# Flowlu

> Flowlu is an all-in-one business management platform for small service businesses, combining a sales CRM with project management, task tracking, quoting and invoicing, a client portal, a knowledge base, and light financial reporting in a single per-user subscription; it is sold self-serve from $6 per user per month on annual billing, has a permanently free two-user plan, and is built by a small bootstrapped team serving more than twenty-five thousand customers.

- Category: Sales CRM (https://saastracker.org/categories/crm)
- Website: https://www.flowlu.com
- Starting price: $0 for two users, then $6 per user per month on annual billing (Essential)
- Free plan: Free forever for 2 users with 100 contacts, one pipeline, lead capture forms, and core project and task management.
- Free trial: 7 days on paid plans with no credit card required, on top of the permanently free plan
- Founded: 2016, HQ: Distributed team, with origins in Chelyabinsk, Russia, Ownership: Privately held and bootstrapped
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-08-22
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/flowlu

## Overview

Flowlu exists because agencies and consultancies keep buying the same three tools. They buy a CRM to track new business, a project tool to run delivery, and an invoicing tool to get paid, and then spend the rest of the year retyping the same client details between them. Flowlu's answer is to put all three in one subscription, with the client record as the spine: an opportunity becomes a project, the project's billable hours become an invoice, and the whole history sits under one customer.

The company started in 2016 and has stayed small and bootstrapped, with a team in single digits serving a customer base the vendor puts above twenty-five thousand. That shows in the product in both directions. The pricing is unusually generous, the feature list is unusually broad for the money, and the pace of polish is slower than a venture-funded competitor's. There is no AI story of consequence, the design is functional, and support is a small team rather than a department.

The pricing structure is aggressive. There is a permanently free plan for two users with 100 contacts and one pipeline, which is enough for a freelancer to run a business on. Essential at $6 per user per month on annual billing adds multiple pipelines, email sync and templates, and CRM reports. Advanced at $11 is where the real machinery lives: sales automations, email tracking, the client portal, duplicate merging, and advanced reports. Ultimate at $16 adds multiple inboxes per employee, extended email history, and white labelling. Monthly billing roughly doubles those figures, which is one of the steepest annual discounts published anywhere in this category.

The honest limitation is depth. Flowlu's CRM is competent rather than sophisticated: pipelines, contacts, email sync, automation rules, and reports, with no custom objects, no native dialer, and a small integration list compared with Pipedrive or Zoho. What you are buying is not the best CRM at $11 a seat but the best combination of CRM, projects, and invoicing at $11 a seat, and that is a genuinely different purchase.

## How it works

1. You create an account and import contacts and companies, then set up sales funnels with the stages your business actually uses. Opportunities are worked as kanban cards, filtered by source, stage, owner, or activity.

2. Communication attaches to the record: connect one or more mailboxes so correspondence threads onto the contact, with open and click tracking on Advanced and above, and reach clients through WhatsApp, Viber, or Telegram for follow-ups where email is not the channel.

3. When an opportunity is won, automation can create the delivery project directly from it, carrying the client details across. From there the project side takes over: tasks with dependencies, Gantt charts, sprints, and time tracking with billable hours recorded against the work.

4. The money side closes the loop. Estimates, proposals, and contracts are generated with client details prefilled, invoices can recur, online payment providers collect, and multi-currency is supported. A client portal gives customers a place to see progress and files, a knowledge base holds internal and external documentation, and an API plus Zapier connect the rest of the stack.

## Best for

Small service businesses, agencies, and consultancies of two to about twenty-five people who sell projects rather than products, and who want one affordable subscription covering the pipeline, the delivery work, and the invoice instead of three separate tools.

## Not the right fit for

- Pure sales organisations with no delivery side; you would be paying for a project and invoicing platform you never open, and Bigin or Pipedrive would serve you better.
- Businesses with an unusual data model that need custom objects and relationships; Flowlu gives you a fixed structure with custom fields and nothing resembling a schema designer.
- Phone-heavy teams, since calling is an integration rather than a native dialer with recording and local presence.
- Companies that buy on integration breadth, because the native connector list is short and much of the long tail runs through Zapier.
- Buyers who need enterprise assurances, a large support organisation, or a long vendor track record; Flowlu is a very small bootstrapped team, which is a strength for price and a risk for procurement.

## Features

### CRM and pipeline

Competent sales tooling, tier-gated in predictable places.

- **Multiple sales pipelines**: Custom funnels with your own stages, worked as kanban boards; the free plan is limited to one pipeline and Essential removes that cap.
- **Contacts and organisations**: Customer records that link projects, tasks, events, invoices, estimates, files, and documents, so the full commercial history sits in one place.
- **Lead capture forms**: Web forms that create opportunities directly, included even on the free plan.
- **Opportunity filtering and views**: Filter the board by source, stage, owner, and activity, which is how a manager finds stalled work without running a report.
- **Duplicate merging**: Advanced tier and above; below that, cleaning duplicates is a manual job.
- **Custom fields**: Custom fields across CRM records for the detail your process needs, within a fixed object structure.

### Communication

Email is native, telephony is not.

- **Mailbox sync**: Connect mailboxes so correspondence threads onto contacts and opportunities; multiple inboxes per employee is an Ultimate feature.
- **Email templates**: Reusable templates with client details merged in, available from the Essential tier.
- **Email open and click tracking**: Advanced tier and above, which is the usual place this feature sits across the category.
- **Personalised email sequences**: Automated follow-up sequences built through the automation rules rather than as a separate sequencing product.
- **Messaging channels**: WhatsApp, Viber, and Telegram follow-ups for markets and clients where email is not the primary channel.
- **Calling via integration**: Calls can be placed from within Flowlu through connected providers with contacts and opportunities created automatically, but there is no native dialer.

### Projects and delivery

The half of Flowlu that makes the CRM worth buying.

- **Projects created from won deals**: Automation turns a closed opportunity into a delivery project with the client details already attached, which is the core consolidation win.
- **Tasks with dependencies and Gantt charts**: Proper project scheduling rather than a checklist, including critical-path style dependency handling.
- **Agile boards and sprints**: Scrum and kanban workflows for teams that run iterative delivery rather than fixed plans.
- **Time tracking with billable hours**: Log time against tasks and flag it as billable so it flows through to invoicing without re-entry.
- **Workload and resource views**: See who is over-committed before the deadline rather than after it.
- **Project templates**: Repeatable delivery processes set up once and reused per client, which is how agencies keep quality consistent.

### Money and clients

Quoting, invoicing, and a portal, at a price most CRMs charge for none of it.

- **Estimates, proposals, and contracts**: Generated with customer details prefilled and tracked through acceptance.
- **Invoicing with recurring billing**: One-off and recurring invoices with online payment collection through connected providers.
- **Multi-currency support**: Bill clients in their own currency, which matters for the international freelance and agency market Flowlu serves.
- **Financial reporting**: Income, expenses, and cash-flow views, which is closer to light accounting than most CRMs attempt.
- **Client portal**: Advanced tier and above. Clients get a secure place to see progress, approve work, and access files, with permissions you control.
- **Knowledge base**: Internal and external article bases for documentation and client FAQs, replacing a separate wiki.

### Automation, platform, and administration

Sufficient plumbing, with white labelling at the top.

- **Sales and workflow automations**: Rule-based automation covering notifications, project creation from won deals, task assignment, and follow-up sequences, starting on the Advanced tier.
- **API and webhooks**: A public API for custom integration, with Zapier covering the wider connector long tail.
- **Mobile apps**: iOS and Android apps covering projects, opportunities, and tasks, functional rather than best in class.
- **White labelling**: Ultimate tier lets you present the portal and interface under your own brand, which agencies use for client-facing work.
- **Roles and permissions**: Role-based access across CRM, projects, and finance modules so freelancers and clients see only what they should.

## Use cases

- **Six-person design agency**: New business lives in a spreadsheet, delivery in a project tool, invoices in accounting software, and the same client details are typed three times per engagement. Outcome: The won opportunity automatically becomes a project, tracked billable hours flow into an invoice, and the client sees progress in the portal, all for about $66 a month on Advanced.
- **Freelance consultant running a business alone**: Paying for a CRM, a project tool, and an invoicing app costs more than the work justifies at current volumes. Outcome: The permanently free two-user plan with 100 contacts, one pipeline, and lead capture forms covers the whole operation until it grows.
- **Small consultancy with retainer clients**: Recurring monthly work has to be invoiced consistently, tracked against a budget, and reported on without anyone reconciling spreadsheets. Outcome: Recurring invoices, time tracking against retainer budgets, and financial reports give an owner a real cash-flow picture without an accountant in the loop every month.
- **Agency owner who wants clients out of their inbox**: Client status questions, file requests, and approvals arrive by email and interrupt delivery work constantly. Outcome: The Advanced-tier client portal, white-labelled on Ultimate, gives clients a place to check progress and approve work themselves, and the knowledge base answers the repeat questions.

## Pricing

Per-user subscription across a free plan and three paid tiers, billed monthly or annually, with annual billing published at roughly half the monthly rate.

- **Free**: $0 for 2 users. 100 contacts and 1 pipeline; Lead capture forms; Core task and project management; Basic invoicing; No email sync or automation. Genuinely usable for a freelancer or a two-person studio, and the 100-contact cap is what eventually forces the move.
- **Essential**: $6 per user per month billed annually ($12 billed monthly). Multiple sales pipelines; Email sync and email templates; CRM reports; Projects, tasks, and time tracking; Estimates and invoicing. Extraordinary value at $6, but no automation, no email tracking, and no client portal.
- **Advanced**: $11 per user per month billed annually ($22 billed monthly). Sales automations; Email open and click tracking; Client portal; Duplicate merging; Advanced CRM reports. The real operating tier for a service business; automation and the client portal both live here.
- **Ultimate**: $16 per user per month billed annually ($32 billed monthly). 5 inboxes per employee; Extended email history; Advanced tracking; Full white labelling; Highest storage and limits.

Billing notes:

- Annual billing is published at roughly half the monthly rate ($6 versus $12, $11 versus $22, $16 versus $32), which is among the steepest annual discounts in this category and effectively makes monthly billing a penalty rather than an option.
- The free plan is permanent rather than a trial, capped at two users and 100 contacts.
- Automation, email tracking, and the client portal all sit on Advanced, so a working agency should budget $11 a user rather than $6.
- Storage and email history length scale by tier, which rarely changes a decision but is worth knowing for document-heavy businesses.
- Payment collection runs through connected providers such as PayPal and Square, so card processing fees are separate from the subscription.

Value assessment: At $11 a user annually, Advanced buys a CRM, a project management system with Gantt charts and time tracking, quoting and recurring invoicing, financial reporting, a client portal, and a knowledge base. Priced individually those are four subscriptions and would run five to ten times as much. Against pure CRMs the comparison is less flattering: Bigin does sales better for $7 and Pipedrive does it much better for $39. So the buying question is simple. If you sell projects and deliver them, Flowlu is one of the best value purchases in this entire directory. If you only sell, you are buying software you will not open.

## Strengths

- The CRM, project management, and invoicing genuinely share one client record, so a won deal becomes a project becomes an invoice without retyping anything.
- Pricing is exceptional: $11 a user on Advanced for a feature set that normally requires three or four separate subscriptions.
- A permanently free two-user plan makes it viable for freelancers and costless to evaluate properly.
- Project management is real rather than token: Gantt charts, dependencies, sprints, workload views, templates, and billable time tracking.
- The client portal and knowledge base remove a meaningful amount of client back-and-forth from the team's inbox.
- Multi-currency, recurring invoices, and financial reporting cover the commercial side better than any pure CRM at this price.
- Bootstrapped and stable since 2016 with no venture pressure to reprice or repackage.

## Limitations

- The CRM is competent rather than sophisticated; there is no custom object model, no advanced forecasting, and no lead scoring of consequence.
- Automation, email tracking, and the client portal are all withheld from the $6 Essential tier, making the headline price unrepresentative for teams.
- No native dialer, so telephony is an integration and call recording depends on the provider.
- The native integration list is short, and much of the long tail runs through Zapier rather than first-party connectors.
- No meaningful AI features at a time when almost every competitor bundles assistants and summarization.
- A very small vendor team, which means slower feature velocity and a procurement risk profile that will not satisfy larger buyers.
- The interface is functional rather than refined, and dense in places because of how much the product covers.

## Comparisons

- **Flowlu vs Bitrix24**: The direct all-in-one rival, and the arithmetic flips with headcount. Bitrix24 charges per account ($99 a month for fifty users) and adds telephony, Open Channels, an intranet, and a website builder. Flowlu charges per user ($11 on Advanced) with a cleaner interface, better project management, and stronger invoicing. Under about ten people Flowlu is cheaper and far more pleasant; above twenty, Bitrix24's flat fee wins decisively.
- **Flowlu vs monday CRM**: monday CRM has vastly better design, a no-code data model, and a huge integration ecosystem, from $12 a seat with a three-seat minimum and contact caps. Flowlu is cheaper, includes invoicing and a client portal monday does not have natively, and needs no board design work. Teams that will live in the tool all day and value experience take monday; budget-driven service businesses that need to bill clients take Flowlu.
- **Flowlu vs Vtiger CRM**: Vtiger One bundles sales, marketing, help desk, projects, and inventory with native telephony from $12 a user, and is stronger on the sales and support side. Flowlu is stronger on project delivery, quoting, recurring invoicing, and the client portal. Product and support businesses lean Vtiger; project and retainer businesses lean Flowlu.
- **Flowlu vs Insightly**: Insightly is the established CRM-plus-projects option with deeper reporting, a larger integration set, and enterprise credentials, at a materially higher per-seat price. Flowlu covers similar ground for a fraction of the cost and adds invoicing and a client portal, but with a smaller vendor behind it. Companies needing procurement-grade assurances take Insightly; cost-driven small agencies take Flowlu.
- **Flowlu vs Capsule CRM**: Capsule is the calmer, cleaner contact-first CRM with projects attached and a free tier, focused on doing less well. Flowlu does far more: Gantt charts, time tracking, invoicing, financial reports, and a client portal. Choose Capsule if you want a tidy CRM and nothing else; choose Flowlu if the invoice and the delivery schedule matter as much as the pipeline.

## Implementation

- Setup time: A working CRM in under an hour. Setting up the project side properly, with templates, billable rates, invoice formats, and the automation that turns a won deal into a project, is a one to two week part-time job.
- Learning curve: Moderate, mostly because of breadth. Each module is straightforward, but a new user meeting CRM, projects, finance, and the knowledge base at once takes a while to orient. Sales-only users learn it in an afternoon.
- Onboarding: Entirely self-serve, with a permanently free plan and a 7-day paid trial requiring no credit card. Documentation and email support carry the load; there is no mandatory implementation service.
- Migration: CSV import for contacts, organisations, and opportunities with field mapping. Email history builds from the point you connect a mailbox rather than backfilling, and extended history is an Ultimate feature. Export covers CRM records, projects, and financial data to CSV, and the API reads the same. The practical lock-in is the invoicing and time-tracking history, which is harder to move meaningfully than a contact list.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: Web, iOS, Android
- API: Public REST API with webhook support for custom integration, plus Zapier for the wider connector ecosystem.
- Compliance: GDPR, Standard data processing agreement available
- Data residency: Confirm hosting region with the vendor if you have a contractual data location requirement; regional hosting is not a headline feature.
- SSO: Google sign-in; enterprise SAML is not a headline feature of this product.
- Security notes: Encryption in transit and at rest, role-based permissions across CRM, project, and finance modules, and permission-scoped client portal access so external users see only what you expose. Two-factor authentication is available.

## Support

- Channels: Email support, In-app chat, Help centre
- Documentation: Documentation covering CRM setup, project configuration, invoicing, the client portal, the knowledge base, and the API.
- Community: Small user community; support is direct from a small team rather than through a large forum or partner network.

## Company

- Founded: 2016
- Headquarters: Distributed team, with origins in Chelyabinsk, Russia
- Ownership: Privately held and bootstrapped
- Employees: Fewer than ten
- Funding: None reported. The company has grown to more than 25,000 customers without outside investment.

Timeline:

- 2016: Founded as an all-in-one business management platform for small service companies, combining CRM, projects, and finance.
- 2018: Adds agile boards, sprints, and time tracking, moving the project side from task lists toward real delivery management.
- 2020: Introduces the client portal and knowledge base, giving agencies a way to keep clients informed without email threads.
- 2022: Adds sales automation, email tracking, and recurring invoicing, filling in the gaps between the sales and finance modules.
- 2024: Extends messaging channels to WhatsApp, Viber, and Telegram and adds white labelling on the top tier.
- 2026: Passes 25,000 customers as a bootstrapped team of fewer than ten people, with annual pricing published at roughly half the monthly rate.

## Integrations

Gmail, Outlook, and IMAP mailboxes, Google Calendar, PayPal and Square for payment collection, Stripe, Jira, WhatsApp, Viber, and Telegram, VoIP providers for click-to-call, Zapier, REST API and webhooks

## FAQ

### What is Flowlu?

Flowlu is an all-in-one business management platform for small service companies. It combines a sales CRM with project management, task tracking, time tracking, quoting and invoicing, financial reporting, a client portal, and a knowledge base in one per-user subscription, starting at $6 per user per month on annual billing with a permanently free two-user plan.

### How much does Flowlu cost?

Free forever for two users with 100 contacts. Paid plans on annual billing are Essential at $6, Advanced at $11, and Ultimate at $16 per user per month. Billed monthly those become $12, $22, and $32, so the annual discount is roughly 50 percent, one of the steepest in this category.

### What does the entry tier withhold?

Essential at $6 gives you multiple pipelines, email sync and templates, CRM reports, projects, time tracking, and invoicing. It does not include sales automations, email open and click tracking, the client portal, or duplicate merging. All four sit on Advanced at $11, which is the realistic tier for a working agency.

### Are there contact or record limits?

The free plan caps you at 100 contacts and one pipeline. Paid plans remove the contact cap and the pipeline limit; what scales by tier instead is storage, email history length, and the number of inboxes per employee (up to five on Ultimate).

### Does Flowlu include email sending and sequences?

Mailbox sync and templates start on Essential, open and click tracking on Advanced, and multiple inboxes per employee plus extended history on Ultimate. Follow-up sequences are built through the automation rules on Advanced rather than as a separate sequencing product, so it is included rather than an add-on but it is not a dedicated outbound tool.

### Does Flowlu have native calling?

No native dialer. You can place calls through connected VoIP providers with contacts and opportunities created automatically from the call, and follow-ups can go out over WhatsApp, Viber, or Telegram. Teams that dial all day should look at Close or Bigin instead.

### Does Flowlu support custom objects?

No. The object structure is fixed (contacts, organisations, opportunities, projects, tasks, invoices) with custom fields available on those records. If you need to model something the structure does not anticipate, Twenty, EspoCRM, or Attio are the right places to look.

### How good is the project management side?

Genuinely good, and better than the CRM. You get task dependencies, Gantt charts, agile boards and sprints, workload views, project templates, and time tracking flagged as billable so hours flow into invoices. For an agency this is the half of Flowlu that justifies the purchase.

### How good is the reporting?

Adequate on sales, better than most on money. CRM reports cover pipeline and activity, with more depth on Advanced. The financial reporting covering income, expenses, and cash flow goes further than any pure CRM at this price. There is no serious forecasting engine or business intelligence layer.

### Can I get my data out?

Yes. CRM records, projects, and financial data export to CSV, and the public REST API reads the same. The practical difficulty is not extraction but reconstruction: time entries, invoices, and project histories are harder to make meaningful in another system than a contact list is.

### What size of team is Flowlu genuinely built for?

Two to about twenty-five people, and specifically service businesses. It is at its best for agencies and consultancies where a sale becomes a project that becomes an invoice. Pure sales teams will find the CRM ordinary and the rest unused, and larger organisations will run into the small vendor's limits on support, integrations, and enterprise assurances.

## Editorial verdict

Flowlu is one of the best value purchases in this directory, provided you are the buyer it was built for. An agency or consultancy paying $11 a user gets a CRM, a real project management system with Gantt charts and billable time tracking, recurring invoicing, financial reporting, a client portal, and a knowledge base, which is four subscriptions replaced by one and a client record that finally stays in one place. Do not buy it as a pure CRM: the sales tooling is competent, not exceptional, there are no custom objects, no native dialer, and no AI, and Bigin or Pipedrive will serve a sales-only team better. Budget for Advanced rather than Essential, because automation and the client portal are the features that make the consolidation work, and take the annual billing, because monthly costs roughly double.

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Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-08-22. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology