Whether you’re looking for an automated business center as a freelancer, or a hub for your team to iron out all the wrinkles in your teamwork, stay with us — we’re about to introduce you to two platforms that satisfy the needs of each.
And if neither fits your requirements, we’ll throw a bonus right in the end that combines the best of two worlds.
Plutio
Plutio is an all-in-one tool for those that have had enough of jumping between different platforms to run their business. Having a single center of operations is crucial in ensuring all your data is up-to-date, and all the files are within an easy reach at all times.
This platform was launched back in 2015 by Leo Bassam. It has a 4.3 rating on G2 and 4.7 on Capterra. The common complaint is the neglectful quality testing, which results in bugs and compatibility issues between features. On the upside, people praise the number of features, making it one of those apps that don’t kid about being all-in-one tools.
Let’s see if our impressions will match these reviews!
Customize Everything
If you’re one of those people who like making online spaces their own, you’ll love the number of things you can change in Plutio. Especially since the platform desperately needs it.
Looking at Plutio’s interface, it’s pretty clear that no designers were involved in its creation. While it’s not an eyesore, it lacks the modern polish that would make the platform more pleasant to work with.
To fix that, you can try your hand at customization. Plutio gives you total control of that, allowing you to adjust the color of every little thing, from background and text color to buttons and statuses. But since there’s no live preview, you’ll have to jump around the platform to make sure your changes look good. On top of that, you should come prepared with the color palette of your choice, otherwise you risk spending more time tweaking the details than in the character creation in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Instead of allowing the users to pick every color under the sun, it should offer themes as a starting point — this way, people could quickly change the interface into something good-looking in no time at all. And those who want their workspace to reflect their brand from top to bottom, they could use the themes to get a head start.

Tasks Over Projects
Plutio doesn’t really have a unique idea to project management, no workflows that could save us time, and in result, money, no smart pipelines or automations in sight.
What we get is a system resembling Trello, where everything happens on boards, cards, and tasks, but it’s not as well-thought-out.
Per each project you can create several task boards, and then within them, cards. You can add as many tasks as you want per card and enrich them with descriptions, attachments, and comments. You can also set start and end dates, assign team members, check out its timesheet, include a checklist, and make it a recurring task. All in all, tasks seem to include everything of importance, but should it be hidden so far into the project? Won’t tasks’ subtasks get lost in the daily grind?
One of the things that does get lost is the timer. You can start it from within a task, but once you leave the project tab, it doesn’t appear anywhere else. In this case, a common scenario happens: people forget they set the timer. And when they return to the project, they’re surprised by the amount of time that has passed by.
Other information might also get easily lost. After all, if you upload an image in a task, it won’t appear anywhere else. And while it might be manageable when you’re a freelancer, it might turn out to be disastrous for teams, where people might be unaware that someone uploaded anything of importance.
Overall, Plutio doesn’t really come with its own idea for project or task management, which might be good news for those looking for a Trello alternative that also handles invoicing.
Documents & Hidden Templates
In Plutio, there are four types of documents that you can incorporate into your workflow: invoices, proposals, contracts, and forms. To create them, you have to use Plutio’s editor that gives you the bare bones to work with.
The editor consists of the following sections, which may vary depending on the type of the document: content, image, video, code, signature, summary, intro, items, timesheet, button, input. With these building blocks, you can create rather simple and plain assets, which should be enough for common scenarios.
If you’d like to speed up the process, you can also download all sorts of templates from Plutio’s website and then import them into the platform. Which is a peculiar approach, especially since other tools — like Dubsado or HoneyBook — offer the templates within the app itself. This means that if someone didn’t notice the templates on the website, they might think there aren’t any.

And of course, you can save any document as your own template for future use, so that your chosen options, such as padding, shadows effects, font, or layout, can be saved and reused.
Comprehensive Scheduler
Good news to those that make booking sessions a part of their business, be it consultants or coaches of any type: Plutio comes with a scheduler!
The scheduler comes with an editor similar to the one used for creating documents. But instead of adjusting fonts and margins, you can set up:
- duration of the meeting and how much it costs,
- the location of the meeting, be it offline or online,
- buffers between meetings, so that you have the time to scream into the pillow or refill your coffee,
- minimum notice, to ensure you won’t be surprised by sudden and inconvenient bookings,
- booking window, which limits how far into the future your clients can book you.
You can also decide if you want to send any confirmation, cancellation, or reminder emails to both organizers and clients, as well as set up push notifications.
So not only can you create a smart scheduling system that takes into consideration all scenarios, but you can also ensure everyone is notified of any sudden changes. Moreover, if you sync your Plutio workspace with your calendar, you’ll be able to avoid double bookings, which can be extremely awkward.

Inbox Masquerading As Chat
Plutio also offers a simple channel of communication called Inbox, which is simply chat. There, you can fire off personal messages to any of your contacts, create group conversations, or send group announcements.
Also, if you create any projects, they will be listed on the Inbox page, so that you can quickly create conversations for them.
In the conversations itself, besides sending messages, you can also directly reply to specific messages, react with emoji — great for voting or showing that you have read and understood the announcement — and create tasks. We especially love that last one feature, because it’s a common scenario to say “I’ll do that ASAP!” and then forget about it as the conversation progresses.
The one thing that’s strange about the conversation thread is that despite the window being rather broad, all the messages, no matter their author, are aligned to the left. They also look exactly the same; there are no extra colors to differentiate your messages from other people’s.
As a cherry on top — you can delete your clients’ messages.

Conclusions
Plutio is a tool for freelancers and small business owners who would love to have a more complex version of Trello with invoicing, chat, and document features. Don’t expect any AI or automations, though — Plutio is a bit behind the times and doesn’t invest in the modern solutions.
The only way to automate your processes in Plutio is through its Zapier integration, which can connect over 7000 apps, including Google Docs, Gmail, Airtable, Mailchimp, Hubspot, and Calendly, just to name a few.
Overall, Plutio offers an outdated way of running your business, which may be just enough for simple needs.
Flowlu
Flowlu is an online work management software for teams launched in 2016, thanks to Artur Gotlijevskij and Maxim Kamyshev. Currently, it can boast about its 4.8 rating on Capterra and 4.7 on G2, with many users emphasizing the ease of use and the CRM part of the platform.
But let’s see for ourselves if the raving reviews are right.
Helpful Onboarding
Nothing makes a worse impression than an empty platform with no guides, tips, or dummy data that would help us make sense of the platform. Thankfully, Flowlu creators understood the necessity of leading their users throughout the whole system.
Right off the bat, we are welcomed by a Flowlu Video Tour, Live Product Demo, and Help Center on our dashboard, so that we can choose our favorite way of learning the tool.
We also get an entirely separate section with resources, so that we can quickly get up to speed on things like task automation, expenses tracking, setting up a pipeline, and more.
And most importantly, we get a list of tasks that we should do to get started with the platform: setting up our account, importing data, inviting team members, and more.

Moreover, no matter which tab you’ll open, you’ll find plenty of demo data that shows you what the platform looks like when it’s being used. And when you have enough of it, you don’t have to bother about having to delete everything manually; there’s a “Delete demo data” button that will purge the whole workspace.
Modern Interface
Many popular solutions are quite old — and it shows. From outdated color palettes to icons that make no sense to the modern audience, as well as questionable UX practices, some tools make it their mission to stick to the ways of the past.
And most platforms would rather churn out more features than to brush up on their looks and basic functionality.
Flowlu, despite being 8 years old now, has managed to embrace the requirements of modern platforms with its clean look and intuitive design.
First of all, it’s up to you if you want Flowlu to show off its bright, light interface, or if you prefer working in the dark mode — you can quickly change that in settings.
Secondly, Flowlu has come up with a neat trick that hasn’t been utilized on any other platform that we’ve tested before (such as Dubsado, SuiteDash, or Square). It concerns the issue of too many tabs and icons cluttering the sidebar — the more mature the software is, the more of them will appear, overwhelming the users. Flowlu though has decided to only list the most important tabs, and then, when you hover over an icon, a menu slides from behind the sidebar. This way, everything is neatly categorized and the users will be able to easily navigate through the platform.
But as it often happens with technology, there are some things we can nitpick.
For example, when we select one of our projects, we don’t go to another page; the project will be shown on a slide that covers ¾ of the page. In the thin space between the sidebar and the slide, we’ll see a snippet of the previous page we were on, which is completely unnecessary.
Team-Friendly
Most of the software meant for business management supports freelancers and self entrepreneurs. There might be features that support collaboration, but the whole system is designed with the single user in mind. Because of that, there’s a niche of small to medium businesses that require a platform for teamwork.
Flowlu is one of the few solutions that try to fill that void, alongside Scoro and Accelo, although each delivers different results.
One of such team-friendly features in Flowlu is chat, which is always within reach in the top right corner, no matter the subpage you are on. There, you can create new conversations with either individuals or groups, sharing exchanges and files alike. If the conversation ends up with ideas for new tasks, you can quickly assign them, either by hand or using a template to speed up the process. The templates come with premade subtasks, start and end dates, priority, estimated time, and more.
There is a downside to this feature — there are no notifications of new messages. This means that all users have to regularly check their inbox, which is easy to forget in the daily chaos.

Besides team communication, it’s necessary to have a variety of roles and permissions. There are no default roles proposed by Flowlu, but you can create custom ones, with their own name and descriptions.
Then, you can decide the permission levels for different aspects of the platform, including docs, email, time tracker, business processes, onboarding, CRM, calendar, and more. For each, you can usually choose between the options of “Access denied”, “Administrator”, “Employee”, “Project Manager”. Sadly, there are no in-depth explanations of the differences between them, so we have to guess.
Detailed Project Stats
Project management in Flowlu will delight everyone who likes to keep a hand on the pulse of each project, considering the amount of information it provides.
Each project has its own dashboard that succinctly summarizes it, giving us insight into the expenses, number of tasks completed, who the primary contact is, and so on. For more information, users can switch between fourteen tabs to learn more. They’ll find there all the invoices, work structure that’s divided into milestones, timelogs of all the people working on the project, and more.
The most intriguing part of the project section and potentially the most powerful one is the automation. It can be a true time-saver for complex projects — with rules and conditions, you can make workflows that will make the project run itself. No one will have to remember to change the project’s status or create a new task; Flowlu will do that for you.

There are countless possibilities. You can trigger the creation of a new event, which can happen immediately, after a specific amount of time, or after the previous automation rule runs its course. You can leave automated comments in the same vein, as well as set up notifications, request a response, fire off an activity feed post, create a new project or a task, and more.
Note that such detailed automations will only be useful for those that work on similar projects, where the workflows don’t deviate too much from the norm. Those whose work is more dynamic and requires a more flexible approach, might find these automation options too rigid, with no room for pivots or sudden changes.
Rich Invoicing Options
Anytime you want, you can create invoices and send them to your clients. But besides simple one-offs, you can also create recurring invoices, which are a must for those who want to offer either subscription-based services, or agreed to payment in installments.
The recurring invoice can never expire — so if a partnership ends, you’ll have to turn it off manually — or you can set a date where it stops being issued. There are also many billing periods to choose from, from weekly to bimonthly or every three years, but you can also create custom cycles, if you want to get paid every five months, for example.
On top of that, it’s up to you if you want the invoice to be saved as draft, to be sent manually, or if it should be sent at once.
To each product or a service you can add a discount or taxes, as well as shipping charges, which is pretty unique in the world of business management tools. This means that those selling physical products can also use Flowlu.
To keep track of all the invoices that you have issued so far and those expected in the future, you can use the payment calendar. Combined with tracked expenses, you can quickly get to speed with the financial situation now and in the future of your business, helping you make better informed decisions and take risks.

Conclusions
Flowlu is a modern answer to modern problems. It embraces teamwork and growing businesses, provides smart ways of automating work and tracking finances, as well as makes it possible to sell both one-off and recurring services.
The only missing parts are chat notifications — so important to ensure the flow of conversations — and lack of Client Portal. Flowlu made space for your team members to thrive, but not to your clients. Once again, we are forced to rely on back-and-forth email communication, which makes it difficult to ensure a top-notch customer experience.
Zendo: An Interesting Alternative
If neither Plutio nor Flowlu cover your needs, we have a bonus proposition for your consideration: Zendo.
It’s a fairly modern solution for small and medium-sized businesses, launched in 2021 by Jakub Gaj, that’s built with teams in mind. All requests submitted by clients, which can concern custom, subscription-based, or productized projects, come with their own communication channels in the form of real-time chats. This way, clients become active partners that are always up-to-date. On top of that, they gain access to all their documents and files at all times, without needing to involve the vendor.
Zendo comes with comprehensive features that boost productivity of the entire team. The centralized communication on top of having all data saved in one place, from financial documents to all the files ever exchanged during chat conversations, is a true time-saver. Your workflows will become much smoother, since you won’t have to hop between different platforms and note where to find each data.
Moreover, compared to other Client Portal software, it combines great customer service with smart ways of streamlining workflows for your teammates.
And best news yet? You can set up your workspace entirely for free with no strings attached.

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Frequently Asked Questions: Plutio vs Flowlu
What Is Plutio?
Plutio is a project management software for freelancers and small business owners who are used to such tools as Trello and would like to customize every part of their workspace. It also comes with a simple time-tracking, scheduler, and an inbox for exchanging messages.
What Is Flowlu?
Flowlu helps teams manage projects as well as their finances. Thanks to employee database expense tracking, on top of tracking all the other expenses, from travel expenses to office supplies, you can make better informed decisions related to the health and the future of your business.
What Is Better, Plutio Or Flowlu?
Both solutions will find their haters and lovers. Plutio is more suitable for freelancers, while Flowlu was created with teams in mind; Plutio puts more focus on tasks, while Flowlu on the overall project progress and management; Plutio has many optimization options and custom fields, while Flowlu has much modern and well-thought-out design. It’s best to create multiple accounts and give all these platforms a try!
What Is Zendo?
Zendo is an all-in-one solution for enhancing productivity of the entire team by introducing centralized communication and single source of truth for all your data.