Top Bitrix24 Alternatives: Best Solutions for Successful Agencies

Lucija Bakić

December 5, 2023

A screenshot of Productive, one of the best Bitrix24 alternatives, depicting a task management dashboard with priority statuses, deadlines, and employee assignments.

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.

Why Do Agencies Look for Bitrix24 Alternatives?

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.

The interface of Bitrix24 that shows a Kanban task view. Columns are named 'New'. 'Waiting for details', 'Invoice', 'In progress' and 'Final invoice', and each has associated task cards. Task cards contain a task name, description, email and phone contact.


Source: BITRIX24

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

  • Multiple reviews mention having issues with customer service, such as a lack of responsiveness
  • The user interface is cluttered and not very visually appealing, which can be overwhelming to new users
  • The learning curve is high in general, and certain users feel like the tool is difficult to configure
  • The cost of the software is high in comparison to comparable options on the market

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.

The Top Bitrix24 Alternatives: Collaboration Platforms, Project Management Software & More

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

1. Productive – The Best Bitrix24 Alternative for Streamlined Professional Services Management

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.

If I had to choose the main benefit of switching to Productive, it would be having visibility of everything in one place: from sales through resources, projects to delivery, plus the time logging and profitability figures in one place—being able to track the end-to-end lifecycle of a project.

Jason Devoy,
Delivery Director at Joi Polloi

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.

Project Management

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. 

The interface of Productive, one of the best Bitrix24 software alternatives, depicting time management with brief descriptions of tasks and an automated timer recording hours worked.


Manage your agency’s billable hours

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

Additional Project Management features include:

  • Project templates for simplified kickoff and more standardized processes
  • Easy task management with assignees, dependencies, comment sections, and notifications
  • Customizable alerts — adjust how frequent your notifications should be, and where you want to receive them
  • Invite your clients to your projects free of charge to speed up the feedback process and increase transparency

Budgeting

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.

The interface of Productive, one of the best Bitrix24 alternatives, which depicts a budgeting report with bar charts for revenue and margins grouped across different companies.


track key agency metrics in real time

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.

Sales

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

The interface of Productive, a top Bitrix 24 alternative, depicting a sales funnel with cards for leads across different stages, with value, services, and project names.


integrate your sales processes with your overall agency operations

Key features include:

  • Customizable pipeline stages and reasons for lost deals that help you estimate your win probability.
  • A sales feed that gives you an overview of your deal history that can be viewed and assigned to team members with to-dos.
  • Build estimates and export quotes directly from Productive with service rates — then, convert won deals into projects.
  • Key sales analytics, including sales forecasts for revenue, total revenue won, breakdowns on lost deals, type of deal closed per sales representative, and more.

Resource Planning

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.

The interface of Productive, one of the best Bitrix24 alternatives, that depicts a responsive resource plan with allocation across team members and projects.


get the full picture of your resource availability

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.

That’s a key thing that we get out of the reports that really feeds into our utilization and resourcing. If we know we’re doing 30% on internal projects, then we know we’ve got the capacity to take on more client work.

brendon nicholas,
Co-founder and Technical Director AT DotDev

Reporting

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.

An example of a utilization report generated in Productive, one of the best Bitrix24 alternatives, with percentages for billable / worked hours across different departments and employees.


align your business strategy with your day-to-day processes with timely reporting

Additional features: Docs, Automations, Purchase Orders.

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

Pricing

  • Plans start with the Essential plan at $9 per user per month, which includes essential features such as budgeting, project & task management, docs, time tracking, expense management, reporting, and time off management.
  • The Professional plan includes custom fields, recurring budgets, advanced reports, billable time approvals, and many more for $24 per user per month.
  • The Ultimate plan has everything that the Essential plan and Professional plan offer, along with the HubSpot integration, advanced forecasting, advanced custom fields, overhead calculations, and more for $32 per user per month.

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

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2. Salesforce – Best for Sophisticated CRM and Sales Management

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

Key features:

  • Multi-channel lead management
  • Consolidated pipeline view
  • Sales forecasting & analytics
  • Workflow automation
The interface of one of Bitrix24 alternatives showing a bar chart with sales data for Forecast by Quarter. The report has additional tabs, including Forecast by App Type, Forecast by Rep, and Trending Performance.


SOURCE: salesforce

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.

3. Wrike – Best for Scalable Project Management

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

Key features:

The interface of one of Bitrix24 alternatives, showing tasks organized into a Gantt chart, with different colored bars depicting the duration of each task.


SOURCE: wrike

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.

4. Asana – Best for Task and Workflow Management

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

Key features:

  • Scrum and Kanban boards
  • Interactive timelines with epics and dependencies
  • Essential project and workflow-related reports
  • Robust GitHub integration
The interface of one of Bitrix24 alternatives, showing task cards organized by their completion status ('New Requests, 'In progress'). Each task card has a priority and progress tag.


SOURCE: asana

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.

5. Basecamp – Best for Basic Project Collaboration

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

Key features:

  • Project schedule and table view
  • Progress tracking with to-dos
  • File storage and sharing
  • Integration with Google Drive & Slack
The interface of one of Bitrix24 alternatives showing different project boards, each with specific teammates and associated descriptions. Users have the ability to create new projects or invite users.


SOURCE: basecamp

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.

6. Monday.com – Best for Custom Workflow Automation

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:

  • Project tracking with Kanban and Gantt
  • Resource allocation and scheduling
  • Real-time document collaboration
  • Dynamic project insights and dashboards
An abstract interface of one of Bitrix24 alternatives, depicting the status of project tasks per month. Each status has an associated owner and color-coded status with three states: 'Done' (Green), 'Working on it' (Yellow), 'Stuck' (Red).


SOURCE: MONDAY.COM

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.

7. Trello – Best for Simple Kanban Board Task Management

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

Key features:

  • Customizable project views
  • Project and task data
  • Board templates for various needs
  • Powerups and plugins for other productivity tools
An abstract interface of one of Bitrix24 alternatives depicting tasks organized through a calendar view.


SOURCE: trello

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).

8. Smartsheet – Best for Spreadsheet-Based Project Management

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

Key features:

  • Resource allocation and reporting
  • Customizable analytics dashboards
  • Project budgeting templates
  • Predictive timesheets
The interface of one of Bitrix24 alternatives depicting a spreadsheet view of project tasks and deadlines. Each has associated estimated labor, materials, and actual labor and materials.


SOURCE: smartsheet

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.

9. Odoo – Best for Open-Source Enterprise Resource Planning

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

Key features:

  • Modules for HR, sales, CRM, and more
  • Flexible and scalable approach
  • Free pricing option
The interface of one of Bitrix24 alternatives, showing an accounting dashboard with data and charts for 'Customer Invoices', 'Vendor Bills', 'Point of Sale', 'Expense', and more.


SOURCE: odoo

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.

10. Microsoft Teams – Best for Communication and Basic Collaboration

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

Key features:

  • Video and audio conferencing
  • Real-time collaboration and chat
  • File sharing
  • Customizable team channels
The interface of one of Bitrix24 alternatives that shows stored contacts. Each contact card has an associated profile photo, name, position, and option to call them from the card.


SOURCE: Microsoft teams

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.

Takeaway: Finding the Best Bitrix24 Alternative for Your Agency

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.

FAQ

What is better than Bitrix24?

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.

Why is Bitrix24 so cheap?

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.

Is Bitrix24 a good CRM?

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.

Is Bitrix24 completely free?

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.

What are the limitations of Bitrix24?

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.

Is Bitrix24 HIPAA compliant?

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.

What is the difference between Jira and Bitrix24?

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.

What is the key advantage of Bitrix24 over other SaaS?

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.

How many agencies are using Bitrix24?

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.

Is Bitrix24 an ERP system?

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.

What companies use Bitrix24?

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

Why use Bitrix24?

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.

Can Bitrix24 track activity?

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.

Does Bitrix24 have an open API?

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.

Is Bitrix24 encrypted?

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.

Does Bitrix24 have a client portal?

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.

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Lucija Bakić

Content Specialist

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