A Ukrainian Bitrix24 Alternative for Agencies, Studios, and Freelance Teams

What agencies actually used Bitrix24 for — and what they actually need

In practice, a 10-person agency used a small slice of Bitrix24: a CRM contact base, a task board, sometimes the document tools for invoice-like paperwork, and the chat. The rest — telephony, sales automation, the website builder, marketing campaigns — sat unused, but still had to be configured around, hidden from the sidebar, and explained to every new hire. Write down what agency operations actually require and you get a different, much more specific list:

The all-in-one trap: why a "kombain" overwhelms a 5–20-person agency

Bitrix24's breadth is real: CRM, tasks, sites, telephony, HR, drive, messenger, automation. But breadth is never free. Every module adds settings, roles, notification rules, and one more screen a new hire has to be walked through. Ukrainian teams have a precise word for this class of software — «комбайн», a combine harvester: it does everything, and it is exactly as easy to park in a small garage as that implies.

At enterprise scale the complexity tax is absorbed by a dedicated administrator whose job is to configure and maintain the system. In a 5–20-person agency there is no such person, so the role lands on a founder or a senior PM — the two most expensive people in the company — in the form of evenings spent adjusting permission schemes and archiving unused modules. The interface that serves every department of a corporation fits no single workflow of a small studio.

The conclusion is not to find a smaller kombain. It is to switch to a tool shaped like an agency: few enough concepts that nobody needs a training session, and deep enough in finances that the numbers you see are the numbers that are true.

CrewDriven: a replacement shaped like an agency

CrewDriven covers the seven areas an agency's operations actually consist of — clients, team, payments, multi-currency P&L, invoicing, time tracking, and resource planning — and deliberately nothing else. There is no website builder, no telephony, no marketing automation, no HR portal. Each of the seven areas is connected to the others: a tracked hour knows its assignment rate, an assignment knows its client, a client's invoices roll up into the monthly P&L. That connectedness is the thing a spreadsheet stack never gives you, and the narrowness is the thing a kombain never gives you.

It is Ukrainian-made: built by a Ukrainian founder, with a fully Ukrainian interface alongside English — both locales are first-class, not a half-finished translation. And it is built around how agencies here actually operate: foreign clients billed in USD or EUR, team and contractors paid in UAH, PLN, or EUR, and reporting that has to reconcile all of it into one honest margin number. Data is hosted in the EU on DigitalOcean infrastructure.

During the launch period every module is free — the full product, not a limited tier. After launch, the plan is flat pricing rather than per-seat: growing from 8 people to 12 should not multiply your software bill. That is a deliberate contrast with per-user suites, where headcount growth is a billing event.

You can create your workspace now and have clients, team, and rates set up in about an hour — or see the pricing roadmap to see how pricing will work after launch.

Ukrainian alternatives to Bitrix24: an honest map

Bitrix24 was many tools in one box, so the honest answer to "what replaces it" depends on which tool you actually used. If what your team really needs is a sales CRM — deal stages, pipelines, a kanban of negotiations — look at the Ukrainian CRM products built specifically for sales teams; that is their home turf, not ours. If the core of your usage was tasks and projects, Worksection is the long-standing Ukrainian project management tool — and we wrote an honest Worksection comparison if you want to see where it ends and an operations platform begins. If the missing piece is money tracking alone — cash flow, accounts, categories — Finmap is a Ukrainian finance tool built for exactly that, and our Finmap comparison covers when each makes sense.

CrewDriven is the right replacement in one specific case: when the thing you are replacing is the operations of an agency as a whole — clients, team, rates, time, invoices, and profit in one connected loop. If you recognize your company in that sentence, the rest of this guide is for you. If not, one of the tools above will serve you better, and it is better to know that before migrating than after.

Migration from Bitrix24, step by step

1. 1

   Export your contacts to CSV

   In Bitrix24, export Contacts and Companies from the CRM to CSV. Then do the cleanup you have been postponing for years: keep only the clients you actually invoice or realistically will. A 10-person agency typically ends up with 15–40 real clients out of hundreds of CRM records. Create them in CrewDriven with their currency, engagement type, and contacts — for a list that size, entering them deliberately takes under an hour and doubles as an audit of your client base.

2. 2

   Recreate the team and rates

   Add your team members, then assign them to clients with cost and bill rates per assignment. This is usually the fastest step, because this data was never in Bitrix24 in the first place — it lived in a founder's spreadsheet. Moving it into a system with rate history is the single biggest upgrade of the whole migration.

3. 3

   Switch invoicing forward-only

   Do not migrate historical invoices. Download the old ones as PDF for the archive, pick a cutover date, and issue everything from that date onward from CrewDriven with a fresh numbering series. Your accountant keeps the archive; your clients see no interruption — the next invoice simply arrives from a cleaner template.

4. 4

   Start time tracking from Monday

   Do not backfill history — reconstructed hours are fiction, and fiction poisons your margin numbers. Start tracking clean from the next Monday. One full month of honest data gives you your first real per-client hour distribution, which for most agencies is the first time they have ever seen it.

5. 5

   Run two weeks in parallel, then close the account

   Keep Bitrix24 in read-only mode as a reference while the team builds the new habit — two weeks is enough for a small agency. Then export a final archive of anything you have not moved, and close the account. In practice, a focused owner completes steps 1–3 in a single working day; the parallel period exists for confidence, not for work.

Frequently asked questions

Is CrewDriven free?

Yes — during the launch period every module is free: clients, team, rates, time tracking, invoicing, multi-currency payments, and P&L. After launch the plan is flat pricing rather than per-seat, so a growing team does not mean a growing bill per chair.

Does CrewDriven have CRM features?

It has the part of CRM an agency runs on: clients with statuses, contacts, engagement details, and revenue per client. It honestly does not have classic sales pipelines with deal stages and a negotiation kanban. If an active sales pipeline is core to your process, pair CrewDriven with a dedicated sales CRM — the operations loop and the sales funnel are different jobs.

Where is my data stored?

In the EU, on DigitalOcean infrastructure. That is the claim, stated precisely — we do not wave certification acronyms we do not hold. If EU hosting is a hard requirement from your clients, CrewDriven meets it.

Is there a Ukrainian interface?

Yes — the entire product ships in Ukrainian and English, and you can switch languages at any time. Both locales are maintained as first-class, including this resources section.

How long does the migration actually take?

For a 2–25-person agency: about one focused working day for the essentials — clients imported, team and rates set up, invoicing switched forward-only. The two-week parallel period after that is about habit, not about work remaining.