Teamwork.com for Software Teams

Teamwork.com is not an agile tool, and the honest version of this page starts there. There is no sprint board in its feature list, no backlog object, no epic-story-task hierarchy, and no story-point ceremony. If you run Scrum on a product team, Jira and Linear exist for a reason and Teamwork is not competing for that job.

What Teamwork does have is the thing most engineering tools leave out: a billing engine. Billable rates, timesheets, invoices built from logged time, retainers, utilization targets and project profitability. So the software teams it fits are the ones that invoice someone: development shops, technical consultancies, agencies with an engineering function, and in-house teams that charge their work back to a business unit.

◆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 →

What It Gives Engineering, and on Which Plan

Engineering need	Tier	Note
Gantt, Kanban board, list and table views	Free Forever	Full view set on the free plan, unusual for this category
Subtasks, tags, dependencies, milestones	Free Forever	The dependency model is where multi-team sequencing lives
Time estimates and time tracking, with billable flags	Free Forever	Estimate and actual on the same object, free
Burndown report, planned versus actual, logged versus estimated per user	Basics	$9.99/seat/mo billed annually, three-seat minimum
Webhooks	Basics	The integration primitive that matters most for CI and chat
Critical path in Gantt, formula fields	Accelerate	$24.99/seat/mo billed annually, five-seat minimum
Billable rates, timesheets, invoicing from logged time	Accelerate	The reason a dev shop picks this over Jira
REST API at 150 requests/minute	All plans	300 on Optimize, 500 on Enterprise
MCP server, with Claude and ChatGPT named	—	Vendor lists these as supported connections

The burndown report landing on the cheapest paid plan is worth pausing on. Most tools in this bracket put velocity and burndown behind a mid or upper tier. Teamwork puts it at $9.99 a seat, which makes Basics a viable home for a small team that wants sprint-shaped reporting without sprint-shaped machinery.

Key takeaway — The views, dependencies, estimates and time tracking are all on the free plan. What you pay for is reporting (Basics), critical path and billing (Accelerate), and profitability (Optimize, unpriced).

## What You Will Have to Build Yourself

There is no backlog, so the backlog becomes a task list with a convention. There is no sprint object, so a sprint becomes a milestone with a date and a set of tasks pointed at it. There are no story points, so estimates live in the time-estimate field. Which is more honest for a team that bills hours anyway, since the estimate and the invoice end up in the same unit.

That modelling exercise is real work, and it is the main cost of choosing Teamwork for engineering. The upside is that the structure you build is yours and reportable: planned versus actual compares your estimate to logged time, and logged versus estimated breaks down per project and per user from Basics.

What does not exist at all, and cannot be modelled around: a native issue tracker with a public-facing submission flow, branch and commit linking, and a release object. If your workflow depends on a pull request updating a ticket automatically, that path runs through webhooks and your own glue code.

The Two Primitives That Make the Modelling Cheap

If you are going to build your own sprint convention, the cost of doing it depends entirely on how much schema the tool gives you for free. Teamwork gives away more than its price list suggests.

Custom fields are unlimited on every plan, including Free Forever. Not three fields, not ten. Unlimited, at zero. That is the primitive you need to encode whatever Teamwork does not model natively: a sprint number, a component, an environment, a severity, a story-point value if you insist on one. Most competitors meter custom fields by tier precisely because they know this is how teams escape a rigid data model.

Task list templates are unlimited on every plan too, with project templates stepping from two on Free to unlimited at Basics. So the convention you design once becomes a template you stamp out each cycle, rather than a setup ritual someone repeats and gets wrong: a sprint skeleton with the right lists, the right fields and the right dependencies.

Put those two together and the modelling exercise stops being a tax and becomes a one-off afternoon. Design the sprint template, encode what you need in custom fields, and the reporting layer on Basics reads it without further configuration. That is a genuinely different proposition from bending a tool that meters the fields you need.

Teams management arrives at Basics, which matters once you have more than one squad: it lets you group people and report by group rather than by individual, so logged-versus-estimated time rolls up to a squad instead of a name.

The API and the Automation Budget

The REST API is available on every plan, including Free, and rate-limited by plan: 150 requests a minute on Free, Basics and Accelerate, rising to 300 on Optimize and 500 on Enterprise.

That 150 is the number to check before committing to Accelerate. A dashboard polling twenty projects every thirty seconds is inside it. A nightly sync pulling every task, time entry and comment across six hundred projects is not, and the next step up is a quote-only tier rather than a published price.

Automation actions are account-level monthly allowances, not per-seat quotas: 100 on Free, 5,000 on Basics, 20,000 on Accelerate, 100,000 on Optimize and Enterprise. A twelve-person engineering team on Basics shares 5,000 actions, not 60,000. If you are comparing against a tool that meters per seat, convert before you conclude anything.

Custom workflows are the tightest counter in the whole product: one on Basics, three on Accelerate, unlimited from Optimize. For an engineering org that wants distinct routed paths for bugs, feature requests, security reports and infrastructure work, that is four, and four is not available below the unpriced tier.

## The MCP Server Is the Genuinely Current Piece

Teamwork ships an MCP server and names Claude and ChatGPT as supported connections^[1]. That lets an external assistant query project data directly rather than through a scraped integration or a custom API wrapper.

For an engineering team this is more interesting than it sounds, because it inverts the usual reporting burden. Instead of building a dashboard nobody opens, you ask the assistant what slipped this week and why, and the answer comes from the live project data. It is also one of the few places where Teamwork is ahead of the larger competitors on something current rather than level with them on something mature.

Treat it as a capability to test rather than a reason to buy. The vendor names the connections; what it does not publish is any limit on query volume or any statement about what the assistant can and cannot write back.

Integrations That Matter to a Dev Team

The integration list runs to 150+, but the ones relevant here are narrower than the number suggests. Webhooks arrive at Basics and are the primitive you will lean on most: CI results, deploy notifications, alerting into project objects. Both calendars sync on every plan. File linking from Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive Personal starts at Basics; OneDrive for Business and SharePoint at Accelerate.

Harvest connects on the free plan for time and invoice export, which is a reasonable bridge if your finance side already lives there. HubSpot, Xero, QuickBooks and FreshBooks arrive at Accelerate; Salesforce and NetSuite at Optimize.

What is absent from the vendor's named list is the engineering tooling you would expect from a product aimed at developers: no GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket connection is named, and no CI platform. Those would run through webhooks and your own code.

Security, for Teams That Get Asked

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. Not gated, which is less common than it should be. Automatic database snapshots run every few seconds, and the stated uptime goal is above 99.9%. Dedicated infrastructure is Enterprise only.

Above that sits an Advanced Security add-on: IP-based network access policy, email-domain restriction on invitations, and configurable automatic session logout at 30 minutes, 45 minutes, one hour or two hours. Setting up the IP and domain rules goes through the vendor's security team by email rather than a settings page.

Two answers to have before a security review. SAML single sign-on is listed as Enterprise in the plan comparison matrix and as part of the Advanced Security add-on, purchasable on any paid per-user subscription, in the knowledge base. Two different plans for the same requirement, so get it in writing. And the vendor states explicitly that the add-on does not support Single Log Out via SAML^[2], so signing out of Teamwork leaves the identity-provider session open. For a team with SLO in its compliance checklist, that is a definitive no rather than a configuration task.

Where the AI Sits

Basics gets AI Essentials, comment-thread summaries, a project wizard, a task builder and AI expense categorization. Accelerate adds an AI utilization summary. Optimize adds AI smart assign, which auto-assigns work, and AI profitability forecasting. Two further items are marked "coming soon" on the vendor's own comparison page: asking AI questions across projects in chat, and service lines.

The budgeting detail: AI is included in all paid plans "for an introductory period", with usage-based credits launching later: November 2026 on the pricing page, September 2026 in the machine-readable pricing file the vendor publishes for AI agents. The credit price is not published. So an engineering team planning to lean on the AI layer should treat it as free this year and unknown next year, and should ask for credit pricing before signing an annual term.

Who This Fits

Strong fit: development shops, technical consultancies and agency engineering teams that bill time. The chain from a logged hour to a client invoice to a project margin is native here and absent from every engineering-first tool. If someone in your organisation reconstructs invoices from timesheets in a spreadsheet each month, that is the problem Teamwork actually solves.

Reasonable fit: an in-house team that charges work back to business units, or one that needs cross-functional visibility more than it needs sprint mechanics, where marketing, support and engineering all need to see when a feature ships, and engineering is willing to model its own sprint convention.

Weak fit: a product team running Scrum or Kanban properly. No backlog, no sprint object, no story points, no branch linking. You would be rebuilding primitives that Jira and Linear give you on day one, and paying for a billing engine you do not use.

Wrong fit: a two-person team. Accelerate's five-seat minimum makes its floor $124.95 a month billed annually, and the billing features that justify the tier sit above the free and Basics plans.

What to Test in the Trial

Fourteen days, no card required, covering the paid plans. Spend it on the three things that decide this.

Model one sprint as a milestone with tasks, estimates and dependencies, then run the burndown report and the planned-versus-actual comparison. That tells you whether the convention you built produces reporting you would actually read. Count your distinct routed paths against three. And point one webhook at whatever you use for CI or alerting, because webhooks are the integration primitive you will depend on and the named integration list does not include your toolchain.

Then ask sales what Optimize costs at your seat count, which plan SAML SSO really sits on, and when AI credits start billing.