What I like best about Insightful is the clear visibility it gives into employee work activity and productivity trends. The dashboard makes it easy to understand work time, productive time, idle time, app usage, and utilization without having to manually check every detail.
For our takeoff/engineering team, the most useful part is being able to compare actual computer activity with assigned work. It helps management understand whether delays are caused by lack of productivity, workload overload, meetings, interruptions, or unclear priorities. The KPI options such as productive time, work time, utilization, meeting time, and manual time are helpful because they give a more complete picture of how time is being spent.
Another benefit is that Insightful can support a pilot approach before rolling it out to the full team. Starting with one employee allows us to test the software, review the data, and decide how useful it is for tracking productivity and improving workflow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The main limitation I noticed with Insightful is that it does not fully support project-level tracking for our workflow. It is very useful for tracking work time, productive time, idle time, app usage, and utilization, but it does not automatically show which specific takeoff project an engineer is working on inside tools like PrebuiltML or other estimating software.
For our team, we still need to manually enter project names, tasks, start/end times, and notes to connect productivity data with actual project progress. This adds some extra effort and may not be practical if employees are switching between multiple projects throughout the day.
Another area that could be improved is integration flexibility. Some project management tools are supported, but we did not see a direct Smartsheet integration, which would have been helpful for our project tracking process. The Microsoft 365 approval process also requires admin review because the requested permissions are broad, so setup may take additional coordination with IT. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Hi there,
Thank you for writing all this out! What stands out is how you've put Insightful to work on the harder question, not just where the time goes, but why a delay happens: workload, meetings, interruptions, or unclear priorities. Reading real activity against assigned work, instead of leaning on assumptions, is a strong way to run a takeoff team.
That comparison is Insightful at its fullest: A full workforce intelligence platform, not just a tracker. The KPI mix you're leaning on - productive time, utilization, meeting and manual time - is what turns raw hours into decisions about workload and priorities. Easing in with a single-user pilot before a wider rollout is a sensible way to do it, too.
The improvement pointers are where the care really shows, so thank you for laying them out so fully. Automatic project-level tracking inside tools like PrebuiltML, a direct Smartsheet integration, and the broad Microsoft 365 permissions at setup - these are all super interesting points, and the sort that feeds into considerations on where Insightful heads next. We'll happily take them all to our product development team!
There's a good deal more this can do for a team that works the way yours does and thinking like this is how we get it there. Count on us as you go.
Best regards,
The Insightful Team
