Insightly API
Insightly's REST API v3.1 is self-serve: a per-user API key over HTTP Basic covers standard and custom CRM objects. Daily request caps are plan-tiered from 1k to 100k with a 10 req/sec ceiling. No OAuth and no webhooks in the core API, so everything polls.
Frequently asked questions
Insightly scores D+ on the API Report Card. Insightly's REST API v3.1 is self-serve: a per-user API key over HTTP Basic covers standard and custom CRM objects. Daily request caps are plan-tiered from 1k to 100k with a 10 req/sec ceiling. No OAuth and no webhooks in the core API, so everything polls.
Without a usable official API, teams fall back on manual exports, file drops, or one-off vendor integrations. The other option is an unofficial API layer like Supergood that automates the authenticated web app directly.
Insightly is a unified cloud customer platform marketed as 'the Modern CRM teams love,' combining four products on a shared data model: Insightly CRM (contacts, organizations, leads, opportunities, projects, quotes, products, price books), Insightly Marketing (email campaigns, journeys, lead scoring, A/B testing), Insightly Service (ticketing, customer portals, knowledge base, SLAs), and Insightly AppConnect (drag-and-drop iPaaS with 500+ pre-built connectors and 2,000+ integrations).
Vertical: CRM + project management (horizontal SMB SaaS, with strong concentration in services verticals). Sales reps work leads, contacts, organizations, and opportunities through customizable pipelines; convert won opportunities directly into projects with milestones and tasks; generate quotes with line items priced from the products/price-book catalog; and log emails, calls, and meetings against the unified record.
Insightly is a well-known but mid-sized SMB CRM.
Yes, for tens of thousands of SMB services firms, Insightly is the system of record for the full revenue-and-delivery dataset: the master contact and organization database with custom fields, the lead and opportunity pipeline with forecasted revenue, the project plan and milestone/task tracking that defines client delivery, the product catalog and price book that generates quotes, the quote-to-cash workflow, the email/call/meeting engagement history on every record, marketing-automation enrollment and lead scores from Insightly Marketing, support ticket and customer-portal history from Insightly Service, role-based permission graphs, and AppConnect recipe state powering 500+ external connectors (Gmail, Outlook, QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe, DocuSign, Slack, Mailchimp).
Founded 2009 by Anthony Smith in San Francisco as one of the first CRMs natively built on Google Apps; raised $38M total across three rounds, last being a $25M Series C in 2016.
Hard ceiling of 10 requests/second per instance with HTTP 429 on overage; daily request caps tiered by plan (Free 1k, Plus 40k, Professional 60k, Enterprise 100k) on a rolling 24-hour window bottleneck any meaningful ETL or two-way sync. Authentication is Basic-auth-with-Base64-API-key only, no OAuth, no scoped tokens, no token rotation primitives, so partner apps and SaaS integrations must instruct every end user to find and paste their personal key. Full sourced list under Sources below.
Common alternatives include HubSpot, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Zoho CRM / Zoho One, Pipedrive, Monday CRM, Copper. Graded alternatives appear under "More from the report card" below.
Grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? We check six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and roll them into a letter grade. Grades get re-verified, and they only move on evidence.