom versions if a hyperspecific view is required for a certain report. More data analytics capabilities can also be unlocked with a subscription to Zoho Analytics.

Insightly includes business intelligence reporting and dashboards within the product and — depending on the subscription plan — can build customized chart cards and share them with anyone. This software also offers 40 chart types, but lacks the same robust classification and granular tools as Zoho.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Sales and Workflow Automation

Getting salespeople to consistently use a CRM has long been a major roadblock to achieving ROI. That reticence stems from the amount of manual work that older-generation CRMs required. The software vendors that were smart enough to respond to this opportunity equipped their CRMs with automation features that reduce laborious data entry.

Zoho also has task management capabilities provided by workflow automation tools. Build custom process automations with the Blueprint tool or set custom approvals to quickly route tasks through team members and sales stages. Zoho also offers a more comprehensive task management system in Zoho Projects, which is available as an add-on.

Zoho also integrates a powerful suite of customer tracking tools that provide businesses with a wealth of information. This is a strong benefit that Zoho offers, but it can often be more data than a small business is prepared to work with.

Insightly automates the entire customer journey, making it an excellent fit for small teams that may find themselves pushing up against the limitations of their staff’s capacity. Insightly takes a simple, but effective flowchart approach to the customer journey, triggering customizable actions dependent on the behavior of new and potential customers. This offloads a great deal of work from the shoulders of the workforce, freeing them up to tackle new leads. 

Insightly vs. Zoho: Email Marketing

Zoho offers dynamic email campaigns with A/B testing and simple, clean templates. In addition, it features advanced email automation and tracking tools to make robust email marketing a simple task regardless of a small business’s level of experience.

Insightly makes this process less labor-intensive by integrating its email marketing features into its marketing automation suite. This integration makes it easy for an individual making dozens of sales to trigger a cascade of routine customer retention missives, ensuring nobody falls through the cracks in the fast-paced small business environment 

If a business is looking to connect its CRM to a third-party email marketing software, each system has a different solution. Insightly integrates with Mailchimp, and Zoho connects with Zoho Campaigns — the company’s own email marketing tool.

zoho crm map feature
Zoho photo

Insightly vs. Zoho: Extras and Integrations

Both vendors offer Android and iOS apps. Insightly’s app lets users view and convert records, create tasks, and call, email, or text any record in their database. There is also a map feature making it easy to get to that next in-person sales call.

Zoho’s mobile app offers a similar array of features, including the ability to call directly from the app and geolocation for finding a prospect’s office. Zoho’s app works offline, so even if mobile signal is lost, contact information can still be edited inside the CRM. The app will sync the changes once internet access is recovered.

In terms of integrations, both products offer a similar set of options. Insightly integrates with over 30 apps, including Dropbox, Outlook, and Google Apps (full list here). Zoho integrates with Mailchimp, Unbounce, Evernote, and others (full list here).

If an office wants to sync either of the two CRMs with an app not listed in their native integration list, Zapier can be used to build a trigger automation.

Zoho’s base CRM can be combined with any of the other apps in its “online office suite,” including Zoho Projects, Zoho Invoice, Zoho Support, Zoho Books, and others. That means it can be customized and expanded as a company’s needs change, which may make Zoho more appealing for a fast-growing or mid-sized company.

Which CRM is Right For Your Business?

Insightly vs. Zoho is a close contest. Both systems at a similar price point and get similar contact management and sales automation capabilities. Insightly’s project management feature, however, is a clear advantage for businesses of any size or level of experience. This means a small business can take advantage of Insightly and its suite of features without having to pay for tools it may not need. Zoho’s scalability with territory management and add-on modules quickly growing and projects a similar rate of expansion.

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