You've ChatGPT-ed. You've Google-AI-ed. You've been on the review sites, and before you make your decision, you'll come across this article – perhaps.
If you're trying to decide between ActiveCollab and Teamwork, you've got your work cut out for you. They're both all-in-one tools for professional service businesses looking to centralize and streamline everything from client work to team collaboration and business operations.
But each one comes with its own set of perks and benefits, and that's why they won't both be the best option for two different business types. So your decision should be led by your unique needs. You'll need to know how your people work together, who your clients are, and how much complexity you need the tool to handle.
On paper, both tools look pretty similar, but in reality, they're suited to different work styles. That's why taking a closer look is what will help you make the right decision. In this blog, we give you a comparison download of the key differences so you can make a more confident decision.
What makes ActiveCollab the better pick than Teamwork in 2026
While many tools try to position themselves as the ultimate solution for multiple use cases and business types, ActiveCollab and Teamwork stay true to their core customer base.
And while both can be adapted and used across industries and business sizes, when you look at their feature set and platform setup, you'll notice they have distinct groups that their products were quite literally made for.
ActiveCollab is hard to beat if you're an agency or a small to medium-sized service business that wants an all-in-one solution.
By bringing together project management, task management, time tracking, budgeting, collaboration, and workload management into one neat, simple platform, it removes the need to have your team jump back and forth between different tools just to do their daily tasks.
Smaller businesses and startups generally work on a lean budget, so having the capabilities of multiple tools all neatly wrapped up into one operating system helps you save on costs, streamline and centralize workflows, and keep things running efficiently.
Teamwork is a tool that favors structure, granularity, and control, and that's exactly why larger businesses and enterprises are its favorite user base.
Large teams and hundreds of client portfolio accounts make daily operational tasks more complex. Teamwork's platform provides a system that can take in all that complexity and help you create some order for complicated and interconnected workflows.
It gives you the approval and proofing tools, controls, and resource planning features to manage complex projects with high precision.
So while Teamwork is super powerful and offers a comprehensive suite of features, this power also comes with a whole lot of complexity that most small and medium-sized agencies simply won't need.
ActiveCollab streamlines & simplifies, while Teamwork opts for robustness
First off, ActiveCollab is built to be simple to use, but that doesn't mean it won't deliver on efficiency and scope.
With ActiveCollab's clean interface and intuitive design:
You won't need to go through dozens of video tutorials and onboarding resources to get set up and running.
Everything from creating a project to inviting team members and clients and setting up your team's daily workload capacities will be super easy to do (even for non-techy users).
You have multiple project views (Kanban, List, and Gantt) and a simple menu that doesn't make you dig around to find what you need. From ActiveCollab's single main page menu, you can simply click back and forth from Projects to People, My Work, Invoices, Workloads, Timesheets, Calendar, and Reports to do what you need, quickly.
What ActiveCollab does really well is centralize the essentials.
You have one dashboard to navigate, and it's designed around the core functions of a service business. You're either managing project tasks, managing people (and their time), collaborating with clients, or trying to understand your team's productivity or business profitability.
Everything is connected, and you can run the entire show from one platform.
With Teamwork, it's a slightly different story.
Because it offers a wide range of advanced permissions, controls, and configurations, the platform is more overwhelming. With a dense user interface and a deeper feature set, it will generally take you more time to set up and do daily tasks.
Teamwork offers a more comprehensive suite of portfolio management features, which let you take care of advanced task dependencies, as well as create and track detailed resource utilization plans.
So it goes much deeper than primary capacity planning and workload management, which ActiveCollab lets you manage at a basic but sufficient level.
ActiveCollab is perfect for agency workflows, while Teamwork is built for larger teams with complex project needs
We've already mentioned that ActiveCollab is tailor-made for agency workflows.
In most cases, these are small and medium-sized teams that need to:
- Juggle multiple clients
- Manage tight deadlines
- Take care of shifting priorities
Agencies and service businesses need to see and manage blockers quickly. So having a birds-eye-view of your entire team's availability in real-time, continuously, is a huge plus.
ActiveCollab excels at meeting the realities of the fast-paced environments that agencies operate in. And because everything lives in one place, you can literally go from an inital client quote to campaign plan and final invoice all within one platform.
With the handy Project Progress overview, you can quickly see:
Task status (how many are in progress, awaiting action, and complete)
Where your budget is at (are you under or over)
How much time has been tracked (compare the proportion of billable and unbillable tasks)
You can even see what your profitability looks like. ActiveCollab gathers all this information and presents it to you in a super simple summary to track project health daily.
While Teamwork can reflect a similar dashboard, it's something you need to configure and isn't an out-of-the-box feature like the overview provided by ActiveCollab. However, because the tool caters to large enterprises, it offers more advanced reporting capabilities, giving you insights into key performance metrics that go deeper into resource allocation and billing.
It's important to note that ActiveCollab also lets you create customized productivity and profitability reports, but they don't provide the high-level data manipulation capabilities Teamwork offers.
So if you want to create your own dashboards that provide granular analysis, Teamwork will work well. But if you want speed, clarity, and adaptability, ActiveCollab is a tool that gives you ready-made visual dashboards that service businesses need to make decisions on the go.
ActiveCollab makes workload management easy, while Teamwork focuses on granular resource planning
One of the biggest challenges for time-poor agency owners is capacity planning and workload management.
When done right, it can see your employee utilization skyrocket, and profitability grow. But if you don't have the tools that make workload management easy and quick to do, this can drag down your entire agency operation.
The two biggest risks here are team burnout and underutilized teams that eat into profits.
ActiveCollab provides users with a simple system to manage both. You simply:
- Set each person's daily capacity
- Assign tasks
- Have your team track time
When you have that easy system in place, all you need to do is monitor the distribution of work via the Workload view in the menu.
You can do basic capacity planning and set up your team's work schedules weeks in advance.
And in case things change (someone falls ill or goes on unexpected leave), you can use the drag-and-drop feature to move tasks around to keep work on track.
The moment you see bottlenecks forming across client projects, you'll see it instantly and be able to adjust task assignments, so you keep the momentum going.
This kind of instant workload visibility and control of task allocation will help you avoid:
- Expensive timeline extensions
- Unhappy client conversations
On top of that, while both tools have native time tracking, letting you track and log time via a stopwatch timer or through manual logging, ActiveCollab integrates time logs so they flow directly through to timesheets and workloads. You can then go and create instant invoices directly from timesheet entries.
Teamwork, on the other hand, works on a more rigid system where site and project admins stay in control of viewing, logging, and approving time for others. This setup is another reason why it's more of an enterprise tool.
So if you're looking for meticulous control of time tracking and super detailed workload and capacity planning, Teamwork will do the job. But if you're after usability and transparency, you'll like ActiveCollab.
ActiveCollab prioritizes communication & collaboration, while Teamwork emphasizes controlled interaction
Another thing ActiveCollab does so much better is communication and collaboration. Whether it's staying on the same page with your team or brainstorming ideas with your clients, ActiveCollab does a stellar job of giving you multiple ways to stay connected and in sync.
For daily conversations, use the platform's existing in-app chat (this is also an option for speaking to external stakeholders or clients you've added to your People section).
To provide updates and collaborate on tasks, you can use the live @metnion comments and see a complete track record of conversions that have taken place.
If a brainstorming session is what you're after, you can create a Discussion, invite all the people you want, and when you're done, you can turn that discussion into a task for someone to own and complete.
ActiveCollab's communication features and the client collaboration and access permissions options are more aligned with agency operations.
When compared to Teamwork's client user setup, it gives you a much more straightforward and easier system.
With ActiveCollab, when you invite an external stakeholder or client to a project, you can choose to give them one of two Client roles, which offer different levels of access:
Client Role (free) – Gives your clients basic project access and visibility. They can view tasks they have been given access to, create discussions and notes, and add files or tasks via comments.
Client+ Role (paid) – Gives your clients advanced collaboration and access options. This group gets all the access of the Client Role, plus the ability to create, assign, and manage tasks.
What this kind of setup does is it allows for faster and easier communication and collaboration to take place between your team and clients. And unlike many other tool providers, ActiveCollab doesn't have any caps on the number of clients you can invite to your projects.
With Teamwork, while it also offers two types of client user roles, a key thing that needs to be mentioned is that you have a cap on the number of projects you can invite client users to, which gives them advanced access. Teamwork takes a more controlled approach, and to achieve the level of collaboration you want, there are more steps you need to go through, so it's more time-consuming.
Essentially, when you weigh up the two tools on their collaboration capabilities, you'll notice that Teamwork can make collaboration slightly more difficult because of all the admin involved with getting clients set up and selecting various permissions.
ActiveCollab vs Teamwork – Which is easier to use and scale with?
One of the main considerations when choosing a project management tool is the onboarding and ease of use.
This isn't just about comfort; it directly affects adoption, productivity, and long-term success for your entire team.
If you compare the two tools on this front, you'll quickly notice that:
ActiveCollab is easier and quicker to learn – As a result, you'll notice that new team members will start contributing faster. The intuitive, user-friendly interface means your team will need fewer training sessions and documentation, and the transition to the tool will be less stressful for everyone.
ActiveCollab can guide you to growth – If you're an agency, a startup, or a small business looking for a tool that will give you some handy features to help you understand where your growth potential lies, the reporting dashboards can help you analyze which client types and campaigns are the ones that deliver the highest profit. This also means that when the time comes to scale, you won't need to upgrade to new software.
With Teamwork, even though its capacity to scale with your business is apparent, it's a complex system that takes more time to learn. You may even need dedicated administrators to manage setups, permissions, and workflows. It's simply not a tool you can launch and run from the get-go.
When you look at price and value, which is better?
The first thing most people look at when it comes to cost is the actual price per user, so let's address this point first.
At first glance, Teamwork may seem like the more affordable option. But, if you take a closer look at what you actually get in terms of features for each plan, you'll notice there are multiple caps and limits across plans, on things like:
The number of approvals you get per month, and
Whether or not you get access to assign multiple currencies to clients for invoicing
So price alone never tells the full story. You need to look at which features provide the greatest benefits to your business and choose the tool that delivers the most value for the price you pay.
ActiveCollab generally offers more and doesn't have complicated plan structures or limits. It's much more straightforward and provides better value, particularly for agencies, because it bundles the core essentials features into a comprehensive suite.
You get project management, time tracking, communication, billing, and reporting without paying for layers of functionality you may never use.
Keep in mind that Teamwork’s pricing reflects its depth and suitability for large enterprises. And even though it's mighty powerful, it can become costly if you need to opt for higher-tier plans, especially as your team grows and needs evolve require more advanced capabilities.
ActiveCollab: Built for the Modern Agency's Way of Working
The tool you decide to go with will ultimately come down to how your business operates and how much complexity your workflows involve.
If you're running a small agency or a medium-sized service business, ActiveCollab is probably your best bet. It gives you a solid advantage with all the project management, time tracking, workload visibility, client collaboration, and billing tools you need in one single place.
Everything is interconnected, and work just flows naturally, from the moment you send out an initial quote to the minute you charge the final invoice. You don't need to be a tech whiz to understand where projects are at, how busy each team member is, or who your profitable clients are.
The clarity is just built right into the tool.
However, for larger organizations with super complex portfolios, Teamwork is probably a better choice. It's got all the fine-grained permission settings, advanced resource planning, and deep reporting you need to coordinate hundreds of people and those long approval processes. But it also comes with a steeper learning curve and a more demanding setup and onboarding.
But since most agencies don't need enterprise-grade levels of complexity that Teamwork offers, chances are ActiveCollab will be a better fit. If you prefer an easy-to-use system with handy collaboration, project progress, and workload visibility features that let you adapt your approach on the fly when our priorities change, it's a tool that will hit the spot.
To get a thorough walkthrough of the platform, book a demo with one of our people, or sign up for our 14-day free trial.