Bigin by Zoho CRM vs. Insightly

Startups Needing Quick Setup with Low Overhead
Startups that need a CRM quickly and don’t have the time or resources to onboard heavy tools can set up Bigin in a matter of hours. It covers all the basic CRM needs out of the box, making it ideal for teams just getting started.

For what we use it for and the ease of use I am happy to recommend Insightly however I can appreciate that others may have more complex feature requirements than I use. As such I would mainly only recommend it to people who I feel would use it in a similar capacity to me.

Incentivized

• Zero-friction onboarding
• Imported 200 Google-Sheet leads in under 5 min via copy-paste wizard; field mapping was drag-&-drop, no CSV-headache.
• Email templates – yes, but the editor is limited.
• Merge-tags work, yet you can’t drop in advanced HTML; our logo had to be linked from an external URL. On the plus side, a bulk send of 25 emails went through without a hitch and none landed in spam – big win for us.
• Reports – fast but shallow.
• The dashboard quickly shows “deals closed” and “average stage duration,” yet you can’t pull conversion rates by lead source without digging into an export. Good enough for the board, too thin for an analyst.
• Automation – paywalled only.
• We wanted Bigin to auto-send a survey when a deal moved to “Won,” but workflows are a paid feature. You can test them during the trial; once it expires it’s back to manual clicks.

Incentivized

• Customization. Although there are some limitations, the world is almost your oyster with Insightly's customizations.
• Simplicity. I appreciate when policy screens are not loaded with too much going on. Insightly looks clean.
• Support. Their help center and the Insightly team is amazing.

Incentivized

• I would like to link the same contact to more than one company.
• I would like to be able to use only the name field, but I need to use first and last name
• I would like to have a plan where there is no limit on the number of customizable fields

Incentivized

• The Inquiry feature is missing some functionality, so it is not as useful as the Request feature
• The Actual Close Date does not autofill when a Request record is closed and marked as Lost/Abandoned
• The customizable objects and fields are very useful but the System Settings interface could be more user-friendly

Incentivized

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Incentivized

Insightly offers a great product; it's the right fit for our company at this time. We were, however, considering moving to Contactually due to their cost effective automation features. However, they lacked the project management capabilities of Insightly. As our company grows, we would love to stay with Insightly - and if they can nail the automation and add the ability to customize a little bit more, it would be the perfect solution for us. For a larger company with a more involved sales team, you might find the metrics/reporting to be a bit basic. Insightly offers great customer service even to free customers

Bigin has really helped us with selling our monitoring services to our customers, which is primarily farmers in the UK. We often need to talk to customers before, during and after a sale, and Bigin helps us keep our contacts and leads organised as we track all these interactions. We recommend it very strongly

Incentivized

Some items are not easily accessible as an admin, and the number of available resources is outdated (video from 2017). For basic tasks such as updating prospects or contacts, it is fine. However, when you change the screen size, the system becomes less responsive, with tables often being difficult to read.

Incentivized

The provider is 100% available, with no downtime, maintenance, or unexpected outages. We have been able to perform solid continuous services for 12 months without any interruptions. We have backups as well, unlike the in-house backup that they keep on their end. I believe they have a very good redundancy and backup infrastructure in case they get any outages.

Incentivized

Pages normally load quickly, but every now and then, as entering updates to fields, it take a while to update. Sometimes even after refreshing the screen, we have to exit and go back in to get the fields or queries to update.

Incentivized

The support is all international and it takes a while to get support as you have to go through chats and set up times, not as easy to just call and get the support you need. They are very nice when you do finally connect with someone and they are knowledgeable, just challenging being international sometimes.

Incentivized

We have used Insightly for almost 2 years now. We have always been able to get in touch with support for a variety of reasons and they have never disappointed us. The support staff have always been very understanding. They have assisted with answers to our questions and have provided great tech support. We would highly recommend them.

Incentivized

Well, we didn’t get the chance to do this in-person training but rather one-on-one online training with HR in-house. There were PowerPoints to discuss as well as video instructions on how to use the app, so it was okay. We were able to play around with it during the training or onboarding session.

Incentivized

I've used Insightly's online training &/ or learned as I went. I've found the blogs and online written material helpful. I've also attended a few webinars, which can be useful if you use a J-I-T approach so as not to overwhelm you (or your staff) with functionality that you are using just yet. The fact that it's all available on their website and you can learn at your own pace is invaluable

Incentivized

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Incentivized

Simplicity, usability, and a modern, intuitive UI.
Easy to learn and simple to guide customers through. Flexible enough to fit diverse business scenarios with seamless integration. Enables managing marketing, operations, customer service, sales, and even assets all in one place. Smooth connections with external services.
Delivers huge value at a fair price.

Insightly actually have many different fields and customization options for data management. Other programs do not have the ability to organize data in this way. It is easy to manage customer contact information, phone call and email tracking, company management and many other data fields. Microsoft and Google do not provide equivalent programs or services. Insightly customer service is quick to respond and address issues. It just takes quite a few emails in order to properly specify an issue or request

Incentivized

(+) Being able to download my LinkedIn connections was a huge benefit. (+) I use the task function to stay on top of my follow-up activity which is another positive feature. (+) The sorting capabilities also help me pinpoint the contacts that I need to stay on top of. (-) When I add a new lead from an existing organization, I would like the organization's information to automatically populate the fields like address, website, description. I enter all that information manually. (-) My mass mailing experience has been tedious due to the email function being interrupted and crashing due to bad email addresses in some of my records. (-) Many of my leads do not have current email addresses. I wish Insightly offered a tool to help find email addresses. I spend too much time researching to find email addresses.

Incentivized

• Reaching more possible customers quickly and with less effort. The fact of being able to automate sending to our contact database, which has previously been tagged and categorized, has allowed us to send information in a more agile way (previously we simply used Outlook, without any type of automation).
• Automatically consulting all the email history you have with any of the contacts has allowed us to be more efficient and avoid duplication in communications.
• The process of implementing and integrating Bigin in our company, although it was not difficult, we found some difficulties to synchronize the database loaded in Bigin by Zoho CRM with our Office365 account.

• For negative impact, the time setting up the various data fields and making sure the data was right and how it showed was not easy.
• Having the integrations available has saved all of us time jumping from platform to platform. Definitely assisted with focus and probably scrubbed at least one meeting.
• For the few issues we had setting up and customizing the tool, the ease of adoption across all the departments has been truly spectacular and beyond expectations.
• Hoping the team will make it more plug and play for future rollouts and work on the mobile app and then this platform would be 100!

Incentivized