Insightly is a “CRM + Project Management” solution for small businesses.
While it provides many features for CRM and PM, critical factors like usability, learning curve and significant setup time make Insightly unsuitable for small businesses. Also Insightly lacks the features to manage employees (HR). TeamWave is a complete platform to manage & streamline everything in your company: Project Management, CRM & HR.
Why TeamWave is the leading Insightly Alternative.
1. Ease of Use
Small businesses need simple software that can provide most of the functionality out of the box. Essentially the software should have a minimal learning curve, setup time and save resources (time and money).
Customisation
CRM customization is important for businesses – it helps a company align the CRM system with own processes and extend the functionality. Insightly doesn’t provide any default sales pipeline.
Here is what you need to do to set up a sales pipeline
- open up system settings
- enter the pipeline name
- assign it to opportunity/project
- add pipeline
- click on edit stages
- enter stages

TeamWave gives you get a pre-built sales pipeline with five sales stages that help you get started right away. You can also edit the sales stages with two clicks: click on settings and click on the stage which you wish to edit. Add additional pipelines from the same page.

Visual sales pipeline
Insightly only gives you a list view of all the sales opportunities. This is not capable of providing compelete visibility of the deals across all the sales stages.

TeamWave’s CRM is built around a proven sales pipeline management methodology.

Just some of the sales-related things you can do easily from a single page:
- Check progress of each deal/opportunity
- Add and move deals from one stage to another
- Mark them as won/lost
- Schedule deal activities
- Select different sales pipelines
- Figure out cumulative deal worth in each stage of the pipeline
- Find out the rotten deals (no activity for specific number of days)
- Filter deals via tags, deal ownership and deal state (open, won, lost, rotten)
- Quickly connect with support via in-app messenger
Note: TeamWave also lets you toggle between list view and time line view of deals.
Time log in project
Insightly doesn’t have time log feature in project management. It can be done via integration with third party app (TimeCamp), but you’ll pay additional subscription fee. Here is what a user has posted on the Insightly forum:

TeamWave offers time logging as an out-of-the-box feature. You can log time spent on each task and compare that with the estimated time. Download the time log report with a few clicks (individual projects/all the projects) and upload it to the invoicing app.

Reports
As a small business owner, time is your most precious resource. You need reporting capability that provides actionable insights quickly and helps you drive sales. While Insightly provides reports, it doesn’t have data visualisation capabilities. It needs to be connected with Power BI (a reporting tool by Microsoft) to generate graphs and charts.
TeamWave’s reporting feature comes with essential pre-built reports, so you spend time in gathering actionable insights instead of configuring & creating reports. These reports are both graphical and tabular (downloadable in CSV/XLS format).
CRM reports have following categories:
- Sales performance
- Pipeline performance
- Activity effort

Sales-related questions that can be answered with a few clicks:
- What is the conversion rate of the deals present in different sales stages?
- Who has maximum deal conversion rate in a particular time period?
- From which sales stage are we losing most number of deals?
- In terms of deal value or number, who has contributed the most to the sales pipeline?
- Which sales rep is completing maximum number of sales activities?
Project Management reports have following categories:
- Projects
- Users
- Time log

Project-related questions that can be answered with a few clicks:
- Which project is in a critical state with respect to overdue and total tasks?
- Which project is contributing the most to the total number of overdue tasks across all the projects?
- Which project has been continuously contributing more to the billable time log?
- Which user has maximum work load? Who has the most number of overdue tasks?
- Whether the time logged by team members has been consistently increasing or decreasing?
2. Collaboration
Collaborating with your team and clients is an important part of project delivery. Insightly neither gives you option to collaborate with clients nor a way to carry out discussions and share ideas with the team.
With TeamWave, you can collaborate with clients or vendors simply by inviting just one person from your client’s team and they will be able to independently add/manage their entire team.

Discuss proposals, ideas and gather feedback from your team using the discussion board. Embed images and files right into messages. Give everyone a chance to weigh in on their own time. Reach consensus and keep important decisions on the record.

3. Price
Insightly has complex pricing structure that starts from $12/user per month and goes up to $99/user per month (annual subscription).

Some of the major restrictions imposed by these pricing plans:
- number of custom fields
- number of records (contacts, leads, projects, tasks, events, emails, comments etc.)
- file storage
- integration (MailChimp)
TeamWave has a straightforward pricing – $3/user per month. If you choose annual subscription, the pricing is $2/user per month. All plans get all the features and apps – absolutely no restriction.

Here is the cost comparison for a company with 10 employees:
4. Application Suite
TeamWave is an integrated suite of business apps, which means you get Project Management, HR and CRM apps. Given below are some of the benefits:
Projects and HR: Project admin can keep track of the performance of the employees along with appreciation received from clients and log them as private notes in the HR app. During appraisal these notes can be reviewed for better decision making.
Sales and HR: In the HR app, if you add someone as the reporting manager of a sales rep, then the reporting manager will be automatically added as a deal follower whenever the sales rep adds a new deal. This fosters collaboration and helps in progress tracking.
Sales and Projects: Important files can be copied from deals to projects (example: requirement document) with a few clicks. Comes in handy when you commence project delivery after winning a deal.
Here is a sneak peek of our upcoming feature:
We’ll be providing tighter integration of CRM and project management app to help you directly convert won deals into project and smoothly transfer all the required files.
Insightly doesn’t offer HR management app. You’ll have to use Zapier to set up some form of integration and it’ll require additional subscription fee along with time.