Alternatives to Zoho
Zoho alternatives for agencies: fifty apps, and a licence for everybody.
Zoho One's better rate comes with a commitment to license every employee on payroll, not just the ones who use it.
Zoho
Spodus- Licences required for
- Every employee on payroll, on the all-employee model
- People who sign in
- Number of applications
- 50+, separately built
- 5, sharing one record
- Double-entry accounting and bank feeds
- Included
- Not offered
- Payroll
- In some regions
- Not offered
What actually pushes people off Zoho.
Two of these are commercial.
The all-employee commitment
Zoho One's headline pricing is the all-employee model, which commits you to a licence for every employee on payroll.
Fifty applications is fifty admin surfaces
The breadth is real and so is the cost of it: separate apps, built at different times by different teams, each with its own settings.
Depth is uneven across the suite
Some Zoho apps are excellent and some are clearly there to make the number fifty.
What a Spodus seat is instead.
Five products rather than fifty, and you license the people who sign in.
You pay for logins, not for payroll
A seat is somebody you give a Spodus account.
Five products, one set of records
The CRM, billing, support, people and team chat share one customer and one employee record rather than syncing between applications.
One admin surface
One permissions model, one set of custom fields, one place where objects are defined.
What you would be giving up.
Zoho's breadth is not marketing, it is real, and Spodus has five products against Zoho One's fifty-plus.
Side by side.
| Spodus | Zoho | |
|---|---|---|
| Licences required for | People who sign in | Every employee on payroll, on the all-employee model |
| Number of applications | 5, sharing one record | 50+, separately built |
| Double-entry accounting and bank feeds | ||
| Payroll | In some regions | |
| CRM, help desk and HR | ||
| Invoicing, tax rates and recurring schedules | ||
| One permissions model across everything | ||
| Customer portal at no seat cost | Varies by app |
Zoho's pricing structure above was read from their own pricing page on 28 August 2026. Spodus is priced per seat, from a three-seat minimum; customers in the support portal are free.
Export from each app, arrive on one record.
Zoho CRM, Desk and People all export CSV, and Spodus imports contacts, companies, deals and employees with column mapping and duplicate detection; tickets do not import.
Thinking about the rest of the stack?
The same honest read on the other tools teams try to leave.
Two ways
to start
Start fresh today, or bring the clients, deals and history you already have.
Start fresh
Free for up to three people.
You get every product: CRM, invoicing, support, team, chat and Spodus AI, which asks before it changes anything. Upgrade when your team grows.
Start for freeBring your data
Bring your data from the tool you use now.
Your deals arrive with their stages, owners and dates. Connect your work email, and each client's emails land on their record. On a paid plan, we'll move it all for you, free.
Try it before you cancel anything.
Start today, or bring your own data to a demo and see it there.
Questions, answered
No. Spodus does invoices, quotes, tax rates, recurring invoices and paid, due and overdue tracking that you update by hand. There is no double-entry ledger, no chart of accounts, no bank feed and no tax filing, and Spodus does not collect money from your customers at all. Zoho Books does the accounting and we do not.
No. You license the people you give an account to. Staff who never sign in are not seats, and customers who open or track a ticket through your portal never hold an account at all.
Realistically: CRM, Desk, People, Invoice and an internal chat. If your Zoho footprint is wider than that, count what you would still need to buy elsewhere before switching.
Yes, by CSV, one app at a time, with a mapping step and duplicate detection so a contact that exists in both CRM and Desk arrives once rather than twice.