Best Creative Agency Project Management Software: How to Choose in 2025

Every week, agency owners ask me the same question: 'What is the best project management software for my team?' 

They’ve bounced between software—maybe trying ClickUp, dabbling with Monday.com, Wrike, Teamwork, & Basecamp, while debating between Trello vs Asana, or contemplating if Notion ai will solve their problems —yet they can't seem to find the right fit. 

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been through the same headaches, and maybe even the wasted time of learning a new agency project management software, getting your team to move, & opportunity cost from the lost productivity during this learning curve.

Or perhaps you’re not using a project management system for your advertising agency at all because you’re overwhelmed at all the options out there.

That’s why I’ve made this guide - to help you pick the best creative project management software, STICK with it, and finally get the most out of it. 

In This Review, We’ll Cover:

1. Mental Models for choosing the best project management tools for agencies

2. Why Trello fails as project management software for marketing agencies

3. Monday.com: A marketing agency project management software nightmare

4. Is Click Up the best project management software for creative agencies?

5. Why Notion should never be used a project management software for agencies 

6. Asana in the fight as the best project management software

7. Conclusion: The #1 best project management software for creative agencies on the market today 

Everything’s right here on the page; but you can also download the entire report to save for later or send to your team.

Mental Models for Choosing the Best Project Management Tools for Agencies

But before I get into it, let me say this:

No option is without its imperfections.

The perfect project management software for digital marketing (or any industry) doesn’t exist.

If it did, all small businesses would be using it & they’d have a monopoly on the market. 

The truth is, the reason that this guide even exists, is because they all have good bits, bad bits, and “why the HELL is this not a feature!!” bits. 

Step-by-Step: How to find & Implement the Right Project Management System for Your Agency: 

1) Make a list of all of the features you need from a project management software

We’ll dive more into this part later to show you how to determine the key features you need for your agency.

2) Review the options on the market to see what fits your criteria

3) Pick one, and commit to using it long-term

This means you’re committed to finding workarounds when the tool doesn’t 100% meet your needs, such as by using Zapier, Make or other software to complement it. You will likely need an operational mind on your team to help with building these workarounds.

4) Hire an expert in building project management software so it can truly support your agency

This is a key step that a lot of agencies skip & it’s a big reason why they end up wanting to move to a new project management software - because they didn’t know how to get the most out of it.

At the end of the day, there are 2 ways to have success at something:

1) Put in the time to learn & implement it yourself, or 2) hire an expert who’s already put in the time to implement it for you, & teach you their knowledge.

The truth is, you can’t expect to run your company, become an expert in project management software, automation and operational thinking, design this system to be best suited to your company, then build and maintain it.

And unless you want to run a company that helps people implement project management solutions, it isn’t the best use of your time either - your time should be spend growing your company doing the tasks that only you can do.

5) Continually optimize the system

As you grow, you’ll need to improve & adapt the system to meet your needs. A long-term partnership with an ops/tech company is ideal to support you through your growth needs 

So now for the juicy part:

I’m going to teach you how to think about selecting a project management for your agency so you will actually know what to look for without watching a bunch of YouTube videos or reading more articles to help you decide.

So first off, why do we even care about having a great project management system?

The right software, setup correctly, will save you hours per week.

You can predictably onboard new clients, with tasks, due dates, dependencies, & assignees already mapped out.

You can have clear visibility over tasks, deadlines and workload, so you know when you need to hire next, or delegate work to another team member.

Your team is more productive as they can focus on exactly what they’re best at without the distractions.

So now you can generate more sales, and service more clients without growing your headcount yet.  

Sounds good right?

Well you’re probably already sold on the idea of using a project management software, or you wouldn’t be here. 

The catch is when you don’t use it well, it can feel worse than what you had before, making you think they don’t work & you don’t need it. 

Unfortunately, this is a fallacy. 

Drop your ego and commit to getting the most out of your project management software, and I promise you, there will be brighter days ahead.

How to Determine the Key Features You Need for Your Agency Project Management Software:

You need to consider the 3 following aspects of your agency so you can identify the functionality you need:

1) Your unique service delivery process

Every agency does things a little differently - it’s what sets you apart. So you need to determine how your unique workflow influences the project management system you need. For example: 

Do you need to share tasks with contractors & key stakeholders?

Do you need to share tasks and even dashboards with clients? Would your clients mind logging into the project management system to access their client portal or would they never do it?

Do you want to manage creative requests in your project management software, perhaps pulling in directly from Slack?

Do you have clients on multiple services and need advanced automation to support your business processes? 

List all the potential use-cases for your software. Bear in mind, you’ll get the most out of the project management system when you see it as an extension of business - it is the central hub for your entire business operations and where your team will spend a lot of time. 

2) The size of your team, how big you plan to grow, & in what time frame

When choosing marketing agency project management software, it isn’t just about seeing what the price is right now. You need to consider how many team members you plan to have in the company, contractors, stakeholders & any other guests that would need access.

You also need to consider external apps that you’d need to pay for to get the functionality you need out of the software, such as Zapier, Make, Figma, Dropbox, or apps built for the platform, such as apps in the Monday.com Marketplace, and limitations you may run into with features of the software at scale. 

3) The roles on your team, & the strengths + weaknesses of each person

If you pick a more complex project management software but none of you are tech savvy, you're likely going to struggle. 

Or perhaps you are tech savvy, but no one on the team has the deep knowledge and time to give building project management software what it deserves, you'll need to hire someone who can do it for you.

Once you’ve considered this, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what functionalities you need.

Next, run it through our list of key features to ensure you didn’t miss anything:

1) The Level & Depth of Automation

A lot of teams don't know what they need, because they don't know what can be automated - they know the obvious ones but not the creative ones. 

But more often than not, you can automate way more than you think so it's better to commit to a project management software with more automation capabilities

2) Sharing Capabilities

Are you just sharing within your internal team?

Will you need guests to access certain tasks but not others?

Do you need to share tasks and updates on client projects through a client portal?

Do you require file sharing with guests & clients?

These are all important things to consider when looking for a tool.

3) Dashboards & Analytics

Do you have a lot of projects going on at any given time?

What are the most important metrics you need visualize to see project progress?

Do you need to see metrics to ensure effective resource management?

Do you need to see a dashboard per clients, as well as an aggregate of all clients on a particular service, and then all clients working with your company?

Do you need to be able to see how the company is performing as a whole and across divisions at any one time?

If so, then you need to be aware of the limits some task managers have of how many boards you can connect to a dashboard 

4) Integration

Does the tool need to integrate with your CRM?

If there’s a native integration, does it have limitations?

If not, how could you connect it using Zapier, Make or Bardeen? 

It’s vital to consider how your project management system integrates with other collaboration tools such as Slack, and the rest of your tech stack.

5) Custom Fields

Do you need to hold large numbers of important information in your task manager as custom fields?

If so, building agency project management software that can not only house a lot of fields, but can easily show them in dashboards, as well as across different task lists is very important.

6) Views

Do you need gantt charts to view complex projects & dependencies?

Are kanban boards sufficient for you?

Do you need workload views to ensure proper resource allocation and that deliverables are produced on time?

It’s important to consider all the views your team will need to manage timelines, track progress, and have effective project planning.

7) Docs

Do you want to use the software for documentation as well as project management?

8) Additional Features

Consider if there are any other key features that are critical for the specific needs of your team, such as invoicing clients or vendors, proofing creative work such as social media posts, and the ability to track time, including billable vs non-billable hours and view it in a time sheet.

Then do a comprehensive analysis so you don’t get stuck in a project management tool that doesn’t work for you.

Following these steps is so important so you can pick a tool with the right customization options for your company, and ensure your creative process is as streamlined as possible.

Once you’ve considered your business goals and made your shortlist of feature requirements...

It’s time to start looking at the best project management solutions for your agency

Why Trello Fails as Project Management Software for Marketing Agencies

What is Trello good for?

• Very small agencies that don’t have plans to grow (aka not most agencies)

• Teams that aren’t very tech savvy and don’t need many functions & integrations 

What is Trello bad for?

• Growing & large teams 

• Teams that require a lot of high-level integrations & automation across many platforms 

• Teams that want complex work & actions automated 

• Teams that don’t just want a project board stuck in a kanban view 

If you have any plans for growth, which I assume you do since you’re reading this article, Trello is more than likely not the tool for you. 

Offering only a kanban view to its users and missing many critical features of the other juggernauts in the project management field, trello simply is not built for scale. 

While it has a very simple & clean solution to teams that don’t want or need many features, or just aren’t very technologically savvy, it is not going to serve teams that want to leverage their tech stack to its highest potential. 

It does offer the power ups feature which allows for some basic integration, and has a task automation section that a lot of tools don’t, which is pretty nice. But its integrations are still lacking compared to the other companies. 

A lot of companies have found themselves using Trello simply because it was one of the first to market, but because it was first, does not mean it is the best. 

Trello does not offer built-in reporting, making it very difficult to pull key stats & data on your team, and its paid plans have pretty limited features.

Its project management features do not work for a complex project board, or allow you to create boards that can help with budgets & reporting. It also does not allow you to create roadmaps or iterations. 

However, those that are easily overwhelmed by task managers will probably feel quite happy using Trello. 

Though, even if you find it temporarily easier, if you have big visions to grow, it is going to bottleneck your operations. 

So you’ll either be missing out on key efficiency & productivity gains, as well as the profit-driving decisions that come from having robust reporting, or you will have to switch to another software down the line which will cost your business lots of time & money.

So, you’re better off biting the bullet now and start using another tool that can better support your growth.

Monday.com: A Marketing Agency Project Management Nightmare

Let’s be honest, you’ve probably seen a billboard advertising Monday.com in your city.

But don’t confuse all this marketing to mean that they are the best option for agencies out there.

Monday has a LOT of limitations that you can’t see from a quick demo or watching other Youtube reviews of the tool. 

We’ve worked with dozens of clients using Monday.com and lately, most clients that come to us using Monday.com want to switch to ClickUp once we highlight some of its limitations.

And we’re actually certified in Monday.com

But after working with the tool so deeply, we’ve uncovered a lot of flaws that don’t make it the best choice for most creative teams. 

In fact, one of our 7-figure agency clients recently made the switch to ClickUp after 6+ years on Monday once we highlighted these issues.

The Limitations of Monday.com for Agencies

1) Folders and workspace levels in Monday do not show an aggregate on what is going on in each folder and workspace

You cannot scroll through all the boards in a folder or workspace, and set advanced filters and grouping on a bulk number of boards. This makes customization very challenging, and what could take a few clicks in ClickUp to see your most important work, turns into a complex workaround solution which costs many hours in Monday 

This is a vital feature for creative agencies that need to quickly see the tasks across all clients in 1 view, and how they’re distrubuted

It’s also critical if you have clients on multiple services, and need a fast birds-eye view of how they are doing

2) You can only connect a limited number of boards to a dashboard

5 on standard plan, 20 on pro plan, 200 on enterprise.

This is very frustrating if you run a growing agency and want to create a dashboard giving a high level overview of all of your clients, which is a basic and common need of pretty much every agency

3) Each time you create a new board and want to see it in a dashboard, you need to connect it manually

An unnecessary manual step that adds up time at scale every time you onboard a new client

4) There are limits on the number of boards you can connect to another board using the “Connect Boards” feature

1 connected board on basic plan, 5 on standard plan, 20 on pro plan, 200 on enterprise plan

This is important, as if you want to mirror an item from one board to another, you must first use the connect boards feature to connect the item to the new board, and then you can mirror it 

If you are an agency that wants to mirror an item from each client board to a master board, to streamline the tasks for your content creation team, you would be limited to connecting 20 client boards to one other board. 

We see clients run into this limitation all the time and it makes workflows highly inefficient

You can only use the mirror column feature 2 levels deep - this is an issue if you want to see an item on 4 or more boards. Not to mention, the mirror column is quite clunky and takes up a lot of horizontal space in your board 

5) Subitem automations are severely limited 

This is due to the design of Monday.com - if you search within your Monday account, you’ll notice that in the backend of Monday.com, it recognizes your items on a board as 1 board, and any subitems in that same board are built as a second board. This means you can actually search for a board that only contains the subitems of a given board.

However, this makes it very difficult to automate anything relating to subitems - you cannot automate changing the due date, assignee or column value of a subitem in Monday.com, you can only automate creating a new subitem 

This causes a lot of limitations for creative teams that often have many subtasks relating to the overall completion of a bigger task

6) There are workarounds to a lot of the items listed above if you use plug-ins from the Monday.com App Marketplace.

However, these apps can quickly add hundreds of dollars a month to your software bill, are often not simple to setup and have limitations themselves. Using these plug-ins will never offer as seamless as an experience as a task manager that has these features built in

An example of these plug-ins is “Same Item Multiple Boards” - this allows you to have no limits on the number of boards a single item could go in.

However, if you want the unlimited plan, it’s going to set you back almost $400/mo - all for an app to make a $20/mo project management software useable 

And it isn’t without its flaws - the items that then appear in multiple boards are not mirrors - you’ll only see the column values that are on the connected board if they exactly match the column values on the original board. Any other column values will not be shown in the item description, which can make the seamless editing of data an issue 

7) Monday.com dashboards have poor time tracking reporting

You cannot produce complex bar graphs where time is the x axis so you could see how many tasks are assigned to your team members each month, or easily see how any hours they worked

Again, there are workarounds to this, but they are clunky and in no way as good as a tool that natively has this feature, like Click Up

So what is there to like about Monday.com?

Some agencies like the intuitive interface and feel that it’s easier to learn.

Though this often ends up being a fallacy - it is easier to learn at the start, but once you need more robust features (that the majority of teams need), you need a much more advanced skillset to figure out workarounds.

Monday.com has specialized solutions such as Monday sales CRM, however the Sales CRM will never be as robust a CRM as something like GoHighLevel, Salesforce or Hubspot, and does not provide advanced email campaigns which are often a huge requirement for agency teams.

It can work for agencies that want to minimize their tech stack, but basic features you’d expect from a CRM, such as showing a complete SMS & call history log within that contact card, are challenging to achieve.

If you’re okay with a high software bill, want to use Monday as your CRM & project management system, and want the customization the app marketplace offers, Monday could be worth looking into.

There are over 200 apps you can natively connect to Monday, as well as the Monday.com marketplace. 

This makes work very agile and you’re able to integrate things like phone burner & pandadoc, meaning you can streamline your entire sales & onboarding process inside of monday alone. 

Granted, you may still want to use zapier for some automations that you can’t do with the native integrations (such as creating new tasks when a contract is signed in pandadoc), but it is pretty sweet that you can send contracts from a template within Monday and keep a log of email communication in your CRM (these features are only available in Monday Sales CRM). 

But we warned - don’t try to cheat the system by signing up for Monday CRM and then try to use that as a task manager too, or vice versa.

The sales CRM is specifically optimized for just that. Statuses are built to show an overarching pipeline. Tasks are leads. Dashboard data is focused around sales. There are no due dates for tasks, and you can’t close subitems, making actual work pretty hard to manage.

This means, if you’re going to take advantage of the specialization of monday, you can easily end up paying for 2-3 products instead of 1, as you will need to buy monday work management in addition to the other products you are using. 

This can turn into a pretty big price tag depending on your team size, but it is still a lot less than using something like hubspot & another PM tool. 

The summary? 

Monday.com certainly has some positives, but it can often cost you a lot more in the long run with time & money if you don’t take the limitations into consideration and truly understand your company goals before committing to Monday.com.

Is ClickUp the Best Project Management Software for Creative Agencies?

ClickUp claims to be the “one app to replace them all” and while we don’t think Click Up can replace ALL your apps, it certainly is the king of agency project management software.

All those limitations we outlined for Monday.com? 

They don’t exist in ClickUp.

The only main software limitation of ClickUp is you can’t have more than 1000 lists or folders in a space.

This is a limitation almost no marketing teams will encounter. And if they do, it’s very simple to overcome, as you can easily restructure your hierarchy system to create another space.

ClickUp is the most customizable and seamless agency project management system on the market right now, in our opinion. 

ClickUp is the software for you if:

• You want the most robust automation features to customize your workflows to your unique agency processes

• You want to easily be able to navigate between a workspace, space, folder & list overview, getting a birds eye view of all your clients, or drill down to 1 particular client or service within a few clicks 

• You want lots of customization options so you can manage project timelines, ensure effective resource planning and enhance team collaboration now and as your business grows

• You prefer a more modern aesthetic and highly intuitive interface

• You want more advanced features like real time chat, in-app video recording, Click Up AI + ClickUp brain, & more 

• You know you need to use a real CRM for your sales, like Salesforce, Hubspot or GoHighLevel, so you want to use the best marketing agency project management software to complement that 

• You want the best and you’re willing to stick through any learning curves 

While we think ClickUp is the best, it may not be for you if:

• You aren’t tech savvy or willing to hire someone to teach you how to use it & set it up in the most optimal way 

• You are planning to use it as a CRM

• You can get analysis-paralysis from thinking of all the ways to customize it

Our team has been using Click Up for a collective 17 years now and while I will admit, when I first used it, I was somewhat overwhelmed & confused by it, I was captivated by its aesthetic, design & promise of a more productive future.

After a few tough months “figuring it out”, we finally began our love affair. And while no relationship is perfect, I think we’re doing pretty good.

ClickUp offers all that I’m looking for as an agency owner myself (although not a marketing agency) to build the best custom workflows for my company.

It offers a lot of features that benefit remote teams, which a lot of agencies are these days.

It excels in its automations & customization - you can essentially build it to work around any process you have, from design & creative work, including approvals, to building websites, launching ads and more.

The ClickUp API was also built for customization, so you use it with Make.com to create your own round robin task assignment system, or make advanced edits to subtasks.

ClickUp offers robust views, time tracking, dashboards & they are constantly pushing out new features & re-imagining what you can do with agency project management.

Their slack integration is especially great for team updates. 

While some users complain about all their ClickUp notifications, this is just a function of not knowing how to turn them off.

ClickUp is highly customizable, meaning you have a lot of options for what you can do - you just need to know what to do so it will benefit your company.

So ClickUp offers everything you need from a project management tool - just make sure you get someone who can help you get the most out of it. 

Why Notion Should Never be Used as a Project Management Software for Agencies 

I wasn’t even going to include this in here because Notion is NOT a project management tool. But that is precisely why I decided to include it in the end.

Notion is a note-taking, documentation and a personal task management tool. 

I love Notion and we use it at TSB for storing all of our SOPs and creating public training links we can share with clients.

But we will never ever ever use it as a project management system, and neither should you.

It was designed for the individual to have better control & organization of their life. It isn’t designed for growing agencies.

Here are a few reasons why:

The automations are so minimal - they offer some time-saving benefits but it is minimal compared to Monday & ClickUp 

The time tracking reporting is quite clunky & doesn’t offer the same ease for payroll as other tools, and you can forget about easily forecasting team workload and re-distributing projects accordingly

It does not offer gantt and other key views required for great project management 

While they recently created dashboard views on databases, there is no way to easily see an aggregate on what is going on in your company, predict workload capacity and more

You can’t create project board templates where you remap due dates like you can in Click Up - this wastes a LOT of time as when you onboard a new client, you’ll have to manually map all the due dates

The home view is not very effective at managing all the tasks assigned to you, and you can’t easily navigate between all clients, while seeing all tasks assigned across the company

The point is, if you try to use notion for project management, you will essentially be duct-taping the tool together to try and get what you need. Notion is also pretty complex when it comes to building new things, and you’ll spend longer looking for an expert in this field. When you do find one, it’s harder to maintain by yourself due to the complexity.

So, keep your life simple - just use Notion for note taking & documentation.

Asana in the Fight as the Best Project Management Software

To the untrained eye, Asana offers the all-around features you need for successful agency project management. 

But here’s why asana doesn’t get the top spot: 

1) It’s more expensive and the price doesn’t scale well

$30.49/mo per user for the Advanced plan compared to ClickUp’s $19/mo per user to Business plus - their comparable plan)

2) It has less AI capabilities than Monday & ClickUp 

3) Support is only included in the top-tier enterprise plans, which is a huge con for growing agencies teams.

When you’re trying to set up your system to work as effectively as possible, you will have to set up lots of automations & probably come up with some complex solutions specific to your workflow. It’s a big issue if you cannot get in touch with support when doing this.

4) Good automation is only available in the higher tier plans

Again a big issue for smaller teams that don’t need a higher plan 

5) Asana doesn’t have docs

Meaning you will have to use another app like google docs or notion, which some teams prefer, but it can often be great to do it all in one app & have seamless linking 

6) Asana tasks remain visible on boards as a default which clogs up a project & can lead to distraction.

Yes, you can filter to turn this off, but it’s another step that wastes time.

7) The dashboards are much less advanced than ClickUp

They only allowing you to create calculations around certain custom fields, and not show robust bar graphs, and your limited to pre-defined widgets

8) The hierarchical structure of Asana can be hard to follow and can lead to a long list of projects in your navigation bar, rather than clean folders. 

9) Dependencies are less flexible in Asana

If you have a dependency set on a task in Asana, and then update the due date of the first task, it will not update the subsequent due dates, which leads to a lot of manual remapping 

10) You can’t embed docs in Asana, leading to more clicks and wasted minutes that add up over a year 

11) There are less views available in Asana

While Asana is pretty intuitive and user-friendly, it lacks the customization of ClickUp.

If you want a tool that’s going to scale well with your company and be able to handle any advanced workflow you throw at it, ClickUp is going to be the best choice.

Conclusion: The #1 Best Project Management Software for Creative Agencies on the Market Today

ClickUp is the best project management software for creative agency on the market right now.

You get the most bang for your buck, while getting tons of functionality the others don’t provide. 

Is ClickUp perfect? 

Of course not, no software is. 

But is it the best out there right now? 

Yes. 

You might expect us to say this since we’re Verified Click Up experts, but we’re also certified in Monday too, worked with Notion since it came out, and worked with dozens of clients that use Trello and Asana.

Every single client that uses Monday.com, Trello, Asana or Notion as an agency management system for their company runs into issues that hurt scaling. 

Almost every client we work with that is using Monday ends up wanting to switch to ClickUp once we highlight the pros and cons. 

Save yourself with headache and opportunity costs of moving software later on and just use it now.

Want help setting up Click Up for your company? Shoot us a message to see if we can help.