Plutio vs Agiled: In The Land Of Mediocrity

In the end, a successful business is defined by its revenue, and not by how pretty its Kanban boards are.

While a good organization supports sales, it doesn’t influence them directly. And it’s so easy to get caught up in polishing the internal processes, smoothing out any wrinkles, and ensuring that our tasks are color-coded.

And it doesn’t help that so many tools make us care about that, offering way too many customization options, distracting us from the things that truly matter in business.

That’s why, in this Plutio vs Agiled article, we’ll take a closer look at just how much these tools help out business owners without adding more management tasks to their workflows.

And maybe we’ll find a software that takes that mission to heart.

Plutio: Trouble In Paradise

Plutio is an all-in-one business management software. But don’t be fooled — not all types of businesses will find everything they need on this platform; only those that have a specific workflow set in place.

And that workflow heavily relies on email.

But before we get down to that, let’s take a look at the company itself.

Plutio was founded back in 2015 by Leo Bassam and it didn’t need any funding to reach $163.1K in revenue five years later…. which, compared to other similar tools — such as Dubsado or HoneyBook — isn’t all that much.

Which might also explain why Leo Bassam is currently collaborating with ClickUp instead of working on his own product, which made his users express doubts and lack faith in Plutio’s future growth on Plutio Community Facebook group.

And while the founder said that nothing will change, this move is worrying enough.

Still, we’ll check on the platform to see if anything has changed since our last visit.

Interface

Some people might think that interface isn’t that important — after all, as long as the features work as intended, there’s no skin off anyone’s nose, right?

But the interface isn’t only about looks; it’s about making the product intuitive and easy to use, having quick access to the most important functionalities and not wasting any time on going through each setting to figure out where everything is.

The less time you can spend on documentation, the better the platform.

Plutio’s interface looks okay — it looks simple thanks to cleanly divided parts, not overwhelming us with a number of features or strange tabs. And while it looks a little outdated, it doesn’t hurt our eyes too much.

If you’d love for your workspace to reflect your brand, you can customize it quite a lot. Besides choosing what elements should be visible on sidebars, you can switch between light and dark mode, as well as control the colors of the background, menu, tooltips, button, texts, statuses, notes, and more. Just be careful — it’s easy to create a colorful monstrosity that will haunt your nightmares.

It’s a shame there aren’t any premade color palettes that you could use, because that could save you time. Unfortunately, by giving you control over each detail, Plutio traps you in considering a myriad of possibilities that don’t really matter in the end.

Still, Plutio gives you all the right options to make your workspace feel your own.

White-Label Features

But to make the workspace truly your own, you need the white-label features that erase any trace of the platform being third-party, which is especially important when dealing with clients.

Thankfully, Plutio does offer a custom domain and a custom domain email, which are both available in the form of add-ons for extra $9 a month. Keep that in mind!

On top of that, you’ll be able to remove Plutio’s logos from the platform and change the colors of the login page.

Project Management

Now, let’s take a look at how Plutio presents your projects to you.

First of all, we have the general “Projects” tab, which shows us all the projects at hand. Whether we want to see them in a list format, on a timeline, or as cards, it’s up to us.

The attention grabbing information that welcomes us there are the projects’ color-coded statuses. This way, we can quickly get a grasp on the current situation, helping us sort out our priorities of the day.

If you’re not happy with the statuses provided by Plutio, you can create your own to replicate your current business processes. Thankfully, you don’t have to bend over backwards to fit them to the existing system.

We also get a progress bar, budget information, assigned members and clients.

At least, that’s the default — you can customize what’s visible on the page, so that you’re not buried under any unnecessary information.

Once you go to a specific project, you can once again switch between five views: list, table, Kanban, project-planning calendar, and timeline, so you can choose whatever works for you best.

Per project, you can create as many boards as you want to better divide your work. Within a board, you can create a task group, and then individual tasks within that. So if you’re a fan of creating tasks within tasks and require levels of depth, this might make you a quite happy project manager, especially if you’re used to working on Trello.

But for a paid work management tool, is this enough? Does Plutio bring anything new to the table in terms of project management? Not really, which might be good news for those who are used to working in a certain manner, but those looking for business-changing solutions might feel a little disappointed.

Task Management

We’ve already mentioned a bit about tasks and the fact that they are at the end of the project food chain. But they get their own tab on the Plutio platform, so let’s take a look at that.

First of all, Plutio wouldn’t be itself if it didn’t offer different views. This time, we can switch between a table, a calendar, and a timeline.

Next, we can filter the tasks in many ways. We can take a look at only those which are supposed to be due today, assigned only to you, those that are delegated, and more. You can also quickly switch between different projects.

From that place, you can also quickly create a new task and assign it to an already existing project, board, or group. On top of that, you can add the start and due dates, assign agents and followers, as well as add custom fields to bring some order to your tasks.

And when you select a task, you’ll get even more options: you can leave comments, include attachments, create a checklist and a new time entry, as well as view the time log. You can also start a timer by selecting a tiny button, which can be easy to miss.

Our fear is that the important information can be buried deep under layers and layers of tasks. Imagine if one of your team members included a necessary attachment in the subtask — unless you check each task one by one, you might miss something crucial.

Let’s be honest; there’s no well-thought out system that would help you organize your work. Instead, you get an equivalent of a matryoshka doll, where tasks are hidden within tasks, which in turn hide even more tasks.

In our opinion, it’s not a particularly smart organization system.

Documents

A business without any documents isn’t a business.

In the case of Plutio, that means you can use proposals, contracts, and invoices.

Unfortunately, there are no ready-made templates that we could use to jumptrack the process, and which make other tools highly popular — such as Dubsado, which has its own library of templates. You can create your own template, mind you, for future use. But at first, you’ll have to create your own resources, and not just for proposals.

To create a template, you can use different blocks and sections in a simple drag-and-drop editor. You can add blocks meant for content, images, videos, code, items, summaries, intros, and signatures, which is more than enough for simple documents.

But, unfortunately, the editor is far from intuitive.

For example, you can style each added section by using the right sidebar. There, you’ll be able to set paddings, margins, text color, background color, shadow effect, and more. The issue is, it’s not enough to select a specific section to adjust its settings; you need to select the “Style section” button that appears when you hover over it.

This means that you can spend a lot of time trying to switch between the sections simply by selecting them, with no success. Frustration guaranteed!

Moreover, confirming your decisions is also a bit on the weird side. Once you select the “delete section” button, it will change its text to “Are you sure?”, which is a sneaky way of asking for confirmation. And since the button itself is quite small, it might be difficult to notice.

Options are also spread across the sidebar in a mystical way. For example, you might think that to change the font you’re using, it would be enough to select the text and change its font on the sidebar. And yet, you can’t do that — you have to go back to the theme settings, switch to the “Designer” tab and look for the new font under the “Page” section.

Overall, the editor is bothersome to use, which makes it difficult to create anything pleasant looking.

Is it the same case with contracts?

Yes. It is the same exact story, just with fewer options to choose from.

And to our absolute dismay, it’s also the same with invoices.

Brace yourself, business owners. Or invest in a proper accounting software.

Selling Services

We’ve mentioned at the beginning of the article that Plutio heavily relies on email, so let’s now explain what we meant by that.

Plutio focuses on helping you with creating documents and organizing your projects, tasks, and subtasks; but it doesn’t do all that much when it comes to actual selling.

And that’s because the selling part happens outside of the platform.

The ideal workflow would look like this:

1. Then, you can start your project and deliver it as soon as possible,
2. After the delivery, you can send an invoice and await payment. Of course, you can also send invoices upfront or to divide them to cover milestones, but still — everything happens through email.

Is that truly a process you can expect of a true professional who prides themselves on the quality of not only their work, but also customer experience?

You can answer that question yourself.

Plutio: Our Thoughts

Plutio is a much simpler tool than you might think.

If all you need is a better version of Trello that can handle the financial side of your business on top of task and management capabilities, and which also is fully customizable, this might be it.

But if you’re looking for a solution that will offer you a cohesive system of managing your internal processes and improving your sales strategies, take a look at Plutio’s competition.

Agiled: Simplicity Done Wrong

Agiled also calls itself the all-in-one business management platform that offers a simple approach to running and managing small businesses. It’s been with us since

2020, when it was launched by Asad Ali (NF), which is quite a surprise; after all, Agiled doesn’t really stand out from its much older competitors, both when it comes to the interface and functionalities.

Let’s jump into it!

Interface

The looks speak in Agiled’s favor; the interface is clear and modern looking, clearly divided into our workspace, sidebar, and search bar. The number of elements isn’t overwhelming, and there’s also a helpful onboarding guide that will lead its users through Agiled’s most important features.

And there are also many customization options you can take advantage of, similarly to Plutio. In Theme Settings, you can switch between the default theme and the custom one; choosing the latter will result in new options appearing, allowing you to change the colors of the Admin Panel, Teammate Panel, and Client Panel.

Below these options, you’ll find the Custom CSS section. While it might delight those that know a thing or two about CSS, most users won’t be happy about it.

White-Label Features

Agiled also ensures your clients have no doubts who they’re dealing with.

First of all, you can set up a custom domain, as well as a custom email domain, so that your URL and email represent you.

Then, you can customize the login page. You can change the logo, its background color, favicon, action button text, and call to action.

That’s enough to forget about who’s owning the platform entirely.

Project Management

While we gently praise Agiled for its clean interface, the trouble starts once we leave the dashboard. And the “Projects” tab is the prime example of how not to design your interface. Here, the most important part — the list of the projects — is pushed to the very bottom of the screen, forcing us to scroll in case of more active projects.

There’s lots of unnecessary blank space and features that could have been rearranged to better make use of the interface.

And that’s true for other parts of the platform as well — the space is wasted by huge headings and big scroll down menus.

Let’s go back to the Projects and talk about functionalities.

First, we have a list of Statuses that inform the user of the number of projects that each state has. This way, you can quickly see how many projects are, for example, overdue, in progress, or on hold. Sadly, the states aren’t customizable.

Below, we get a table of all our projects, where we get a glimpse of its category, members, deadline, client, completion status, and date of creation.

To learn more about a specific project, we can simply select it. Or we can also select the very last button and then pick the “view project details”, which seems unnecessary and not that well thought-out.

In the project itself, get yourself ready for a lot of clicking around, because Agiled’s philosophy is to provide you with as many features as possible, no matter how they fit with the rest of the functionalities.

In the main dashboard of the project, you can take a glance at your earnings and expenses, see how much time you spent on it, look up the milestones and timesheets, as well as check out the activity timeline, which records every single action done by your team.

We also get many tabs we can switch back and forth between, including Milestones, Files, Timesheet, Discussion, Wikis, Workflows, Contracts, and more. In our opinion, spreading relevant information across so many tabs is bothersome — imagine how much time you’ll waste, trying to find one note.

Moreover, there’s no way of customizing that space. If, for example, you’d like to have the Gantt chart always at hand, you’d better have several tabs open and work like that.

Overall, this section proves that Agiled slapped many functionalities together, hoping they’ll stick. But that’s not enough for such a competitive market, where new solutions seem to appear every day.

Task Management

Does task management also suffer from lack of design?

Yes.

Here, we’ll also find a simple table, which thankfully doesn’t suffer from the blank space issue, but there are columns that are squeezed together in case of smaller screens.

When adding a new task, we can assign it to a project, category, and a person responsible for it, as well as set the due date (which in Projects is called “deadline” — there shouldn’t be any inconsistencies like that) and priority (either high, medium, or low).

Then, when we select a task, we get more information: description, attached files, time tracking, files, and comments.

We can also add a sub task, which is extremely easy to miss; it’s not a button, just a simple, gray text with no borders or highlights whatsoever.

If we don’t assign a task to a project, it’ll appear on a Task Board, where all “orphaned” tasks go to (in Agiled’s words). All tasks will also be visible on the Task Calendar.

Do these tasks appear anywhere else? They do appear in the “Open tasks” section within a project, and there’s also a “To do list” section on our Dashboard. Unfortunately, our tasks don’t appear on the latter, for some inexplicable reason.

Overall, tasks should always be close at hand. Here, they’re playing hard to get, making us think that task management wasn’t the priority for this platform.

Documents

Agiled offers a whole separate space for documents.

At a first glance, it looks the same as the Projects tab; we get a row of numbers that provide us some data on how many documents there are, how many were sent, viewed, completed, and more.

Then, underneath, we’ll find a table with all our documents listed. Along with their names we see their recipients, statuses, types, value, and date of creation.

If you want to create a new document, you can simply use the button placed in the right top corner. This will prompt a new window to appear, allowing us to either pick an already existing template (something that Plutio didn’t have!) or start from scratch.

If it’s the templates you’re after, you might be tempted to simply select the “Document Templates” button instead of the “Create document” one — but since that one only leads to a 404 error page, don’t even bother.

Now, what kind of templates do we have available? A bunch of contracts and proposals, including “Bookkeeping Service Agreement Template”, “Photography Contract Template”, or “Mobile App Development Proposal Template”.

Once we made our choice, we can enter the name of the document, pick its category, type, as well as expiry date, and then we can input notes and… chat script.

Which we have no idea what it’s for, because there are no tooltips to guide us.

On the next step, we’re taken to a builder. First impressions were quite nice — the interface is clear and clean, and there are several widgets and layers options to choose from, too. You can include headings, images, a pricing section, page break, signature, video, dates, and more. Add to that little adjustments to the text and paddings, and you can create an awfully simple document that in the end, will do its job just fine.

Next, we should discuss templates, but apparently, you can’t access any of them — you can rage-click all you want, but nothing will happen by selecting them! You’ll be forced to start from scratch, which can be quite time-consuming.

Overall, Agiled does the bare minimum, which is enough for an average business.

But is “average” really what you’re aiming for?

Selling Services

With Agiled, you can create both products & packages to step up your productization game.

In the Products tab, we once again face the table view of all current products. We can also create a new one, which is fairly simple; all we have to do is provide the name, tax, price, and description. Then, we can also tick a mysterious “Purchase Allow” box, which probably means we can decide if we want this product to be on sale right now or not.

Once we’ve created our Products, we can set up a plan. All we need to do is to enter the name, a code — which we have no idea what it stands for, once again due to the lack of any tooltips — and price.

Then we can decide whether our plan is a one-time deal, or if it renews until canceled or after a specified number of billing cycles. We can also set up a free trial and a setup fee by ticking boxes, which come with typos. Which doesn’t present an especially professional looking front!

Packages are no different; we get the same table view, and then a few fields to fill out. Notable things are the discount that we can set, then the currency (which, mind you, wasn’t an option when creating products), tax, and unit price for each of our items.

Surprisingly, we can’t quickly create packages based on our already existing products.

When it comes to making sales, Agiled doesn’t offer you any cohesive system to support you in that endeavor. Once again, the product designers assume that all business owners love to run their businesses through emails, only needing an app to handle invoicing and some of the project management.

Agiled: Our Thoughts

Agiled may look like a modern app at first, but don’t be fooled — there mustn’t have been too many designers involved in the process, or else it would have looked completely different. From typos in the interface to buttons that lead to nowhere, you can find yourself frustrated in no time at all.

With the number of well-designed platforms already available on the market, we recommend skipping Agiled entirely. If you must, pick Plutio; and if you didn’t like what Plutio had to offer, then what about Zendo?

Zendo: Our Proposition

Neither Plutio or Agiled bring anything new to the table. They offer some checklists, a Kanban board, an invoicing system, white-label features — but at this point, everyone does.

Zendo, on the other hand, took a brave step outside of the box and came up with completely different workflows for your business.

For example, you can skip email communication entirely. You can lead the whole sales and delivery processes directly on the platform, where clients communicate with you, submit their own orders through the Service Catalog, and then make payments with a single button in-chat.

Because everything happens on the platform, you don’t have to upload any data or files manually. You can trust Zendo to keep track of all the vital information and store it for you, without having to bother with double saving anything.

Moreover, you won’t find any tasks within tasks and subtasks. Instead, each new submitted by clients order becomes its own project, which can be assigned to one of your team members. And each project has its own workflow automation functionality that prompts Status changes, so that you don’t have to think about the little details.

Most importantly, in Zendo, the client becomes your partner. They can log in to the platform and take an active role in their own projects, where they can submit additional requests, make purchases, exchange files, take part in discussions, and watch over the progress.

Thanks to that, you’ll be able to create strong business relationships, where both parties are treated as equals.

All that you can find under a truly affordable pricing, where one of the subscription plans is entirely free, with no strings attached. Sign up to find out how to effectively run your entire business online!

Originally published at https://getzendo.io on June 4, 2024.