Pipedrive vs Insightly: Which CRM for agencies wins?

Agencies don’t struggle with “finding tools.” They struggle with keeping pipeline execution consistent while delivery stays on track. When prospect context lives across inboxes, calendars, and spreadsheets, follow-ups slip, handoffs break, and forecasting becomes guesswork. A CRM for agencies has to keep new business moving fast while preserving enough account history to support renewals, upsells, and referrals.

Pipedrive and Insightly tackle these challenges from distinct perspectives. Pipedrive emphasizes a visual pipeline and activity-driven follow-ups, designed to streamline deal progression with minimal operational complexity. In contrast, Insightly integrates project management features, ensuring that sales processes align closely with delivery and execution, making it particularly advantageous for agencies involved in project-based work.

The optimal choice hinges on the complexity of your processes, the level of customization required, and the extent of ongoing maintenance your agency can commit to setup and administration.

What is Pipedrive?

Pipedrive is a sales CRM designed around a visual pipeline and activity-driven selling. Agencies often utilize it for its straightforward deal tracking, clear next steps, and light process enforcement. Users can maintain multiple pipelines to distinguish between new business, renewals, or partnerships, while scheduled activities ensure follow-ups remain visible. Additionally, automations significantly reduce administrative tasks associated with repetitive updates and reminders, making it ideal for teams that prioritize efficient pipeline execution over an expansive suite of features.

What is Insightly?

Insightly is a CRM that integrates project-oriented features, effectively linking sales records with delivery and post-sale activities. This can be particularly beneficial for agencies that require deal management to be closely aligned with client delivery, especially for project-based work. Through its pipelines, users can track opportunities, while tasks and activity sets facilitate standardized internal processes across different stages. Once configured, its reporting and dashboards provide visibility into both sales and execution metrics, making it a popular choice for agencies seeking a CRM that bridges the gap to delivery workflows.

Feature comparison of Pipedrive and Insightly

Multi-pipeline and custom stages

Pipedrive allows users to create multiple deal pipelines from the pipeline view, with each pipeline featuring its own unique stages. You can easily edit stage attributes like names and probabilities, and add or remove stages as needed. This flexibility enables the separation of agency motions—such as new business, renewals, and partnerships—into distinct pipelines, ensuring that stage definitions are tailored to each process.

Similarly, Insightly facilitates the setup of pipelines and stage lists that align with various sales motions. Separate pipelines can be utilized to differentiate agency flows like new business, renewals, and partner referrals while maintaining distinct stages for each pipeline. As processes evolve, stages can be adjusted to ensure that opportunity tracking accurately reflects the current qualification and delivery handoffs. Insightly implements pipeline logic at the record level, ensuring each opportunity adheres to a defined stage flow.

Client and Deal Activity Tracking

In Pipedrive, activities encompass scheduled actions linked to people, organizations, leads, deals, or projects, including calls, meetings, and follow-ups. You can set up calendar sync as either one-way or two-way, ensuring that Pipedrive activities and external calendar events remain aligned as per your configuration. Logged activities are displayed on the relevant records, facilitating the tracking of past actions and upcoming schedules for an account or deal.

Insightly's activity tracking is based on tasks, events, and logged interactions associated with contacts, organizations, and opportunities. With Activity Sets, Insightly allows you to create repeatable sequences of tasks and events from a template, streamlining follow-ups after discovery calls, proposals, or onboarding processes. Timelines and related lists keep a clear record of completed actions and upcoming next steps, enabling easy review of account history and current commitments during internal handoffs.

Automation and Workflows

Pipedrive's reporting system is managed through Insights, featuring custom reports, dashboards, and goals. Dashboards can be shared with teammates internally, and when permissions permit, public links can be created, allowing stakeholders to access a dashboard without needing direct account access. Goals within Insights monitor progress across deals, activities, and forecasts, all tailored to the specific configuration and plan limits.

Insightly's Workflow Automation initiates actions based on record criteria, such as field updates, assignments, and task creation. It can also integrate with pipeline-driven processes, for instance, by applying Activity Sets when an opportunity reaches a certain stage in Insightly. The execution of workflows is contingent on how triggers and actions are set up within the account, facilitating routine transitions like moving a deal to onboarding and generating the corresponding task checklist.

Reporting and Analytics

Pipedrive's reporting is facilitated through Insights, which offers custom reports, dashboards, and goal tracking. You can easily share dashboards with teammates internally, and if permissions permit, generate public links for stakeholders to access dashboards without needing direct account access. Goals within Insights monitor progress across deals, activities, and forecasts, depending on your configuration and plan limitations.

Insightly's reporting capabilities include dashboards and custom reports derived from CRM elements such as opportunities, activities, and projects. You can filter reports by owner, pipeline, stage, and time range, and save them for ongoing reviews. Insightly also allows for report scheduling, ensuring stakeholders receive timely updates without the need for manual exports. The accuracy of pipeline reporting relies on consistent stage usage and activity logging by the entire team.

Integrations and Data Hygiene

Pipedrive integrations can be accessed through the Pipedrive Marketplace, where users can easily install various apps and integrations directly from their accounts. To maintain data hygiene, the Merge Duplicates feature identifies potential duplicate contacts and organizations, offering a streamlined workflow to merge records efficiently. Pipedrive also explains how its duplicate identification adheres to specific rules based on its import logic, impacting the detection and merging of duplicates.

Insightly offers integration options through its integration layer and connected apps, which vary depending on the chosen plan and configuration. Its data hygiene features include duplicate management processes that assist in identifying and merging duplicate contacts, organizations, or leads, ensuring that records remain consolidated. Additionally, the import behavior can affect duplicate creation based on the matching rules applied during uploads. Maintaining clean records enhances downstream reporting and minimizes conflicts in automation.

folk: The Best CRM for Agencies in 2026!

folk is an AI-driven CRM designed to streamline the centralization of contacts, conversations, and deal context without complicating the setup process. It caters to agency teams where multiple individuals engage with the same account through prospecting, onboarding, delivery, and renewals. With a clear record of relationship history, handoffs no longer rely on memory or scattered notes.

• Multi-pipeline and customizable stages tailored to various agency motions
• Contact and deal timelines that consolidate interaction history in one location
• Email and calendar synchronization to link conversations to the appropriate records
• Tasks, reminders, and follow-up tracking to ensure standardized next steps
• Contact enrichment to supplement missing company and contact information
• Deduplication tools to merge duplicates and maintain a clean database
• Simple pipeline reporting for monitoring stage health and deal progression
• Integrations and automation connectors to minimize manual updates

For agencies, the primary benefit is achieving operational clarity across parallel relationships. Pipelines can represent various revenue streams such as retainers, projects, partnerships, and referrals, while tasks and reminders ensure consistent follow-ups throughout the team. Data hygiene features like enrichment and deduplication help eliminate duplicate records and fill in missing fields, keeping pipeline reporting effective over time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while Pipedrive offers a straightforward visual pipeline and automation for efficient deal tracking, and Insightly excels in integrating project management with sales processes, folk stands out as the premier choice for agencies that prioritize email integration, automation, and sequencing. With its streamlined approach to managing multiple pipelines, rich contact histories, and robust deduplication features, folk empowers teams to maintain operational clarity and consistent follow-ups, making it the best alternative for modern agency needs.

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