Best Zoho Alternatives in 2026: A Decision Guide for CTOs, PMOs, and Delivery Leaders in 2026

Transparency note: Celoxis publishes this article, and Celoxis is one of the tools on the list. We have tried to write the guide we would want if we were sitting on the other side of the table. That means naming the situations where a competitor is the better answer, and naming the situations where Celoxis is not a fit. If you spot something out of date, tell us and we will fix it.

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The short answer

If you are leaving Zoho because your team outgrew task tracking, the right replacement depends on what broke first.

Portfolio visibility, resource capacity, and project financials broke. Look at Celoxis, Planview AdaptiveWork, or Smartsheet. Celoxis is usually the fastest to stand up and the cheapest to run at PMO scale.

Cross-team collaboration and marketing work broke. Look at Wrike, monday work management, or Asana.

Engineering delivery broke. Look at Jira, paired with a portfolio layer above it.

Client billing and margin tracking broke. Look at Kantata, Scoro, or Celoxis.

Nothing broke and you just want cheaper. Stay on Zoho Projects, or move to ClickUp or Bitrix24.

Most Zoho migrations we see are not about features. They are about a CFO asking a question that the tool cannot answer.

In This Guide Table of Contents ▾

First, be clear about which Zoho you are actually replacing

This trips up more evaluations than it should. “Zoho” is not one product. It is a suite of more than fifty apps, and the alternative you need depends entirely on the module that is failing you.

This matters commercially. Teams searching for Zoho Social alternatives need Buffer, Sprout Social, or Hootsuite, not a project portfolio management platform. Teams searching for Zoho One competitors are usually weighing suite consolidation against best-of-breed depth against best-of-breed depth, which is a different decision again.

The rest of this guide is about the Zoho Projects and Zoho One project-delivery use case. That is where Zoho alternatives searches usually land, and it is where the money is. If you want the shorter version of this list, we also maintain a focused piece on Zoho Projects competitors.

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The four things that actually push teams off Zoho

We talk to a lot of buyers mid-evaluation. The reasons are remarkably consistent, and none of them show up on a feature comparison chart.

1. Reporting stops at the edge of a single project

Zoho Projects reports well on a project. It reports poorly across a portfolio. Verified users on review sites repeatedly flag that reporting customization runs out for advanced needs, and that deeper analysis pushes you toward Zoho Analytics as a separate purchase and a separate integration.

For a PMO, that is the whole job. If your quarterly board pack takes three people two days in a spreadsheet, and your portfolio dashboards cannot be built without it, your tool is not a project portfolio management tool. It is a task tracker with charts.

The question that exposes it: “Show me every project over budget, by business unit, with the owner and the last status update, filtered to this quarter.” If that takes more than one saved report, you have a gap.

2. Resource management is a module, not a system

Zoho Projects has workload views and resource utilization charts. What it does not have, at least not natively across the whole portfolio, is proper capacity planning: named resources with job roles, multiple locations and shifts, holiday calendars, contractor pools, planned versus actual utilization, and instant conflict detection when you assign someone who is already committed.

It is worth being precise here, because capacity planning, resource planning, and resource management are three different disciplines and most tools only do the third. CTOs feel this first. You approve a roadmap in January and find out in April that the same four senior engineers were quietly assumed into six initiatives.

3. The financial picture lives somewhere else

Zoho Projects tracks time and can invoice through Zoho Books or Zoho Invoice. It does not do serious project accounting: cost estimation, revenue forecasting, margin by project, earned value, and portfolio-level profitability.

So the numbers live in finance systems, the delivery data lives in Zoho, and someone reconciles them by hand every month. That reconciliation is the hidden cost nobody puts in the business case.

4. Suite gravity starts working against you

Zoho’s biggest strength is the ecosystem. Everything talks to everything, and it is genuinely cheap. That is also the trap. Solving each new gap means buying another Zoho app, usually Creator for workflow, and after Projects plus Analytics plus Creator plus Books plus People, the “cheap” stack is neither cheap nor simple. You now own five integrations and five admin surfaces.

This is the point where Zoho competitors stop being a price comparison and start being an architecture decision.

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What changed in project management software between 2023 and 2026

If your last evaluation was a few years ago, four things have moved. Ignore them and you will buy the tool you needed three years ago.

AI moved from summaries to decisions

The first wave of AI project management tools wrote status updates. The current wave analyzes portfolio data and recommends action. Gartner now tracks this as adaptive project management and reporting, where portfolios adjust continuously instead of at fixed review gates.

Practically, that means you should be testing whether an AI assistant can answer “which projects are most at risk of slipping past quarter end, and why” against your own data during the trial. Not whether it can write a nice paragraph.

Celoxis ships this as Lex, an assistant that reads live project data and surfaces risks, answers natural-language questions, and routes you to the relevant dashboard. Planview has Anvi. ClickUp sells Brain MAX as a separate seat add-on. Zoho has Zia, though the AI features sit on paid tiers only.

Consolidation beat app sprawl

The 2021 pattern was a tool per team. The 2026 pattern is a work management platform with one data model, plus deep integrations to the two or three systems that genuinely need to stay separate, usually Jira and the finance system.

Every extra tool is an extra reconciliation. Leaders have done that math.

Seat design became a pricing lever

This is underrated and it is where budgets get won or lost. Old model: everyone pays the same per-seat price (how seats are priced is now a design decision, not a line item). New model: seats are priced by what the person actually does.

A three hundred person organization might need forty full project manager seats, two hundred team member seats at a lower rate, sixty timesheet-only seats at a lower rate again, and free read-only seats for executives who just look at dashboards. That structure can halve your bill versus a flat per-user tool, and it is the single biggest reason project management software pricing comparisons based on advertised entry price are misleading.

Data residency and deployment came back

For regulated industries, government suppliers, and European operations, “where does the data sit” is now a procurement gate. On-premise deployment and regional data centers are no longer legacy requirements, and where your project data physically sits is now a procurement question. Zoho Projects is cloud only. If you need self-hosted, that alone ends the evaluation.

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A decision framework you can run in one meeting

Before you look at a single vendor page, answer these five. Your answers eliminate two thirds of the market.

1. What is the smallest unit of truth your leadership needs? If it is a task, most tools work. If it is a portfolio with cost, revenue, and capacity attached, you need PPM software, and the list drops to maybe six vendors.

2. Who has to log in, and what does each group do? Count your project managers, your doers, your timesheet-only contributors, and your view-only executives separately. Then price every shortlisted tool against that split, not against headcount.

3. Is delivery your product, or is delivery your overhead? If you bill clients for project work, you need financials, billing models, and margin tracking. If projects are internal, you need capacity and prioritization far more than invoicing.

4. What must the tool integrate with, and how deep? “Has a Zapier connector” and “has a two-way native Jira integration that syncs effort back to the portfolio” are different products.

5. What is your realistic implementation capacity? Enterprise platforms with six-month implementations fail when the PMO is three people. Be honest about this. It is the most common cause of a failed migration. If you want a longer version of this framework, we wrote one on how to choose project management software.

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The 12 best Zoho alternatives in 2026

Pricing below is vendor list pricing as of August 2026, billed annually where applicable. It changes often. Confirm on the vendor page before you build a business case.

1. Celoxis

Best for: PMOs, IT and engineering leadership, and delivery organizations that need portfolio, resource, and financial management in one platform without an enterprise implementation.

Celoxis is a project portfolio management platform rather than a task tool that grew upward. It handles intake, planning, resourcing, financials, and executive reporting in a single data model, which is the specific thing Zoho Projects users tend to be missing.

Where it is strong:

• Interactive Gantt chart with automatic scheduling that reflows plans when reality changes, plus inter-project dependencies and critical path
• Capacity planning across locations, shifts, holidays, job roles, and contractors, with immediate conflict alerts
• Project accounting: cost estimation, revenue forecasting, margin tracking, and custom financial KPIs, natively
• Dashboards and reports that work across the portfolio, including drill-down charts on custom and formula fields, scheduled email delivery, and PDF export
• Role-based seat pricing, plus free read-only seats for executives on every plan
• Lex, an AI assistant that reads live project data and answers questions in plain language
• Cloud in US or Europe, or on-premise on your own servers

Where it is not the answer: If you want a lightweight board for a ten person marketing team, this is more platform than you need. Celoxis also carries a five full-access user minimum.

We keep a feature-by-feature Celoxis vs Zoho Projects comparison if you want the detail behind these claims.

Pricing: Core from $10 per user per month. Essentials $25. Professional $35. Business $45. Enterprise is custom. Team member and timesheet seats are priced lower, and read-only seats are free.

Verdict: For most organizations leaving Zoho Projects because the portfolio outgrew it, this is the closest match to the actual problem, at a fraction of enterprise PPM cost.

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2. Planview AdaptiveWork (formerly Clarizen)

Best for: Large enterprises with a mature EPMO and a real implementation budget.

Named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Adaptive Project Management and Reporting. It supports waterfall, agile, and stage-gate delivery in one governed system, with time-phased capacity planning across thousands of resources and AI through Planview Anvi.

Watch-outs: Quote-only pricing, historically starting around $45 per user per month and climbing. Configuration is substantial. Reviewers consistently mention long setup and the need for dedicated admin capacity. Anvi is an add-on.

Verdict: The right call if you are a global enterprise with a governance mandate. Heavy if you are a twenty person PMO.

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3. Smartsheet

Best for: Organizations that live in spreadsheets and want structure without retraining everyone.

Grid-first interface, strong automation, solid governance (Smartsheet vs ClickUp vs Celoxis covers the head-to-head), and good portfolio rollups at the higher tiers. Adoption is easy because it looks familiar.

Watch-outs: See our fuller writeup on Smartsheet alternatives. Portfolio reporting and SSO push you into Business and Enterprise tiers, and enterprise pricing is quote-based. The spreadsheet metaphor gets strained on complex dependency networks.

Pricing: Pro from around $9 per user per month, Business around $25, Enterprise custom.

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4. Wrike

Best for: Marketing, creative, and cross-functional operations teams.

Best-in-class proofing and approval workflows, custom request forms, and strong cross-team visibility. If your bottleneck is review cycles, Wrike solves it well.

Watch-outs: Advanced dashboards and resource allocation sit in higher tiers, and real-world enterprise spend often lands well above the advertised Business rate.

Pricing: Team from around $10 per user per month, Business around $25, Pinnacle custom.

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5. monday work management

Best for: Teams that need adoption to happen in a week.

The most visually approachable option on this list, and we compare it directly in monday vs Celoxis. Highly configurable boards, huge template library, and dashboards that pull across boards at higher tiers.

Watch-outs: Gantt and timeline views start at Standard. Automation actions are capped per tier and the caps bite faster than expected. Portfolio depth and financials are not comparable to a true PPM tool.

Pricing: Basic around $9 per seat per month, Standard $12, Pro $19, Enterprise custom.

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6. Asana

Best for: Goal alignment and cross-department coordination in mid-sized companies.

Clean dashboards, strong goals and OKR linkage, and genuinely good workflow design. More detail in our Asana alternatives roundup.

Watch-outs: The free tier now covers only one to two users. Timeline, portfolios, and resource views require the Advanced tier, which roughly doubles the per-seat cost. No native time tracking.

Pricing: Starter around $10.99 per user per month, Advanced around $24.99, Enterprise custom.

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7. ClickUp

Best for: Cost-conscious teams that want maximum feature surface per dollar.

Genuinely a lot of tool for the money, and we go deeper in our ClickUp alternatives guide. Native Gantt, time tracking, docs, whiteboards, and unlimited storage on a $7 tier is hard to argue with on price.

Watch-outs: Configuration sprawl is real, and so is the admin burden of keeping it consistent across teams. Brain MAX AI is a separate add-on at around $9 per user per month, which changes the math significantly.

Pricing: Unlimited $7 per user per month, Business $12, Enterprise custom.

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8. Microsoft Project and Planner

Best for: Organizations already standardized on Microsoft 365 with Power BI in place.

Deep scheduling heritage (Microsoft Planner vs Project vs Celoxis breaks down which is which), native Teams integration, and Power BI reporting if you have the analysts to build it.

Watch-outs: The Project and Planner licensing story has been in flux, and getting portfolio reporting working usually means a Power BI project of its own. Resource management across a portfolio needs the top tier.

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9. Jira

Best for: Software engineering delivery.

Nothing beats it for agile software teams. It is the right tool for the engineering layer.

Watch-outs: It is not a portfolio tool for the business. Finance, resourcing, and executive reporting need something above it. Most mature organizations run Jira for engineering and a PPM platform above it, connected by a two-way integration.

Pricing: From around $7.91 per user per month.

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10. Kantata (formerly Mavenlink)

Best for: Professional services firms of roughly 50 to 5,000 people where utilization and margin are the business.

Purpose-built professional services automation. Resource forecasting, project accounting, and margin analytics are the core, not add-ons. See our Kantata and Mavenlink comparison for the detail.

Watch-outs: Quote-only pricing at the higher end of this list. Reviewers cite implementation effort. Narrow fit if you also run internal IT and infrastructure portfolios.

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11. Scoro

Best for: Agencies and consultancies that want quote-to-cash in one place.

Combines pipeline, project delivery, time, and invoicing. If your pain is that a project starts in a CRM, runs in a PM tool, and ends in accounting software, Scoro closes the loop.

Watch-outs: Per-user pricing with seat minimums, and depth on the delivery side is lighter than a dedicated PPM platform. Check current tiers directly.

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12. Bitrix24, ProofHub, and Teamwork.com

Best for: Small businesses looking at Zoho alternatives for small businesses or genuinely free Zoho alternatives.

• Bitrix24 prices at the organization level rather than per user, with a free tier supporting unlimited users. If you want CRM plus projects plus chat on one bill and you have more than a dozen people, the economics are strong. Interface density is the trade-off, and third-party integrations carry per-user fees.
• ProofHub uses flat monthly pricing instead of per-seat, which suits growing teams with unpredictable headcount.
• Teamwork.com is built specifically for client work, with billable time and client permissions handled properly.

Watch-outs: All three are task and collaboration tools. None replaces portfolio management, capacity planning, or project financials, and their strength is team collaboration rather than governance. If you are reading this because your CFO asked a portfolio question, these are not the answer.

Prices are vendor list pricing as of August 2026 and change frequently.

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Match the tool to your situation

You are a CTO with engineers spread across too many initiatives. Keep Jira for the engineering layer. Add a portfolio layer above it that shows real capacity, so roadmap commitments are made against people who actually exist. Celoxis, Planview AdaptiveWork, or Smartsheet.

You are a PMO director building governance from scratch. You need intake and prioritization, RAID logging, stage gates, and an executive dashboard on day one. Buying a task tool and configuring governance on top of it takes eighteen months. Buying a PPM platform takes weeks. Celoxis or Planview AdaptiveWork.

You are a CEO who wants one number you can trust. Your requirement is a single source for status, spend, and capacity, with free view-only access so you are not paying full seat price to look at a chart. Check the seat model as carefully as the feature list.

You run a services business and margin is the metric. Kantata, Scoro, or Celoxis. Test billing models, revenue recognition, and margin-by-project during the trial, not features.

You are a marketing director drowning in review cycles. Wrike. This is the one case where it clearly wins.

You are a small business under twenty people. Honestly? Zoho Projects at around $5 per user is hard to beat, and staying is a legitimate outcome of this evaluation. Consider Bitrix24 or ClickUp if you want a different interface at similar cost, and see our notes on project tracking software for smaller and remote teams.

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Why Celoxis works well for teams leaving Zoho

We build it, so weigh this accordingly. Here is the mechanism rather than the marketing.

The Zoho Projects problem is structural. Tasks, time, analytics, financials, and custom processes each live in a different app, so cross-cutting questions require joining data across systems. Celoxis puts them in one model, which is why the reporting question gets easier rather than just prettier.

How the flow works in practice:

1. Intake. Project requests arrive from email, forms, or spreadsheets into one queue. You rank them with configurable logic against your own KPIs, and match demand against actual available capacity before anything gets approved.
2. Planning. Build the project plan with automatic scheduling, multiple resources per task, all four dependency types, and inter-project dependencies. When a date moves, the plan reflows instead of going stale.
3. Resourcing. Assign against real availability that accounts for locations, shifts, holidays, job roles, and contractors. Overload alerts fire at assignment time, not at the retrospective.
4. Financials. Cost and revenue estimates, forecasting, expense capture with receipts, multi-level timesheet approvals, and profit and margin tracked live against plan.
5. Reporting. RAG health calculated automatically, baselines and earned value, drill-down charts on any field including formula fields, dashboards per audience, and scheduled email delivery so the board pack builds itself.
6. Custom apps. Risks, issues, change requests, RAID logs, or any process specific to your business, built with custom fields, routing rules, and escalation policies. This is the capability that keeps you from buying a low-code tool on the side.
7. AI. Lex reads the live data and answers questions in plain language, flags risks, and takes you to the dashboard that matters.

The commercial part that usually decides it: seat types. Project managers take Standard seats. Doers take Team Member seats. Contractors take Timesheet seats. Executives take free read-only seats, up to fifteen depending on plan. For a mixed organization, that structure is frequently the difference between a business case that passes and one that does not.

Deployment: cloud in the US or Europe, or on-premise on Linux and PostgreSQL with no additional software licensing cost. Teams with data residency requirements find this narrows the field fast.

Celoxis is used by PMOs at organizations including NASA, Rolex, Lufthansa, HBO, KPMG, Adobe, and Whirlpool, and is listed on Gartner Peer Insights in the project and portfolio management market. You can also read verified customer reviews and success stories.

Do not pick Celoxis if: you want a simple visual board for a small team, you have fewer than five people who need full access, or your primary need is social media scheduling or CRM. Those are real cases, and other tools on this list serve them better.

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What migrating off Zoho actually involves

Most failed migrations fail on change management, not on data. Plan for ninety days.

Days 1 to 30: prove it on one portfolio. Pick one business unit with real complexity, not the easy one. Export active projects, tasks, and timesheets from Zoho. Run this inside a free trial rather than a sales call. Rebuild your three most important reports in the new tool. If you cannot rebuild them in week two, that is your answer about the tool.

Days 31 to 60: run parallel. Keep Zoho read-only. Run the pilot portfolio live in the new system, including a real month-end close. This is where financial and timesheet gaps surface, and where you find out whether people actually update their tasks.

Days 61 to 90: roll out by function, not by headcount. Onboard project managers first, then team members, then executives, and budget for structured training. Give executives dashboards before you give them training, because they will only ever use dashboards.

Things that will bite you if you skip them:

• Historical timesheet data for billing disputes and audits. Decide what you are keeping before you cancel Zoho.
• Zoho Creator apps quietly holding a critical process. Inventory these in week one.
• Integration rebuilds, particularly anything wired into Zoho Books, Zoho CRM, or Zoho People. Vendor migration services are worth pricing here.
• Your reporting calendar. Do not migrate in the month a board report is due.

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How to model the real cost

The advertised price is not the number, and our guide to project management software pricing and cost models goes deeper. Build the number this way.

Seats. Split headcount by role type and price each group at its actual tier. This alone changes the ranking of most shortlists.

Tier gates. List every feature you genuinely require, then find the lowest tier that includes all of them. Resource management, portfolio dashboards, SSO, and automation caps are the usual gates. Many teams price the entry tier and buy the third one.

Add-ons. AI seats, analytics products, integration modules, and premium support. Add them.

Implementation. Internal hours plus any vendor services. An enterprise platform that takes six months of a senior PM’s time has a real cost even if the invoice says otherwise.

Renewal. Ask what year two looks like and get it in writing.

What you stop paying for. Subtract the tools the new platform replaces, including that spreadsheet reconciliation that costs two people two days a month.

Run this for three years. Cheap tools that gate the features you need often lose to a mid-priced platform that includes them.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best alternative to Zoho Projects?

For organizations that need portfolio management, capacity planning, and project financials in one place, Celoxis. For large enterprises with dedicated implementation capacity, Planview AdaptiveWork. For marketing and creative teams, Wrike. For small teams, ClickUp or Bitrix24.

Are there free Zoho alternatives?

Yes. Bitrix24 offers a free tier supporting unlimited users. ClickUp has a Free Forever plan with unlimited users. Trello and Jira both have free tiers for small teams. Free plans work for task tracking. None of them handles portfolio management, capacity planning, or project financials.

What are the main Zoho competitors?

For Zoho Projects: Celoxis, Wrike, Smartsheet, monday, Asana, ClickUp, and Jira. For Zoho One as a suite: Microsoft 365 plus a best-of-breed stack, Bitrix24, or Odoo. For Zoho Social: Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social.

Is Zoho Projects good enough for enterprise use?

It is capable for structured task and project management, and adoption is strongest among small businesses. Where it falls short at enterprise scale is portfolio-level reporting, native capacity planning, project accounting, granular project-level security, and on-premise deployment. Our side-by-side comparison covers each of these.

How much does Zoho Projects cost in 2026?

There is a free plan for up to five users and three projects. Premium is around $4 to $5 per user per month billed annually, Enterprise around $10, and Ultimate around $14 to $15. Resource management and lite user options can add line items that are not shown on the pricing page, so get those quoted before you commit.

What is the difference between project management software and PPM software?

Project management software helps you deliver one project well. PPM software helps you choose the right projects, staff them against real capacity, track the money, and report across all of them. If your leadership asks portfolio questions, you need PPM. We list the top project portfolio management software separately.

Which Zoho alternative is best for small businesses?

Bitrix24 if you want CRM and projects on one flat bill. ClickUp if you want feature depth cheaply. Teamwork.com if you bill clients. Staying on Zoho Projects is also a perfectly reasonable answer under about twenty people.

Can I keep Jira and still get portfolio reporting?

Yes, and most mature organizations do exactly this. Run Jira for engineering delivery and connect it to a portfolio platform above it. Celoxis integrates natively with both Jira and Azure DevOps.

Does any Zoho alternative offer on-premise deployment?

Celoxis offers on-premise deployment on Linux and PostgreSQL. Jira Data Center and Bitrix24 self-hosted are also options. Zoho Projects, Wrike, Asana, monday, and ClickUp are cloud only.

How long does migrating off Zoho take?

Plan ninety days for a mid-sized organization: thirty days to prove the tool on one portfolio, thirty running parallel through a month-end close, and thirty to roll out by function. Rushing the parallel-run phase is the most common mistake.

What should I test during a free trial?

Rebuild your three most important existing reports, load one real project with real dependencies, run one timesheet approval cycle, and ask the AI assistant a question about your own data. If all four work in two weeks, the tool will work. Our notes on what to ask in a software demo and how to run a free trial properly cover the rest.

Making the call

The honest summary is this. If you are under twenty people and Zoho Projects covers you, stay. If your leadership is asking portfolio questions that require a spreadsheet to answer, no amount of configuration inside Zoho will close that gap, and every month you delay adds another month of manual reconciliation.

The fastest way to know which side of that line you are on is to take one real project, with its real dependencies, real budget, and real people, and run it through a platform built for portfolio work. Start a free 14-day Celoxis trial that comes preloaded with sample data, or book a demo and we will map your current Zoho setup to a Celoxis workflow live, on your numbers.