Top Bitrix24 Alternatives: Best Solutions for Successful Agencies

As your agency grows, you’ll need to find the best Bitrix24 alternatives to stay competitive.

Bitrix24 is a Russian-based task management tool designed to help agencies collaborate more efficiently during the sales process. While this tool offers many useful features, some agencies might look for more extensive solutions focusing on resource management, financials, and reporting.

This article will cover the best Bitrix24 alternatives for professional service agencies, with an overview of the main benefits, downsides, and user reviews.

Bitrix24‘s main features include customer relationship management (CRM) with an integrated sales pipeline, telephony, essential marketing automation, and task management with Gantt and Calendar views.

Bitrix24 has a 4.1-star rating on both G2 and Capterra. The main downsides of the tool reported by users are:

As the main benefits of the platform, reviewers comment that Bitrix24 helps them improve team collaboration and information sharing with file sharing, client communication, and task management.

For our alternatives list, we’ve handpicked the best tools that offer something unique or improve upon existing Bitrix24 features. These are:

Productive is an all-in-one digital agency software solution for businesses of all shapes and sizes. It offers many of the features that Bitrix24 does, such as an integrated sales pipeline, task management, and analytics.

Additional capabilities include project budget management, resource planning, and financial forecasting.

With Productive, you can cut down from using multiple separate tools to one comprehensive solution, safeguarding your data and streamlining workflows.

With a 4.6 star rating on G2 and Capterra, Productive is praised as a modern, user-friendly solution with responsive customer support.

Let’s take a look at some of its key features for professional services automation in more detail.

Integrate your time management into your workflows with Productive’s Time Tracking. It offers a billable hours tracker that you can run from your tasks and place onto the desktop. Your team can also manage their hours by inputting time worked retroactively, or these entries can be created automatically while booking resources. Managers can use time approvals to entries as billable or ask for extra clarification. 

Additionally, Productive provides project progress visibility with its intuitive platform views, which include Calendar, Gantt, Kanban-style, and more.

Additional Project Management features include:

Productive Budgeting feature supports detailed financial oversight, enabling firms to build their budgets, track expenses, and forecast future costs.

Set up your retainers to occur automatically or separate complex budgets into multiple phases for streamlined cash flow. You can also set a limit on billed hours, so that you receive an alert when your utilization has crossed a certain percent — this lets you keep a closer eye on your project progress.

Streamline your budget management with customizable invoices and integrations with popular accounting systems, such as QuickBooks and Xero. With Productive’s Billing feature, you can pull data from your budgets, generate and attach your timesheets, and then send your invoices directly from the platform.

Productive’s Sales features offer lightweight CRM capabilities that support prospect and sales team management.

Key features include:

Productive’s Resource Planning feature helps project managers get the most out of their agency’s resources. It offers flexibility in booking hours and easy drag-and-drop reallocation, visual heatmaps for workload monitoring, customizable filtering options, and placeholders for future staffing.

An advanced feature is financial forecasting. After scheduling your resources, you can switch to the Profitability view to check how your budget and profit margins will look up until the deadline. If you reallocate resources, these metrics change in real time. Additionally, you can forecast your utilization rate for specific periods of time to align your resource capacity planning with your business strategy.

Read the full story: Using Productive, DotDev Has Grown 50% YoY For the Past Three Years

Productive’s advanced Reporting offers more than 50 agency-focused templates for insights into project progress, team performance, and various financial metrics. Use custom fields to add agency-specific parameters to your report. You can also convert your data into visualizations and organize them into dashboards or schedule them to be sent to email.

Additional features: Docs, Automations, Purchase Orders.

Integrations include: Xero, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Breathe, Zapier, Slack, Jira, Google Calendar, and more.
 

Productive offers a 14-day free trial, so you can decide if it’s the right Bitrix24 alternative for your agency.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a CRM solution with comprehensive features for sales management and customer engagement.

Key features:

Frequently highlighted benefits of Salesforce Sales Cloud are its extensive analytics and customization. The software also has robust integrations, so you can scale it as your agency grows. However, this can be overwhelming for new users, who also note the comparably higher cost of the software. Salesforce can be a good Bitrix24 alternative for users who are looking for an even more powerful, sales-focused solution. For a more streamlined project management experience, consider other tools.

Wrike is a project management system for teams of all sizes with features that simplify collaboration and resource scheduling.

Key features:

Wrike can be a good Bitrix24 alternative for teams who are looking for more comprehensive support for their agency operations, with additional resourcing and budgeting features. However, consider that Wrike doesn’t have notable CRM features, as well as the fact that budgeting is currently not included in the basic pricing option.

Check out our comparison of Wrike vs ClickUp vs Productive to find more about the best project management and allocation software.

Asana is a software solution with a focus on fostering team collaboration with task organization and workflow management.

Key features:

Users frequently enjoy Asana for its user-friendly and intuitive interface. It can be a good option for smaller teams that want to improve their project collaboration. However, when we compare Asana vs Productive, Asana lacks advanced reporting features, as well as specialized features that support the sales process. Keep this in mind if you’re looking for a more comprehensive solution.

Basecamp is a software solution that stands out for its simplicity and straightforward project collaboration tools.

Key features:

Basecamp is an easy-to-use tool for activity tracking on projects and tasks. It provides all of the essential features for simplified task and document management. However, it lacks more extensive agency project management features, so if you’re looking for a Bitrix24 alternative with advanced analytics tools, consider some of the other tools on this list.

We also covered Basecamp in our list of alternatives to WorkflowMax, so you can check out that article to learn more.

Monday.com is a project and task management platform for workflow automation. The software helps teams collaborate and communicate on a single platform.

Key features:

Monday.com’s main strengths are its customizable project boards and various capabilities for easier collaboration. However, the software solution lacks the specialized features of more extensive financial tools, such as financial forecasting. As it has a free pricing option, it can be a good choice for small teams or startups.

Trello is a task management tool with an intuitive interface and user-friendly features.

Key features:

Trello can be a good choice for teams of visual thinkers, such as designers and marketing teams. It provides document management, file sharing, and progress-tracking features that support collaboration. However, agencies looking for a Bitrix24 alternative with more robust budgeting and resource management features should consider other tools (compare Trello to other popular project management tools).

Smartsheet is an enterprise resource planning or ERP for professional services with resource planning, automation, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.

Key features:

Due to its similarities to Excel, Smartsheet can be a good Bitrix24 alternative for users who are experienced with working in spreadsheets. However, this can be a downside for others, as certain users have noted that the interface is not as intuitive or modern as similar solutions. Additionally, Smartsheet doesn’t have the benefits of a dedicated project budget management system.

Odoo is an open-source operations management software that provides a suite of modules for a variety of industries and businesses.

Key features:

Odoo can be a good Bitrix24 alternative for teams with complex workflows that require a lot of customization to support all their daily agency operations. However, reviewers mention that Odoo requires technical knowledge to implement and that this information isn’t always easily available. Remember that you might need to invest significant time and resources to get the most out of Odoo.

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration and communication platform that integrates with the Microsoft Office suite.

Key features:

Microsoft Teams is primarily a communication tool. As such, it lacks project management and CRM features. For users who are looking for purely a way to connect with their teams, stay on top of progress, and share files, Microsoft Teams can be a suitable choice.

According to a survey by McKinsey, only 16% of respondents believe that their agency’s digital transformation successfully and sustainably improved performance. To ensure that your Bitrix24 alternative sticks the landing, pick the best option for your agency.

This often depends on subjective criteria such as agency needs, team composition, and even personal opinion. However, consider the benefits of investing in a comprehensive agency management solution. These types of tools can help you save your time and money, as well as standardize your data and processes.

To find out more about what an all-in-one tool can do for your agency, book a demo with Productive.

Your best alternative to Bitrix24 will likely be subjective, as this depends on your needs and software preferences. For comprehensive project management, Productive is often picked for its modern user interface and robust features like advanced analytics tools, resource planning, and forecasting.

Bitrix24 can be considered affordable as it has a free pricing option suitable for smaller agencies and startups. However, more advanced features are part of paid plans, which certain users have found expensive compared to other tools on the market.

Bitrix24 can be considered a good customer relationship management (CRM) solution. It offers essential features such as lead management, sales and marketing automation, and contact management.

Bitrix24 has a free pricing option that provides essential features such as collaboration, tasks, and the contact center. However, more advanced features, greater storage, and additional tools such as marketing automation are available in their paid plans.

The main limitation of Bitrix24 is a steep learning curve due to a slightly dated user interface, according to user reviews. Additionally, Bitrix24 may lack customization in the free version and can be difficult to configure for your agency’s needs.

The Bitrix24 website mentions HIPAA compliance concerning AWS, which is used to store agency data in the US or EU. However, specific mention of other essential steps for full compliance, such as a business associate agreement (BAA) is not available on the website. It’s advisable to contact Bitrix24 directly or consult with a compliance expert for the latest information.

Jira is a software solution tailored to agile, software development teams, and supports their project and task management. Bitrix24 is a more generalized CRM and project management tool and has a broader range of features that cover the needs of sales and marketing teams, as well.

Users typically enjoy Bitrix24 for helping them streamline their lead management to ensure customer satisfaction. Certain users might enjoy the free pricing option of the tool, however, this limited version might not be fully suitable for medium to larger businesses.

The exact number of agencies that manage their project and sales processes with Bitrix24 varies and is continuously changing. Bitrix24 is popular among small to medium-sized businesses and is used globally.

An enterprise resource planning system usually includes more robust resource scheduling and financial forecasting features. As Bitrix24 offers mostly streamlined project management capabilities and CRM, it would not traditionally be considered an ERP system.

Bitrix24 is usually used by small to medium-sized businesses in various industries, including marketing, real estate, and consulting.

Bitrix24 can be a good software solution for agencies looking for a system with CRM features, simplified progress management, and a limited free pricing tier.

Bitrix24 can be used to track team activity with its simplified project management features. These include task comments, calendars, Kanban and Gantt charts, absence charts, and other collaboration capabilities.

Yes, Bitrix24 offers an open API for integrating with other tools and services, but only as part of its on-premise implementation when hosted on enterprise servers.

According to the Bitrix24 website, web connections for data transfer are encrypted, and two-factor authorization is available. For the latest information about Bitrix24’s encryption standards, it’s advised to contact the vendor directly.

Bitrix24 offers a client portal, so you can invite your customers inside the CRM solution and create your own workspace, document storage, calendars, and use other features.