For creative agencies, it can be very challenging to manage and organize the various different creative processes to ensure you are meeting deadlines and clients’ requirements.
This is where project management software solutions can help creative agencies in promoting effective collaborations, tracking requirements and deadlines, while at the same time maintaining employees’ morale and creativity.
In this guide, we will discuss the best project management software tools for creative agencies available in the market, but let us begin by discussing our criteria in evaluating the different software solutions.
How We Review Creative Project Management Software
When comparing between different products, here are the main factors we evaluate:
- Ease of use:
- whether the creative project management software is easy to learn and use
- Whether the software comes with comprehensive documentation and technical support.
- Availability and quality of templates
- Whether the software offers a method to manage and share files easily and efficiently.
- Quality and intuitiveness of user interface
- Features:
- Scheduling and workload management: task tracking, project planning, assigning roles and responsibilities, etc.
- Intake project forms: allowing team members to simplify the intake process and manage project requirements
- Collaboration and communication: how easy it is to share files, chat with other team members, share feedback, etc
- Reporting and analytics: how easy it is to generate and share reports
- Approval features: how easy it is to manage the approval processes
- Budget management: invoice sharing and processing, billing, reimbursement, time-tracking, financial reporting, and other features
- Integration: third-party integrations with other popular solutions
- Price vs Value: how expensive the software solution is compared to the features and functionalities offered.
Creative Project Management Software Use Cases
While different creative agencies might have different workflows, typically most creative agencies will use the project management software for:
- Planning and organizing project schedules
- As a centralized hub for sharing and organizing project ideas
- Sharing and discussing project requirements
- Track progress for various project tasks
- As a central collaboration hub for sharing and discussing files with other team members
- Organize and track team availability and workload, as well as allocating resources
Best Creative Agency Project Management Software Tools
- Function Point
Pricing: Starts from $38/user/month. A free demo available
Function Point offers an impressive range of features and functionalities that are specifically designed for creative and marketing agencies.
It is an all-in-one agency management software solution offering CRM and budgeting features, project management tools, resource management, collaboration tools, and advanced reporting features.
While it’s not the most affordable solution, it offers the right balance between ease of use and a powerful set of features. With Function Point agency software you’ll get advanced analytics tools to measure the performance of each creative project, tracking functions to improve staff utilization and effectiveness, and various tools to manage multiple projects across multiple teams and departments. Function Point also offers Zapier integration.
A very powerful creative agency project management tool where you’ll get a better understanding of your agency’s performance and profitability.
- Screendragon
Pricing: Starts from $20/month per user and one-time implementation fee. A free demo is available.
Screendragon is another popular project management solution designed for creative agencies. It has an intuitive user interface that is very easy to use, and you can also customize the interface with your own branding if you want. It also offers usable templates, custom forms, and customizable workflow management rules.
Screendragon also offers an open API so it can technically integrate with any solution, and it also offers native integrations with popular solutions like SAP, and you can also use Zapier to integrate with apps like Google Drive, Office 365, and others.
A pretty affordable solution offering powerful features approval process automation, advanced routing, and more.
- Monday.com
Pricing: $17/month for 2 users, 14-day free trial available
Another popular project management solution, although Monday.com is not specifically designed for creative and marketing agencies.
It does offer a great set of tools that creative agencies and professionals can benefit from, including budget tracking, content marketing planning and management, onboarding process, creative request management, and more.
Monday.com is especially great in its collaboration/communication features and scheduling/workload management features. For agencies with remote workers, you use Monday.com to easily share project boards to remote freelancers and external clients, and is probably one of, if not the best choice if remote workflows are the norm for your creative agency.
It can integrate with various popular apps like Google Drive, Microsoft 365, and others through Zapier.
- Wrike
Pricing: $9.8/user/month. A free version is also available.
Wrike is an award-winning project management software solution. It has an easy-to-use interface, but it also offers great versatility in customization. For instance, Wrike offers customizable briefs and intake forms, and the workload management visual tool is also highly customizable.
You can easily switch between dashboards and it also offers intuitive notifications and messages for easier collaborations. There are also a wide variety of templates for common processes in creative agencies, further improving its ease of use.
One of the key highlights of Wrike is its integration, offering native integrations to over 400 popular solutions including Marketo, Salesforce, and various Google and Microsoft solutions.
Also, one of the most affordable solutions available at the moment.
- ClickUp
Pricing: The free plan is powerful enough with most primary features, the unlimited plan starts at $5/month with extra features
If you are looking for a free solution, ClickUp’s free plan is pretty robust and will provide all the features most creative agencies will need. The paid plan is also fairly affordable, starting at only $5/month. The paid plan offers additional functionality for unlimited users.
ClickUp offers very powerful features for collaboration and file sharing. Team members can easily comment on tasks and chat with other team members for more effective collaborations. It also offers powerful reporting features, including six built-in report types for effective reporting. Users can also easily collect approval, feedback, and/or customer data by generating custom-branded forms with Wrike.
For integration, ClickUp offers native integrations with Google Suite, Dropbox, and many other tools, it can also integrate to various popular apps through Zapier.
Closing Thoughts
While the five agency tools we’ve shared above certainly aren’t the only ones available in the market, they are among the best you can count on when it comes to enabling collaboration and optimizing the executions of your projects.
In turn, they can help your agency to become more efficient and productive.