Playbook
How to choose a project management tool for a marketing agency
Most project management tools were built for software teams and later repositioned for agencies. Here is how to tell which ones actually fit agency work.
Agency Hub Co Team, , 8 min read
Agency work does not look like software work
Most of the tools you will look at (ClickUp, Asana, Monday, Notion, Linear, Jira) came from software teams. They were built around sprints, backlogs, and a single product being shipped by one team. Agencies do not work that way.
An agency runs many small products in parallel, each one owned by a different client, each one with a different rhythm of review and approval. The primary object is a client account, not a sprint. Any project management tool you evaluate has to hold up against that shape.
The five tests that separate agency-fit tools from the rest
1. Can everything be scoped to a client by default?
Open the tool. Create a task. Look at how it lives in the system. Is it under a project that is under a client, or is it floating in a shared workspace and tagged after the fact? If it is the second one, expect ongoing pain finding what belongs to whom.
2. Can a client be included in a limited, professional way?
Try to give a client a guest seat. What can they see and touch. Does it look like your brand or the tool's brand. If the answer is guest seats in your internal workspace with your tool vendor's chrome on top, you will end up adding a separate portal tool later.
3. Can a designer or writer open a task and immediately see the client context?
The best test is opening a random task from a random project as if you were a new team member. Can you tell which client it belongs to, what the deliverable is for, and who reviews it, without clicking three levels up? If not, the tool is optimizing for the wrong object.
4. How much configuration is required before the tool is useful?
Some tools ship with an empty canvas and a promise that you can build any workflow you want. In practice, that means a two-week setup project by whoever on your team has the least billable time. If the tool cannot demonstrate the agency-shaped setup out of the box, plan on the setup being your problem.
5. What happens when the work is done?
How does the tool handle invoicing that project. Recording that revenue against that client. Sending the client the final files. If none of that is native, you are still going to need three other tools. Which brings us to the real question.
Project management is not the whole job
The trap with agency project management software is treating it as the anchor tool and stacking everything else on top. In reality, project management is one of six things an agency has to do for a client: manage the work, communicate about the work, share files, send invoices, send contracts, and give the client a place to see it all.
If your project management tool only does the first one, you are picking between two options: keep five other tools alongside it, or find a system that does the whole set.
We learned this the slow way at our own agency. We ran on Notion for roughly two years, and the specific failure mode was not the task management itself; it was that anything client-facing had to be manually lifted out of the internal team list into a separate client-visible list. When we priced out a Notion consultant to automate that handoff, the quote came in around five thousand dollars for a build we were not sure would hold up, so we evaluated Monday, Airtable, Asana, and ClickUp and moved to ClickUp. That one switch collapsed three subscriptions (Loom, Slack, Notion) and turned the approval handoff into an automation. The reason that story is relevant here: a project management tool that ignores the client-facing surface is not solving the whole job, no matter how good the internal boards look.
A shortlist you can actually work through this week
- ClickUp: deepest project management feature set. Passes tests 1 and 3 with configuration. Fails on native invoicing, portal, and contracts. Best when your bottleneck is internal work and you accept a multi-tool stack around it. It is the tool our own agency moved to after roughly two years in Notion, when the manual work of copying tasks from a team list to a client-facing list finally broke.
- Asana: cleaner than ClickUp, less configurable, similar gaps on the client-facing side. A strong pick if your team resists complex tools.
- Monday: visual, easy to set up, similar client-side gaps. Popular with agencies that want their operations lead to configure boards without writing formulas.
- Notion: flexible, great for docs and knowledge, weaker on task management under load. We ran our own agency in Notion for about two years and eventually looked into hiring a Notion automation expert to close the gaps; the quote came in around five thousand dollars for a build we were not confident would hold up, and we moved to ClickUp instead.
- Agency Hub Co: client-first project management with native invoicing, chat, contracts, and a branded portal on the same account. Built for boutique agency work. Agency Hub Co is invite-only right now, as we expand from our own agency to a small number of early partners.
How to actually run the evaluation
Pick two tools, not five. Set up one real client (redact names if you like) in each. Move a week of real work through each. Have your designers and account leads try it, not just the founder. At the end of the week, count how many other tools you still have open. That is the number that matters.
If both tools leave you with five other tabs open, you were shopping in the wrong category. The right category for a boutique agency is usually a client-first system that covers the work and the client experience together, not a deeper project management tool.