Quivva vs Scoro

Scoro is a full business operations platform for professional services firms. Quotes, projects, Gantt charts, contacts, suppliers, sales pipeline, resourcing and billing all in one system. It is genuinely capable and it is built for agencies with staff.

Quivva is a practice management tool for one person running a small number of retainer or engagement-based clients. It covers time, retainers, capacity, invoicing and expenses, and deliberately does not attempt CRM, proposals or team resourcing.

These two are not really competing for the same buyer. If you have a team, a sales pipeline to manage and quotes going out every week, Scoro does things Quivva will never do. If you are one person and your problem is knowing where you stand across four retainers, Scoro is a large and expensive answer to a question you did not ask.

The problem this page is really about

People arrive at Scoro when the spreadsheet finally breaks. The instinct is reasonable: get a proper system, one that knows about clients and projects and money, and stop reconciling things by hand.

The risk is buying a platform sized for a fifteen person agency to solve a one person problem. Scoro is priced per user and structured around the assumption that work is assigned, approved and reported across a team. As a solo operator you pay for that structure and then navigate around it.

Pricing

Scoro publishes tiers per user per month. On the pricing page these were listed as roughly:

Quivva is US$15 per month, or US$144 per year. No tiers, no per-seat multiplier.

The gap is large, and it should be explained rather than waved at. You are not paying five times as much for the same thing. Scoro’s price buys quoting, CRM, supplier management, Gantt dependencies, team resourcing and financial forecasting across a business. If you use those, the price is defensible.

What is worth noticing is where Scoro puts the features a retainer-based consultant actually needs. Retainer management is not on the entry tier, it is a paid upgrade. Capacity planning sits two tiers up, on the most expensive plan. So the specific things that would make Scoro useful to this reader are the things Scoro treats as premium, which tells you something about who it expects to be selling to.

How each one handles a retainer

Scoro’s retainer handling is real and reasonably thought through, and one part of it is genuinely good.

Setting one up is done by selecting “retainer” when adding a project, then specifying a duration. Set twelve months and it creates twelve invoices immediately. That is a slightly odd mental model, since you are generating a year of invoices before any work has happened, but for an agency planning a portfolio it likely makes sense.

The payoff is a timeline view showing all retainer invoices laid out across the year, with remaining days and remaining billable hours on each. That is a good view. It is also very close to what Quivva shows, just presented in a more enterprise register. Scoro also offers a screen showing all billing periods together, which is a nice piece of design.

Quivva’s model is simpler and stays closer to the relationship. One active retainer per client, either pay-for-work (hourly, where the client is buying delivery) or pay-for-access (fixed fee, where the client is buying availability). One invoice per billing period, generated as you go rather than a year in advance, and Quivva advances to the next period once the current invoice is sent or paid.

Fixed-price projects with milestones sit alongside the retainer on the same client, so a retainer client with a one-off deliverable does not require a separate arrangement. If your engagements typically include a ‘foot in the door’ paid assessment, followed (in some cases) by an ongoing retainer, you may find Quivva’s approach more intuitive.

For recurring work, Scoro offers task bundles that drop the same set of task names into each month. Quivva has no equivalent, and does not need one, because task names autocomplete from your history with that client.

Capacity: whose capacity, and measured how

Scoro’s Planner, on the top tier, exists to manage a team. It assumes everyone works the same hours each week and displays capacity as a percentage of available hours.

That model works for a resourcing manager assigning people to jobs. It works less well for one person. It has no notion of a buffer, so 100% utilisation reads as the target rather than as a warning sign. For a fractional executive whose value depends on having enough headroom to actually think, a tool that treats a fully booked week as optimal is quietly pushing in the wrong direction.

Quivva starts from your actual working pattern, set per day of week, for example eight hours Monday to Thursday and four on Friday. The weekly planner breaks the week into slots and orders work by leverage rather than by whatever fills the grid. Hours-remaining warnings fire when you drop below two hours in the week’s allocation, or when starting a timer would take you past the contracted amount. You can proceed anyway, and the overage is recorded and shown, because the decision to go over belongs to you and not to the software.

Invoicing, and the automation question

Scoro’s invoicing is powerful. It schedules, it recurs, it handles a lot.

It is also, in practice, bewildering. The number of inputs on a single invoice screen is considerable. The scheduled retainer invoice form is slightly simpler but still busy. If you are comfortable with the MS Office suite of programs, you will feel comfortable with Scoro.

Quivva is more deliberate about where information appears and how it is edited, rather than presenting a page of text inputs and checkboxes and letting you sort it out. By focusing on fractional executives and solo consultants, Quivva is able to be more opinionated and intuitive for those use cases. Scoro conversely supports a range of industries, and must remain generic enough to work for all use cases.

The more interesting difference is philosophical. In January 2026 Scoro extended its “watchdogs” feature to retainers: set a threshold, and Scoro emails you automatically when a retainer crosses it. Their framing is explicit, it lets you “manage a large portfolio of projects without the manual grind.”

That is exactly right for the customer Scoro is serving. It is worth thinking about carefully if you are not that customer. Managing a large portfolio without touching it is a goal that makes sense when clients are numerous and individually small. When you have four clients paying serious money for your judgement, being surprised by an automated threshold alert is not the same as knowing your book. Quivva puts the burn position in front of you as part of your normal working view rather than notifying you once it has already become a problem.

The same applies to invoicing itself. Scoro will generate and schedule a year of invoices without your involvement. For a retainer client you speak to weekly, the invoice is part of the relationship, not just an accounts receivable event. Quivva keeps you in the loop by default, review and send, because a fully automated invoice is not an unambiguous win when the client is buying your attention.

Where Scoro is the better choice

This is not a close call in the situations where it applies.

You have a team, or expect one. Scoro handles assignment, role-based labour cost, utilisation reporting and team performance. Quivva has no multi-user concept at all and will not gain one.

You need CRM, quoting and a sales pipeline. Scoro has contacts, quotes, a quote estimation matrix, price lists and pipeline reporting. Quivva deliberately stays out of CRM territory. If your problem is winning work rather than delivering it, Quivva is not the tool and you should not buy it expecting otherwise.

You need financial forecasting and supplier management. Cost and profit forecasting, revenue recognition, supplier management and detailed financial reports are all in Scoro.

You need Gantt charts and task dependencies. Scoro has them. Quivva has milestones in order, and nothing more elaborate.

Scoro is a serious product doing a bigger job. The case against it here is fit and cost, not quality.

Which to choose

Choose Scoro if you run or are growing a services business with staff, if you need sales and delivery and finance in one system, or if you need forecasting across a portfolio of clients.

Choose Quivva if you are one person, if your client list is short and each relationship matters, and if you want the retainer position and your real capacity visible without paying for a top tier plan and configuring a platform to get there.

If you are a solo consultant seriously evaluating Scoro’s Performance tier purely to get the Planner and retainer management, that is the clearest signal that the fit is wrong. You would be buying an agency platform for two features.