Insightly User Management Guide

• Model type: role-based
• Description: Insightly uses a fixed set of built-in roles (Administrator, Standard User, Read-Only). There are no custom role definitions. Record-level visibility is further controlled by object-level sharing rules (Everyone, Owner Only, or specific Teams). Field-level security (field permissions) is available on Professional and Enterprise plans to restrict which fields a user can view or edit.
• Custom roles: No
• Custom roles plan: Not documented
• Granularity: Role level (3 fixed roles) plus object-level sharing rules and field-level security on Professional/Enterprise. No custom role builder is available.

1. Log in as an Administrator.
2. Click the avatar/profile icon in the top-right corner and select 'System Settings'.
3. Navigate to the 'Users' section.
4. Click 'Invite User' (or 'Add User').
5. Enter the new user's email address.
6. Select the user's Role (Administrator, Standard User, or Read-Only).
7. Optionally assign the user to one or more Teams.
8. Click 'Send Invitation'. The user receives an email to set their password and activate their account.
9. The seat is consumed and billed immediately upon invitation acceptance (or upon sending, depending on plan billing cycle).

Required fields: Email address, Role (Administrator, Standard User, or Read-Only)

Watch out for:

• Inviting a user immediately counts against the seat limit; if the plan seat cap is reached, the invitation will be blocked until a seat is freed or the plan is upgraded.
• Users must accept the email invitation to activate their account; pending invitations still consume a seat on some plan configurations.
• The free plan was discontinued in October 2024; all new users must be on a paid plan.
• SSO-enforced accounts (Enterprise) require the user's email domain to match the configured IdP; mismatched domains will prevent login.

• Can delete users: Verify in tenant
• Delete/deactivate behavior: This app exposes delete operations in its API documentation, but the admin-console path may present removal as deactivation, archiving, or deletion depending on tenant configuration. Confirm whether the UI action is reversible before treating removal as recoverable.

1. Log in as an Administrator.
2. Navigate to System Settings → Users.
3. Locate the user to be deactivated.
4. Click on the user's name to open their profile.
5. Click 'Deactivate User' (or toggle the Active status to inactive).
6. Confirm the deactivation in the prompt.
7. The user is immediately blocked from logging in and the seat is freed.

Watch out for:

• Deactivated users' owned records are not automatically reassigned; orphaned ownership can cause records to fall outside active users' sharing scope.
• The last Administrator on the account cannot be deactivated; a second Administrator must be promoted first.
• Deactivated users still appear in historical activity logs and audit trails, which is intentional for compliance but can cause confusion.
• If the deactivated user was the sole member of a Team, records shared only with that Team may become inaccessible to other users until the Team is updated.

• Where to check usage: System Settings → Users → view the list of Active users and compare against the plan's seat count shown in System Settings → Subscription.
• How to identify unused seats: Administrators can review the 'Last Login' date column in System Settings → Users to identify users who have not logged in recently. No automated idle-user report is available natively.
• Billing notes: All plans are billed annually only; monthly billing is not available. Seats added mid-cycle are prorated for the remainder of the annual term. All-in-One bundles (Plus $349/mo, Professional $899/mo, Enterprise $2,599/mo) include a fixed user count and additional Insightly products (Marketing, Service). The free plan was discontinued in October 2024.

Without SCIM (available only on Enterprise at $99/user/month, billed annually), every onboarding and offboarding event requires a manual admin session in Insightly. Inviting a user consumes a seat immediately - even before the invitation is accepted - so seat overages can appear before a single login occurs.

Deactivated users' owned records are not automatically reassigned, meaning offboarding a departing employee typically requires a separate manual cleanup pass to prevent orphaned records from falling outside active users' sharing scope.

Administrators consistently flag three friction points in community discussions. First, the inability to permanently delete user accounts means deactivated users accumulate in the user list over time, with no native cleanup tool available.

Second, Read-Only seats carry the same per-user price as Standard seats, which surprises organizations expecting a lower cost for view-only stakeholders. Third, the three-role fixed model draws recurring complaints from teams that need more granular permission control but are not on Enterprise.

Common complaints:

• Users report that there is no way to permanently delete a user account, only deactivate, which can clutter the user list over time.
• Administrators note that deactivated users' owned records are not automatically reassigned, requiring manual cleanup that can be time-consuming for large teams.
• Community members have expressed frustration that Read-Only seats cost the same per-user price as Standard seats, making them poor value for view-only stakeholders.
• Users on Plus and Professional plans report that the absence of SCIM provisioning makes onboarding and offboarding at scale operationally burdensome.
• Some administrators report confusion about pending invitations consuming seats before the invited user has accepted, leading to unexpected seat overages.
• The lack of custom roles (only three fixed roles) is a recurring complaint from organizations that need more granular permission control without upgrading to Enterprise.
• Users have noted that the 'Last Login' field is the only native tool for identifying inactive users, and there is no built-in automated report or alert for unused seats.

When evaluating whether to stay on a lower tier, consider that every app requiring SSO or automated provisioning will surface the same gap - Insightly's SCIM is gated behind Enterprise and also requires an active SSO configuration as a hard prerequisite.

Organizations on Plus or Professional must manage every user lifecycle event manually through the admin console. All plans are billed annually only; there is no monthly billing option, and the free plan was discontinued in October 2024. All-in-One bundles (Plus $349/mo, Professional $899/mo, Enterprise $2,599/mo) include a fixed user count alongside additional Insightly products.

Bottom line

Insightly's manual user management is straightforward for small teams but becomes operationally burdensome at scale without Enterprise-tier SCIM.

The fixed three-role model, absence of automatic record reassignment on deactivation, and seat consumption on pending invitations are the three operational risks most likely to create real administrative overhead.

Teams evaluating the platform should factor in whether the Enterprise plan's SCIM and SSO capabilities justify the per-seat cost increase relative to the manual effort required on lower tiers.