How to access your API key in Insightly (3 easy steps) 

Insightly is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed to help businesses manage their relationships, sales, projects, and tasks in a centralized system. The platform is particularly popular among small to medium-sized businesses, although it can be used by larger enterprises as well.

While you can benefit from Insightly’s standalone features and capabilities in a variety of ways, you can get even more value by integrating Insightly with your product or your internal applications. 

To do so, you’ll first need to procure your unique API key. We’ll break down the steps for doing exactly that below!

Step 1: Login to Insightly

Start by creating an account or by logging in here with your credentials. You can create a free account with no commitment or credit card required. 

When creating a free account, enter your name, email address, and a password to get started.

Insightly's getting started homepage

Related: A guide to CRM API integration

Step 2: Navigate to the user settings

Once logged in, locate and click on your profile or user icon in the top right corner of the screen. A drop-down menu will appear. Select "User Settings" from the options.

User settings in Insightly

Step 3: Scroll down to the API key section

Within the User Settings, scroll down the page until you see “API”. A key will already be generated for you, but you can generate a new one if needed.

Where your API key appears in Insightly

Related: How to retrieve your API key in Dropbox

Other key considerations for building to Insightly’s API

Before integrating with Insightly’s API, it’s worth considering other items:

Pricing

Insightly’s CRM product offers multiple levels of pricing. In addition to their free version, they offer Plus, Professional, and Enterprise plans. Pricing is also on a per seat basis and comes with varying capabilities. 

To dive into Insightly’s pricing, check out their pricing page

A look at Insightly's pricing options

Rate limits

Insightly uses rate limiting to prevent API abuse. According to their their documentation, the number of requests are limited on a per-instance basis with no more than 10 requests allowed per second. 

The daily rate limit is set based on the plan level you/your organization choose. The rate limits are as follows:

  • Free: 1,000 requests/instance
  • Legacy plans: 20,000 requests/day/instance
  • Plus: 40,000 requests/day/instance
  • Professional: 60,000 requests/day/instance
  • Enterprise: 100,000 requests/day/instance


In the screenshot below, you can see rate limits per plan as well.

Insightly's rate limits per plan

Errors to look out for

Some common response messages you might see include:

  • 400: Data validation error
  • 401: Authentication failed
  • 403: Record or storage limit reached 
  • 404: Record not found
  • 417: File Attachment insert failed 

There are countless others though. You can refer to Insightly’s API documentation to learn more. 

Final thoughts

Many of your customers use other CRM tools, like Hubspot, Salesforce, or Zendesk. 

You can offer integrations with any of the CRMs your clients use by building to Merge’s CRM unified API

To learn more about the API, and Merge’s platform more broadly, you can schedule a demo with one of our integration experts!