Insightly vs Pipedrive vs AllClients: A Definitive Comparison [January 2024]
For two weeks, I tested Insightly and Pipedrive on my contact lists to find the best platform for managing my relationships with prospects, leads, and customers.
Here’s how they compare:
Insightly is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that seamlessly blends contact management, project organization, and sales pipeline tracking. It’s a great choice for medium-sized teams with a complex tech stack and integration requirements. However, it doesn’t offer the most sophisticated email marketing tools and its contact management interface feels a bit outdated.
In the opposite corner is Pipedrive, a user-friendly CRM platform, built around a visually intuitive sales pipeline for tracking and managing deals as they progress through stages. It targets enterprises with large and complex team structures and busy sales pipelines. Its pricing model doesn’t really favor small businesses.
Both tools have qualities that work great for their intended users but make them less ideal for others like small businesses. That’s why I included AllClients in the comparison. It’s an all-in-one CRM, email marketing, and workflow automation platform with robust email campaigns, a business-friendly pricing model, and a powerful sales pipeline — a perfect solution for very small or micro businesses.
In this article, I compare Insightly vs Pipedrive vs AllClients in six key areas:
Pricing
Sales pipeline
CRM
Email marketing
Landing pages and popup forms
Integrations
Let’s begin with a top-level overview!
Insightly vs Pipedrive vs AllClients:
Comparison Summary
What is Insightly?
“Build your custom CRM workflow” 🛠️
Anthony Smith had difficulty finding good CRM software that had good integration with Gmail, Google Calendar, and other Google Apps. So, he founded Insightly in 2009 to provide business owners with a fully integrated and scalable CRM platform.
Insightly is a centralized hub for managing contacts, leads, and customer information. And, it seamlessly integrates project management tools, allowing teams to plan, execute, and monitor projects within the CRM environment. It provides a unique sales pipeline that combines automated workflows with a conventional sales funnel. This way, users can nurture leads and automatically progress them through deal stages using the same tool. Insightly CRM also includes task and event management to help users organize their work, set deadlines, and stay on top of important activities. In addition, it offers powerful Reporting and Dashboard functionalities, giving users insights into sales performance, project progress, and other key metrics.
Medium-sized businesses with a complex tech stack and unique integration requirements will find Insightly ideal for them. That’s because of its native AppConnect no-code app builder that lets you set up workflows across 2000+ applications.
What is Pipedrive?
“Where deals find the perfect flow” 🌟
Pipedrive was founded in 2010 by salespeople — Timo Rein, Urmas Purde, and Co. — who needed better tools than the CRM solutions that the market could offer. As a result, they built an easy-to-use, visual, and automated platform to help businesses streamline their sales processes.
Pipedrive’s core feature is its intuitive and customizable visual sales pipeline, which allows users to easily manage and track deals as they progress through different stages of the sales process. As a CRM platform, it also provides a centralized database for managing deals and contacts and storing key information about leads and customers. It seamlessly integrates with email platforms, enabling users to track communication, send emails directly from the CRM, and sync email conversations with relevant deals. Furthermore, it provides workflow automation for repetitive tasks, saving time and ensuring consistent sales processes.
It’s ideal for large teams with complex structures and extremely busy sales pipelines. That’s because it fosters collaboration within sales teams with shared deal visibility, activities, and communication, enabling a cohesive and efficient team workflow.
What is AllClients?
“Easy All-in-one CRM and Marketing Platform” 💹
Jeff Shamus and Todd Binder created LoanClients — a CRM for the mortgage industry — in 2004. But it became popular with Insurance Agents, Dentists, Landscapers, and other professionals from a wide range of industries, so they changed the name to AllClients.
AllClients provides robust contact management tools, allowing users to organize and centralize their customer information. It can easily import, export, and categorize contacts, keeping track of essential contact details, interactions, and communications. It also includes powerful marketing automation tools like email campaigns and autoresponders to help businesses optimize marketing strategies and nurture leads. In addition, it includes popup forms and landing pages to track and manage leads through a sales pipeline. And, with the mobile app, you can manage tasks, deadlines, and workflows on the go.
AllClients is designed with the first-time CRM user in mind. Its interface is simple and its features are easy to learn. But it’s not just for beginner entrepreneurs. It provides powerful contact management tools, robust email marketing features, and time-saving workflow automation, which also makes it a strong contender for small teams.
Insightly vs Pipedrive vs AllClients:
Pricing
All three platforms offer a 14-day free trial, and Insightly is the only one that offers a free CRM plan.
Insightly offers a 14-day free trial for its Plus and Professional plans in the CRM package. It also offers a free CRM plan for 2 users, 10 emails/day, and up to 2,500 contacts.
However, they don’t offer trials for the Marketing, Service, and AppConnect packages, so you must contact sales for demos and information.
On the other hand, Pipedrive offers a 14-day free trial on all plans and add-ons.
Last but not least, AllClients’ 14-day free trial allows you to test the full range of its features. It also offers tutorials and guides to help you get accustomed to it.
Insightly offers a pay-as-you-use model with four separate feature packages.
Insightly divides its functionality into four packages and charges separately for them. It also offers an all-in-one package that combines all of them at a 30% discount.
Each package is divided into three plans that unlock more features and higher limits for things like daily mass emails, data storage, custom fields, number of landing pages, tracked domains for analytics, monthly connection app tasks, and more.
The only exception here is the marketing package that also charges a bonus on top of the base price based on the number of prospects you have.
Pipedrive’s pricing model scales to match the team or company size.
Pipedrive offers five pricing plans and several add-ons, with each plan increasing limits and adding features to match the team size.
Pipedrive’s Essential plan provides customizable pipelines, contact management, and a sales assistant, making it ideal for solopreneurs who need to set up sales processes quickly.
The Advanced plan is best for small businesses that need automation tools to speed up their workflow. That’s because it provides 30 active automations, two-way email sync, and automatic contact data capture.
With the Professional plan, your medium-sized team gets team management tools like dashboard collaboration, team goals, 3 company teams, and automatic task assignments.
The Power plan offers the same features as the professional plan but is scaled up for companies with large, complex team structures and busy sales pipelines. That’s because it offers:
200,000 open deals
unlimited insights dashboards
90 active automations
and 15 company teams
The Enterprise plan lets you enjoy the full range of Pipedrive’s features without limits and is ideal for large enterprises.
Pipedrive offers several paid add-ons that provide core CRM tools.
Pipedrive is primarily a sales pipeline and deal management platform. However, it offers project management, lead generation, email campaigns, web analytics, and e-document tools in multiple paid add-ons.
For example, the chatbot, live chat, and web forms builder are available in the LeadBooster add-on costing $39/month. The $16/month Campaigns add-on lets you create HTML emails using the email designer tool. If you need insights and analytics on visitor engagement with your website and landing pages, you can opt for the $49/month Web Visitors add-on.
AllClients offers a simple pricing model with customizable subscription plans.
AllClients offers three pricing plans with affordable costs and multi-user functionality. Higher plans increase limits on the number of users, monthly email, and contacts.
It also allows you to increase the number of contacts on any plan at $20/month for 5,000 contacts. More users can join your account for just $15/user. And, it lets you increase the number of monthly outgoing emails at $10 per 1,000 additional emails.
Winner: AllClients. It offers the least complicated pricing model of all three. Plus, it is more affordable and allows you to extend your limits without subscribing to a higher plan. Insightly and Pipedrive offer their feature piecemeal and force you to purchase the most expensive plan to get a discount.
Try AllClients for free! (no credit card required)
Insightly vs Pipedrive vs AllClients:
Sales Pipeline
Insightly offers a multi-step pipeline builder with nested sales automation.
Insightly’s sales pipelines “Journeys” are similar to automated marketing campaigns. However, they’re designed to nurture customers rather than market a product or service.
Journeys consist of four key components:
A prospect list of contacts for targeting by the journey.
Email template(s) for newsletters, drip campaigns, and nurture campaigns that get sent at different stages of the journey.
Email cadence that describes the experience and pace delivered to each prospect.
Exit strategy to handle prospects who take actions and those who don’t.
With Insightly’s sales pipeline, prospects can move through a linear path on the journey, or branch out into multiple paths based on their engagement.
It also remembers the progression of each prospect in the journey, so that if a removed prospect is re-added, they resume from the point they were removed.
Pipedrive’s sales pipeline is simple, flexible, and highly customizable.
Pipedrive uses a simple linear sales pipeline that displays all the deals in each stage sequentially.
It allows users with admin privileges to customize the name, probability, and rotting days of each pipeline stage, or create new pipelines entirely from scratch.
Pipedrive also allows you to add a deal to any stage of the sales pipeline.
Deals can include physical or virtual products, custom labels, and the customer’s contact information. You can set a custom probability for the deal, which overrides the default stage probability — allowing you to use the same pipeline for multiple deals with different chances of success.
AllClients provides marketing automation (Workflows) to automatically move contacts between stages.
AllClients’ Boards allow you to visualize a contact’s journey through your sales pipeline.
You can create multiple boards and they’re fully customizable. For example, you can add custom columns, and customize their order and color. This way, you can use them as a sales pipeline or any custom journeys you have for your contacts.
Boards are tightly coupled with AllClients’ marketing automation, allowing you to build workflows that:
put contacts on the boards
move them through stages
send emails to all contacts on a board
and remove contacts from boards
Winner: Pipedrive. It provides a simple and customizable sales pipeline that seamlessly integrates with its workflow automation. Insightly is best for users who want branching conditions in the pipeline. AllClients offers a simple Kanban-style deal flow coupled with marketing automation for the smoothest contact journey.
Insightly vs Pipedrive vs AllClients:
CRM
A) Contact Database: Insightly and Pipedrive offer simple client lists while AllClients provides To-Do functions and contact shortcuts on the dashboard.
Insightly
Like most CRMs, Insightly provides simple contact lists with basic filters and bulk actions. It also allows you to import and export contacts using CSV files.
It supports record linking, allowing you to quickly find all organizations a contact belongs to and vice-versa. Furthermore, you can link events, deals, and sales opportunities to contacts.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive also includes a simple contacts list and allows you to add new contacts manually or import them in bulk using CSV files. But, unlike Insightly, Pipedrive includes a contacts timeline that summarizes all events and activities associated with all contacts in the database.
AllClients
AllClients provides the most sophisticated contact management of the three, starting with contact shortcuts on the main dashboard.
Shortcuts allow you to quickly find contacts with first names, last names, or organizations starting with the selected letter.
It also includes several widgets for finding, adding, and listing contacts on the main dashboard.
AllClients allows you to create group actions on selected contact groups to extract contact information and use it to auto-fill emails, envelopes, and autoresponder campaigns. They also let you attach notes to multiple contacts, create to-do lists, export contacts, and bulk delete contact data.
AllClients also lets you attach To-Do Lists to any contact in your database. They serve as reminders for upcoming tasks, appointments, events, and any other activity you need to perform on the contact. And, you get notifications on the due date of any of your To-Dos.
B) Insights and Analytics: Insightly dashboards have customizable widgets, Pipedrive provides custom reports dashboards, while AllClients handles Custom Reports with their Advanced Search Function.
Insightly lets you create custom analytics dashboards with customizable charts and reports widgets.
You can customize the report filters, chart axes, date ranges, and row limits. It provides several visualization tools, such as:
Tables
Area graphs
Vertical bars
Bubble charts
Horizontal bars
Pie and Donut charts
World and country maps
Insightly also allows you to create calculated fields based on CRM data with several built-in functions like SUM, AVG, FLOOR, and RANDOM. Then there are its analysis tools: trend lines, grid lines, legends, axis labels, and more.
Pipedrive provides customizable dashboards with reports widgets as well.
You can choose which filters to apply to the report and set a date range. It also lets you choose between a column chart, bar chart, pie chart, scorecard, and table.
You can also customize the axes data and filter the report using labels and email segmentation tools.
AllClients doesn’t use traditional “Reports”.
Instead, it provides the Advanced Search tool that lets you query contacts, deals, campaigns, and email databases in unlimited ways. Furthermore, the results of this Advanced Search are not just static reports that you can visualize — AllClients lets you act on the client data you receive.
For example, you can create a query like: “Find all the people who are past customers, live in San Jose, are buying a home in the next 6 months, and have no Active Autoresponders. Then send them all Email #21”.
And that’s not all.
You can also save Advanced Searches and insert a custom widget that displays the real-time data on your dashboard.
Winner: AllClients. It provides the most advanced data query tool of all three platforms, allowing you to build custom queries and act on the resulting client data. Insightly is best for users who need advanced visualization tools, while Pipedrive is best for teams that only need simple reports with limited customizations. Learn more about AllClients’ CRM features here!
Insightly vs Pipedrive vs AllClients:
Email Marketing
Note: Email marketing is made up of many features, that’s why we divided this topic into three sub-sections (click on the link to jump to each):
A. Email Builder
B. Automated Email Campaigns
C. Email Segmentation
A) Email Builder: All three platforms provide drag-and-drop HTML email builders, but AllClients offers the most content options and customizations.
All three tools use the same third-party email builder. But that doesn’t mean your email marketing options are all the same between them.
Insightly
Insightly offers few templates and limited customizations for its emails. Moreover, the email builder is only available on the Marketing package, which is its own separate subscription plan.
Pipedrive
On the other hand, Pipedrive provides 40+ templates that cover a wide range of marketing campaigns. Its email builder lets you add even more content types, such as:
video
custom icons
bulleted lists
menu buttons
and custom HTML code
AllClients
AllClients email marketing feature provides all the content types that Pipedrive and Insightly offer. However, it gives you many more content blocks to make your emails more unique and visually appealing, including:
GIFs
stickers
spacers
countdown timers
and dedicated social media links
It also lets you preview your email in dark mode. This way, you can choose the right combination of colors to make your emails look good on any device.
B) Automated Email Campaigns: Insightly doesn’t offer built-in email campaigns. AllClients offers more campaign steps and actions than Pipedrive.
Insightly
Insightly is not an email marketing platform.
Instead, it allows you to transfer contacts to MailChimp and manage email campaigns there. It also provides a mass email feature for sending emails to multiple contacts.
Pipedrive
On the other hand, Pipedrive allows you to create campaign automations from scratch or choose one of several pre-built templates. Automations have three building blocks:
Trigger event that kickstarts the automation.
Actions are executed when conditions are satisfied.
Conditions that must be satisfied for the automation to progress.
Pipedrive allows you to chain multiple conditions together and you can add any campaign to an automation sequence.
AllClients
Meanwhile, AllClients provides automated workflows with more actions and flow control options than Pipedrive. For example, it allows you to pause the campaign until a set date or time, or you can set the automation to only run within a set time range.
It also provides automatic spam compliance for all campaigns and can capture data from emails without manual entry.
C) Email Segmentation: Insightly provides basic segmentation filters, Pipedrive provides filters based on email campaign data, and AllClients can perform group actions on segmented contacts.
Insightly
Insightly only provides basic contact segmentation based on personal and organizational information.
It doesn’t provide campaign data filters. Moreover, you can only perform limited bulk actions on segmented contacts, such as contact notes, email broadcasts, and contact merging.
Insightly has Dynamic Lists — contact lists that are automatically populated when a prospect matches the preset criteria. With this feature, you can apply bulk actions to a target audience without even knowing about the contacts.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive’s email segmentation lets you create customizable filters to find audiences that match a certain criterion. These filters also include email campaign data.
For example, you can filter contacts based on the campaign date or their interaction with campaign elements like subscriptions and embedded links.
This segmentation tool helps you craft personalized messages by creating email templates for specific filter groups and automatically populating them with contact information.
AllClients
AllClients also provides segmentation filters with hundreds of conditions and validations. It lets you save the filters and use them with any contact list on your account.
Like Pipedrive, AllClients provides filters based on email campaigns and custom contact fields. However, it stands out with the ability to execute actions on segmented contact groups.
Winner: AllClients. It provides an advanced email builder with lots of customization tools. Furthermore, it offers better email segmentation tools and bulk contact actions. On the other hand, Pipedrive is better for users that want to create lots of email campaign automations.
Try AllClients for free! (no credit card required)
Insightly vs Pipedrive vs AllClients:
Landing Pages and Popup Forms
Insightly provides built-in A/B testing for landing pages.
Insightly uses the same designer tool for email campaigns and landing pages, and as we’ve discussed, it has fewer content blocks and customization options than Pipedrive and AllClients. However, it provides three template types to help you get started:
Custom templates — saved, user-created templates.
Layout templates — blank structured templates with placeholder content.
Themed templates — fully-built templates with ready-made content for customization.
Unlike the other two platforms, Insightly offers built-in A/B testing for landing pages and web forms, helping you find the best combination of page elements for lead generation.
Pipedrive doesn’t offer landing pages, only web forms.
Pipedrive doesn’t offer landing page building features.
However, it lets you build fully customizable web forms to help you capture leads. You can add any field to the web form, customize the submit button, and even add a reCAPTCHA test and success page.
It automatically sends the data captured from web forms to the contacts database or any other CRM of your choice. And, it streamlines the form distribution by using a single link for embedding in websites, emails, and social media.
AllClients lets you add custom data fields to landing pages.
AllClients also uses the same builder tool for emails and landing pages.
However, it includes the Form content block for landing pages. This way, you’re using the same drag-and-drop tool for creating web forms, landing pages, and email campaigns. There’s only one tool to learn! 😇
In addition to the built-in fields, AllClients lets you add up to 40 custom fields in your web forms that you can label however you want and set the type of data you want to collect.
After the form has been filled and submitted, you can display a custom “Thank You” message, send the visitor to another web page, or redirect them to another landing page. AllClients also tracks all landing page views, form submissions, and lead conversions so you can assess their performance.
Winner: Insightly edges over AllClients because it offers A/B testing for its landing pages and web forms.
Insightly vs Pipedrive vs AllClients:
Pros & Cons
Insightly is ideal for customer journeys, Pipedrive offers the best workflow automation, and AllClients is best for CRM and email marketing.
Insightly vs Pipedrive vs AllClients:
Final Verdict
AllClients is ideal for small businesses, Pipedrive for large teams and enterprises, and Insightly is for medium-sized businesses.
So, which one’s the best CRM of the three? At first glance, these tools look like direct competitors aiming to satisfy your CRM needs. However, they offer unique features that appeal to different audiences. Each is the best for different purposes.
Insightly focuses on providing seamless integration with every possible tech stack, Pipedrive helps you to automate your sales pipeline best, and AllClients excels at contact management and email marketing.
With that being said, here’s my final verdict on the Pipedrive vs Insightly vs AllClients showdown:
Use Insightly if:
You want to integrate with an existing business tech stack.
You want to create automated customer journeys.
You want to create custom apps for your CRM.
Click here to get started with Insightly!
Use AllCients if:
You need simple, yet sophisticated email marketing tools.
You want the best contact management and customer relationship platform.
You need an all-in-one platform that doesn’t depend on an external tech stack.
Click here to get started with AllClients!
Use Pipedrive if:
You’re a large enterprise with complex team structures.
You need powerful workflow automation to handle lead management.
You already have a huge following and revenue flow from social media.
