Choosing between Pipedrive and Insightly comes down to one question: do you need a tool that runs your sales pipeline, or one that also runs the work starting after the deal closes? Pipedrive is a sales CRM (customer relationship management software, the system holding your contacts, deals and follow-ups in one place). Insightly is a CRM with project management built into the same database.
This 2026 comparison covers what each platform costs, what the price does not include, how the features differ in daily use, and which team each one fits.
Key Takeaways
- Pipedrive costs $14 to $79 per seat per month billed annually. Insightly costs $29 to $99 per user per month billed annually.
- Neither platform has a free plan in 2026. Both offer a 14 day trial with no credit card required.
- Pipedrive sells lead generation, projects, email campaigns and document tools as paid add-ons on top of the seat price.
- Insightly’s marketing, support and integration modules are priced per account and can cost more than the CRM itself.
- Insightly merged with landing page company Unbounce in July 2024 and now sits inside that combined business.
- Pick Pipedrive for pure sales execution. Pick Insightly if the same team also delivers the project after the sale.
What Pipedrive and Insightly Actually Are
Pipedrive is built around a visual sales pipeline: a board where every deal sits in a column representing its stage, and you drag it right as it progresses. Activity reminders, email sync, forecasting and reporting all support that view. A five person sales team can be selling out of it the same week they sign up. Our separate Pipedrive CRM review goes deeper on the product itself.
Insightly started as a CRM for small businesses that also deliver projects: agencies, consultancies, installers, professional services firms. When a deal is marked won, it can convert straight into a project with tasks, milestones and an owner, using the same contact and company records. That handover is the reason most teams choose it.
Insightly’s ownership changed in the meantime. On 16 July 2024 it merged with Unbounce, the landing page company, forming a business of more than 200 employees across Europe and North America. Insightly says its CRM serves more than a million users. Vendor consolidation is common here, as our overview of CRM trends in 2026 explains.
Pipedrive Pricing in 2026
Pipedrive renamed its tiers. The four current plans, priced per seat per month when billed annually, are:
- Lite: $14 ($168 per seat per year). Pipeline, lead and calendar management, plus AI assisted report creation.
- Growth: $39 ($468 per year). Full email sync, workflow automation, nurturing sequences and subscription tracking.
- Premium: $59 ($708 per year). Lead generation through LeadBooster, custom deal scoring, AI email tools and contracts with e-signatures.
- Ultimate: $79 ($948 per year). Added security controls, data enrichment, a sandbox for testing and extended phone support.
There is no free plan, only a 14 day trial with full access and no credit card. Paying monthly costs more; Pipedrive advertises savings of up to 42% for the annual commitment.
Several capabilities buyers assume are included are sold separately: LeadBooster (chatbot, web forms and prospecting), Projects, Campaigns (email marketing), Web Visitors and Smart Docs. Pipedrive’s pricing page lists starting prices for these between roughly $13 and $41 a month. A team on Growth that wants lead capture and email campaigns can therefore pay noticeably more than the headline $39.
Insightly Pricing in 2026
Insightly lists three CRM plans, priced per user per month when billed annually:
- Plus: $29. Up to 100,000 records, 50 custom fields, two role based permission levels and limited workflow automation.
- Professional: $49. Up to 250,000 records, 100 custom fields, unlimited permission roles, complete workflow automation and REST API access.
- Enterprise: $99. Up to 500,000 records, 200 custom fields, plus sandboxes, calculated fields and custom validation rules.
The old free plan for two users is gone. Insightly’s pricing page now advertises only a 14 day free trial with no credit card, so both platforms are paid products from day one in 2026.
Two limits matter more than they look. The API sits on Professional, so if you plan to sync Insightly with a warehouse, a billing system or a customer data platform, budget for at least $49 per user. Full workflow automation also starts at Professional, which leaves the entry tier closer to a contact database than a system that works for you.
The add-on modules are where Insightly’s total cost diverges sharply from its seat price. Marketing automation is billed per account per month at $99, $499 or $999. Support and ticketing is per user at $29, $49 or $99. AppConnect, the integration layer, runs $799 per account per month for 25,000 tasks and $1,899 for 100,000. All in one bundles are listed at $349, $899 and $2,599 per month, plus required fees of $3,000 for technical setup and $1,500 for onboarding. Read those numbers before comparing $29 against $14.
Core CRM Features Compared
Pipeline and Deal Management
Both platforms give you customisable stages and drag and drop deal cards. Pipedrive’s version is the more refined one: the board is the product’s centre of gravity, and reps can work a full day without leaving it. Insightly’s pipelines are flexible and handle unusual processes well, but they share attention with projects, tasks and records.
If your process is straightforward and you want reps in the tool daily without a fight, Pipedrive wins here. Adoption matters more than feature count, since a CRM nobody updates produces no forecast at all, a problem covered under sales enablement.
Contacts, Automation and Reporting
Insightly stores richer relationship data, modelling organisations, contacts, opportunities and projects as linked records. Pipedrive keeps contact records deliberately lighter and focused on what a rep needs before a call. Detailed records help when one client relationship runs for years; lighter records help when a rep works 40 open deals.
On automation, Pipedrive handles the repetitive parts of selling: creating a follow up when a deal moves stage, sending a templated email, updating a field, assigning an owner. Workflow automation is available from the Growth plan. Insightly automates delivery as well, converting a won deal into a project with a task list and owners. That single step removes the manual handover most agencies run in a spreadsheet, and it is often worth more than any individual sales feature. The wider case for automating routine steps is set out in our look at business automation trends.
Reporting follows the same pattern. Pipedrive offers dashboards, deal and activity reports and revenue forecasting, with AI assisted report creation on every plan: you describe the report you want and Insights builds it. Insightly reports on projects as well as sales, so you can measure delivery time and margin rather than only closed revenue. For teams building a forecast rather than a monthly guess, our piece on RevOps tools and business forecasting is a useful companion.
Project Management: Insightly’s Real Differentiator
This is the clearest split between the two products. Insightly manages projects natively in the same system as the sales data. Pipedrive can do projects, but only through its Projects add-on at extra cost, and the feature is younger and lighter.
The practical test is simple: is the person who closes the deal involved in delivering it? In an agency, a consultancy or a services firm the answer is usually yes, and Insightly saves a full handover step every time. Where sales hands off to a separate operations team with its own tooling, the answer is no, and Insightly’s project layer is capability you pay for and never open. Teams in that second situation are better served by a dedicated tool, such as those compared in Monday.com vs Notion or covered in our guide to managing multiple projects.
AI Features in 2026
Pipedrive includes several AI features on every plan: an import assistant that maps spreadsheet columns to Pipedrive fields, AI assisted report creation, natural language search in the Marketplace, smart app recommendations and a mobile business card scanner. Premium and Ultimate add AI email creation, AI driven performance notifications, and email summarisation and suggested replies, both in beta. A Sales Assistant that answers questions about your Pipedrive data is also in beta.
Insightly’s AI sits mainly in its higher tiers and in the Unbounce side of the product, aimed at linking marketing and sales data. Neither vendor publishes AI credit limits the way HubSpot and Salesforce now do, which is a point in their favour: metered AI billing has become a real budgeting problem elsewhere, as our Salesforce vs HubSpot comparison shows.
Integrations
Pipedrive runs a public Marketplace covering the full revenue cycle. Popular listings include Zapier, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, QuickBooks and DocuSign, and the platform syncs calendar and email with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Pipedrive does not publish a total app count, so treat any specific number you see quoted with caution.
Insightly connects through AppConnect, its own integration layer, which reaches tools including QuickBooks, Mailchimp and Zapier. The catch is the price: AppConnect is a separate per account subscription starting at $799 a month, not an included feature. For many teams a general purpose automation tool is cheaper, an option we weigh up in Workato vs Zapier and in our guide to iPaaS and business integration. If accounting is the connection you care about most, our QuickBooks Online review covers what that side can actually do.
Setup, Daily Use and User Ratings
On G2, Pipedrive holds 4.3 out of 5 from roughly 3,125 reviews and Insightly CRM holds 4.2 out of 5 from roughly 946 reviews. The scores are close enough that they should not decide anything on their own. The review volume gap is the more useful signal: Pipedrive has a far larger installed base, which usually means more community answers and more documented solutions to problems you are about to hit.
The comments follow a consistent pattern. Pipedrive is praised for visual pipeline management, quick setup and a strong mobile app for field sales. Insightly is praised for customisation, integration breadth and reporting. Set-up effort tracks what you are configuring. Pipedrive asks you to define pipeline stages and connect your inbox, and you are largely done in an afternoon. Insightly asks you to model records, permissions, custom fields and project templates, which takes closer to a week but produces a system shaped around how your business runs. Plan real onboarding time either way, because tool adoption follows the same rules as any other team productivity change.
Which One Fits Your Team
Choose Pipedrive if your team sells and someone else delivers, your sales process is linear, you want reps in the tool without a change management project, or your budget is tight and you can live within Lite or Growth. It also suits distributed sellers, since the mobile app is genuinely usable; see our guide to remote sales teams.
Choose Insightly if the same people sell and deliver, you need customer records that survive years of project history, or you want sales and delivery reporting in one system. Plan for Professional at $49 rather than the $29 entry point, because the API and full automation live there.
Look elsewhere if neither fits. Solo operators and very small teams often do better with a lightweight tool: see our folk.app review or our Salesflare CRM review. Teams wanting CRM inside a wider business suite can compare Bitrix24 CRM. Companies planning to scale into complex territory management and heavy customisation should read our Salesforce CRM review first, and Freshworks CRM vs Pipedrive covers another common pairing.
Verdict
For most sales teams, Pipedrive is the better buy. It costs less at every comparable tier, reps adopt it faster, and it moves deals through stages well at its price. The caveat is the add-on model: check whether lead capture, campaigns or documents matter to you before comparing headline prices.
Insightly earns its higher price only when you use the part Pipedrive does not have. If your business closes a deal and then delivers a project against it, keeping both halves in one database removes real friction and real errors. If it does not, you are paying a premium for a module you will never open.
Whichever you pick, the CRM is only as good as the process behind it. Clear stage criteria and consistent data entry matter more than the logo on the login screen, a point that runs through our coverage of sales trends in 2026.
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