Best Project Management Software for Agencies

Most "best project management software for agencies" roundups score every tool on the same generic checklist: tasks, a Gantt chart, integrations. Agencies rarely lose a client over a missing Gantt chart. They lose one when a client sees a task nobody meant to show them, or finds out a retainer ran unprofitable three months after it happened.

The direct answer: the best project management software for agencies isn't the one with the most features, it's the one built around what agencies get paid for: keeping a client's confidence without handing them the run of the project, and knowing which retainer is profitable before the invoice goes out. Onplana, Teamwork.com, Adobe Workfront, and monday.com land in genuinely different places on those two criteria, and the right pick depends on which one is actually costing your agency money right now.

What Agencies Actually Need From PM Software

A feature checklist tells you whether a tool has tasks and a timeline. It doesn't tell you whether a client reviewing a shared board can see another client's budget, or whether the PM running four retainers at once can tell which one is quietly losing money. Four criteria separate the agency-relevant tools from the generic ones: billable time and retainer tracking, so utilization connects to actual invoices rather than busy calendars; scoped, not total, client-facing visibility, since a client relationship survives on curated progress; creative review and approval routing, for teams whose deliverable is a design file rather than a status field; and resource capacity across multiple concurrent clients, a different problem than capacity on one internal project.

Best Project Management Software for Agencies: Four Platforms on Eight Dimensions

Dimension	Onplana	Teamwork.com	Adobe Workfront	monday.com
Pricing	Published: Free / $7 / $12 / $20 / $29 per seat	Published: Free / $9.99 / $24.99, then Optimize and Enterprise are custom quotes	Not published; Select, Prime, and Ultimate are quote-only	Published: Free (2 seats) / $9 / $12 / $19 per seat, Enterprise custom
Free tier	Yes, 5 members, 2 projects, Gantt + critical path included	Yes, up to 5 projects	None	Yes, capped at 2 seats
Billable time & retainers	Rate cards on every plan; timesheets and capacity at Professional ($12); no dedicated retainer workflow	Time budgets, retainer tracking, and invoicing from logged time at Accelerate+	Not a documented focus; scheduling and request routing are the core	No native retainer or invoicing workflow
Client-facing visibility	Free guest seats (from Starter) plus public share links on reports, no login required	Centralized client comms and approvals built into the product	Workfront Proof gives external reviewers a scoped markup and approval link	Guest access and shareable board views
Creative review / proofing	Not built in	Not a dedicated module	Workfront Proof: dedicated markup, versioning, and multi-stage sign-off	Not a dedicated module
Resource capacity across clients	Per-person capacity vs. allocation, every project, at Professional	Live workload capacity at Accelerate+; skill-based scheduling at Optimize	Resource management module, scoped during configuration	Workload view (Pro tier) shows assigned hours per person
Dependency scheduling & critical path	FS, SS, FF, SF with lag, and a calculated critical path, every plan	Finish-to-start and finish-finish only; no documented critical path	Included in its scheduling module; depth set during configuration	Timeline view shows dependencies visually; no critical path calculation
Deployment	Cloud-agnostic; self-hosted at Enterprise Plus	SaaS only	SaaS only, Adobe-hosted	SaaS only

The diagram below plots each platform on the two axes that actually separate them for agency work: how deep the billing and retainer tooling goes, and how much client-facing or creative-review depth ships with it.

Where Teamwork and Workfront Actually Win

Teamwork.com wins the billing argument outright. Its Accelerate tier adds time budgets, retainer management, and client invoicing generated straight from logged hours, built for the question an agency operations lead asks weekly: is this client actually profitable this month. The fuller Onplana-Teamwork comparison covers where Teamwork's scheduling model falls short once a project needs more than sequential tasks, but on billing depth alone, nothing here matches it below a custom quote.

Adobe Workfront wins the creative-review argument the same way. Workfront Proof, part of Workfront's request-and-review workflow, gives an external reviewer a scoped link to mark up a frame or layout element and route it through sign-off, without handing them the rest of the project. The fuller Onplana-Workfront comparison covers where that depth comes from. For an agency whose daily bottleneck is client approval on creative work, not scheduling, that can outweigh Workfront's quote-only pricing.

Showing a Client Progress Without Showing Them Everything

This is the requirement most roundups skip, and it's the one that actually damages a client relationship when handled badly. Every agency PM has watched a client scroll past a task meant for someone else, or read an internal comment not written for them. Each platform solves it differently. Onplana scopes this through free guest seats, from the Starter plan, plus public share links on cross-project reports that need no login and show only what the link was built to show. Teamwork centralizes client communication and approvals inside the product, so the client's view is a designed surface rather than the internal workspace. Workfront routes reviewers through Workfront Proof, which shows the asset under review and nothing else. monday.com relies on guest access and shareable board views, which need more manual discipline about what's on the board. None of the four default to "give the client your workspace," the mistake this criterion exists to prevent.

Which Platform Fits Which Agency

Teamwork fits an agency whose main question is real-time retainer profitability and that wants billing and delivery in one tool. Adobe Workfront fits a marketing or creative operations team running high-volume request intake with formal, multi-stage sign-off, and budget for a sales-led deployment. monday.com fits a team that wants broad workflow flexibility across more than client work, at the cost of agency-specific scheduling and billing depth. Onplana fits an agency that wants a calculated critical path on every plan including Free, rate cards and resource capacity planning without a custom quote, and scoped client visibility without buying a dedicated billing suite it may not need yet.

If resource capacity across concurrent clients is the specific problem pushing an evaluation, the free Resource Heatmap shows who's overallocated across your active retainers in about ten minutes, before any of these four gets a procurement conversation. Utilization vs billability covers the two ratios agencies most often conflate, and the rest of the Onplana blog covers agency-adjacent resource and billing topics in more depth. Full current pricing for Onplana is on the pricing page.

Run the free Resource Heatmap See who's overallocated across your active client retainers in about ten minutes, before you commit to any platform's resource-planning tier. No signup required. → Open the Resource Heatmap