ProjectWorks Alternative & Comparison (2025)

ProjectWorks Alternative & Comparison (2025)

This article will explain why Drum is the best ProjectWorks alternative for professional service firms in 2025.

Before we dive into the specific reasons why Drum is the superior choice, let’s explore what you should be looking for in an operational platform for your business.

The ideal platform should deliver massive value for your firm by consolidating your workflows in an intuitive, snappy interface.

Your business should focus on finding a solution that excels in managing these critical areas:

1. Sales pipeline
2. Project management
3. Time-tracking
4. Budgeting
5. Revenue projections
6. Resourcing
7. Invoicing

The biggest advantage you can create is finding a solution that can manage all of the above at a high level and effectively become your firm’s “Single source of truth”.

By implementing a system that handles all these elements, you can:

1. Simplify your internal processes
2. Ensure staff know exactly where to go when looking for project or sale information
3. Make sure that nothing falls through the gaps in your day-to-day operations

Why Look for a ProjectWorks Alternative?

Limited Project Management Features

• No ability to create templated projects, tasks, or budgets
• Everything must be created as a “project” - there’s no distinction between quotes and active jobs
• Moving time entries between projects or tasks is time-consuming
• Project status tracking is basic, with limited ability to add notes or updates

Missing Sales Pipeline Management

• No built-in CRM functionality
• Can’t track sales opportunities
• Limited visibility of potential future work
• No pipeline revenue forecasting

Financial Tracking Challenges

• Unbillable WIP is included in budget burn calculations even when written off
• PDF reports don’t maintain filtering functionality
• No automated notifications when project budgets are nearly depleted
• Limited financial insight tools

User Experience Issues

• No mobile app for time entry
• Clunky interface that can slow down daily operations
• Limited automation of repetitive tasks
• Basic filtering and search functionality

These limitations can lead to:

1. Increased administrative overhead
2. Reduced visibility of business performance
3. Staff frustration with day-to-day operations
4. Missed opportunities in your sales pipeline
5. Difficulty scaling your business efficiently

The good news?

Modern alternatives like Drum have been specifically designed to address these pain points. Let’s explore the 5 key reasons why Drum stands out as the best ProjectWorks alternative for professional services firms in 2025.

1. Deep (and intuitive!) Finance Integration

Ideally your ProjectWorks alternative will integrate simply into your existing accounting system. It should offer:

• One-click integrations for invoices
• Two-way syncing of invoice statuses and contents
• Raising of purchase orders and bills
• Contact syncing between systems (no duplicates contacts!)
• Automated updates between each system as things change (addition of line items, payment status, etc.)

By having your operations platform and your accounting system integrated, you’ll reduce friction for directors and the accounts team transferring data between systems or manually syncing the data.

You also create interesting internal workflow opportunities!

For example, project managers could raise and request approval for invoices and costs, with senior staff or accounts staff then approving and integrating those invoices directly into your finance system from your operational platform.

Although the ProjectWorks alternative that you choose should be your ‘single source of truth’ as much as possible, deep integration with your accounting software further enhances your ability to streamline and simplify your business.

2. Intuitive Interface User Experience

Your staff should enjoy using the ProjectWorks alternative that you choose. They should easily be able to:

1. Find what they’re looking for at any time.
2. Track their time against projects with ease.
3. Understand what they’ve been assigned to in moments.
4. Easily learn how the functionality works.

The system should also load quickly between pages, show the information that you want at every step and be simple enough for you to quickly onboard new hires.

If the primary software that your firm uses to manage your business is slow, unintuitive or overly complex, you won’t get the most out of it and you’ll rely on spreadsheets and other software to manage portions of your business.

3. Tiered Permissions

The operations system for your firm should also allow you to manage a clear set of user permissions across the suite of features that are on offer:

1. Only certain staff should be able to see financials
2. Approval permissions should be tiered
3. Ability to adjust billable rates should be tiered
4. Visibility of the sales pipeline
5. Visibility of active/upcoming projects
6. Ability to integrate invoices, purchase orders or bills into your financial system (e.g. Xero).

Ideally, the system will have tiers for your internal roles:

1. Directors, senior staff and the finance team will have “complete” access to all areas
2. Project managers will have access to their assigned work and their team’s assigned work (potentially the financial metrics of their assigned projects)
3. Operational staff will see only what they need, with any other information hidden.

The ideal system should manage these permissions with ease (and even create some smart defaults for you when you create your account).

4. Highlight Crucial Business Insights

By leveraging a “Single Source of Truth” with the ProjectWorks alternative that you choose for your firm, you will be able to unveil crucial business insights just by using the system.

Your ideal system should help you to:

1. Predict future revenue from your sales pipeline
2. Predict future revenue from the remaining budgets of your won projects
3. Identify your staff who are meeting their utilization targets and those who aren’t
4. Determine the profitability of your different project types
5. Clearly display the financial performance of your projects in real time.

The challenge is that you DON’T want to have to spend hours every week massaging data to see the above insights. If the system you choose requires that level of management, it won’t get done.

The ideal system should show these crucial business insights in real time as your team uses the system, requiring very little additional work.

5. Customer Support

Transitioning to a ProjectWorks alternative is a significant project for your business.

1. You likely have to import your existing client list, projects, staff, billable rates and more
2. You have to train your staff on how to use the system
3. The system’s settings and templates may need to be customised for your unique internal workflows
4. You may need to work with the team to understand how it expects you to structure your internal processes to work best in the new system

The team that you work with can make all of the difference!

The customer support team of the ProjectWorks alternative that you use should:

1. Make the transition feel like a breeze.
2. Identify the data that you need to import to get the best results from your new system.
3. Share training plans with you and your team, filling any gaps as required.
4. Have short communication loops, ideally with an in-software live-chat system.

Many enterprise-level software platforms will require significant additional investment for this level of customer service (up to $80,000!), but there are some ProjectWorks alternatives that provide this level of customer service in their base price or with a very affordable onboarding fee.

Let’s See How Drum Delivers on These 5 Key Areas!

The 5 pillars of the perfect ProjectWorks alternative that we listed above are foundational to how Drum works!

That’s why we believe that Drum is the perfect ProjectWorks alternative in 2025.

Drum offers the key functionality that you’re looking for:

1. Managing your sales pipeline (including integration with your online forms).
2. Project management
3. Time-tracking
4. Budgeting
5. Revenue projections (both from your sales pipeline and won projects)
6. Staff resourcing

All in an intuitive, fast platform.

Let’s break down the functionality of Drum in greater detail to help you make an informed decision.

1. Sales Pipeline Management in Drum

You can get your leads into Drum in two ways:

1. Simply enter new sales opportunities via a simple form (the traditional way)
2. Forward your enquiry emails directly to your Drum Sales Inbox and Drum Composer will convert those emails directly to sales opportunities using world-class AI.

From that point, you can assign responsible staff, set the deal value, assign a lead score and the key dates for the deal.

With this simple information, Drum can now predict your firm’s future revenue:

You can also define an internal process for your sales pipeline that is created for each new opportunity that is added to Drum:

This ensures quality control among your team and dramatically simplifies staff onboarding.

The sales opportunity dashboard has powerful filters to ensure your team is always on top of the most valuable opportunities and never let opportunities with firm due dates (e.g. tenders) fall through the gaps.

2. Proposal Generation in Drum

From an opportunity in Drum, you can generate a proposal within minutes.

A proposal in Drum has two parts:

1. The client-facing portion with line items, stages (optional) and pricing.
2. The proposal budget.

For simpler or smaller-scoped projects, you can create a simple proposal template with standardised pricing and use that over and over whenever those opportunities appear.

For bespoke opportunities that require more thought from a pricing perspective, Drum’s budgeting tool allows you to:

• Create the structure of the project
• Assign resources to each phase
• Determine the hourly requirement of each resource and task

You can then sync your complex budget back into a form that makes sense for the proposal!

Drum also has a Microsoft Word document generator that can create dynamic proposal documents using your existing proposal template that you already have, saving you from extra data entry!

3. Project Management in Drum

Creating a project from a successful proposal in Drum is a breeze.

In fact, Drum uses the financial information from the proposal to create the budget for the resulting project.

You can either use the project structure from the proposal or a predefined project template to create the stages and tasks that you’d like to create the structure for the newly created project.

You can allocate staff to different project phases and tasks and easily see how the budget is impacted in real time as staff allocate expenses and time to your projects.

Drum integrates with your accounting software so that creating purchase orders for your sub-contractors is as simple as changing a status field (depending on the user’s permissions!).

4. Time tracking in Drum

To manage client projects effectively, you must know how much time staff are spending on the different phases and tasks.

Time-tracking in Drum is extremely intuitive to ensure that time tracking is proactively completed by staff, ensuring that the management team has a clear understanding of project performance at all times.

Each user of your Drum account will have their own time sheet dashboard, where they can see the projects that they’ve been allocated to and easily be able to add time, along with a description of the work being done.

And as time and costs are added to a project, the project health is impacted in real time:

5. Revenue Projections in Drum

Simply by using Drum, you can visualise robust revenue projections.

On the sales dashboard, you can view your current sales performance across a number of different key performance indicators, but you can also view the risk-adjusted revenue impacts of your current sales pipeline:

When converting a successful proposal to a project, you also have the ability to project the project revenue into upcoming months.

The beauty of this system is that you can now visualise your future revenue from both your won projects and your sales pipeline:

All of this information is only seen by staff with the correct permissions and creates a numbers-driven culture within the firm.

The best part?

You just have to use Drum! There’s very little time overhead in having these key insights for your firm as you use Drum.

6. Invoicing in Drum

When it’s time to invoice your clients in Drum, you can choose from a set of predefined options to prevent unnecessary data entry:

1. The original invoice amount.
2. A percentage of the total budget.
3. A fixed amount.
4. Un-billed time & costs.

From that point, you simply ensure that you’re capturing all time and expenses that were required to achieve that invoicing milestone.

Once the invoice is created, Drum will clearly show you the invoice’s associated costs and whether or not the invoice’s value matches the costs that were allocated to that project to reach this invoicing milestone:

Think of the line items as what the client sees, with the hours and associated expenses as only for your internal use. Of course, you can export the associated time and costs to a PDF to report to the client if required.

To integrate an invoice with your accounting software, you simply have to change the status of the invoice and seconds later, you’ll be able to send invoice from your existing accounting system.

Drum maintains a two-way connection with your accounting system to ensure you’re never going from system to system to find information (such as paid status).

Ready to Try the Best ProjectWorks Alternative?

Click here to book a product demo with the expert Drum team.

The Drum team will deeply understand your current situation, what you’re trying to achieve, and then determine if it’s a good fit for your firm and what the next steps might be!

Conclusion: Why Drum is the Clear Choice Over ProjectWorks

To recap, Drum offers superior advantages in:

1. Consolidating your sales pipeline and projects
2. Showing clear project budgets to your management team
3. Providing an intuitive and simple platform for your staff
4. Delivering excellent support through all stages of migration

We’d love to show you how Drum can transform your firm’s operations. Click the button below to book a product demo with our expert team: