Scoro Review: Is It Worth the Cost and Learning Curve? [2024]

A Massive Software for Project Management. Maybe Too Massive.

Scoro promises to help you manage “every aspect of your business.” That’s a big claim. A business involves a lot more than just project management. You need to keep track of your finances, relationships with clients, and a million other things.

Does Scoro deliver? After several days of exploring the software and trying it with different projects, I can say that yes: Scoro can take care of pretty much every aspect of your business.

That doesn’t mean you should go running for it, though. The very things that make Scoro great for some users will make it less than ideal for others.

If you need to manage a smaller project, Scoro’s avalanche of features will only leave you scratching your head (and wasting time in the process). In addition, its business-first approach won’t work for teams that rely on more personal communication.

Scoro is available in English, Estonian, French, German, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Spanish. Although there’s no free plan, you can try any plan free for 14 days.

So, is Scoro just what you’re looking for? Or is it a little too much? Let’s dig in to find out.

(Almost) Everything a Company Needs

Scoro has a “more is more (… is more)” approach to features. Besides project management, there are tools for managing client relationships, marketing, and finances. The project management part of Scoro alone has more functionality than other apps in their entirety (see our list of the best project management software in 2024 for more details).

That design philosophy has its cons, though. When an app offers just about everything, it’s easier to notice the absence of basic things like a built-in messaging system or task automation. You can also get lost in the details and forget what’s most important.

This doesn’t necessarily make Scoro’s offering any less impressive. If you’re looking to manage your business top-to-bottom, then Scoro is hard to beat. Let’s take a closer look.

Keep Track of Your Project, However You Want

Scoro offers a suite of options for managing a project. You can edit details like clients, estimated duration, and budget. After that, all you need to do is add a couple of phases and milestones. These will help you define the goals you need to reach before the project is complete.

It’s easy to create new tasks within a project. Each task comes with a detailed view that includes:

• Task description.
• Assigned members.
• Priority and percentage complete.
• Associated time entries.
• Associated quotes and invoices.
• Comments and files.

To see how your project develops over time, you can create advanced Gantt charts with dependencies. The board and list views give you a more direct look at your tasks with varying levels of detail.

Know Exactly Where You’re Standing With Contact Management

Managing good relationships is crucial to running a successful business. You need to have detailed information about your contacts, whether they’re clients, partners, or investors. The contacts tab offers just that.

For any registered contact, you get information about their relationship to a project, invoices made and received, comments, and much more. Everything is automatically updated based on your movements. You can even set custom relationships between contacts, which can be useful for adding new people based on referrals or avoiding awkward situations.

It’s not all about external contacts either. In the our team tab, you get a quick overview of your team members, their roles, and how to reach them. Click any of their names, and you get an in-depth list of relevant information.

Stay on Top of Your Schedule with an Easy-to-Use Planner

I’ve often set up a bunch of planners at the start of the year and proceed never to use them. If printed planners were as good as Scoro’s, I wouldn’t have that issue.

Scoro’s planner shows you a detailed list of all your tasks for one day. You can use the drag-and-drop editor to re-schedule any task, and it’s exceedingly easy to add new ones. The same goes for the calendar, which, besides being intuitive and useful for planning, is easy on the eyes.

Managing your time goes beyond just planning ahead. The time tracker feature allows you to keep a detailed registry of who is working on what and when. It will also show you when you’re going over your planned time and when you should be working on another task based on your schedule.

All Your Finances in a Single Place

It’s incredibly easy to create custom invoices using Scoro. All you need to do is go to the invoice tab, click on new, and fill in the required information. Every time you make a new invoice, it automatically updates the client’s contact information.

It’s not just about the money you receive, but also about the money you spend. That’s why Scoro offers a great expense tracker. If you need a general overview of your financial health, you can check a report comparing your earnings vs. your expenses and giving you detailed information about your margins.

The Information You Need, Whenever You Need It

All of these different features might sound overwhelming. Just because you can register large amounts of information doesn’t mean that you know what to do with it, right?

That’s where reports and the dashboard come in. You can customize your dashboard to show exactly the information you want to see, presented in a visually appealing way.

Reports, on the other hand, give you an ultra-detailed overview of different aspects of your business. There are 17 reports available. Each of them provides actionable information in a way that’s understandable and concise.

Easier Than You’d Think but It Takes Some Getting Used To

Considering the sheer size of the platform, I was afraid that Scoro would be nearly impossible to use. That fear got even worse as soon as I saw the corporate-looking UI (user interface). It seemed like the kind of software that you need a master’s degree to even understand, let alone use. Right?

Well, first impressions aside, I’m happy to say that I was wrong – mostly. The UI might not be the prettiest in the world, but it’s well-organized. Most features are intuitive, and there’s plenty of support available if you ever get lost.

Some features and tabs are awkwardly-placed, which makes navigation a little hard to get used to. But overall, Scoro is surprisingly intuitive for an app this big.

Getting Started with Scoro

To get started with Scoro, all you have to do is go to scoro.com and click the button that says “try for free.” Input your name and email, set a password, and that’s it.

You’ll receive a quick walkthrough of the software that shows you where everything is located. You can access it again at any time under the Help menu.

Your site comes pre-filled with a bunch of projects, contacts, and more. Personally, I’ve always been a “learn by doing” kind of person, so I love this approach. If you feel ready, you can delete the demo data at any moment using the drop-down menu that appears when you hover over your name.

The Help You Need, Exactly Where You Need It

Scoro’s support page is filled with clear and helpful tutorials for almost every major feature. Most tabs come with a short “intro to” video that you can access in the upper middle. Each video is a brief explanation of the purpose of each tab and the features offered.

Another great resource is the help menu. Whenever you click on Help, you get a drop-down list of relevant information based on where you are on the site.

See What You Want, Nevermind the Rest

Scoro is hardly the first project management software to include filters. But what sets it apart is the quality of the filtering options. You can get ridiculously specific with the information you want to view, which is great when you’re handling this much of it. It doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with tasks, invoices, or anything in-between.

If you need to show information to others, you can export anything to a PDF file in seconds. The exports are stunning and only show the information you want.

Customize Your Workspace to Your Needs

Although Scoro’s catalog of options and fields is enormous, it won’t include everything you need. That’s where custom fields come in. All you need to do is go to site settings/custom fields and click add.

You can choose exactly where you want your custom field to appear, whether it’s mandatory, and a myriad of other options. With custom fields, you don’t have to worry about data that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.

There Could Be More Options for Direct Communication

Scoro offers plenty of features to improve collaboration within a project. You can comment pretty much anywhere, export project details as detailed PDFs, and create custom tags for better organization. Unfortunately, there aren’t as many options for more general in-team communication.

Team Dashboard & Communication

The commenting feature isn’t the most advanced in the world, but it’s good enough. You can tag other team members in comments, which is helpful because you can comment pretty much anywhere in Scoro. If you need to make a more general announcement to your crew, the news feed is pretty much a company blog.

Using the news feed, you can create posts using a basic text editor. Other members can comment under your post, and you can even send a notification for a team member or group every time you post something new.

Otherwise, there aren’t that many options for direct communication. There is no built-in chat feature, nor is there a team dashboard per se.

You can see the contact information for your team under the aptly named our team tab, and the planner gives you a general overview of your teammates’ schedules, but that’s about it. For a service that’s supposed to be all-in-one, Scoro lacks some basic teamwork features.

File Sharing

You can attach files to almost any part of Scoro. You just have to find the menu that says file sharing. There’s also a file sharing tab that works as a centralized folder. There, you can find and upload any files that are important to the project.

There are limited options to what you can do with these files, though. Besides just uploading and downloading, there aren’t any tools for interacting with the files, such as proofing or editing tools.

There is also a 500 MB per file limit and a storage limit of 10 GB (and that’s on the highest-priced plan), which seems insufficient considering Scoro’s target audience.

Mobile App

Scoro’s mobile app is almost as powerful as the browser version. There are some issues for displaying visual information, such as Gantt charts and Dashboards, but it’s a great tool for getting work done overall.

Its only real con is that it takes a while to learn, just like the browser version. If you’re going to use the app, I recommend playing with it for a while before getting to work.

Efficient and Attentive Support

If you live in the US or the UK, you can call Scoro’s support and request a callback. For everyone else, email is the only available support channel.

To test the quality of support, I decided to contact them with two basic questions:

• Can I import project details from a different platform? How?
• How do I set up a project for a freelancer who’s only temporarily on board?

Regrettably, Scoro’s site does not display average response times or available hours. Therefore, I was uncertain about what to anticipate. Based on my interactions with various support emails, I have received replies ranging from 10 minutes to a couple of days (excluding instances of no response).

The Scoro support emailed me back in 30 minutes. Not bad at all.

I’ve had to wait far longer for far less helpful replies. Scoro’s team answered my questions fully. It was a great experience all around.

To ensure that it wasn’t a one-off kind of thing, I sent another email asking about the storage limits for each plan. Once again, I got a response in a little under 30 minutes, which cleared my doubts completely.

Great Value for Its Price, but Expensive Nonetheless

Scoro isn’t cheap by any metric. The most basic plan is more expensive than Smartsheet’s Business and monday.com’s Pro, neither of which will ask you to pay extra for basic things like Gantt charts. Even the 14-day free trial from Scoro is shorter than the standard 30 days.

Plus, the pricing plans are difficult to figure out. Scoro offers three pricing plans: Essential, Work Hub, and Sales Hub. But there are standard and pro versions for both Work Hub and Sales Hub. Both standard versions cost $37.00, and both pro versions cost $49.00 (per user per month).

So what’s the difference? Obviously, the included features, but you have to dive into the knowledgebase to get a complete view of what’s included with each plan. To complicate things further, you can pay extra for add-ons as well.

Having fiddled with a bunch of different plans and add-ons, I can simplify things for you a bit. If you’re looking to manage your business with Scoro, I recommend the standard Work Hub. It’s one of the most complete plans, and you can add on any extra features you need.

If you’re looking to manage a smaller project, I wouldn’t recommend Scoro’s Essential plan. It’s a bit too expensive, and it lacks Scoro’s best features. Instead, consider going for a mid-tier monday.com or Teamwork plan.

Either way, don’t reach for your wallet just yet. You can try any plan for free when you register. If you decide to commit, remember to pay annually to get the best prices.