Agencies run on systems and operating procedures. Systems are your software tools, and procedures are your processes. They work together to deliver optimal results so you can grow and scale your business.
If either of those two is ineffective, it will directly affect your business’s bottom line. And it all starts (or breaks) with the tool you use to run your marketing agency workflows: your project management tool.
When you’re on the lookout for agency project management software, you don’t want to settle for a good enough tool, you want the best tool you can get their hands on. So we’re sharing our shortlist of seven of the top marketing agency project management tools on the market from big and small vendors.| Platform | Best For | Price |
|---|---|---|
| ActiveCollab | Agencies & Consultancies with 15-50 employees | $ |
| Trello | Freelancers and small agencies | $$ |
| Plutio | Agencies up to 10 people | $$ |
| Productive | Agencies 50-100 employees | $$$ |
| Avaza | Freelancers & agencies up to 20 people | $$ |
| Ruddr | Agencies up to 10 people | $$$$ |
| Notion | Enterprise | $$$$ |
1. ActiveCollab
ActiveCollab is an end-to-end marketing agency and project management platform that helps you find your perfect balance and match your resources to project needs and client work output. It lets you run a profitable agency by optimizing your entire business operation.
Who Is ActiveCollab For?
If you’re an agency of 15 or more people and need a project management software that will help you scale your business without losing touch with your people and dropping the quality of work output, ActiveCollab is truly a logical solution – we made it for that particular scenario!
ActiveCollab’s Top Features
Project management – Regardless of methodlogy and style, your can run your project management campaigns anyhow you want. Kanban boards, list views, Gantt charts, task dependencies, labels... you name it, we got it!
Client management – All your clients in one place. Work closely with each and every one of them, but also have an ultimate bird's view.
Time tracking & tasks – Get detailed insights into time records with our time-tracking feature. Add estimates and time logs you can hide from clients, use the stopwatch to log time spent on tasks, and add expenses to individual tasks.
Project budgeting & profitability – Understand the health of your agency business – set a project budget, track spending as the project progresses, and mark tasks as billable or unbillable.
Resourcing & planning – Set and view team availability and leave days to assign work based on capacity. People and resource feature lets you make accurate estimates for future project pricing, resource allocations and budges.
What Users Are Saying About ActiveCollab
The common theme amongst users is that our platform is easy to learn and use, but some of the other things that stand out include:
Pros
- Robust without being overwhelming – The tool is super intuitive and easy to navigate for agency teams and clients.
- Consolidation without a high price – You have one centralized tool for all your project and client exchanges, so there’s no context switching or misalignment.
Client & team communication – You can communicate via in-app chat or comments and mentions directly within tasks. Set permissions and keep all collaboration in one place.
With over 600 reviews, here's how we're rated:
| Review Platform | Rating |
|---|---|
| Product Hunt | 4.9 |
| Capterra | 4.5 |
| G2 | 4.2 |
Pricing
We don't have a free plan, but you can always sign up for our 14-day free trial or book a demo and let us show you around! For our pricing, you can refer to pricing page!
2. Trello
Trello is a colourful and uncomplicated project and work management tool that lets teams organise their work into lists and track progress to finish.
Who is Trello Best For?
As a beginner-friendly tool, Trello is designed to meet the needs of small marketing teams, but it’s not ideal if you want to scale your business. For marketing and advertising agencies, it helps organize campaigns and creative projects and plan content calendars.
Trello’s Top Features
Butler automation – The Butler feature lets you create custom rules, buttons, and commands to automate repetitive tasks like assigning due dates and moving cards from one list to another.
Drag-and-drop management – The drag-and-drop feature makes it quick and easy to move tasks around.
What Users Are Saying About Trello
While smaller businesses seem relatively happy with it, larger agencies may find it limiting. Some of the pros and cons of Trello are:
Pros
- 200+ Integrations – Even though Trello doesn’t have all the features that more comprehensive project management tools have, it does integrate with over 200 apps like Slack, Google Drive, and time-tracking apps.
- Choose a template – If you don’t want to build your own board, you can use a pre-built template and customize it to your agency’s workflows.
Cons
- Limited PM features & customization – In terms of project management, it offers a limited number of features and customizations. It’s not a good fit if you need subtasks and have complex projects with dependent task relationships.
- Lacks financials – If you want to track project budget and spending, you won’t get that with Trello. This is strictly a task management and collaboration tool.
With over 35,000 reviews here's how users rated Trello:
| Review Platform | Rating |
|---|---|
| Capterra | 4.5 |
| G2 | 4.4 |
Pricing
Trello offers a free plan for up to 10 collaborators and paid plans with more advanced features starting from $6 per person per month.
3. Plutio
Plutio is an all-in-one business management tool with project management, customer relationship management, and invoicing, amongst other features.
Who Is Plutio Best For?
With a Forbes badge for essential tools for micro businesses, Plutio is ideal for freelancers and small boutique agency marketing teams.
Plutio’s Top Features
- Plutio scheduler – You can use the scheduler to book meetings and appointments with clients and connect and sync it to your calendars.
- Contracts & agreements – A perk of the tool is the contracts and agreements feature, which lets you create and send documents and also allows your clients to sign legally binding contracts online.
What Users Are Saying About Plutio
There's a mixed sentiment from Plutio’s users. The main pros and cons seem to be:
Pros
- Customization options – You can use templates or create your own professional documents with customized fields aligned to your brand. Integrate them into projects so everything is linked, from proposal to invoice.
- Projects, forms & surveys – Alongside your standard project management features, you can create custom fields for URLs and ratings. You can use one of the project templates or create your own. A unique feature of the tool is the ability to create forms, polls, and surveys for your projects.
Cons
- Limited integrations – Some users express the need for more integrations as the tool does have limited functionality with some features like CRM.
- Customer support – Recent reviews call out the unresponsive customer support.
With over 200 revies, here's how users rated Plutio:
| Review Platform | Rating |
|---|---|
| Capterra | 4.6 |
| G2 | 4.3 |
Pricing
Plans start at $19 for solopreneurs or freelancers, where you can invite up to three clients, or $39 per month for up to 10 contributors. Plutio does offer a free trial; no credit card is needed, but they don’t disclose the length of the trial.
4. Productive
Productive is a project, resource, and finance management tool with an integrated sales pipeline and agencies and professional services businesses.
Who is Productive Best For?
The platform is a good fit for small to medium-sized agencies of up to 50 people. Because it comes with a mix of features you need to run agency operations, it might be a good choice if you’re looking to consolidate your software tools.
Productive’s Top Features
CRM – If you need a project management tool that comes with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capability, you get that with Productive.Productive AI – Summarize tasks and activities, autofill expense forms, and get help writing project plans and content.
What Users Are Saying About Productive
While it does come with a comprehensive set of features, it also comes with some setbacks.
Pros
- Project finance – It’s got a good set of features to track and manage project financials like expenses and profitability.
- Customer support – Most users call out the prompt customer support they receive when running into issues.
Cons
- Learning curve – While it is a relatively comprehensive project management tool, many users report a steep learning curve with limited onboarding support, which makes it overwhelming.
- Unintuitive time tracking & billing – To set up and use time tracking and internal billing features it seems much harder than it should be.
With over 150 reviews, here's how users rated Productive:
| Review Platform | Rating |
|---|---|
| Capterra | 4.6 |
| G2 | 4.6 |
Pricing
Plans start at $11 per person per month for teams of up to 10. They also offer a 14-day free trial.
5. Avaza
Avaza is a project and work management tool for client-facing businesses that want a simple integrated solution to manage their clients and projects.
Who Is Avaza For?
This tool seems to be best for small and medium-sized agencies across consulting, marketing, legal, construction, and IT sectors. Its low-tier plans are a good fit for freelancers and startups.
Avaza’s Top Features
Project management – You can create projects, turn them into templates, add and assign tasks with deadlines, and manage workflows in list, KanBan, or Gantt view.Invoicing & payments – It lets you create quotes and estimates and turn them into invoices that clients can pay online via PayPal, Stripe, and select direct debit bank payments.
What Users Are Saying About Avaza
Users praise the platform’s ease of use and time-tracking features. Some other pros and cons include:
Pros
- Simple user-friendly interface – Most users call out the clean and user-friendly interface that’s easy to navigate, especially for beginners.
- 24/7 customer support – With an around-the-clock support team, customer queries are answered and solved relatively quickly.
Cons
- Limited features & integrations – While you can create subtasks within tasks, you can’t assign them to individuals. It also has limited integrations and reporting dashboards for project budget tracking.
- Mobile functionality – If you want to manage your marketing agency from your phone, Avaza’s mobile app is not as polished as the desktop app.
With over 800 reviews, here's how users rated Avaza:
| Review Platform | Rating |
|---|---|
| Capterra | 4.6 |
| G2 | 4.6 |
Pricing
Avaza does offer a free plan, which is ideal for freelancers and solopreneurs. Paid plans for teams of two or more start at $11.95 per month.
6. Ruddr
Rudder is a multi-currency professional services automation (PSA) platform with basic project management features.
Who Is Ruddr Best For?
With a focus on time-tracking and resource allocation and planning, Rudder is ideal for small and medium marketing agencies that deal with clients in different currencies and want to keep a close eye on their profitability and project costs.
Ruddr’s Top Features
Task time-tracking – The built-in time-tracker lets you log time in manually or use the timer to track work to completion. You can also cap time to meet budgets.Resource planning – Allocate tasks based on team capacity and split or clone work items. Rudder also shows a real-time forecast of key project numbers, such as total hours, revenue, cost, gross profit, and gross margin.
What Users Are Saying About Ruddr
Most users praise the customer support offered by Ruddr. Some of the main pros and cons users mention are:
Pros
- Time entry approvals – You can configure multiple approvals for timesheets before you invoice clients.
- Project & KPI dashboards – View and compare project success metrics to inform future plans and see performance indicators such as realization rate, revenue, and margin.
Cons
- Complex setup – One thing users seem to call out is the complex setup process to make the platform tailored to their needs.
- Limited features – When it comes to project management, its features are limited if you compare it to similar tools on the market.
With over
| Review Platform | Rating |
|---|---|
| Capterra | 4.5 |
| G2 | 4.4 |
Pricing
Plans for Ruddr start from $17 per person per month, and they do offer a 30-day free trial with no credit card needed.
7. Notion
Notion is a unique workspace that you can customize and set up to create your own task and project management platform.
Who Is Notion Best For?
If you want to ‘build’ your own project management tool but don’t want it to be an actual app development project, Notion might be the tool for your marketing agency.
It’s like a blank canvas you get to build from scratch. This is also what makes it suitable for absolutely any team size or business type.
Notion’s Top Features
Documents & collaboration – The tool lets you create documents and creative content as if you are in Google Docs. You can set up permissions and have others edit content in real time and write comments within each document or task.2000+ marketing templates – One of the great things about Notion is the already created templates you can use for everything from content strategy to campaign briefs.
What Users Are Saying About Notion
With a large following and fan club, Notion is well-liked by many users, but not all users find it easy to grasp and learn. Some of the pros and cons worth mentioning are:
Pros
- Embed files – Notion lets you embed files and videos from Google Docs, Sheets, or other apps so you can view and access them instantly.
- Notion AI – The tool’s AI assistant can help find answers across your tasks, documents, and integrations. It can create and edit documents and analyze PDFs and images.
Cons
- No project budgeting features – One big disadvantage is it doesn’t have any budget management and tracking options, which can be problematic for agencies.
- Lacks invoicing – Even though invoicing is not a must-have feature for project management tools, most agencies these days do appreciate having both as a package detail.
- Might be too complex to use – Even though it’s flexible and has many customization options, the tool can feel entangled and confusing.
| Review Platform | Rating |
|---|---|
| Capterra | 4.5 |
| G2 | 4.4 |
Pricing
There is a free plan available for freelancers, and paid plans start from $12 per person per month.
Why your marketing agency deserves ActiveCollab (seriously)
ActiveCollab is not just any old project management tool, it’s a tool made exclusively for marketing agencies. One that lets you identify gaps in your resource allocation and streamlines your end-to-end client workflows.
You can run your entire agency from a single software platform because it gives you project management, resource management and planning, budget and profitability reporting, and client management and invoicing. With our built-in time-tracking feature, you get granular insights into how your team’s hours are being used up and where you need to make adjustments.
The team at ActiveCollab is not just a team of software developers. We have former agency founders and professionals who get what it means to work at, and run a marketing agency, so we understand your needs and pain points better than other tool providers.
That’s what makes ActiveCollab the project management platform every agency deserves. But if you can’t take our word for it, we get it. You probably need to see and experience it for yourself, and that’s exactly what you should do.
Sign up for our 14-day free trial or book a demo to have one of our people walk you through the ActiveCollab, the productivity and collaboration workspace for growing service businesses.
