Project Management Software for Agencies
Agencies have three requirements almost no pricing page addresses clearly - client access, seat churn and billable time. Those decide this, not features.
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On this page
Agencies get sold the same project management software as everyone else, and then discover that the three things which actually decide the bill are the three things pricing pages are vaguest about.
- What a client user costs.
- What happens when your headcount moves up and down with the pipeline.
- Whether time recorded against work is billable time or a separate exercise.
Everything below is organised around those, because an agency that gets them right can live with almost any feature set, and an agency that gets them wrong will be unhappy with the best product on the market.
Why per-seat pricing fits agencies badly
Most project tools charge per user per month. That model assumes a stable team, which is precisely what an agency does not have.
You bring in a contractor for six weeks. You add a client's marketing manager so she can see the schedule. A project ends and three freelancers stop. Under per-seat pricing every one of those is a billing event, and the predictable result is that people get left out of the tool to avoid the cost — which quietly recreates the problem you bought it to solve.
Wrike makes the sharpest version of this visible in its own terms: subscriptions are sold in groups of five up to 30 seats. An agency oscillating between six and nine people pays for ten all year.
Asana is gentler but the same shape — seats are added one at a time up to 5 users, then in blocks of five up to 30. Below thirty people that is manageable; the point is that the bill steps rather than tracks your actual usage.
Basecamp — the flat-fee answer
Basecamp keeps turning up in agencies for one structural reason: it does not count people. Its pricing page puts it plainly — "No per-user fees, everyone's included."
| Plan | Price | Active projects | Users |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freelancer | $25/mo | 3 | Up to 20 |
| Studio | $59/mo | 10 | Unlimited |
| Pro | $99/mo | 25 | Unlimited |
| Unlimited | $299/mo billed annually | Unlimited | Unlimited |
What Basecamp counts instead is active projects, which for an agency is the number to model carefully. Three on Freelancer is genuinely restrictive. Ten on Studio suits a small agency running a handful of engagements; twenty-five on Pro suits most.
The trade is real and worth stating honestly. Basecamp deliberately does not do dependencies, critical paths or resource levelling. If your delivery genuinely needs a schedule where moving one date moves six others, Basecamp will frustrate you and you should buy Asana instead. If what you actually need is for everyone — staff, contractors, clients — to see what is happening and where the files are, its restraint is the feature.
Storage is 5GB on Freelancer, 25GB on Studio, 100GB on Pro. For an agency handling video that is the constraint to check, not the user count.
Teamwork.com — built around billable client work
Teamwork.com is the one on this page designed for agencies specifically rather than adapted to them. Basics is $9.99 a user a month billed yearly and Accelerate $24.99, with a free plan for 5 users and 5 projects and a 14-day trial with no card required.
Its pricing page references collaborating with third-party users and inviting client users into projects, but does not state whether that carries a cost. That is the question to put to their sales team with your real client count before you commit, and it is a reasonable proxy for how any vendor will treat you: a clear answer in writing is a good sign, a vague one is not.
The reason to look here rather than at a general tool is time. If you bill hourly or run retainers, having time recorded against the same task the work lives in is worth more than any feature comparison, because the alternative is a Friday afternoon of reconstruction that is always slightly wrong and always in the client's favour or yours, never neither.
Asana and monday.com — when delivery is genuinely complex
Asana Starter is $10.99 a user a month billed annually ($13.49 monthly), Advanced $24.99 ($30.49 monthly). monday.com is $9 a seat on Basic, $12 on Standard and $19 on Pro billed annually.
Both are the right answer for an agency whose problem is sequencing rather than client communication — production schedules, launches with hard dates, work where five people are waiting on one deliverable. Neither is cheap once you are past ten people, and neither is designed around clients logging in.
Two agency-specific cautions. On monday.com, dependencies and timeline views sit above the Basic tier, so the $9 figure is rarely the one you end up paying — price Standard. And on both, decide deliberately whether clients get access at all; many agencies are better off keeping delivery internal and sending a deliberate weekly summary than giving a client a live view of every slipped date.
Trello and ClickUp — the budget positions
Trello free covers up to 10 collaborators per Workspace with 10 boards, and Standard is $5 a user a month annually. For an agency whose work is genuinely a queue — a content studio, a support-and-maintenance retainer — this is a serious answer at a fraction of the price. One board per client hits the ten-board free limit fast, so budget for Standard.
ClickUp is $7 a user a month annually on Unlimited, $12 on Business, with a free tier advertising unlimited members but 60MB of storage. It has the most capability per dollar here and the most configuration to own. In an agency that means one thing: someone has to be responsible for how it is set up, or it becomes five people's five different systems.
The four questions to ask before you sign
Whatever you shortlist, get written answers to these. They cost nothing to ask and they are where agency budgets go wrong.
1. What does a client user cost, at our numbers? Not "are guests free" — give them your real client count and ask for the invoice.
2. What happens when we remove a seat mid-term? Some vendors refund or credit, some hold you to the annual commitment. With contractor churn this is a recurring cost, not a one-off.
3. Which tier are the features we assumed were standard? Dependencies, timeline views, time tracking, guest permissions and reporting are the usual ones sitting above the entry plan.
4. What does an export contain? Tasks and comments usually travel. Attachments, time entries and the record of who changed what and when frequently do not — and for an agency that history is sometimes the evidence in a billing dispute.
That question has its own section on this site, scored against the vendors' own documentation. The relevant ones here are Wrike, whose all-plans export drops descriptions, attachments and comments; Teamwork.com, whose full backup is a MySQL database file; monday.com, which leaves archived boards behind; and Jira Cloud, which stops at 10,000 work items per export.
Choosing
- Client communication is the problem, headcount moves: Basecamp Studio, $59 a month flat.
- You bill hourly: Teamwork.com, with the client-seat question settled in writing first.
- Delivery has hard dependencies: Asana Starter, or monday.com Standard.
- Work is a queue and budget is tight: Trello Standard at $5 a seat.
- You want maximum capability and have someone to own it: ClickUp.
If you are still deciding between the two market leaders, that is covered in Asana vs monday.com. If you are leaving Asana over price or complexity, the options are in Asana alternatives. And before any of it, the numbers that do not appear on a pricing page are in what project management software actually costs.
Questions people ask
What is the best project management software for an agency?
Basecamp if your pain is client communication and a headcount that moves - it is a flat monthly fee with no per-user charge, $59 a month on Studio for unlimited users. Teamwork.com if you bill hourly and need time attached to client projects. Asana or monday.com if your delivery work has genuine dependencies and your client contact happens over email anyway.
Do clients need a paid seat?
It depends entirely on the product and it is frequently unclear on the pricing page. Some treat external people as free guests with restricted access, some count them as seats, and some allow them only above a certain tier. Ask the vendor directly with your real numbers before you sign - for an agency with twenty clients this is the difference between a small bill and a large one.
Is flat pricing better than per-seat for an agency?
Usually, past roughly eight people. Agencies have a headcount that moves with the pipeline - contractors on for a project, off after it - and per-seat pricing turns every one of those into an administrative decision. Basecamp Studio at $59 a month flat is cheaper than five seats of Asana Starter and stays the same price at twenty people.
Should an agency use one tool for internal work and clients?
One tool if you can, because the alternative is copying status between two places and one of them will be wrong. The realistic exception is when your clients will not log in to anything, in which case use the tool for delivery and accept that the client-facing summary is a separate, deliberate piece of work.
Do we need time tracking in the project tool?
If you bill hourly or run retainers, yes - time entered somewhere other than where the work is recorded is time that gets reconstructed on a Friday from memory. If you bill fixed price and only want to know whether jobs are profitable, a separate tracker is fine and often better.
Where this information comes from
Product details change often. Each item below links to the primary source we checked, so you can confirm anything that matters to your decision.
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