Insightly is the smarter pick for small to mid-size businesses that want CRM and project management in one place without paying HubSpot prices. Its Professional plan starts at $49 per user per month, which is manageable for lean teams. HubSpot is the clear winner if marketing automation, lead nurturing, and pipeline visibility matter more than project delivery. HubSpot’s free tier is genuinely useful, but costs escalate fast once you need real automation, with the Marketing Hub Professional jumping to $800 per month.

These two tools sit in very different price brackets once you move past the entry level. Here is how they compare across common team sizes.

Both tools cover the CRM fundamentals: contact management, deal pipelines, task tracking, and email logging. Insightly adds something HubSpot does not offer natively at any tier: linked project management, so when a deal closes, you can convert it directly into a project with milestones and tasks. HubSpot’s pipeline tools are more visual and flexible, with better drag-and-drop deal management and more granular sales forecasting on paid tiers. For pure CRM depth and reporting, HubSpot wins. For teams that sell and then deliver, Insightly’s project linkage is a genuine differentiator that saves you paying for a separate project tool.

HubSpot is built around marketing automation and it shows. You get behavior-based triggers, lead scoring, email sequences, landing pages, forms, and a full journey builder even on mid-tier plans. Insightly’s marketing automation exists but feels like an add-on rather than a core product. Insightly Marketing is sold separately and lacks the depth of HubSpot’s workflow engine. If email campaigns, lead nurturing sequences, and multi-step automations are central to how you generate revenue, HubSpot wins this category without a close contest. Insightly is fine for simple follow-up sequences but not for teams running sophisticated inbound or outbound programs.

Insightly prices per user and the cost scales predictably, which makes budgeting straightforward. HubSpot’s free plan is genuinely generous but its paid plans price based on contacts and feature tiers, which means costs can surprise you as your list grows. A 10,000-contact Marketing Hub Professional account runs $800 per month before you add any users or extra hubs. Insightly’s Enterprise plan at $99 per user per month is expensive for large teams but at least you know what you are paying. For small teams under 10 people, Insightly often works out cheaper at comparable feature levels. For scaling marketing operations, HubSpot’s cost is usually worth it if you are actually using the automation.

Insightly is built for teams that need to move a deal through a pipeline and then immediately execute on it, with native project management features that convert closed opportunities into tracked deliverables without switching platforms. HubSpot has no comparable built-in project delivery layer, relying instead on third-party integrations like Asana or Monday.com to fill that gap. For service businesses, agencies, or operations teams that treat delivery as part of the customer relationship, that missing layer in HubSpot creates real friction and added cost. Insightly’s task assignment, milestone tracking, and project templates are genuinely useful out of the box, not afterthoughts bolted onto a sales tool. The winner here is Insightly, and it is not close — if your workflow does not end at the signed contract, Insightly handles what comes next in a way HubSpot simply does not.