Productive.io Alternatives: Which One Is Best for You?
Looking for the best Productive.io alternatives?
Whether you’re already using Productive or doing your due diligence, we’ve got the information you need. We can give you insider knowledge on features, benefits, and user reviews of Productive vs other agency management software — after all, we created it.
Productive is a comprehensive solution that caters to professional services businesses of all shapes and sizes. Its key features include integrated project management, resource management, finances, and forecasting.
If you’re looking for something specific, Productive releases useful new features and quality-of-life improvements each month, so check out our Product Updates and Roadmap to see if you’re missing out on something special.
Now that we’ve got this out of the way, let’s move on to our guide to the top Productive alternatives.
List of the 7 Most Popular Productive.io Alternatives
1. Scoro – A Good Productive Alternative for Agencies
Scoro is a work management platform that offers a wide range of features for professional service agencies, including project management, resource planning, and customer relationship management (CRM).
source: SCORO
Key Features
- Project management: Scoro provides billable vs non-billable hours tracking, time off management, and multiple ways to manage time entries. Additional features include project templates, Gantt charts, and support with various types of client engagements, whether retainer, fixed-fee, or hourly-priced.
- Resource planning: Scoro’s Planner interface provides basic team scheduling and capacity overviews. Get utilization insights, plan your schedules by considering availability and skill sets, and balance team workloads.
- CRM for agencies: Scoro’s sales funnel helps agencies handle communication with potential customers. You can forecast revenue and closing probability and analyze performance across sales reps to make more informed decisions across all departments.
- Expense management: When it comes to managing your project budgeting and various expenses, Scoro automates quote creation and sharing. It also has invoicing capabilities and purchase orders, so you can easily track your payments and expenses from the platform.
Scoro vs Productive
What is similar: Scoro and Productive have some similarities: both can be described as PSA software, as they offer a range of features that support agency operations. Productive includes all of Scoro’s capabilities, with additional features such as collaborative documentation with Docs and workflow Automations.
manage all project information with productive
What is different: The main difference between the two can be found in how they approach task management and project hierarchies. Users on Capterra report that Scoro’s “dependencies don’t function very well” and that task builds and Gantt chart views can be difficult to manage.
Additionally, some mention having issues with how Scoro handles notifications, which can be easy to miss and unintuitive to set up. With Productive, you can manage the frequency of your notifications from the settings and control where they appear (in email or within the app). All notifications can be accessed through the inbox, so you can always review the latest project updates.
To learn more about Scoro, check out the top Scoro alternatives for agencies or read our in-depth comparison of Scoro vs Accelo.
Which Tool to Choose?
Overall, Scoro can be a great tool for your end-to-end project management. It certainly provides a comprehensive set of features for agencies of all sizes. However, make sure to look into how Scoro handles task management as one of the main potential downsides. As this is a feature that will be used by all members of the team, it’s important that it’s as user-friendly as possible to drive adoption.
The Original Agency Management Software
Productive can become your single source of truth for project, financial, and resource management.
2. Accelo – A Decent Alternative to Manage Sales and Finances
Accelo is a professional services platform for consulting, IT, architecture, accounting, engineering, and other service-providing businesses. Similarly to Scoro, it supports your business performance, from sales to invoicing and reporting.
source: ACCELO
Key Features
- Projects: Accelo offers all the essential features of traditional and agile project management, including simplified collaboration with task hierarchies, notifications, a Gantt chart, and timesheet management.
- Sales: Accelo simplifies client management with custom sales workflows. Other features include quote creation and sending, easy conversion to projects, and revenue and closing probability forecasting.
- Reporting: Accelo offers basic and advanced features for tracking key agency metrics such as profitability, revenue, and cash flow. You can measure the accuracy of your estimating and team performance and manage project timelines with overdue tasks.
- Invoicing: Accelo integrates with popular project accounting software like QuickBooks and Xero. You can also manage retainers, track payments, and automate notifications for overdue invoices.
Accelo vs Productive
What is similar: Accelo and Productive offer features of all-in-one agency management software, including workflow management, project tracking, sales management, and real-time insights. When it comes to these features, the two tools are evenly matched.
In Productive, the ability to tie invoicing and detailed estimates and project deliverables: that’s kind of been the secret sauce.
What is different: While Accelo does provide some resource scheduling features, and you can use the Gantt chart to allocate your human resources, this feature is a staple of Productive.
Productive provides a responsive resource plan that integrates time-off management, financial management, and forecasting. You can also use tentative bookings to plan for unconfirmed projects, as well as visualize your utilization across various metrics.
visualize and manage key project metrics in real time
Which Tool to Choose?
Accelo is another great option for professional service agencies. If you’re focused on invoicing and sales as your key features, you can consider Accelo as your alternative. However, Productive might be the better pick for more robust capacity planning.
3. Kantata (Mavenlink) – A Popular Competitor for Resource Management
Kantata, previously known as Mavenlink, is another platform that helps agencies optimize resource allocation and get key agency insights. Manage your agency workflows by utilizing a variety of platform activities and capabilities, from scheduling to business intelligence.
SOurce: KANTATA
Key Features
- Project management: Kantata helps you optimize your project planning and project financial management. Create dashboards that provide valuable insights into agency performance. Manage tasks, collaborate, and get time and expense tracking on one platform.
- Resource management: Forecast your capacity to plan for future possibilities and balance workloads. Improve your financials and automate the resource scheduling process. Manage the impact your decisions have on your agency’s performance.
- Team collaboration: Ensuring project visibility across all stakeholders, including your clients, with access permissions. Add context to your tasks, easily notify teammates of progress, and integrate the platform with communication tools such as Slack.
- Project accounting: Get real-time insights and manage your client billing. Create custom dashboards with interactive reports.
Kantata vs Productive
What is similar: Productive and Kantata both provide essential features for comprehensive agency management, such as task management software and simple resource allocation. Both tools are dedicated to improving agency financial performance by providing in-depth insights into key financial metrics.
From a business level, now we make better decisions regarding our utilization. I’m understanding new things about profitability. I’ve made certain assumptions before, and some of those assumptions have proven to be wrong. For some projects, we weren’t sure how far over budget we were, and now we can really see.
What is different: Compared to Kantata, Productive provides additional features tailored to agencies and their teams. This includes an embedded sales funnel that helps you manage your client communications and create new projects easily, as well as collaborative documentation with Docs and no-code automated workflows with Automations.
productive provides an overview of your entire sales cycle
Which Tool to Choose?
Although Kantata is a powerhouse for human resources management, Productive might be a better all-rounder, especially for supporting collaborative project management. Also, consider these additional factors when making your choice or considering some : Users often report that Kanata’s UI/UX can be a bit complex and clunky to learn. Additionally, Kantata doesn’t provide transparent pricing or a free online trial, which can make the decision-making process more difficult.
This article on the top Mavenlink alternatives analyzes which tools can be a good substitute for Kantata, so check it out to learn more.
4. Monday.com – One of the Best Tools for Team Collaboration
Monday.com is a team collaboration and project tracking software for marketing teams, sales, IT, operations management, and construction businesses.
source: MONDAY.COM
Key Features
- Project management: With Monday.com, you can visualize tasks and workflows with various project views, including Kanban and Gantt. Other features include custom dashboards with widgets, task management with to-dos, and automatic notifications.
- Resource management: Monday.com supports the planning, scheduling, and allocation of resources for multiple projects. Get a high-level overview of projects and make strategic business decisions.
- Docs: Monday.com provides collaborative documentation. Work with teammates in real time, sync your pages with your dashboards, and stay on top of all relevant project information. A good alternative here would be Notion which we covered in our Monday vs Notion comparison.
- Automations: Use easy-to-set-up workflow automations. Monday.com also integrates with various third-party software, including tools for development, marketing, collaboration, and more.
Monday.com vs Productive
What is similar: Monday.com and Productive help keep projects on time by streamlining collaboration and communication for project teams. This includes project planning and task management, real-time documentation, and automation features.
get full visibility into project progress with productive
What is different: There are two main differences between the two tools. First is that Monday.com can be described as a generalized work management platform, which means it supports industries outside of professional services. On the other hand, Productive is a specialized all-in-one agency management tool.
The fact that Productive is agency-focused means that the whole ecosystem fits together so that there are fewer tools we have to pull together in order to do what we need to do.
The second is connected to the first. Monday.com provides good collaboration features but is lacking when it comes to more robust agency management. There are exhaustive integrations you could use, but Productive provides these capabilities as part of its platform. For example, one of the main downsides of Monday.com is that it doesn’t provide project budgeting and billing. The resource management and reporting features are also limited compared to Productive.
Which Tool to Choose?
We recommend Monday.com as an essential project management platform for various businesses. Productive is the better pick if you’re looking for a comprehensive solution to manage all agency operations, including resource and financial management.
Monday is also known as a Plutio alternative; head over to our article for more details.
5. Teamwork – A Similar Software Solution to Productive
Teamwork is another comprehensive tool designed to help various teams manage their work on a unified platform.
source: TEAMWORK
Key Features
- Resource management: Teamwork offers workload planning and resource scheduling to help you handle your agency’s project resource management. Get real-time insights into availability and make better project decisions.
- Budgeting: Manage your billable hours and create simple timesheets. Translate your budgets into client invoices. Teamwork also offers simplified retainer management and expense tracking.
- Collaboration: Choose between multiple project views, including Gantt and Kanban. With Teamwork, you can easily break down your work into tasks and subtasks and manage information with custom fields.
- Reporting: Get advanced insights into your agency and project health by monitoring planned vs. actual time to completion, profitability, and utilization.
Teamwork vs Productive
What is similar: Both Teamwork and Productive can be described as an all-in-one tool for simple and complex projects in professional services agencies. They provide resource planning and financial management capabilities, simple time tracking, and easier collaboration for internal teams.
What is different: Although Teamwork offers resource planning capabilities, Productive really takes this to the next level with its financial forecasting and scenario planning. With Productive, you can also leverage absence management to get the full picture of your resources — you can define agency-specific categories of time off and handle requests from the platform.
define and manage agency-specific leave
Another thing you might miss if you switch to Teamwork is the integrated Sales Pipeline, along with sales revenue forecasting, sales team performance management, and more.
Which Tool to Choose?
If you’ve tried out Productive’s features, chances are that Teamwork will be a good choice for you. It’s a good all-rounder tool with financial tracking and collaboration tools. However, if you’re looking for something considerably different, Teamwork might not be the best pick and there are other potentially interesting Teamwork alternatives to review. Some users on Capterra also have issues with the UI being cluttered and complex, which is a frequent downside of complex tools.
6. Workamajig – A Top Choice for Creative Agencies
Workamajig is a project and task management tool for marketing agencies and creative teams.
source: WORKAMAJIG
Key Features
- Project & Task Management: Templatize your projects for easier kickoff. Create and manage project budgets and generate invoices with flexible billing options. With Workamajig, you can log time directly from tasks and keep your projects on schedule.
- Resource Management: View workloads by week and day and filter your resources by their department, role, or service. Workamajig also includes time off management and easy reallocation.
- Sales: Workamajig’s sales dashboard provides you with sales pipeline visibility. Manage the performance of your sales teams and set goals. Additional features include communication history and email integration.
Workamajig vs Productive
What is similar: Workamajig and Productive share some collaboration features, as well as sales, resource management, and budgeting, though there are some notable differences between them when it comes to the latter two.
What is different: Compared to Productive, Workamajig is a more specialized creative agency project management software solution. It offers features that make creative workflows easier to manage, such as proofing and approvals. In turn, it lacks some of the more advanced features for agency management that Productive provides, such as scenario planning, financial forecasting, and robust utilization and profitability insights.
visualize and forecast your utilization with productive
Which Tool to Choose?
Workamajig can be a good choice for agencies in creative industries. However, consider that there are some downsides associated with the tool. According to user ratings and reviews on Capterra, Workamajig can be difficult to manage, and the reporting features can be limited for some agency needs. Check out our comprehensive review of Workamajig alternatives to learn more.
7. Rodeo – An Affordable Choice for Smaller Teams
Rodeo Drive is a professional services automation platform with various helpful project management features.
source: RODEO
Key Features
- Time Tracking: Rodeo Drive offers an integrated timer or manual entry to help you manage your time tracking. Get insights into time analytics per team members, projects, and clients, and sync your tracking to your budgeting.
- Budgeting: Simplify your project budget management by analyzing your actuals in real time. Rodeo Drive also provides support with invoicing fixed-price, retainer, and hourly-priced projects. Manage your team and financial performance with reporting.
- Planning: Handle your project progress by planning out your team’s workloads. Use drag-and-drop to reschedule your tasks. You can also filter your planner by project or team member for easier oversight.
Rodeo vs Productive
What is similar: Like Productive, Rodeo Drive offers essential features for agencies, such as time management, project and resource planning, and budgeting.
What is different: While Rodeo Drive offers some resource scheduling features, they are scaled-down compared to Productive. With Productive, you can manage your time off, visualize different scenarios with tentative bookings, and forecast key agency metrics such as profitability, revenue, and budget burn. You can also generate time entries automatically by syncing them with bookings.
[With Productive] I can check our budgets in just a few clicks now and we’re not in a situation where we’re at the end of the month and we still have to deliver 40% of the budget and overwork ourselves relentlessly.
Productive also offers some additional features, such as Purchase Orders for expense tracking, workflow automation with Automations, Docs for collaborative editing and file sharing, and an integrated Sales Pipeline.
Which Tool to Choose?
Rodeo Drive can be a good time tracking software and project management alternative for teams in creative agencies. However, it lacks some advanced features for true all-in-one agency management. Additionally, it offers only two pricing tiers, a free tier for limited users and features and a paid tier with all features. This reduces the amount of customization you can do with your software.
Why Agencies Use Productive as Their Single Source of Truth
According to research, more than 50% of agencies don’t use integrated software that can deliver real-time insights into their business performance. For example, 33% of agencies know their forecasted revenue and even fewer manage their project budget burn rate at 18% (2022 Global Agency Landscape Report).
productive helps you make data-driven business decisions
With Productive, you don’t have to be part of this statistic. Manage your financials and do so much more, with features including:
- Project views: Switch between multiple project views to find the one best suited for your current project.
- Flexible time tracking: Simplify time management for teams and managers with flexible entry and integrations with Google and Outlook Calendar.
- Financial forecasting: Make informed decisions with real-time insights into key agency metrics, such as profit margins, revenue, and budget burn.
- Customer relationship management: Drive alignment between sales and other departments by managing your entire sales cycle.
- Project budgeting: Productive helps you manage budgets of all types. You can also split complex budgets into multiple phases and automate retainers.
- Advanced reporting: Use one of the 50+ agency-focused templates and create your own parameters with custom fields.
- Additional features: Docs, Billing, Purchase Orders, Automations, and more.
Productive also offers a 14-day free trial, so you try it out before committing to a paid plan.
What I really like about Productive is that it’s not trying to be a tool for everybody. It’s really a tool for agencies. And I really like that because some of the pain points that an agency has are not addressed by other tools because it’s not something that is a priority for them.
Read the full story: How SOUP Got a Firm Hold on Their Projects Using Productive
Takeaway: Productive vs Alternative Software Solutions
We’ve explored various alternatives to Productive, from comprehensive to specialized software. We hope this overview of key features and benefits will help you find the exact software solution your agency needs to succeed.
Whatever you decide, consider the benefits of using Productive as your agency’s source of truth. With Productive, you get the benefits of collaboration and communication tools integrated with advanced financial and resource management. This can help standardize workflows, unify data, and reduce your tech stack.
If you’re interested, book a demo to find out how Productive can support your agency.
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Productive is also a great WorkflowMax alternative. Head over to our article to learn more about the specific features and benefits it offers to ex-WFM users.
