Choosing the right CRM can transform how you attract, engage, and delight customers, but with so many options on the market, it’s hard to know which platform truly delivers.

HubSpot is often seen as one of the premier choices for growing B2B businesses thanks to its all-in-one suites, intuitive interface, and powerful automation tools.

But how does it stack up against Insightly?

In this comparison, we’ll break down the key differences between HubSpot and Insightly, looking at everything from features and flexibility to pricing to technical details, such as integrations, which will help you decide which platform fits your business best.

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A slight caveat before we get into the meat of this article - we’re a HubSpot Solutions Partner. We’re well-versed in working with the platform, and we think it’s a brilliant fit for most B2B businesses. However, we would never recommend it if it doesn’t fit your specific business requirements.

Throughout this article, we will give an impartial comparison between HubSpot and Insightly to help you make the correct decision for your circumstance.

1. Ease of Use and Onboarding

Starting with HubSpot, there are numerous ways to get onboarded and started within the system. You can start with:

A DIY implementation - This requires you to set it up yourself. If you need support, then steal our HubSpot Implementation playbook to give you a head start.
HubSpot’s Onboarding Programme - HubSpot offers an onboarding product which helps you set up the essentials within your portal.
Partner-led Onboarding - This is where you employ an agency to help you get set up on the platform, working with outsourced experts to mould your processes around your portal.

Either one of the three is effective in getting you started and helping you set up your portal in the correct way. And once you’re set up, you can take advantage of the numerous products that HubSpot offers.

Whilst, like all other CRMs, there may be an initial learning curve, HubSpot's user-friendly design supports businesses in effectively leveraging the platform's capabilities to drive growth and improve customer engagement. One user on G2 commented by saying:

Hubspot is very helpful, offering a robust way to learn and manage service, sales, and marketing. Its built-in help resources and user-friendly tools have made it much easier to understand and implement key business strategies.

With its wide array of tools and features across its three tiers, Starter, Professional and Enterprise (including a stripped-back, free version too), HubSpot is known for combining sales, marketing, service, operations and, most recently, eCommerce functionality within its suite. This makes it ideal for those B2B businesses looking to scale their business without the investment into a wide tech stack that needs external integrations to merge with your CRM.

Insightly, comparatively, is designed with small to mid-sized businesses in mind, offering a user-friendly interface and streamlined onboarding process.

The platform's clean layout and intuitive navigation make it accessible for users with varying levels of technical expertise. Customisable dashboards and straightforward pipeline management tools allow teams to quickly adapt the system to their specific workflows. One reviewer said:

The flexibility in being able to create your own custom fields, reports, templates, and dashboards. Very easy to use, after initial set up.

However, some users have noted that while the initial setup is straightforward, mastering more advanced features like automation and complex reporting may require additional time and learning.

This contrasts with platforms, such as HubSpot, which offer more guided onboarding experiences and extensive in-app tutorials to assist users in leveraging advanced functionalities more quickly. Insightly does offer a comprehensive knowledge base alongside video tutorials and regular webinars to support users in getting onboarded quickly, and begin using the platform effectively - but just be aware of the learning curve for more advanced features.

2. Customisation and Flexibility

HubSpot’s flexibility is one of the key reasons businesses continue to scale with - and use - the platform. With the ability to create custom properties, objects, workflows, and dashboards, teams can shape the system around their exact processes rather than adapting their processes to fit the tool.

Whether it’s segmenting contacts with bespoke criteria, building out tailored sales pipelines, or automating marketing workflows based on specific behaviours, HubSpot’s customisation options and flexibility enable users to design a system that mirrors their real-world operations. As one G2 reviewer puts it:

Adapt quickly with a flexible system that allows you to architect your business exactly as it appears in the real world... without months of custom dev work.

This level of adaptability means that even as your business evolves, HubSpot evolves with you, without the need for expensive development work or third-party tools.

Insightly CRM, on the other hand, offers a range of customisation options designed to cater for businesses.

Users can create custom fields, design unique pipelines, and tailor dashboards to align with specific workflows. This flexibility allows teams to adapt the CRM to their processes, enhancing efficiency and user adoption among their colleagues. On G2, one user said:

The flexibility in being able to create your own custom fields, reports, templates, and dashboards. Very easy to use, after initial set up.

However, some users have noted limitations in more advanced customisation scenarios.

For instance, the inability to merge data across different objects can pose challenges for businesses with complex data structures. Additionally, while Insightly provides workflow automation features, setting up intricate automations may require a deeper understanding of the platform, which, as mentioned earlier, creates a higher level of expertise needed once using the platform.

In summary, Insightly offers a solid level of customisation for businesses, suitable for businesses that need a cost-effective solution for customer communications. However, organisations that have more complex needs for a CRM, other CRM systems are more aligned to their requirements.

3. Features and Product Ecosystem

This will be no surprise, but HubSpot’s main standout strength is its unified system across all business departments.

From marketing automation and sales pipelines to customer service, CMS, and operations, every tool is designed to work together on a single platform. This native integration removes the friction of jumping between disconnected systems and gives teams a clearer, shared view of the customer journey. It also connects up to your CRM, which enables your users to have a single-view of the customer.

What really sets HubSpot apart, though, is the balance between depth and usability.

Each Hub is feature-rich in its own right, with a level of practicality that you would usually assume to be reserved for specialist, independent tools. Having all these tools under a single umbrella enables businesses to take advantage without the need to patch together a load of third-party apps. As one reviewer puts it:

HubSpot is more than just a CRM – it's an ecosystem of powerful tools that seamlessly integrate to help you grow.

Insightly, on the other hand, positions itself as a unified CRM platform that blends traditional sales pipeline tools with integrated project management and workflow automation.

This dual capability allows businesses to manage both pre-sale and post-sale activities within a single system, reducing the need for multiple applications. Insightly's core features include customisable pipelines, task tracking, and relationship linking, which help teams visualise and manage their sales processes effectively.

Furthermore, and like HubSpot, Insightly also supports robust relationship linking, enabling users to map complex networks between contacts, organisations, and opportunities. One user spoke about the feature set Insightly offers by saying:

Insightly is easy to use and highly customisable. We've created a number of custom objects and custom fields within those to manage everything from donations to shop orders to event registrations.

4. Pricing

This is where HubSpot can get tricky, as it’s not exactly a cheap option if you want all the bells and whistles.

HubSpot offers a free CRM option, but only allows you to store up to 1,000 non-marketing contacts within this tier. From there, if you want the customer platform (which is the bundle which encompasses all ‘Hubs’), it comes priced at:

Starter: £45 per month (£41 per month if you want to pay £492 on an annual basis)
Professional: £1,932 per month (£1,738 per month if you want to pay £20,856 on an annual basis)
Enterprise: £5,151 per month

However, what HubSpot does allow you to do is scale your tiers as you grow and adopt new features within ALL tiers if you choose the customer platform option. However, if you don’t you can also pick and choose what tier of each suite and make your own, personalised bundle - something that other CRM providers don’t often allow.

Prioritising small to medium-sized businesses, Insightly CRM has a much less steep pricing point. Their pricing is split into three tiers, varying based on the number of users you plan to onboard onto the system and the breadth of features you require.

It also offers a free version. However, this is limited to two users and has restrictions on the number of records and features. The paid plans are as follows:

Plus: £21.36 per user/month
Professional: £30.20 per user/month
Enterprise: £72.91 per user/month

As mentioned, this is comparatively cheaper than HubSpot; however, it’s worth considering the broad range of features HubSpot offers in comparison to Insightly. Despite getting the project management tools that Insightly offers, HubSpot allows you to considerably cut down on the martech tools that your business is currently using with emails, website, operations and customer service all under a single platform.

5. Integration and Extensibility

The final comparison point is regarding integrations and how easy it is to connect multiple apps to the CRM.

Firstly, HubSpot offers an extensive integrations ecosystem, featuring over 1,500 native integrations through its App Marketplace. This allows users to connect their CRM with a wide array of tools, including, for example, QuickBooks, Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and other ERP & CRM tools.

This connectivity ensures that data flows smoothly between platforms, including HubSpot’s CRM, which reduces manual input and enhances operational efficiency. A Capterra user highlighted the value of HubSpot’s integration abilities by saying:

The integrations of HubSpot are unmatched, big reason they charge big is those ecosystem integrations.

This flexibility ensures that, as your business evolves and introduces more systems into your tech stack, HubSpot can adapt with you without needing substantial change.

Insightly also has a comprehensive extensibility, with its in-built integration engine, AppConnect, allowing users to build workflows across over 2,000 third-party applications without writing code, covering platforms like Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Xero, Slack, and Gmail.

Like other CRM alternatives, Insightly also provides a comprehensive REST API, enabling deeper customisation and system-to-system connectivity. This makes it possible to tailor data flows and interfaces to suit more complex business requirements, especially when working with legacy systems or bespoke apps.

One user praised its ease of integration, stating:

Integrations with Facebook, Shopify and our CMS were easy to set up and manage.

Despite offering a solid foundation for integrations, in comparison, HubSpot offer a wider selection of pre-built integrations with deeper native functionality. Just something to consider when weighing up the options of both parties.

In Summary...

Choosing the right CRM comes down to your team’s needs, technical capabilities, and growth ambitions. While Insightly may offer strong features in certain areas, HubSpot stands out for its ease of use, unified ecosystem, and scalability, particularly for growing B2B businesses.

If you're leaning towards HubSpot and want to get implementation right from day one, download our 5 Stages of HubSpot Implementation guide. It walks you through each phase of a successful rollout, helping you avoid common pitfalls and maximise ROI from the get-go.