Solve CRM vs Insightly (2026)

TL;DR

• Pick Solve CRM if your business runs on Google Workspace, your "projects" are jobs and appointments rather than multi-month engagements, and you want a CRM nobody has to administer.
• Pick Insightly if deals close into structured delivery — tasks, milestones, deliverables — and you need reporting that a client or a board will actually look at.

"Project management" means two different things here

Both products sit in the same category on paper: CRM that doesn't abandon you the moment the deal closes. In practice they're solving for different shapes of work.

Solve CRM (solve360.com) is built for service businesses — HVAC, consulting, residential services, non-profits. Its record model is flexible: contacts, companies, projects, properties, cases all live in the same system, and the interface keeps follow-ups, tasks, and communication history in front of you. It's job-and-activity shaped. Who called, what needs doing, when is the appointment.

Insightly is milestone shaped. When a deal closes, it converts into a project with tasks, milestones, and deliverables tracked in the same system. That's a heavier model, and it presumes delivery is a phased thing with a shape you plan in advance — a consulting engagement, a construction job, a professional services implementation.

If your delivery is "go do the thing on Tuesday," Solve fits. If your delivery is "six weeks, four phases, three deliverables, and a client who asks for status," Insightly fits.

Google Workspace is not a tiebreaker — it's a decision

Solve's Google integration is not a checkbox. Two-way Gmail sync, Calendar scheduling, and Google Sheets reporting are described as native rather than bolted on, and the product is genuinely designed around Google being your system of record for email and calendar. Native iOS and Android apps cover field teams.

Insightly does deep Gmail and Outlook integration with two-way sync, which means contact records update from whichever inbox you live in. It's ecosystem-neutral in a way Solve is not.

If you're a Microsoft 365 shop, this section ends the comparison. Insightly. Solve's central advantage evaporates and you're left comparing a lightweight tool to a more capable one with no offsetting reason to take the lighter one.

Pricing and the billing trap

Solve is $25/user/mo. Insightly is free for 2 users, then $29/user/mo (Plus), $49 (Professional), $99 (Enterprise).

At the entry tier these are close enough that price shouldn't decide it — but the tiers hide something important. Insightly's Plus plan has limited workflow automation; you need Professional at $49/user/mo for anything serious. So the honest Insightly price for a team that wants automation is roughly double Solve's, not $4 more.

And Insightly requires annual billing across all paid plans. No monthly escape hatch, no short commitment, no "let's try it for a quarter." For a small business that's a genuine constraint, and it's worth naming before you get to the contract.

Where each one is genuinely weak

Solve's ceiling is low and its reporting is the weakest thing about it. The feature set lags Salesforce or HubSpot on complex multi-stage pipelines, and reporting is limited unless you push data into Google Sheets and analyze it yourself. That's a workable escape hatch if you have someone comfortable in Sheets — and a dead end if you don't. Marketing automation is essentially absent. Solve is not built for larger organizations and doesn't try to be.

Insightly's problem is that it feels its age. The UI lags newer CRMs, particularly on mobile — which matters if your delivery team is in the field rather than at a desk. Automation is gated behind Professional. And it's explicitly not for high-velocity sales teams: if your motion is volume outbound with tight forecasting, Insightly's strengths are irrelevant to you and its weaknesses aren't.

Between them, the mobile question is the sharpest practical divider. Solve has native mobile apps built for field teams managing jobs on the go. Insightly's mobile experience is the part users complain about most. If half your team is in a van, that's not a footnote.

Reporting, and who's asking for it

This is where Insightly earns its higher tiers. It has strong reporting — enough to have picked up 2026 recognition as a top CRM for analytics — plus relationship linking that connects contacts, organizations, opportunities, and projects to each other, and custom objects on Enterprise for businesses with their own data shapes.

Solve's answer to reporting is Google Sheets. That is not a criticism dressed as praise: for a 6-person HVAC business, a Sheet is genuinely the right amount of reporting, and buying analytics you'll never open is a common and expensive mistake. But if anyone above you asks for pipeline forecast, project margin, or utilization on a recurring basis, Solve will make you build it by hand every month, and you will resent it.

Bottom line

Solve CRM is the right answer for a small Google-native service business that wants a CRM with no administrator, no configuration project, and no reporting anyone has to maintain — and it's genuinely good at that. Insightly is the right answer when the delivery side of the business has real structure, when you need reporting you can hand to someone else, or when you're on Microsoft. The trap is buying Insightly's Plus tier expecting automation it doesn't have, or buying Solve expecting analytics it will never give you. Decide whether your post-sale work is jobs or projects — that single question resolves nearly everything else.