Pipedrive x Insightly: Which AI CRM is the best?

AI has evolved beyond a mere feature; it now serves as the driving force behind smarter pipelines, quicker decision-making, and stronger customer relationships.

With offerings ranging from predictive insights to automated workflows, CRM platforms increasingly compete on how thoroughly they integrate AI into each interaction.

While both Pipedrive and Insightly promise intelligent sales assistance, their levels of AI depth, usability, and overall business impact differ significantly. For teams that prefer simplicity over complexity and avoid cluttered dashboards, folk provides robust AI integration that enables timely follow-ups and insightful extraction from calls and emails, representing one of the most powerful applications of AI within a CRM.

Why AI Integration Matters?

AI revolutionizes CRMs, transforming them from static databases into proactive sales assistants. Rather than waiting for representatives to sift through contacts or compose follow-up messages, AI automates essential actions, predicts outcomes, and enriches data in real time.

• Faster decisions. AI identifies leads to prioritize based on intent signals and deal velocity.
• Smarter outreach. Tools offer suggestions for message templates, optimal timing, and can even analyze tone or sentiment.
• Cleaner data. Say goodbye to manual entry; AI automatically fills in missing information and flags duplicates or outdated entries.
• Sales forecasting. Predictive models enable teams to identify potential pipeline risks before they arise.
• B2B data enrichment. AI quickly gathers company size, job titles, LinkedIn profiles, and contact information to complete lead records effortlessly.
• AI-powered sequences. Personalized cold emails are automatically generated and scheduled based on deal stage, persona, or interaction history.

When AI is seamlessly integrated into a CRM, sales representatives spend less time on administrative tasks and more time selling, which is what distinguishes a good CRM from one that genuinely drives revenue!

What is Pipedrive?

Pipedrive’s AI Sales Assistant is integrated into your pipeline feed, providing win-probability scores and next-best-action recommendations to help sales representatives concentrate on the most promising deals. It crafts personalized outreach emails, condenses lengthy email discussions into concise summaries, and alerts you when deals hit a standstill. You can communicate with the Assistant for context-aware responses regarding your performance, and it also suggests valuable integrations and features to enhance your toolkit. All insights and reminders are consolidated into a single feed—eliminating uncertainty and facilitating guided selling.

What is Insightly?

Insightly’s AI roadmap offers generative assistance across marketing, sales, and service sectors. In Marketing, the AI assistant creates and enhances email and landing-page content while providing A/B testing options. CRM users can produce AI-generated email responses, summarize lengthy ticket conversations, and even translate calculated-field formulas into simple language to auto-generate code. The improved AI-driven business-card scanning on mobile enhances accuracy and contact management. It's all designed to make your CRM experience conversational and seamless, rather than cumbersome.

Feature comparison of Pipedrive and Insightly

AI Follow-ups

Pipedrive’s AI Sales Assistant keeps an eye on your deal activity and recommends optimal times for follow-ups. After every call or email, it can generate a follow-up task with a suggested date and even propose the opening lines for your email based on previous interactions. You have the flexibility to modify the content or timing before the task enters your pipeline. If you require multi-step branching—sending one template if the prospect responds and another if they don’t—Pipedrive’s Workflow Automation can seamlessly manage those scenarios for you.

Insightly’s AI Assistant scans your activity feed and email threads to pick up on follow-up signals. When it identifies phrases like “let’s touch base next week,” it prompts you with a task or a draft reply, complete with a subject line and an opening sentence. You can fine-tune the timing and wording before finalizing it. For conditional branches—like “if no reply in three days, send a reminder”—you can integrate these prompts into Insightly’s Workflow Automation.

Automated Contact Enrichment

Pipedrive’s Smart Contact Data feature automatically fills in essential fields by scanning email signatures and public web records. As soon as you add a new contact, their company name, website, location, and social profiles are populated within seconds—eliminating the need for manual research. For additional firmographic or technographic insights, such as tech stack or funding information, simply integrate a Marketplace enrichment app like Clearbit or FullContact to enhance your records in real time.

With Insightly, every time a new lead record is created, the AI-powered business card scanner and integrated data partners swiftly retrieve profile details—including name, title, company, email, phone, and social links—from public sources. To enrich firmographics or technographics further, you can connect AppConnect enrichers like Seamless.AI or Clearbit for real-time updates on each contact.

Smart Fields

With Pipedrive's AI Sales Assistant, you can easily request a tailored outreach draft that includes an on-brand email sequence complete with subject lines, body content, and sending intervals specific to your deal stage. In just minutes, you receive ready-to-use email templates, which can be saved in Pipedrive or integrated into Smart Email BCC for automated delivery. Need follow-up triggers? Simply incorporate those steps into your Workflow Automation, and let the system take care of everything.

Insightly allows you to create dynamic layouts and dependent picklists, making forms responsive based on existing data. For instance, if you already have a visitor's email, the form will bypass that field and present new questions instead. Additionally, you can configure custom properties that sync with your AI Assistant, ensuring that any missing information is automatically filled in using your enrichment connectors.

AI-Powered Message & Sequence Generation

With Pipedrive's AI Sales Assistant, simply request an outreach draft, and it will generate an on-brand email sequence complete with subject lines, body copy, and send intervals customized to your deal stage. In just minutes, you can access ready-to-use email templates, which can be saved in Pipedrive or integrated into Smart Email BCC for automated delivery. Need follow-up triggers? Easily incorporate those steps into your Workflow Automation and let the system take care of everything.

Insightly’s AI Assistant is equally efficient; just give it a straightforward prompt—like “three-step outreach to marketing directors” or “post-demo follow-up”—and it will produce comprehensive email sequences, including subject lines, body copy, and sending schedules in seconds. You can save these sequences as templates and deploy them through Campaigns or Workflow Automation, ensuring that each step is triggered by opens, clicks, or stage changes.

Next Best Action

Pipedrive’s AI Sales Assistant evaluates your pipeline health, analyzes past win patterns, and identifies engagement signals to recommend the most impactful next step—be it a call, a personalized email, or sharing a proposal. These suggestions are conveniently displayed in your deal view or as task recommendations. You can also sync them with your calendar or integrate with Zapier, ensuring that your sales reps always know precisely what actions to take and when.

Similarly, Insightly’s predictive analytics engine assesses deal health, engagement signals, and historical win patterns to suggest the best next steps—whether it's a call reminder, sharing personalized content, or sending a proposal. These recommendations appear in your pipeline view or as task prompts, and you can seamlessly incorporate them into workflows to support your team at every stage.

folk CRM: The Ultimate AI Assistant for Sales

folk serves as the sales assistant that teams have always desired. This intuitive, integrated, and proactive CRM handles the tedious tasks, allowing sales representatives to concentrate on cultivating genuine relationships. With an impressive 4.5/5 rating on G2, folk is recognized as one of the most reliable AI-powered CRMs tailored for lean teams.

Designed with startups, agencies, and sales teams in mind, folk transforms AI into a practical tool rather than an overwhelming challenge.

Effortlessly Extract Insights from Calls and Emails

A standout feature of Folk is its AI-driven call transcript analysis, which empowers sales and investment teams to garner essential insights from recorded discussions. By seamlessly integrating with dialers like Ringover or Aircall, as well as call recording tools such as Grain for Google Meet, users can automatically import transcripts into Folk. From there, you can utilize Magic Fields, an in-built AI functionality that enables you to define prompts for extracting specific information from transcripts. For instance, sales teams can effortlessly retrieve details like contract values, user counts, decision-makers, budgets, or next steps—eliminating the need for manual note-taking. Investment teams can access insights like founder backgrounds, fundraising stages, or what startups are seeking. These fields are fully customizable: simply craft a prompt, map it to the transcript, and let Folk's AI handle the rest. The outcome is a structured, searchable CRM enriched with high-value data from your calls, streamlining follow-ups, qualification, and reporting.

Smart AI-Powered Follow-Up Reminders

folk's AI Follow-Up feature ensures that no opportunity is overlooked. Seamlessly integrated into the platform, this intelligent assistant evaluates your email interactions to determine when a follow-up is necessary. For instance, if you sent a question via email and the lead hasn't responded, Folk will automatically identify this lack of response and remind you to follow up at the optimal time.

Moreover, this feature also works in reverse—bringing forgotten leads or stalled conversations back into focus. By reviewing past interactions, Folk assists you in prioritizing the right contacts to re-engage, thereby propelling deals forward. This intelligent, contextual follow-up system saves valuable time, minimizes manual tracking, and enhances your chances of closing more deals.

Summary of AI Features in folk CRM

• Suggested actions: Receive proactive reminders and AI suggestions based on recent activities or deal stages.
• Extract intel from calls: Utilize AI to pull next steps, decision-makers, your leads' budgets, and all the essential details.
• AI-generated messaging: Save time with context-aware outreach suggestions designed for each contact.
• Duplicate management: AI identifies duplicates and organizes messy contact lists to maintain a tidy CRM.

folk is available starting at $20 per user per month, featuring a 14-day free trial with no credit card required!

Conclusion

Both Pipedrive and Insightly leverage AI to enhance sales processes, offering features like intelligent follow-ups and automated data enrichment. Pipedrive excels with its AI Sales Assistant providing actionable insights and streamlined communication. Insightly focuses on generative assistance for marketing and service tasks, making it versatile. However, folk is a great alternative, combining simplicity with robust AI capabilities, enabling teams to extract insights effortlessly from communications, automate follow-ups, and maintain organized contact lists—allowing sales reps to prioritize building relationships.

Start your 14-day free trial or book a demo today.