Zoho CRM x Insightly: Which AI CRM is the best?

Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses

AI has evolved beyond a mere feature; it now serves as the driving force behind smarter pipelines, quicker decisions, and enhanced customer relationships.
Today, CRM platforms differentiate themselves by the extent to which they integrate AI at every interaction, offering everything from predictive insights to automated workflows.
While both Zoho CRM and Insightly provide intelligent sales assistance, the depth of their AI capabilities, user-friendliness, and overall business impact differ markedly. For teams that prioritize simplicity over complexity and avoid cluttered dashboards, folk delivers robust AI integration, enabling timely follow-ups and insightful data extraction from calls and emails. This represents the most effective utilization of AI within a CRM.
Why AI Integration Matters?
AI revolutionizes CRMs, transforming them from static databases into proactive sales assistants. Rather than relying on reps to sift through contacts or draft follow-up messages, AI automates crucial tasks, forecasts outcomes, and enriches data in real-time.
- Faster decisions: AI identifies which leads to prioritize based on intent signals and deal velocity.
- Smarter outreach: Tools offer message templates, optimal timing, and even analyze tone or sentiment.
- Cleaner data: Say goodbye to manual entry—AI automatically fills in missing information and flags duplicates or outdated records.
- Sales forecasting: Predictive models enable teams to identify potential pipeline risks ahead of time.
- B2B data enrichment: AI swiftly gathers company size, job titles, LinkedIn profiles, and contact information to complete lead records.
- AI-powered sequences: Personalized cold emails are generated and scheduled automatically based on deal stage, persona, or interaction history.
With deep AI integration in a CRM, sales representatives can dedicate less time to administrative tasks and focus more on selling—making the difference between a good CRM and one that genuinely drives revenue!
What is Zoho CRM?

Zoho’s Zia is an integrated AI assistant that you can chat or speak with for immediate CRM updates—whether you need reports, record adjustments, or task creations, it eliminates the need to navigate complex menus. Behind the scenes, Zia provides dynamic deal-win predictions, anomaly detection, and churn forecasting to maintain your pipeline's health. It enhances records using email signatures, alerts you to competitor mentions in real time, and recommends workflow automations tailored to your team's behaviors. With its custom Prediction Builder, you can create personalized AI models for any module—no coding skills required.
What is Insightly?

Insightly’s AI roadmap introduces generative assistance across marketing, sales, and service sectors. In marketing, the AI assistant not only drafts but also refines email and landing-page copy with A/B testing variations. CRM users can generate AI-crafted email responses, summarize lengthy ticket threads, and even articulate calculated-field formulas in plain language to auto-generate code. On mobile devices, the enhanced AI-powered business card scanning improves accuracy and captures contact information more effectively. The goal is to make every aspect of your CRM feel conversational rather than cumbersome.
Feature comparison of Zoho CRM and Insightly
AI Follow-ups
Zia utilizes Workflow Rules to streamline your follow-up tasks. After setting triggers such as deal stage changes or task completions, Zia monitors which follow-up actions are most effective and can automatically create tasks or send notifications when it’s time to reconnect. Additionally, Zia’s “Best Time to Contact” feature examines past engagement to recommend the ideal time for your call or email. For more complex, multi-step workflows, you can integrate Zoho Flow or Zapier.
Insightly’s AI Assistant analyzes your activity feed and email exchanges for follow-up indicators. When it identifies phrases like “let’s touch base next week,” it proposes a task or drafts a reply, complete with a subject line and opening sentence. You can modify the timing and content before finalizing. For conditional follow-ups—such as “if no reply in three days, send reminder”—you can incorporate these suggestions into Insightly’s Workflow Automation.
Automated Contact Enrichment
Zoho’s native Zia Data Enrichment automatically fills in essential details such as company size, industry, key contacts, and financials by matching your leads with public records. To access additional firmographics or technographics that Zia doesn’t cover, you can install marketplace extensions like Clearbit or InsideView; once connected, these tools will auto-populate your selected fields in real time, eliminating the need for manual lookups or CSV imports.
When a new lead record is created, Insightly’s AI-powered business card scanner or integrated data partners immediately retrieve profile details—including name, title, company, email, phone, and social links—from public sources. For even more comprehensive firmographics or technographics, you can link AppConnect enrichers like Seamless.AI or Clearbit to enhance every contact in real time.
Smart Fields
With Zia for Emails, you can effortlessly prompt Zia to draft or refine your messages—be it subject lines, body content, or tone adjustments—and receive polished email snippets in seconds. These can be saved as templates and organized into sequences using Zoho’s workflow rules. For complete automation, link Zia-generated templates to Zoho Flow to activate each step based on opens, clicks, or field updates.
Insightly allows you to create dynamic layouts and dependent picklists, enabling forms to adjust based on existing data. For instance, if you already have a visitor’s email, the form will skip that field and present new questions instead. In the background, you can map custom properties that sync with your AI Assistant, ensuring that any missing information is automatically filled in through your enrichment connectors.
AI-Powered Message & Sequence Generation
With Zia for Emails, you can easily prompt Zia to draft or enhance your messages—whether it's subject lines, body copy, or tone adjustments—and receive polished email snippets in seconds. These can be saved as templates and organized into a sequence using Zoho’s workflow rules. For complete automation, link Zia-generated templates to Zoho Flow, allowing each step to be triggered by opens, clicks, or field updates.
Simply give Insightly’s AI Assistant a prompt—like “three-step outreach to marketing directors” or “post-demo follow-up”—and it will quickly draft full email sequences, complete with subject lines, body copy, and sending schedules. You can save these sequences as templates and deploy them through Campaigns or Workflow Automation, ensuring that every step triggers based on opens, clicks, or changes in stage.
Next Best Action
Zia’s Next Best Experience widget evaluates deal health, engagement signals, and historical win patterns to suggest the most impactful next steps—whether it's a call reminder, sharing a relevant PDF, or sending a tailored follow-up. These recommendations are displayed directly in your CRM and can seamlessly integrate into workflows, ensuring that reps always know their next action.
Similarly, Insightly’s predictive analytics engine analyzes deal health, engagement signals, and historical win patterns to recommend the most effective next steps—be it a call reminder, sharing personalized content, or dispatching a proposal. These suggestions are presented in your pipeline view or as task prompts, and they can be incorporated into workflows to support your team at every stage.
folk CRM: The Best AI CRM
folk serves as the sales assistant that teams have always desired. This straightforward, integrated, and proactive CRM handles the busywork, allowing sales reps to concentrate on nurturing genuine relationships. With a 4.5/5 rating on G2, folk is recognized as one of the most reliable AI-powered CRMs for lean teams.
Tailored for startups, agencies, and sales teams, folk makes AI accessible and practical, eliminating the overwhelming aspects.
Extract Intel from Calls and Emails
A standout feature of folk is its AI-driven call transcript analysis, which enables sales and investment teams to glean essential insights from recorded conversations. By integrating with dialers like Ringover, Aircall, or call recording tools such as Grain for Google Meet, users can effortlessly import transcripts into folk. From there, they can utilize Magic Fields, an innovative AI feature that allows you to set prompts to extract specific information from the transcript. For instance, sales teams can automatically retrieve details like contract value, number of users, decision-makers, budget, or next steps without needing manual note-taking. Investment teams can obtain insights such as founder background, fundraising stage, or a startup's specific needs. These fields are completely customizable: simply write a prompt, map it to the transcript, and folk's AI takes care of the rest. The outcome is a structured, searchable CRM enriched with high-value data from your calls, streamlining follow-ups, qualification, and reporting.
AI-Powered Follow-Up Reminders
folk's AI Follow-Up feature ensures that no opportunity goes unnoticed. This intelligent assistant, built directly into the platform, analyzes your email conversations to determine when a follow-up is necessary. For example, if you've posed a question in an email and the lead hasn't responded, folk will automatically identify the lack of reply and remind you to follow up at the optimal time.
Moreover, the feature also works in reverse, highlighting leads you may have overlooked or conversations that have grown stale. By reviewing past interactions, folk helps you prioritize the right contacts for re-engagement and advancing deals. This smart, contextual follow-up system saves time, minimizes manual tracking, and enhances your chances of closing more deals.
AI Features in folk CRM Summary
- Suggested actions: Receive proactive reminders and AI suggestions based on recent activities or deal stages.
- Extract intel from calls: Harness AI to pull next steps, decision-makers, budgets, and everything else you need.
- AI-generated messages: Streamline your outreach with context-aware suggestions tailored to each contact.
- Duplicate management: AI identifies duplicates and cleans up messy contact lists, keeping your CRM organized.
folk is available starting at $20 per user per month, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required!
Conclusion
Both Zoho CRM and Insightly showcase advanced AI capabilities, enhancing user experience through features like predictive insights and automated workflows. Zoho's Zia offers dynamic deal predictions and tailored automations, while Insightly focuses on generative assistance across marketing and sales. However, for teams desiring a straightforward solution that maximizes AI integration without clutter, folk is a fantastic alternative. With features like AI-driven follow-ups and call transcript analysis, folk empowers sales teams to prioritize relationships and streamline processes effectively.
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