Struggling to pick the right tool?
ActiveCampaign vs Insightly can feel like a head-scratcher, right?
You need a CRM that actually helps your business grow, not just adds to the chaos.
Imagine missing out on key leads or losing customers because your system’s clunky.
That’s the problem.
But what if you could clearly see which one truly fits your needs in 2025?
This article will break down ActiveCampaign vs Insightly and show you the real differences.
Overview
We’ve spent weeks diving deep, testing ActiveCampaign and Insightly in real-world business scenarios.
From setting up campaigns to analyzing reports, our hands-on experience fuels this comparison, ensuring you get practical insights, not just theory.
Unlock the power of an all-in-one marketing platform. So, check it out now!
Pricing: It has a 7-day free Trial. Paid plan starts at $15/month
Key Features:
- Email Marketing
- Marketing Automation
- CRM
Need a CRM that goes beyond sales with robust project management tools? Insightly’s got you covered.
Pricing:Â It has a free trial. The premium plan starts at $29/month.
Key Features:
- Project Management
- Workflow Automation
- Relationship Linking
What is ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign? It’s a powerhouse. Think marketing automation, email, and CRM all in one spot.
Do you want to automate your sales? This tool can help.
It also enables you to keep track of customers and makes your marketing smarter.
Also, explore our favorite ActiveCampaign alternatives…
Our Take
ActiveCampaign is an excellent choice for businesses that want to leverage the true power of email marketing and automation. However, it may not be the best fit for beginners due to its complexity.
Key Benefits
- Advanced automation: Create complex workflows to nurture leads and automate tasks.
- Email marketing powerhouse: Send beautiful and effective email campaigns.
- Built-in CRM: Manage contacts and track interactions.
- Segmentation and personalization: Target specific groups of contacts with personalized messages.
Pricing
- Starter: $15/month.
- Plus: $49/month.
- Pro: $79/month.
- Enterprise: $145/month.
Pros
Cons
What is Insightly?
Insightly? Yeah, it’s a CRM.
But it does more. Think project management, too.
This tool is designed to grow businesses.
It allows you to track deals and projects in one place, which sounds useful.
Also, explore our favorite Insightly alternatives…
Our Take
Insightly is a solid choice for businesses that need a scalable CRM with project management capabilities.
Key Benefits
- Scalable for growth: Adapt the platform as your business expands.
- Project management features: Keep your projects organized and on track.
- Customizable dashboards and reports: Get the insights you need to make informed decisions.
- Integrations with popular apps: Connect with your favorite business tools.
Pricing
- Plus: $29/user/month.
- Professional: $49/user/month.
- Enterprise: $99/user/month.
Pros
Cons
Feature Comparison
Choosing the right crm platform depends on the tools you use most.
We will now dive into the nine most important key features of both ActiveCampaign and Insightly, helping you decide.
1. Marketing and Sales Automation
- ActiveCampaign: This is the clear winner for marketing and sales automation. It is known for its deep, customizable workflows and intelligent marketing automation, allowing you to create complex customer journeys based on behavior. Its core strength lies in ActiveCampaign marketing automation.
- Insightly: Offers solid workflow automation capabilities, especially around sales pipeline management. While it has marketing features (Insightly marketing), its automation isn’t as deep or specialized as ActiveCampaign‘s.
2. Contact and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- ActiveCampaign: Features excellent contact management with a built in crm focus. It allows for tracking customer lifecycles and provides great personalization. It is primarily an email marketing services platform with CRM capabilities.
- Insightly: A true crm platform at its heart (insightly crm), it offers comprehensive customer relationship management, including tracking sales opportunities and providing a 360-degree view of the customer.
3. Email Marketing and Templates
- ActiveCampaign: Provides a powerful email builder and thousands of pre built templates. It supports advanced features like conditional content and dynamic content, making it a top email marketing services provider.
- Insightly: Includes good email templates and allows you to schedule emails. However, its design and advanced personalization options are not as extensive as those offered by ActiveCampaign.
4. Sales Pipeline Management
- ActiveCampaign: Offers robust sales pipeline visualization and management, enabling teams to track deals and automate follow up email sequences. This is part of its overall activecampaign crm.
- Insightly: Excels here, with dedicated sales pipeline tools and the opportunities dashboard. It is a comprehensive crm platform built to streamline sales engagement from lead to close.
5. Learning Curve and Ease of Use
- ActiveCampaign: While incredibly powerful, its deep feature set gives it a steeper learning curve. It is generally better suited for a more advanced user who can leverage its complexity.
- Insightly: Known for being user-friendly and having a clean interface. It is easier for small teams or those new to CRM to adopt and master.
6. Advanced Segmentation and Reporting
- ActiveCampaign: Provides advanced segmentation based on customer data, purchase history, and actions. It also offers excellent custom reports to measure digital marketing ROI.
- Insightly: Offers good segmentation and reporting, but the customization options for custom reports are not as deep as those found in ActiveCampaign.
7. Integrations and Extensibility
- ActiveCampaign: Offers a vast marketplace for add ons, connecting with thousands of other services. It supports popular systems and is highly flexible.
- Insightly: Connects well with other tools, notably having strong integration with Google Workspace. It also has its own crm add ons to expand functionality.
8. Dedicated Support Options
- ActiveCampaign: Standard plans typically include chat and email support. Phone support is often reserved for higher-tier or enterprise plan customers.
- Insightly: Offers solid support, with phone support becoming available at different tiers, often providing a more personal touch than ActiveCampaign‘s chat-first approach.
9. Transactional and SMS Features
- ActiveCampaign: Supports transactional emails (like order confirmations) and offers sms add ons to send sms or text messages as part of its automation sequences.
- Insightly: Focuses less on native transactional emails and advanced SMS messaging, concentrating more on the core CRM and project management experience.
What to Look For When Choosing CRM Software?
Here’s a quick list of what to watch for before picking your next crm tools:
- Focus on Marketing vs CRM: Decide if you need a marketing-first system like ActiveCampaign (best for complex email campaigns and end automation) or a true CRM-first platform like Insightly (a modern crm teams love, which focuses on managing all customer records and organization).
- Project Management Needs: Insightly excels here, allowing your team member to easily assign tasks and track project progress. ActiveCampaign has limited project management functionality.
- Automation Depth: ActiveCampaign is a must-have platform for sophisticated marketing teams needing more advanced features like ads, activecampaign, or highly conditional content. Insightly’s workflow automation is simpler.
- User Experience and Learning Curve: Insightly has a clean, intuitive interface, making it easy for small businesses to onboard. The ActiveCampaign review often notes a steeper learning curve due to its depth.
- Scalability and Customization: Check which platform handles growth and unique business needs better. Insightly lets you customize dashboards and pages. ActiveCampaign allows for custom objects and more advanced features on higher tiers, which is crucial for big businesses.
- Pricing Model: Insightly starts pricing per user, making it easy to calculate costs for your company. ActiveCampaign bases its costs on the number of contacts, which can scale up quickly, especially if you are not billed annually.
- Support and Reliability: ActiveCampaign provides a strong knowledge base and chat support, while Insightly’s service is often praised for its personal touch. You need to manage the support options carefully.
- Mobile and Accessibility: Both offer a mobile app, but check the review and features like Insightly products’ business card scanner for your team’s productivity.
- Data Compliance: Ensure the vendor adheres to a strong data privacy framework. For instance, check if ActiveCampaign gdpr compliant features meet your requirements.
- Reporting and Visibility: Can you easily get custom reports? Both offer useful dashboards to monitor your progress, but look for the specific details you need to track.
Final Verdict
For most companies, we recommend ActiveCampaign. Why?
It is simply the better solution for sophisticated email marketing automation.
Its ability to build automations for things like transactional email, RSS-triggered campaigns, and landing pages is superior.
Insightly service is good for project-heavy teams, but ActiveCampaign’s deliverability and new features make it the stronger overall platform.
If your focus is on boosting customer experience through personalized communication, ActiveCampaign is legit.
We’ve tested ActiveCampaign alternatives, and the core offering still wins.
This review is based on hands-on use, so trust that we point you toward the better long-term solution.
More of ActiveCampaign
Here’s a comparison of ActiveCampaign with its alternatives:
- ActiveCampaign vs Pipedrive: ActiveCampaign excels in marketing automation and lead nurturing with integrated CRM. Pipedrive, however, is a sales-centric CRM that emphasizes visual pipeline management and efficient deal tracking.
- ActiveCampaign vs GoHighLevel: GoHighLevel is an all-in-one platform for marketing agency users, with strong white-labeling and unlimited accounts.
- ActiveCampaign vs Keap: ActiveCampaign offers robust marketing automation and email capabilities. Keap is tailored for small businesses, blending CRM with sales and email for an integrated approach.
- ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot: ActiveCampaign is a leader in email marketing automation and customer engagement. HubSpot provides a more comprehensive, all-in-one platform covering marketing, sales, service, and content management.
- ActiveCampaign vs ClickFunnels: ActiveCampaign is ideal for email marketing automation and lead nurturing within a CRM context. ClickFunnels specializes in building sales funnels and landing pages for direct conversions.
- ActiveCampaign vs Folk: ActiveCampaign is known for sophisticated marketing automation and detailed customer segmentation. Folk offers a simpler, collaborative CRM for contact management, email campaigns, and basic sales pipelines.
- ActiveCampaign vs Instantly: ActiveCampaign delivers advanced marketing automation and a comprehensive CRM. Instantly focuses more on cold email outreach and lead finding with basic CRM features for simplified sales.
- ActiveCampaign vs ClickUp: ActiveCampaign excels in marketing-specific automation and customer relationship management. ClickUp is a versatile work management platform that can be customized for CRM and emphasizes project management.
- ActiveCampaign vs Monday CRM: ActiveCampaign provides powerful marketing automation and email campaigns with strong CRM integration. Monday CRM emphasizes visual collaboration and customizable boards for lead and deal management.
- ActiveCampaign vs Capsule: ActiveCampaign offers robust email marketing and advanced automation for sales and customer journeys. Capsule CRM provides straightforward contact management and sales pipeline features, ideal for basic CRM needs.
- ActiveCampaign vs Insightly: ActiveCampaign focuses on deep marketing and sales automation with lead scoring and tracking. Insightly combines CRM with project management, suiting teams needing both sales and project delivery.
- ActiveCampaign vs Freshsales CRM: ActiveCampaign provides comprehensive marketing automation and email with integrated CRM functionalities. Freshsales CRM focuses on sales management and streamlining sales processes with AI-powered insights.
- ActiveCampaign vs Salesforce: ActiveCampaign specializes in marketing automation and email engagement for small to medium businesses. Salesforce is an extensive, scalable CRM platform for large enterprises, covering sales, service, and marketing.
- ActiveCampaign vs Zendesk: ActiveCampaign focuses on email marketing, sales automation, and customer experience management. Zendesk primarily provides customer service and support tools, including ticketing systems and help desks.
More of Insightly
Here’s a brief comparison of Insightly with these software solutions:
- Insightly vs Pipedrive: Insightly focuses on CRM with integrated project management; Pipedrive specializes in visual sales pipeline management, often preferred by sales-centric teams.
- Insightly vs GoHighLevel: Insightly is great for combining CRM with project management. It helps track sales and projects together. GoHighLevel is an all-in-one platform for marketing agency needs. It offers strong marketing and sales automation tools and can manage multiple clients.
- Insightly vs Keap: Insightly offers a robust CRM with project tracking; Keap provides powerful marketing automation, email campaigns, and comprehensive sales features.
- Insightly vs ActiveCampaign: Insightly merges CRM with project management capabilities; ActiveCampaign excels in advanced marketing automation, email sequencing, and lead scoring.
- Insightly vs HubSpot: Insightly offers a strong CRM with project management, while HubSpot provides a vast all-in-one platform for marketing, sales, and customer service.
- Insightly vs Clickfunnels: Insightly is a CRM with project management; ClickFunnels is primarily a sales funnel builder for creating landing pages and automating sales processes.
- Insightly vs Folk: Insightly is a comprehensive CRM with project management capabilities; Folk is a more streamlined, collaborative contact management tool.
- Insightly vs Instantly: Insightly offers a robust CRM and project management solution; Instantly focuses on automated cold email outreach and lead generation.
- Insightly vs ClickUp: Insightly integrates CRM and project management; ClickUp is a versatile work management platform that can be configured for CRM tasks.
- Insightly vs Monday: Insightly combines CRM with project management; Monday CRM is a highly customizable work operating system, adaptable for various CRM needs.
- Insightly vs Capsule CRM: Insightly is a more feature-rich CRM with project management, while Capsule CRM is a simpler, straightforward contact and sales opportunity tracker.
- Insightly vs Freshsales: Insightly offers a robust CRM with project management; Freshsales CRM provides advanced sales automation, AI insights, and multichannel communication.
- Insightly vs Salesforce: Insightly is a comprehensive CRM with integrated project management; Salesforce is an enterprise-grade, highly customizable, and expansive CRM solution.
- Insightly vs Zendesk: Insightly is a CRM with project management features; Zendesk primarily focuses on customer support and service ticketing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is ActiveCampaign better than Insightly for email marketing?
ActiveCampaign generally surpasses Insightly for email marketing due to its advanced automation and personalization features. If complex email sequences and triggered campaigns are vital, ActiveCampaign is the stronger choice.
Which platform has better task management, ActiveCampaign or Insightly?
Insightly excels in task management. It offers robust project management tools, detailed task list views, and team collaboration features, making it ideal for businesses focused on project delivery.
Does ActiveCampaign have robust CRM capabilities?
Absolutely. ActiveCampaign offers strong CRM features, including lead scoring, deal tracking, and sales automation. It’s designed to streamline sales processes, making it a powerful tool for sales teams.
How do the integrations compare between ActiveCampaign and Insightly?
ActiveCampaign boasts a more extensive range of integration options, connecting with numerous popular apps and services. This makes it highly adaptable to various business workflows and existing software.
Which dashboard is more user-friendly, ActiveCampaign or Insightly?
Insightly provides a cleaner and more intuitive dashboard. Its user-friendly interface simplifies navigation and information retrieval, making it easier for users to quickly access essential data.
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