Striven Review 2026

What is Striven?

All-in-one ERP software for small and mid-sized businesses combining CRM, accounting, and project management.

Striven is a operations tool that we've reviewed as part of our directory. Here's what it does well, where it falls short, and whether it's worth your money.

How We Evaluated Striven

We scored Striven on five things: ease of setup, core feature quality, pricing transparency, integration options, and documentation. Same rubric we use for every operations tool in the directory, so the scores are comparable.

That meant using the product, testing the features that matter most for operations work, reading the docs, and checking whether pricing is upfront or hidden behind a sales call. We also compared it against CrowdStrike and Guesty to see where it stands.

Key Features

What Striven actually gives you:

• Contact & Lead Management: Organize contacts and track leads through your pipeline
• Core Functionality: Purpose-built feature set for operations workflows
• User Interface: Clean interface designed for productivity
• Integration Support: Connects with popular tools in your stack

Pricing

Striven doesn't list pricing publicly on their website, so you'll need to reach out to their sales team for a quote. That's fairly common for tools aimed at larger teams, but it does make it harder to evaluate quickly.

To give you a rough sense of the market, comparable operations tools like CrowdStrike and Guesty charge in the range of custom pricing to custom pricing/mo, which should help you calibrate expectations.

Pros and Cons

What we like

• This is a tool built specifically for operations, which means the features are tailored to real use cases in this space rather than being generic functionality that sort of applies
• It focuses on doing one thing well rather than trying to be a Swiss Army knife, which usually means the core features get more development attention and polish than they would in an all-in-one platform

What could be better

• Pricing isn't listed publicly, so you'll have to sit through a sales call just to find out if it's in your budget. That alone is a friction point for smaller teams
• Larger organizations with complex requirements may find that some of the advanced features they expect from enterprise software are missing or underdeveloped

Striven Alternatives

If Striven isn't the right fit, here are the closest competitors worth looking at:

We track hundreds of operations tools in our tools directory. Worth browsing if none of these match what you need.

Who It's For (and Who It's Not)

Good fit: Striven makes the most sense for teams that use operations tools daily and need something reliable and well-maintained. If that sounds like your situation, it's worth at least testing it out.

Skip it if: you only need this occasionally. A simpler or free tool would save you money and setup time. In that case, you might want to look at CrowdStrike as a lighter-weight option.

How Striven works

Striven is a cloud ERP for small and midsize businesses that bundles accounting, CRM and sales, project and task management, inventory, HR, document management and reporting into one system. The accounting side is a real general ledger product (GL, AP/AR, bank reconciliation, multi-currency, sales tax, fund accounting) rather than an invoicing bolt-on, and the vendor states it is built to be GAAP-compliant. The pitch is straightforward: stop running the business across several disconnected apps. Its industry positioning leans operational, covering construction and contracting, discrete and process manufacturing, field services (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, IT), professional services, distribution, retail and property management.

You subscribe per user and switch on the modules you need. Everything sits in one database, so an invoice, a project, a task and an inventory movement all reference the same records. Most of the configuration work is roles and permissions (financial data is gated per role), workflows and automation rules, the chart of accounts and tax setup, and the external Portals you expose for customers, vendors and job candidates. Portals are priced separately by portal-user count.

Integrations are a short curated list rather than a marketplace: Stripe, Square, Authorize.net and Shopify for payments and invoices, ShipStation and Onfleet for fulfilment and last-mile delivery, Google Calendar and Microsoft Calendar for scheduling, Twilio for outbound SMS, a Gmail add-on that turns email into tasks, an email relay so system mail leaves your own server, and a documented REST API at api.striven.com for everything else. Payroll is not processed inside Striven: the module collects hours, salaries, benefits, PTO and expenses, then exports CSV, Excel or XML to your existing payroll provider. Access is browser-based, and the vendor describes the interface as optimised for phones and tablets rather than advertising native apps.

Where Striven wins

• Genuine double-entry accounting inside the ERP. General ledger, AP/AR, bank reconciliation, multi-currency and fund accounting mean financials are not a separate system you reconcile back to.
• One data model across the whole business. CRM, projects, tasks, inventory and accounting share records, which is the main reason to pick it over stitching together QuickBooks plus a CRM plus a project tool.
• External Portals with a free tier up to 100 portal users. Customer, vendor and career portals are useful for contractors and field-service firms whose clients need to see invoices and pay online.
• Published flat per-user pricing ($35 Standard, $70 Enterprise) instead of the quote-only pricing typical of enterprise ERP.
• Support, implementation guides and webinars included at no extra cost per the vendor, alongside a published developer API.

Where it falls short

• The integration catalogue is thin for an ERP. Roughly a dozen named integrations (Stripe, Square, Authorize.net, Shopify, ShipStation, Onfleet, Google and Microsoft Calendar, Twilio, Gmail). Anything else is API work.
• No native payroll processing. The payroll module organises and exports data to an outside provider, so you still pay for and run something like Gusto or ADP separately.
• A small-team pricing penalty. Under 5 users you pay an extra $25 per user on top of the seat price, which makes two and three person shops disproportionately expensive.
• The pricing page does not explain what separates Standard from Enterprise, and portal usage beyond 100 users jumps to $99/month (500 users) or $499/month (unlimited).
• No free tier, only a free trial, and an all-in-one ERP of this scope carries real configuration work (chart of accounts, roles, workflows, portals) before it earns its keep.

Who should use Striven

It fits owner-operated SMBs of roughly 5 to 100 people in operations-heavy trades: construction, field service, manufacturing, distribution and professional services. The typical buyer is outgrowing QuickBooks plus a pile of point tools and wants accounting, jobs, inventory and CRM in one place, with clients able to view and pay invoices through a portal.

Skip it if you are a one to three person business, where the under-five-user surcharge and the setup burden are hard to justify. Skip it if you need payroll run in-house, since Striven only exports to an outside provider. And skip it if your stack depends on a long tail of SaaS integrations that Striven does not list, because closing those gaps means building against the API yourself.