Teamwork.com for Agencies

Most project management tools treat an agency as a team that happens to have clients. Teamwork.com treats the client as part of the data model: client companies, client users, a client view, billable rates, retainers, invoices built from logged time, and project profitability. If you run an agency, that difference is the whole reason to look at it.

This page works through the agency workflow end to end: intake, review, billing, profitability. It names the tier each piece sits on, because the pieces are spread across three plans and two of them are quote-only.

◆Our scorecard

3.8/5

AI 3.4/5

Real and tiered rather than a label: AI Essentials, comment summaries, a project wizard and a task builder from Basics; an AI utilization summary at Accelerate; AI smart assign and profitability forecasting at Optimize; plus an MCP server that names Claude and ChatGPT. Held back by three things the vendor states itself — two features still marked coming soon, an introductory free period with no published credit price, and two different launch dates for billing in its own material.

Value for money 3.5/5

The free tier is unusually generous for this category — Gantt, time tracking and billable flags cost nothing — and Basics at $9.99/seat/mo billed annually is competitive. But seat minimums of three and five raise the real floor above the headline, and the capabilities that justify choosing Teamwork over a cheaper general-purpose tool concentrate in Accelerate and in Optimize, which carries no published price at all.

Capability & depth 4.3/5

118 capabilities documented on the vendor's own pages, and the professional-services layer is deeper than general PM tools reach: billable rates with retrospective changes, personal and company timesheets with approval, expenses against budgets, time and financial and fixed-fee budgets, invoicing from logged time, multi-currency billing, profitability reporting, utilization targets, resource scheduling by skill and capacity placeholders. The ordinary work-management set is complete on every plan, free included.

Ease of use 3.5/5

Scored on structural evidence rather than reviewer testimony, which we do not hold for this product: one-click project import from Wrike, Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp, Trello and monday.com lowers the switching cost, and the full view set plus time tracking on the free plan means the core workflow can be tested before purchase. Against that, the complexity is concentrated where the money is — rates, budgets, retainers and utilization — and the custom-workflow cap of one on Basics and three on Accelerate forces process decisions early.

Integrations 3.9/5

150+ integrations claimed, and the ones that matter are named per tier rather than left vague: Harvest and both calendars on the free plan; HubSpot, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, Xero, QuickBooks and FreshBooks at Accelerate; Salesforce and NetSuite at Optimize. The MCP server is a current capability rather than a rebrand, and file linking from Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive starts at Basics. API rate limits scale by plan, 150 to 500 requests a minute.

User sentiment 4.0/5

Four sources on file, and the spread is the signal rather than the average: 3.3 out of 5 from 69 reviews at the low end against 4.4 from 1,343 and 4.5 from 941 in the two large pools. Reads as a product that satisfies most buyers and disappoints a minority sharply. The figures come from search results rather than rendered review pages, because the major aggregators block automated reading.

Docs & learning resources 3.0/5

The raw material is better than most vendors publish — a plan comparison matrix with explicit per-tier cells, and a machine-readable pricing file served for AI agents. It is undermined by its own staleness: SAML SSO, the Optimize seat minimum, when quotes unlock and the AI billing date each get two different answers across vendor pages, and a live support article still describes plans named Deliver, Grow and Scale, which no longer exist.

Support & reliability 3.8/5

SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 stated, data residency in the US or the EU on AWS, automatic database snapshots every few seconds, an uptime goal above 99.9%, and two-factor authentication plus role-based permissions on every plan. Live chat and email support from Basics; premium support and a dedicated success manager are Enterprise only. One hard limit stated by the vendor: Single Log Out via SAML is not supported.

Weighted across the axes above (weights reflect what actually drives the decision in this category). How we score →

The Client Is a First-Class Object, From the Free Plan Up

Start with what you get before paying anything, because it is more than competitors give away. Client companies, a client view and collaborators are on every plan including Free Forever^[1]. So is time tracking, and so is marking that time billable.

Unlimited client users arrive at Basics. Unlimited, not metered. Worth checking against how your current tool prices external seats. One limit to plan around: a client user can be attached to a maximum of five active projects at once. A retained client with six concurrent workstreams needs that structured differently, and discovering it during an engagement is worse than designing around it.

The permission model is the part that matters most for agency work. Rate and profitability visibility is restricted at project level, and the vendor states that collaborators specifically cannot be granted rate or budget permissions at all. So a client can live inside the project where the work happens without seeing what you charge for it, and that separation is enforced by the role rather than by someone remembering to hide a column before a share link goes out.

Key takeaway — You can bring clients into the actual project rather than a sanitized copy of it, and the rate data stays invisible by role. That removes the duplicate-project habit most agencies build to protect margins.

## Intake: Forms and Workflows, and the Counter That Bites

Work requests arriving as emails, Slack messages and phone calls is the first thing an agency tries to fix with a PM tool. Teamwork's intake forms route requests into structured work, and they arrive at Accelerate ($24.99/seat/mo billed annually, five-seat minimum).

Here is the gate nobody checks: custom workflows cap at one on Basics and three on Accelerate, unlimited only from Optimize. A typical agency needs more paths than that sounds like. Creative briefs follow one approval chain. Client change requests follow another, because they affect scope and need a rate decision. Internal requests follow a third: new business collateral, recruitment, your own website. Add a bug or amends path for live work and you are at four, which is one more than Accelerate allows.

Count your real paths before you compare prices. This single number moves more agencies up a tier than seat count ever does.

Review: Proofs, and the Second Counter

Client review runs through Proofs, and the allowance is tiered: five a month on Free Forever, 20 on Basics, unlimited from Accelerate.

Twenty proofs a month sounds generous until you count revisions. A studio shipping five pieces of creative a week, each going through two rounds, is at forty. For an agency, the proof cap is usually the reason to leave Basics. Not the financial features, which arrive on the same tier and get the credit.

Two mechanics make the proofing workflow cheaper to run than it looks. A proof file caps at 105MB, but the vendor states proof files do not count against your storage allowance^[2]. So the large files you cycle through review are not the ones eating the 100GB on Basics or the 250GB on Accelerate. And extra storage is sold in 500GB increments added to the subscription, so a ceiling is a line item rather than a forced upgrade.

## Billing: Where Teamwork Separates From General PM Tools

This is the sequence that does not exist in Asana, monday.com or ClickUp without bolting on a second system.

At Accelerate, you get billable user rates, the ability to apply rate changes retrospectively, personal and company-wide timesheets, reminders to log time, expenses logged against a budget, time budgets at task-list level, basic invoices built directly from logged time, basic quotes, and an AI utilization summary. Role-based and client billable rates can be set and restricted. Accounting connects here too: Xero, QuickBooks in both Basic and Advanced forms, and FreshBooks, alongside HubSpot for the sales side.

Retainers deserve their own line, because agencies run on them. Time-only retainers arrive at Accelerate; unlimited retainers, and retainers that track cost as well as time, arrive at Optimize.

At Optimize, the question changes from "what did this cost" to "did this make money". Project profitability, financial budgets rather than time budgets, fixed-fee budgets, multi-currency billing, timesheet review and approval, billable utilization targets per user, a profitability report, financial insights, custom reports, scheduled reports, and AI profitability forecasting. Quotes gain margins, tax and discounts. Salesforce and NetSuite connect here.

Optimize has no published price. The pricing page says "Let's talk", and the vendor's support documentation lists a five-user minimum for it while the pricing page shows "Contact us" for the same cell. So the tier that answers the margin question is a sales conversation, and you cannot budget it from the public page.

Resourcing Across Clients

Agencies lose money in two places: work nobody scheduled, and people scheduled twice. Teamwork splits the answer across two tiers.

Accelerate gives you the Workload Planner with live capacity and role management. Enough to see who is overbooked this week and move work before it slips.

Optimize adds the planning layer: scheduling resources across projects and people, placeholders that hold future capacity before a project is won, modelling tentative projects before they close, planning around public holidays and time off, and scheduling by skill rather than by name. For a shop that pitches work it does not yet have, the placeholder and tentative-project features are the ones that make the forecast real rather than aspirational.

Agency need	Tier it starts on	Published price
Client view, client companies, billable time flags	Free Forever	$0, maximum 5 users
Unlimited client users, portfolio health, project status	Basics	$9.99/seat/mo billed annually, 3-seat minimum
Intake forms, billable rates, timesheets, invoicing, Workload Planner, retainers	Accelerate	$24.99/seat/mo billed annually, 5-seat minimum
Profitability, multi-currency, timesheet approval, skills-based scheduling, tentative projects	Optimize	Not published
Dedicated infrastructure, premium support, dedicated success manager	Enterprise	Not published

Reporting an Agency Owner Actually Reads

Basics covers the operational view: project status, burndown, project and portfolio health, planned-versus-actual, and logged-versus-estimated time by project and by user. That last one is the report that catches scope creep early, and it is on the cheapest paid plan.

Accelerate adds budget insights, invoice status and an expense summary. Optimize adds advanced dashboards, the profitability report, financial insights, custom reports and scheduled reports. The last matters more than it sounds, because a weekly margin report that arrives without anyone running it is a different management habit from one somebody has to remember.

Dashboards themselves are available on every plan, with sharing from Accelerate.

Security and Client Contracts

Agencies pitching regulated clients get asked the same questions, so here are the answers. SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 are stated. Data residency is US or EU, hosted on AWS. Two-factor authentication and role-based permissions are on every plan. Automatic database snapshots run every few seconds, and the stated uptime goal is above 99.9%.

Two caveats worth knowing before a client questionnaire. SAML single sign-on appears as an Enterprise feature in the plan comparison matrix and as part of a purchasable Advanced Security add-on on any paid per-user subscription in the knowledge base. Two different answers, so confirm which applies to you in writing. And the vendor states explicitly that the Advanced Security add-on does not support Single Log Out via SAML^[3], so signing out of Teamwork does not end the identity-provider session. If a client's security review treats SLO as mandatory, that is a definitive answer rather than a configuration task.

Migration, If You Are Already Running Something Else

Teamwork advertises one-click project import from Wrike, Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp, Trello and monday.com. For an agency mid-year with live client work, the difference between a button and a migration project is the difference between switching and not switching.

What will not carry over is the part that made you look in the first place: rates, budgets, retainers and profitability history have no equivalent in the tools you are leaving, so expect to build that layer from scratch. Start with the current quarter rather than backfilling, and set rates before you import, so logged time lands billable from day one.

Putting Your Name on It

For an agency, the client-facing surface is part of the deliverable, and Teamwork splits white-labelling across two tiers.

Custom branding arrives at Basics: logo and visual identity on the workspace your clients log into. A custom domain and custom CSS arrive at Accelerate, which is the difference between a client visiting a branded page on the vendor's domain and visiting something that looks like yours. Colour themes are adjustable on every plan, including Free.

If presenting the workspace as your own platform matters to how you sell, the custom domain sits on the same tier as the billing engine, so the two decisions collapse into one.

Two more collaboration pieces live at Basics and are easy to miss when comparing feature lists: a document editor inside Teamwork, and chat attached to projects rather than living in a separate tool. Collaborative documentation spaces are also Basics, marked coming soon for Free Forever. For a small agency, that combination can remove one subscription rather than adding one.

Who This Fits, and Who It Does Not

Strong fit: agencies and studios that bill time, run client review cycles, and need to know project margins. The chain from logged time to invoice to profitability is the product's reason to exist, and nothing in the general-purpose category matches it without a second system and a reconciliation habit.

Weaker fit: a two or three person shop. Accelerate's five-seat minimum makes its floor $124.95 a month billed annually, which is a real number for a small studio, and the features below that floor do not include billing. A freelancer billing time is better served by a dedicated time-and-invoice tool.

Wrong fit: an agency whose main problem is creative asset management rather than billing, or one that needs a proofing-first workflow with deep version comparison. Teamwork's proofing is competent and uncapped from Accelerate, but it is a feature of a work-management product rather than a dedicated review platform.

What to Do in the Trial

The trial runs 14 days with no card, and it covers the paid plans. Spend it on the two counters and the one unknown.

Build your real intake paths and count them against three. Run a week of genuine client review and count the proofs. Set one billable rate, log time against it, and generate one invoice. That chain either fits how you bill or it does not, and fifteen minutes answers it. Then ask sales three questions in writing: what Optimize costs at your seat count, which plan SAML SSO sits on, and when AI credits start billing, given that AI is free only for an introductory period and the vendor's own pages give two different launch dates.