Best project management software for agencies and creative studios in 2026

Start with the part of agency work your current setup misses. Teamwork.com and Breeze combine client projects with time tracking; Productive and Scoro add deeper billing and financial reporting. For a creative studio, also decide where file annotation and approval will happen. A task board can track a review round without replacing a proofing tool.

The comparison below is written for agencies that run several client accounts at once with one shared team: marketing, digital, web, branding and design shops.

Disclosure: We make Breeze, which is one of the tools below. Prices come from each vendor's own pricing page and help centre, and the review summaries come from the linked G2 and Capterra listings. Where another tool fits an agency better, we say so.

What does an agency need from project management software?

An agency needs a tool that keeps several clients apart, lets each client see and comment on their own work, and shows where the team's hours are going per account. Most tools can hold tasks. The difference shows up in six places, and they are the criteria used throughout the comparison:

• Client access and what it costs: whether a client can log in, comment and upload files on their own project only, and whether each client contact costs a seat. On a tool that bills clients as users, ten client contacts can cost more than the team.
• Request-to-task handoff: how a brief, an email or a form submission turns into a task in the right project without someone retyping it.
• Ownership: one named owner and a due date on every deliverable, visible to the account manager without a status meeting.
• Review comments: where client feedback lands, whether internal discussion can stay hidden from the client, and whether rounds of changes are easy to follow.
• Deadline visibility across clients: a view of who is doing what this week across every account, because the same designer usually works for four clients.
• Time reporting: hours per client, per project and per person, split into billable and non-billable, so a retainer that is quietly losing money shows up before the month ends.

Notice what is not on that list: invoicing, rate cards, CRM and resource forecasting. Those matter to some agencies a great deal, and they are the line between a project tool and a PSA (professional services automation). If the money side already runs smoothly in your accounting software, you are buying the six things above. If re-keying timesheets into invoices has become somebody's job, the PSA tools in the list are worth their setup.

How much does it cost to let clients in?

Client access can be free, cheap or a seat per contact, and it changes the real price of an agency tool more than the headline rate does. For a ten-person agency paying annually where the vendor offers it, here is the monthly bill on a plan that suits client work, and what each client login costs on top:

Tool and plan	Monthly cost for 10 people	What client access costs
ClickUp Unlimited	$70	23 guest seats for a 10-user team, plus unlimited view-only guests
Breeze	$90	client users free and unlimited
Basecamp Pro	$99 flat, billed monthly	clients count as users, but Pro has no user limit
Teamwork.com Basics	$99.90	free client licenses, documented for Deliver, Grow and Scale
Productive Essential	$100	clients free
Wrike Team	$100	external users need a paid seat; viewers are free
monday.com Pro	$190, plus AI credits on new accounts	unlimited guests on Pro; Standard bills every 4 guests as 1 seat
Asana Advanced	$249.90	unlimited free guests on paid plans
Scoro Quote to Cash	$290 at the listed rate	client portal is a paid add-on

The table cannot show whether the plan does what you need. ClickUp caps how often you can mark time billable below its top plans, Wrike's time tracking starts on Business, Asana keeps time tracking for Advanced, and monday.com's time tracking column is on Pro and Enterprise only. Prices and limits for each tool are in its entry further down.

How should an agency run one client engagement from request to sign-off?

Give each client engagement its own project, turn every incoming request into a task with an owner and a date, keep client feedback on the task, and log time where the work happens. The walkthrough below uses Breeze as the example because we can show it with real screens, but the same shape works in most tools above.

The illustrative case: an eight-person agency running a website redesign for a client, alongside two monthly content retainers for other clients. A project lead, two designers, a developer, a copywriter and an account manager share the work, and the redesign's client contact wants to see progress without weekly calls.

One project per client engagement

Create a project for the redesign and give it lists that match how the work really moves: Requests, In progress, Internal review, Client review, Changes and Done. Statuses can be renamed and added by an admin, so a "Waiting on client" status is a two-minute job and makes stalled work obvious on the board. The two retainers get projects of their own, and once one project is set up the way you like, any project can become a template for the next client.

Turn requests into tasks without retyping them

Client requests arrive by email, so the handoff matters. Every person has a unique email address for each project, and forwarding an email to it creates a task: the subject becomes the task name, the body becomes the description and attachments come along. A line such as @assign or @duedate in the email sets the owner and the date on the way in. For the retainers, where requests repeat, a project form works better. The client fills it in from a public link and each submission lands as a task in the list you chose, with the answers in the description.

Owners and dates the whole team can see

Each deliverable gets an owner, or several people when the copywriter and designer share it, and a due date. The account manager checks the board for the redesign, and the "Tasks due by users" report or the team workload calendar for everything else. The workload view lays every person's assigned tasks out on a timeline across all projects, which is where you spot the designer who is booked on the redesign and both retainers in the same week.

Client review on the task, internal talk out of sight

Invite the client's contact as a client user. Clients see only the projects they are invited to, can comment on tasks and upload files in comments, and can optionally be allowed to move tasks. Client users are free, so inviting the client's marketing lead and their boss costs nothing. When the homepage design is ready, the designer attaches it to the task and moves it to Client review. The feedback arrives as comments on the same task, next to the file, and the designer works through it there.

Internal discussion, such as the project lead's notes on how far the client's changes stretch the scope, can be hidden from clients task by task or comment by comment. For a stakeholder who will not log in at all, a task can be shared with a public link, and commenting can be switched on: the person enters an email address and gets a unique link to comment. That is a review conversation, not a proofing tool, and the section on creative work below covers when a studio needs more.

Hours per client, checked before the month closes

Everyone starts the timer on the task they are working on, or types the time in afterwards. Time spent on the agency's own pitch deck or an internal review gets marked non-billable with the dollar icon, so the billable figure stays honest. Set a project budget in hours and an hourly rate on the redesign, and the project overview shows how much of it has gone.

For the retainers, the check is a monthly habit. Run the time tracking report for the month, grouped by project, and you see whether the content retainer that pays for 30 hours has quietly absorbed 44. Grouped by user, the same report shows whose time went where. Share it with the client as a public report if you want: it runs with client permissions, so hidden tasks and comments stay hidden.

The hours export to CSV for your accountant or invoicing tool.

Which tools are worth a trial for agency work?

Each entry below gives the plan an agency would actually buy, what clients cost on it, and where it stops fitting.

Teamwork.com

• Pricing: Free for up to 5 users. Basics is $9.99 per user per month billed yearly or $13.99 monthly, with a 3-user minimum. Accelerate is $24.99 billed yearly or $29.99 monthly, with a 5-user minimum. Optimize and Enterprise are quote-based. Teamwork AI is included on paid plans for an introductory period, and the pricing page says usage-based AI credits launch in November 2026 without publishing a rate. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.5/5 on Capterra from 941 reviews, 4.4/5 on G2 from 1,214 reviews.

Teamwork.com is the general project tool most clearly built around client work, and it is the first one to trial if you run a service agency of ten to fifty people. Projects can be organised by client, and billable and non-billable time is tracked and reported from Basics. Teamwork's client-user documentation describes a free client license, available on Deliver, Grow and Scale, that lets a client user be added to up to five of their company's projects. Proofs for approving files are included too, with a monthly cap on the lower plans and no cap from Accelerate.

The money side is where the plans split. Accelerate adds time budgets and retainers and builds client invoices from logged time, and Optimize adds financial budgets with revenue, cost and profitability. That ladder suits an agency that expects to grow into retainer tracking. A small studio pays for the 3-seat floor on Basics and may never need the rest.

Where Teamwork.com isn't the right fit: Two- or three-person studios, agencies that want retainers and invoicing on the entry plan, and teams that would rather not learn a tool with this much in it.

What reviewers say about Teamwork.com

The agency reviews we read on Capterra and G2 describe concrete billing and delivery workflows. They describe logging time against tasks consistently and using budgets, workload and profitability day to day rather than as extras. The longer reviews also warn that all that depth takes onboarding, and that the mobile app trails the desktop. For an agency choosing a plan, the useful question is whether that extra financial detail justifies the setup.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Productive

• Pricing: Essential is $10 per user per month billed yearly or $12 monthly. Professional is $25 billed yearly or $29 monthly. Ultimate is priced after a demo. Every plan needs at least 3 seats. Clients are free, while employees and contractors who use it take paid seats. 14-day free trial, no card required. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.6/5 on Capterra from 109 reviews, 4.6/5 on G2 from 76 reviews.

Productive (productive.io) is the agency PSA in this list that a small or mid-sized agency can buy without an enterprise sales process. Every client engagement gets a budget, including retainer budgets, and the time logged against it burns it down in hours and money. The overview in the screenshot shows budgeted time, budget used and what is still to invoice, and invoices are drafted from a budget's unbilled time and expenses. Comments can be hidden from clients.

Productive needs budgets, services and rates set up before the first project runs, and that setup takes time. For an agency that bills hourly or by retainer, it is the structure the billing needs anyway. Rate cards, billable time approvals and accounting integrations sit on Professional, so the real price for that kind of agency is closer to $25 a seat than $10.

Where Productive isn't the right fit: Agencies whose invoices already come cleanly out of accounting software, two-person studios paying the 3-seat minimum, and anyone hoping to be running within an afternoon.

What reviewers say about Productive

In the Capterra and G2 reviews we read, most describe Productive as the system that finally replaced a stack of separate tools, from Harvest and Forecast to Asana, and several say it was the first time they could see which clients were profitable. Support gets unusually warm praise. The recurring cost is setup: onboarding takes days or weeks, and reporting that combines sources can feel clunky. Both samples are small, and some complaints date from 2021.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Breeze

• Pricing: $9 per user per month billed yearly, or $10 billed monthly, with every feature included. Client users are free and unlimited. A single-user Solo plan is $14 a month. 14-day free trial, no card required. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.4/5 on Capterra from 45 reviews, 4.1/5 on G2 from 22 reviews.

Breeze is the option for an agency of roughly three to twenty people that wants client access, task ownership and time tracking working on day one, without designing a system first. The walkthrough above shows one engagement end to end.

Because there is one plan, a ten-person agency pays $90 a month on yearly billing with time tracking included and every client contact free, which puts it near the bottom of the cost table.

Where Breeze isn't the right fit: Breeze does not do invoicing, rate cards per role, retainer burn-down, resource forecasting or proofing with annotations on the file. An agency that invoices from timesheets or plans utilisation across a large team should start with Productive, Scoro or Teamwork.com, and a design studio running formal review rounds will want a proofing tool alongside it.

What reviewers say about Breeze

This is our own listing, so weigh it accordingly. Of the Capterra and G2 reviews we read, most say Breeze is quick to pick up, clients included, and several use the built-in time tracking every day, one agency to judge campaign profitability. The pushback is about depth: larger projects outgrow it, and people ask for better team-wide reporting and timelines. Both samples are small, and much of the Capterra set dates from May 2024.

Sources: Capterra, G2

monday.com

• Pricing: Free for up to 2 seats. Basic is $9 per seat per month billed annually or $12 monthly, Standard $12 or $14, and Pro $19 or $24. Enterprise is quote-based. Paid plans start at 3 seats and are sold in seat buckets, so a team of six pays for ten. Accounts created on or after May 6, 2026 must also buy a monthly AI credit bundle with their seats. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.6/5 on Capterra from 6,116 reviews, 4.7/5 on G2 from 17,221 reviews.

monday.com suits an agency that runs on visible status. Boards are colourful and readable, a client can follow a board without training, and automations take over the reminders and handoffs between account, design and development. For agencies with many similar jobs, such as a social retainer that produces the same deliverables every month, templates and automations save real time.

The plan that fits agency work is Pro, because time tracking and unlimited guests both start there. Add the seat buckets and the AI credit bundle for new accounts, and a ten-person agency pays about twice what Breeze or Teamwork.com Basics cost.

Where monday.com isn't the right fit: Small agencies between seat buckets, teams that want hours against a retainer without building it from columns, and anyone put off by AI credits sold alongside seats. Our monday.com alternatives cover the lighter options.

What reviewers say about monday.com

Among the Capterra and G2 reviews we went through, few disagree about what monday.com does well: colour-coded boards that non-technical staff read at a glance, and automations that take over follow-ups. Price is the most common complaint, because seats come in blocks and the useful features sit in higher tiers, followed by the time it takes to set up complex boards. Both listings now cover the wider platform, so a few reviews are about monday CRM.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Scoro

• Pricing: Sold as combinations of eight apps. Time-billing is $17 per user per month, Projects & Resources and Quote to Cash are $29, and End-to-end is $57. Scoro says annual billing takes 13 to 17 percent off, depending on currency and combination. Minimum 5 users. A client portal is a paid add-on. 14-day free trial, no card required. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.5/5 on Capterra from 263 reviews, 4.5/5 on G2 from 503 reviews.

Scoro is built around the path from a quote to an invoice. A quote becomes a project with a budget, time and costs are logged against it, and the invoice is drafted from what was delivered, while dashboards show how the whole agency is doing rather than one project. The shared calendar and planner, used to book people and avoid double-booking, are a reason agencies with a busy studio choose it.

For an agency the usual combination is Quote to Cash, or End-to-end if you also want the sales pipeline in the same system. The five-user minimum and the per-app model make it a better fit from about fifteen people up.

Where Scoro isn't the right fit: Agencies under five people, teams whose problem is coordinating tasks rather than money, and anyone who wants clients in the tool without paying for the portal add-on.

What reviewers say about Scoro

In the reviews we read, those who moved from BigTime, Accelo or Bitrix24 describe the quote-to-invoice chain as the reason to stay, and several value seeing how the business performs rather than a single project. The common warning is weight: too many views and metrics at first, and task creation that feels clunky next to Asana. Two very negative Capterra reviews describe support and notice-period problems. Some reviews are older, so check whether the current workflow addresses the issue that matters to you.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Wrike

• Pricing: Free for unlimited users. Team is $10 per user per month for 2 to 15 users, and Business is $25 per user per month for 5 to 200 users. Prices are shown per month on annual billing, and Business and above are annual only. Pinnacle and Apex are quote-based. External users need a paid seat, contributors take a reduced-rate seat, and viewers are free. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.4/5 on Capterra from 3,040 reviews, 4.2/5 on G2 from 4,537 reviews.

Wrike suits agencies and in-house creative teams that handle a high volume of different request types. Dynamic request forms with conditional logic route a brief to the right team, custom item types and workflows let a video job and a banner job follow different steps, and resource management balances workloads across a large studio. Wrike markets a dedicated creative and design solution for exactly this.

Model the licensing before trialling. A client who needs to do more than look takes a full paid seat. Wrike's plan comparison puts time tracking and timesheets on Business and above, and budgeting on Pinnacle and Apex, so an agency that logs hours against clients is comparing the $25 Business seat, not Team.

Where Wrike isn't the right fit: Agencies under about ten people, where the setup does not pay back. See our Wrike alternatives for lighter tools.

What reviewers say about Wrike

In the Wrike reviews we sampled, what people like is also what they warn about. Most on Capterra and G2 praise custom item types, request forms and dashboards that let very different teams share one account, and the Gantt view is named often. Roughly half the Capterra sample describes a steep start, noisy default notifications and features locked to upper tiers. Reviewers often frame it as a mid-size to enterprise tool.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Asana

• Pricing: Personal is free for up to 2 users. Starter is $10.99 per user per month billed annually or $13.49 monthly. Advanced is $24.99 annually or $30.49 monthly. Enterprise is quote-based. Paid plans include unlimited free guests. Every paid plan includes AI Teammates and Asana Dash with 5 requests per user per month, up to 50 per account, and extra requests cost $0.50 prepaid or $0.60 on demand. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.5/5 on Capterra from 13,699 reviews, 4.4/5 on G2 from 13,979 reviews.

Asana is the strongest general tool here for planning the work itself. Dependencies tie the launch date to the client's content delivery, the timeline shows the knock-on effect when that delivery slips, and forms turn client requests into structured tasks. Free guests on every paid plan make it cheap to bring clients in, and proofing and approvals arrive on Advanced. Asana also now sells Asana Client Management, aimed at agencies and listed as available on Starter and Advanced, without a separate price published.

Hours are where the price climbs. Native time tracking sits on Advanced at $24.99 a seat, and the Timesheets and Budgets add-on is available only on Enterprise. An agency that wants hours against a retainer ends up on Advanced with a separate tracker, or on an Enterprise contract.

Where Asana isn't the right fit: Agencies that want hours, budgets and retainers without Enterprise, and teams unwilling to spend time tuning notifications. Our list of Asana alternatives goes wider.

What reviewers say about Asana

Across the reviews we read on both sites, the same win comes up: work leaves email and spreadsheets, and everyone can see who owns what and when it is due. Dependencies and timeline planning come up as standouts. Complaints concentrate on plan gating, with portfolios, reporting and the better AI on higher tiers, plus a learning curve for admins and notification overload until it is tuned. A few object to AI being pushed into the product.

Sources: Capterra, G2

ClickUp

• Pricing: Free Forever plan. Unlimited is $7 per user per month billed yearly or $10 monthly. Business is $12 billed yearly or $19 monthly. Enterprise is quote-based. Unlimited includes 5 guest seats plus 2 for each additional paid user, Business 10 plus 5 per user, and view-only guests are unlimited. AI is a separate per-user subscription: Brain AI at $9 billed yearly ($14 monthly) or Everything AI at $28 ($33 monthly). Plan details.
• Rating: 4.6/5 on Capterra from 4,631 reviews, 4.6/5 on G2 from 14,333 reviews.

ClickUp is the most configurable tool in this list, and it works well for an agency that has someone who enjoys building systems. Clients become spaces, engagements become folders, and the same work can be a board for designers and a Gantt chart for the account manager. Forms handle intake, and proofing on images and PDFs is unlimited on Business.

Watch the time tracking limits. Logging time is available from Unlimited, but ClickUp's help centre treats marking entries billable, adding descriptions and working from timesheets as advanced time tracking, capped by plan below the top tiers.

Where ClickUp isn't the right fit: Agencies without someone to own the setup, and teams that want a tool that works on day one. If that sounds familiar, our ClickUp alternatives are simpler.

What reviewers say about ClickUp

The ClickUp reviews we read are enthusiastic about building the system around their own process: custom statuses, fields and views, with several replacing Trello, Asana or Basecamp entirely. The flip side runs just as consistently through Capterra and G2. New users find it overwhelming, screens feel crowded, and large workspaces lag or freeze. Expect the experience to depend heavily on how well someone sets it up.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Basecamp

• Pricing: Free for one project and up to 5 users. Freelancer is $25 per month for up to 3 active projects and 20 users. Studio is $59 per month for up to 10 active projects with unlimited users. Pro is $99 per month for up to 25 active projects and adds time tracking. Unlimited is $299 per month billed annually. Every person you add counts as a user, clients included, but Studio and above have no user limit. 30-day free trial, 45 days on Unlimited. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.4/5 on Capterra from 14,448 reviews, 4.1/5 on G2 from 5,488 reviews.

Basecamp suits agencies that want client messages, files and tasks together. Each project has a message board, to-dos, a schedule, files and chat, so the client conversation and the list of what is due sit side by side, and clients quickly learn where to look.

The limits are about projects and planning. Pricing is set by active projects, so an agency with thirty live jobs is on Unlimited. Pro adds time tracking, but there are no estimates or budgets to compare those hours with, no Gantt chart and no dependencies.

Where Basecamp isn't the right fit: Agencies that need hours against a retainer, dependencies or resource planning, and agencies running more than ten live projects on a small budget. Our Basecamp alternatives list the tools that go further.

What reviewers say about Basecamp

Judging by the reviews we read, agencies on Capterra and G2 single out how quickly clients learn where to comment and find files, and many reviewers like the flat price and the calm, everything-in-one-project layout. The dominant criticism is that it is too basic for complex work, with no Gantt chart, dependencies or resource planning. G2 scores it noticeably lower than Capterra does, and some reviews predate Basecamp 5.

Sources: Capterra, G2

If you work alone, the freelancer comparison fits better. If your firm sells discrete engagements rather than ongoing accounts, the consultants' shortlist weighs fixed-fee budgets more heavily. And if you are an in-house marketing team running campaigns for one brand, the marketing team tools are the closer match.

What changes when the agency does creative or design work?

Creative and design agencies need everything above plus a way to handle work that goes round a loop. A design deliverable is not a task completed once; it is an artefact that goes to round two, round three and sometimes round six, with feedback from people outside the team. That is where generic project tools most often disappoint, and the fix is usually a clearer division of labour rather than a bigger tool.

Three things separate a setup that handles design work from one that merely holds it:

• Revisions are versions, not comments: Round three needs to be findable next to rounds one and two. Where a tool keeps only the latest file with a comment thread attached, the history of what changed lives in people's memory.
• Feedback lands on the artefact: Notes attached to the file beat notes attached to the task, which beat notes in chat. Every step away from the artefact adds a translation, and translations are where amends get missed.
• Approval is a state, not an opinion: Approved needs to be something the work is, visible to everyone, and not a line buried in an email from the client.

For many studios, a project tool tracks the rounds, the owners and the deadlines, while a dedicated review tool such as Filestage, Ziflow or Frame.io handles annotation on the artefact. Some tools in the list close part of that gap: Teamwork.com includes Proofs, ClickUp has proofing on images and PDFs on Business, and Asana has proofing and approvals on Advanced. None of them makes a specialist proofing tool redundant for a studio doing heavy video or print work.

What a project tool should give you is the loop count and the blocking state. A "Client review" list and a "Waiting on client" status in Breeze, or the equivalent elsewhere, show at a glance that the brand guidelines are on round four and waiting on the client, not merely open. Name rounds in the task title or a custom field (R1, R2, R3) so the history stays readable, and keep each round's files and feedback in the same task.

Should you trial with one real client project?

Yes. A demo project tells you very little about an agency tool, because the hard parts only show up with a real client: how the first request arrives, whether the client actually comments where you asked, and whether the hours at the end of the month mean anything. Pick the two or three tools from the comparison that match your size and billing model, and run the same live project in each for two weeks. For rates, retainers and margin per client, start with Productive or Scoro, then compare the financial features in Teamwork.com.

In Breeze, that test takes an afternoon: set up one current client project as in the walkthrough above, invite the client's contact and log time from the first task. After a week you will know whether the client used it, and whether the hours tell you something you did not know before.

If the work is visual, add a proofing tool to the test. For a closer look at the day-to-day side, the article on managing client projects covers the habits that make any of these tools work.