Rapport3 — now Project Flow by Milient — is an established platform for mid-to-large UK practices. Arkavio is the all-in-one practice management software built for 1–50 person UK practices: published pricing, sign up yourself, set your fees up this afternoon.
Rapport3 has earned its place. Founded in the UK in 2001 and now part of Milient, it has more than twenty years in the market, a renewal rate it reports at 99%, and — by its own account — a large share of the AJ100 as customers. For a 50-to-200-person practice coordinating complex resourcing across many projects, that maturity is exactly what you want. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
Arkavio is built for a different practice. If you are 1 to 50 staff in the UK, you probably do not want a four-to-eight-week implementation, an "enterprise" feature set you will pay to ignore, or a "contact us for pricing" conversation before you can see what it costs. Our price is published (£179/month per practice, ex VAT), you sign yourself up with a 14-day free trial, and the whole platform is wired around one thing: a fee intelligence engine that derives your breakeven and charge-out rates from your real staff costs and overheads, then carries those numbers from proposal to project to invoice. It is also built by a registered architect — and "Architect" is a protected title under the Architects Act 1997, so that is a claim a generic software vendor cannot make.
| Arkavio | Rapport3 / Milient | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | 1–50 person UK architecture practices, including sole practitioners and 2–4 person studios. No minimum seats. | Mid-to-large practices (roughly 20–200+ staff). Described as a weaker fit below around 20 staff. |
| Pricing | Published: £179/month per practice, ex VAT. One plan, no per-seat charge, no feature gating. Founding Partner £99/month locked 12 months for the first 20 UK practices. | Pricing on request — not published. Per-user figures from third-party aggregators are estimates, not Rapport3's own rates, so we do not quote a number. |
| Getting started | Self-serve sign-up with a 14-day free trial (card required). Sample data seeds on day one; set your fees up in about 30 minutes. | Sales-led. No self-serve sign-up or free trial; a paid implementation and a typical 4–8 week onboarding. |
| Fee proposals | Structured fee intelligence engine: per-grade breakeven and charge-out rates derived from your staff costs and overheads, allocated across RIBA Plan of Work stages. | An offers/quotes module for generic quoting. Per our research, no breakeven calculation or charge-out-rate derivation from practice overheads. |
| Breadth of modules | Proposals, projects, CRM, VAT-compliant invoicing, timesheets and practice economics — sharing one cost model. Xero sync, client-facing document email and Expenses land in V1.1 this summer. | Genuinely broad: timesheets, expenses, resource planning, CRM, invoicing, QA, knowledge portal — mature breadth aimed at larger, complex practices. |
| Resource & capacity planning | Timesheets feed fee usage and project profitability. No dedicated multi-project resource-scheduling module in V1. | Mature resource planning and multi-project financial consolidation — a core strength for large practices. |
| Quality & compliance workflows | Not in scope for V1 — focused on fees, projects, invoicing and cashflow. | Built-in QA, process management and competence tracking aimed at larger firms. |
| UK fit | RIBA stages, UK VAT, HMRC 6-year retention, UK statutory late-payment interest (Late Payment of Commercial Debts Act), UK GDPR, EU hosting. | Strong UK heritage and native RIBA stage mapping; integrates with Xero, Sage and Access Dimensions. Now part of Milient (Norway-backed), so UK-specific roadmap priorities may shift over time. |
| Accounting integrations | Xero-compatible VAT-period export today; native Xero sync ships in V1.1 this summer. | Established Xero, Sage and Access Dimensions integrations — an advantage if you already run those tools heavily. |
14-day free trial · cancel anytime · £179/month, ex VAT