Why teams leave Insightly
Insightly promised one tool for the whole customer journey: leads, deals, then projects after the win. For small teams that promise held. The teams we migrate have grown past it. Sales wants faster pipeline work, delivery wants a real project tool, and the one tool for everything now serves neither side well.
There is also the admin drift problem. Years of custom objects, links and activity sets accumulate, built by people who have moved on. The account works, but nobody can say why it is configured the way it is. A migration is the cheapest moment you will ever get to shed that weight.
What carries over and what does not
Contacts, organisations, leads, opportunities, tasks, events and notes all export as CSV per object type, with record IDs that let you relink them after import. Custom fields on the standard objects export too. Files can be downloaded and re-attached where they earn it.
Projects, custom objects, links, activity sets, page layouts and workflow automation stay behind. Emails saved into Insightly through the mailbox add-in also stay, but the original threads live in your mail provider and resync once Pipedrive connects to the same mailboxes.
Field mapping: Insightly to Pipedrive
| Insightly | Pipedrive | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Organisation | Organization | Match on domain, dedupe on name. |
| Contact | Person | Match on primary email. |
| Opportunity | Deal | Map pipelines and stages one by one. |
| Lead | Leads inbox | Unqualified only. Convert the rest before export. |
| Project | Projects add-on, PM tool, or archive | Decide per the options above, never into deals. |
| Custom object | Fields, a pipeline, or a spreadsheet | Flatten deliberately, one object at a time. |
| Tasks and events | Activities | Open items only, import after deals. |
| Activity sets | Automations | Rebuild as stage-triggered activity creation. |
| Links | Fields or participants | Keep the few that carry meaning. |
Pitfalls specific to Insightly
The link model is the sneaky one. Insightly lets users link anything to anything, with labels like referred by or board member. These webs export as separate link tables that no import tool understands. Sit with the team, find the five link types that matter, and turn them into fields. The other links describe history nobody queries.
Custom objects hide business processes. One client tracked equipment installs as a custom object with four hundred records. That is not CRM data, it is an asset register. The right answer was a spreadsheet plus a link field, not a forced import. Expect at least one such discovery in any mature Insightly account.
The lead backlog is the third. Insightly keeps unconverted leads forever, and web forms kept feeding them. Filter on age and activity before importing anything into the Pipedrive Leads inbox, or the team's first sight of the new tool is a wall of dead leads.
The step plan
1. Inventory objects, links and sets
List custom objects with record counts, link types in real use, and active activity sets. Mark each: rebuild, flatten, archive.
2. Settle the projects question
Choose the destination for delivery work and archive completed projects read-only.
3. Export per object and clean
CSV per object type, IDs preserved. Deduplicate organisations and contacts, filter the lead backlog, and flatten the links that survive.
4. Build Pipedrive and test
Pipelines, stages, fields and users, then a fifty record test import verified by hand.
5. Import, rebuild sets, cut over
Import in order: organizations, people, deals, activities, notes. Rebuild activity sets as automations. One cutover date, mailboxes reconnected on day one.
Timeline and cost band
Three to six weeks and €4,000 to €11,000 with a partner. The spread is almost entirely about custom objects and the projects decision, not record volume. The cost page shows how these bands are built. Insightly accounts that grew from an old contact database share traits with the legacy CRM route, worth a read if your instance is a decade old. The Copper guide covers a lighter Google-centred exit, and the common mistakes guide lists the adoption traps that follow any migration.