Teamwork.com Buyer's Checklist

Most software checklists are feature lists with boxes next to them, which is useless because every tool in a category has most of the features. This one is built around the things that actually decide a Teamwork.com purchase, in the order they bind. Work top to bottom and stop when something disqualifies the plan you were assuming.

Before You Open a Trial

1. Count your distinct approval paths. Not tasks, not projects. Paths. Creative briefs, client change requests, internal work, amends, bug reports, whatever yours are. Write the number down.

Custom workflows cap at one on Basics and three on Accelerate, unlimited only from Optimize. Four paths means the unpriced tier. This is the tightest gate in the product and the one least likely to appear on a comparison table.

2. Count your monthly client proofs, with rounds. Five pieces of creative a week at two rounds each is forty a month. Proofs cap at five on Free Forever and 20 on Basics, unlimited from Accelerate.

3. Decide whether you need to answer the margin question, meaning whether a given project made money. If yes, you need Optimize, which has no published price, and the checklist below changes from a budgeting exercise into a list of questions for a sales call.

4. Write down your headcount, then ignore it. Teamwork does not gate by team size: Basics has a three-seat minimum and Accelerate a five-seat minimum, neither with a published maximum. An eight-person team can sit on either.

Key takeaway — Three numbers decide this before price does: approval paths, monthly proofs with rounds, and whether margins matter. Seat count decides almost nothing.

5. Multiply before you compare. The floor, not the per-seat figure, is what you pay. A four-person team on Accelerate pays for five seats.

6. Check the annual discount on your tier, not the badge. The vendor advertises "Save 29%". On Basics that holds: $13.99 down to $9.99 is 28.6%. On Accelerate it does not: $29.99 down to $24.99 is 16.7%.

7. Add the unknowns to your model as unknowns, not zeros. AI is included "for an introductory period" with usage-based credits launching later, and the credit price is published nowhere. Add-on prices are all unpublished: Advanced Security, onboarding, Teamwork Connect, Premium support, Desk.

Questions for the Sales Call

These are the ones where the vendor's own material gives two answers, so the answer has to come in writing.

8. What does Optimize cost at our seat count? And what is its real seat minimum? The support documentation says five users, the pricing page says "Contact us" for the same cell.

9. Which plan does SAML single sign-on actually sit on? The plan comparison matrix lists it as Enterprise. The knowledge-base article for the Advanced Security add-on describes it as purchasable on any paid per-user subscription. Those are two different bills for one requirement.

10. When do AI credits start billing, and at what price? The pricing page says November 2026. The vendor's own machine-readable pricing file says September 2026. Neither publishes a rate.

11. What does the Advanced Security add-on cost, and how long does setup take? The IP-based access policy and email-domain restriction are not toggles. The documented route is emailing the vendor's security team.

12. Does anything here change when the plan names change? Ask because the vendor's live support articles still reference "Deliver, Grow, and Scale" plans that no longer exist, and the structured data on its pricing page carries those names with prices that do not match the page.

Security Review, If You Have One

13. Stated certifications: SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001:2022.

14. Data residency: US or EU, hosted on AWS. Choose at account creation. Moving later is not a settings change.

15. On every plan, including Free: two-factor authentication and role-based permissions. Not gated, which is less common than it should be.

16. Automatic database snapshots every few seconds, with a stated uptime goal above 99.9%.

17. Dedicated infrastructure: Enterprise only.

18. The hard no. The vendor states explicitly that the Advanced Security add-on does not support Single Log Out via SAML^[1]. Signing out of Teamwork leaves the identity-provider session open. If SLO is mandatory in your review, this is a disqualification rather than a configuration task. Find that out now, not in a questionnaire.

Client and External Access

19. Confirm what a client sees by looking at their screen. Rate and profitability visibility is restricted at project level, and the vendor states collaborators cannot be granted rate or budget permissions at all. That is a strong guarantee. Verify it once with a test account anyway.

20. Check the five-project limit per client user. Unlimited client users arrive at Basics, but each one attaches to a maximum of five active projects at a time. If you run six concurrent workstreams for one client, restructure the projects.

21. Note what works in both directions. The "client" object serves the agency you hired as well as the client who hired you, which matters for in-house teams working with external suppliers.

Capacity and Integration Limits

22. Automation actions are account-level, not per seat: 100 a month on Free, 5,000 on Basics, 20,000 on Accelerate, 100,000 above. A twelve-person team on Basics shares 5,000. If you are comparing against a per-seat quota, multiply before concluding.

23. API rate limits: 150 requests a minute on Free, Basics and Accelerate; 300 on Optimize; 500 on Enterprise. Check your polling interval against 150 before committing to Accelerate.

24. Storage: 100MB on Free, then 100GB, 250GB, 500GB and 1,000GB. A single upload caps at 2GB, a proof file at 105MB. And proof files do not count against the allowance^[2]. Extra storage sells in 500GB increments, so a ceiling is a line item rather than a forced upgrade.

25. Check your toolchain is actually on the list. The vendor names 150+ integrations, but no GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or CI platform appears among them. Webhooks arrive at Basics and are the supported route for anything absent. Which means your own code.

26. Check your source tool is on the list. The vendor advertises one-click project import from Wrike, Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp, Trello and monday.com. If yours is not among those six, ask what the route is before you plan a date.

27. Expect four things not to arrive, because they have no equivalent in the tools you are leaving. Rates, budgets and retainers are Teamwork-native concepts. Nothing transfers. Approval routing does not map, because your old automations are not Teamwork custom workflows. The billable flag and the rate behind it will not come across even where logged hours do. And project structure will arrive as it was, which is usually not the structure you want.

28. Decide not to backfill, in writing, before someone suggests it. Teamwork allows retrospective rate changes, which makes backfilling closed projects technically easy and analytically worthless. It produces margin figures that look authoritative and rest on rates nobody charged at the time. Start the financial layer from the current quarter.

29. Build the schema before importing, not after. Custom fields and task list templates are unlimited on every plan, so create them first and let the import land inside a structure you chose.

Contract Mechanics to Read Before Signing

30. Annual terms are prepaid and run the full term. There is no mid-term exit; the vendor's stated route is declining renewal before the next annual billing date. Monthly subscriptions carry no commitment and can be cancelled any time, remaining active to the end of the current period, at 29% more on Basics and 17% more on Accelerate.

31. Changes are asymmetric, in the direction that favours the vendor. Upgrades, added users and add-on purchases take effect immediately. Downgrades, removed users and moves to a lower plan take effect at the start of the next billing cycle or at renewal. So a team that shrinks pays for the old size until the term turns over.

32. Payment methods differ by term. Monthly subscriptions take Visa, MasterCard or Maestro. Annual subscriptions additionally accept bank transfer, which matters if your finance process does not run on cards.

33. The trial is 14 days, no card, covering the paid plans. That is the window for everything in the next section, and it is shorter than most procurement cycles. Start it when you are ready to test, not when you start evaluating.

What to Do in the Fourteen Days

The trial requires no card and covers the paid plans. Spend it testing the things that cannot be answered from a page.

34. Build your real intake paths and count them against three.

35. Run a genuine week of client review, counting proofs with rounds.

36. Set one billable rate, log time against it, and generate one invoice. Fifteen minutes, and it either fits how you bill or it does not.

37. Create custom fields and one project template, then stamp it twice. Confirm your reports read the fields. Custom fields and task list templates are unlimited on every plan including Free, so this costs nothing and determines whether month two is usable.

38. Invite one external collaborator into a project with a budget on it, and look at their screen.

39. Open planned-versus-actual and logged-versus-estimated after a real day of logging. If the estimate field is empty, both reports are blank. And those are the two that catch scope creep.

The Disqualifiers, Collected

Stop here and look elsewhere if any of these is true:

• Single Log Out via SAML is mandatory. Stated as unsupported.
• You need more than three approval paths and cannot buy a quote-only tier.
• You are two or three people and need intake forms or unlimited proofs. Both sit above the $124.95 Accelerate floor.
• You run Scrum on a product team. No sprint board, no backlog object, no story points, no branch linking.
• Your main need is social scheduling or a publishing calendar. Neither exists, and no social platform appears in the named integration list.
• You need a published price for everything before signing. Two of five plans and all five add-ons are unpriced.

And the inverse, the reason to stop shopping: if your work ends in an invoice and you currently reconcile logged time against rates by hand, the chain from hour to invoice to margin in one system is genuinely hard to assemble from parts, and that is what you would be buying.