HubSpot vs Insightly: which CRM to choose for growth

Insightly is a solid CRM for small and mid-sized businesses that want sales and project management in one place, with marketing and service available as additional products. HubSpot is the better choice for most growing businesses because it brings marketing, sales, service, content, data and AI together on a single CRM, with an ecosystem and ease of adoption that are hard to match.

What each one is, in a nutshell

Insightly is a San Francisco-based CRM aimed at small and mid-sized businesses, which merged with the landing page platform Unbounce in 2024. Its offering is split into several products: Insightly CRM (with post-sale project management), Insightly Marketing, Insightly Service and AppConnect, its tool for integration and automation between apps.

HubSpot is a customer platform built on a shared CRM, Smart CRM, with Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Service Hub, Content Hub, Data Hub and Revenue Hub on top and Breeze as the AI layer. The architectural difference matters: in HubSpot every hub has shared the same database and the same interface from the outset.

HubSpotInsightly

ArchitectureOne CRM for every hubSeparate connected products

Free optionFree toolsFree trial

MarketingNative Marketing HubSeparate Insightly Marketing

Customer serviceService HubSeparate Insightly Service

Post-sale projectsPipelines and custom objectsNative projects

AIBreeze Assistant and agentsCopilot in higher editions

EcosystemThousands of apps and partnersAppConnect and marketplace

CRM and data model

Insightly works with leads, contacts, organisations, opportunities and projects, and its higher editions add custom objects, calculated fields, validation rules and sandboxes. Relationship linking between records is one of the features reviewers praise most.

HubSpot starts from standard objects (contacts, companies, deals, tickets, leads, products, quotes) with labelled associations, calculated properties and, in Enterprise, custom objects and sandboxes. Both can model complex processes; the difference is that in HubSpot the same model is used natively by marketing, sales and service.

Which is better for sales?

Insightly covers sales management well: opportunity pipelines, lead assignment and routing, task automation, two-way email sync and mobile apps. Enterprise adds products, price books and quotes.

Sales Hub offers the same and adds very mature sales productivity tools: follow-up sequences, meeting scheduling, templates and snippets, playbooks, a prospecting workspace, quotes, forecasting and call recording with transcription. Some of these features are in the entry editions and others in Professional, so you can start small and grow.

Project management: Insightly’s strong suit

To be fair, turning a won opportunity into a project, with its tasks, milestones and related records, is something Insightly handles natively and that agencies, consultancies and installers appreciate. It is its most distinctive feature.

HubSpot approaches it differently: when a deal is won, a workflow creates a ticket or a custom object record in an onboarding or delivery pipeline, with tasks and owners, associated with the customer and the deal. The delivery team, the salesperson and support then all see the same history. It takes a little design up front, but it is integrated with everything else.

Marketing: separate product versus native hub

Insightly Marketing offers email automation, prospect scoring, A/B testing and dashboards, and is priced per account according to the number of marketing prospects. Following the merger with Unbounce, Unbounce landing pages sit within the same product family, although they are presented as a separate brand.

Marketing Hub covers email, automation with branching, forms, landing pages, ads, social media, SEO, lead scoring and revenue attribution, all acting on the same contact record the salesperson works. Content Hub adds website, blog and AI content on the same platform.

Customer service

Insightly Service offers tickets, SLA tracking, macros, reports and, in higher editions, satisfaction surveys, ticket automation and customisable portals. It is a complete product for a mid-sized support team.

Service Hub offers all of that and connects it to everything else: a shared inbox, knowledge base, customer portal, surveys, customer success tools and Breeze’s customer agent. For a salesperson to see an open issue before a renewal, or for marketing to exclude customers with critical tickets from a campaign, no syncing is needed.

Automation and AI: Breeze versus Copilot

Insightly includes automation workflows from its Professional edition and has added Copilot, a conversational assistant for looking up and updating records, drafting emails and summarising a customer’s history, with a query allowance per edition. It also offers an MCP connection for using external AI assistants with CRM data.

Breeze goes beyond an assistant: Breeze Assistant works with full CRM context, and prospecting, data and customer service agents carry out tasks on the same records the whole business uses. Some features consume HubSpot credits or depend on the edition. On automation, HubSpot workflows act on any object, with branches, delays and custom code in higher editions.

Reporting

Insightly offers advanced reports and configurable dashboards, with more capacity in the higher editions. In G2 and Capterra reviews, ease of building reports sometimes comes up as an area for improvement.

HubSpot brings marketing, sales and service into the same dashboards, and Data Hub adds external data. For leadership, being able to see cost per channel, conversion, sales cycle and tickets per customer in a single report is one of the clearest arguments for a single platform.

Integrations and API

Insightly has a REST API, webhooks and AppConnect, an app-to-app automation tool with connectors for Microsoft, DocuSign and QuickBooks, priced separately by task volume. It is a good way to connect the CRM without development.

HubSpot has a marketplace with thousands of apps, many with native two-way sync, a well-documented public API, webhooks, private apps and UI Extensions for building custom screens inside the CRM. At Vexco we have taken this a long way: for a SaaS fintech that migrated from Salesforce we built around a dozen microservices integrated with HubSpot. We see it every day in our HubSpot integrations work.

Ease of use and adoption

Insightly users tend to describe it as easy to learn for the basics, with a steeper curve to get the most out of it. Because each product is bought separately, the experience can vary between modules.

HubSpot is among the highest-rated CRMs for ease of use, with one interface across every hub, a free academy and a huge community. When marketing, sales and service use the same tool with the same logic, adoption is faster and training carries over.

Implementation and total cost of ownership

Insightly charges per user for CRM and Service, per account for Marketing (based on the number of prospects) and by task volume for AppConnect, with bundles that combine them. According to its pricing page, some bundles include one-off onboarding and technical setup fees and premium support calculated on the licence. HubSpot offers free tools, Starter, Professional and Enterprise editions per hub, per-seat licences, platform bundles and credits for some AI features; higher editions can also carry onboarding. See the official pricing pages for HubSpot and Insightly.

When you work out total cost, add licences, onboarding, connectors, admin hours and the cost of keeping separate products in sync. A Sales Hub implementation usually takes four to eight weeks; with several hubs and complex integrations, ten to fourteen.

Support, community and partners

Insightly offers phone and email support to all users and a premium plan with faster response times. On top of its support, HubSpot has a very active community, extensive documentation, an academy with certifications and a global partner network. At Vexco we are a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner with a 4.9/5 rating in HubSpot’s directory.

Security, GDPR and data hosting

Insightly holds a SOC 2 Type II attestation and a data processing addendum that addresses GDPR; its security page does not state the hosting region, so it is worth confirming with the vendor. HubSpot lets new accounts host data in the European Union, with a data processing agreement, consent tools and, in higher editions, SSO, audit logs and advanced permissions.

Side-by-side comparison

When could Insightly make sense?

• Your business runs on projects (agency, consultancy, installer) and you want the hand-off from sale to delivery solved with no extra design.
• You only need CRM and project management, without advanced marketing or a help desk.
• You already use Unbounce for landing pages and value staying within the same product family.
• Your team is small and stable, and you do not expect major integrations or marketing growth.

If you are weighing up other CRMs in this segment, HubSpot vs Nutshell may also be useful.

Verdict: why HubSpot wins

• A genuine platform, not connected products. Marketing, sales, service and content share the same database and the same interface.
• Start free and grow hub by hub. Free tools, entry editions and the option to switch on only what you need.
• AI across the platform. Breeze is more than an assistant: its agents carry out work across the full CRM.
• An unrivalled ecosystem. Thousands of integrations, a mature API, UI Extensions and a huge community and partner network.
• Full-lifecycle reporting. Leadership sees everything from first click to renewal in the same dashboards.
• EU hosting. A clear advantage for European businesses subject to GDPR.

How to migrate from Insightly to HubSpot

A migration from Insightly calls for careful decisions about where each object goes, especially projects. These are the steps we follow in a HubSpot migration:

1. Weeks 1-2Audit and data model design
2. Weeks 3-4Properties, pipelines and objects
3. Weeks 5-6Record and history migration
4. Week 7Workflows and integrations
5. Week 8Training and cutover

1. Map your objects. Leads to contacts or the leads object; contacts and organisations to contacts and companies; opportunities to deals; projects to tickets in a delivery pipeline or to a custom object.
2. Review relationships. Insightly’s links between records should become labelled associations in HubSpot; document each type before migrating.
3. Create properties and pipelines first. Use the opportunity to merge duplicate fields and turn free text into picklists.
4. Keep the history. Notes, emails, tasks and events should arrive as associated activities with their original dates.
5. Replace AppConnect. Each app-to-app automation is replaced with a native integration, a workflow or a custom integration.
6. Plan the cutover. Set the date, make Insightly read-only and migrate the final delta so nothing from the last day is lost.

• Sales Hub
• Marketing Hub
• Service Hub

HubSpot

• Content Hub
• Data Hub
• Breeze

Typical pitfalls: projects migrated without being associated with their deal, lost relationships, owners who do not exist and AppConnect automations nobody had documented. If you want a team that combines consultancy and development, Vexco can take you from the audit through to a complete HubSpot implementation.

• Comparison
• Insightly
• Migration
• Sales Hub